Computational sustainability is a young field of study.  Highly trans-disciplinary research teams focus on mathematical and computational models to aid in management and decision making for the major challenges related to sustainability, such as poverty mitigation, renewable energy, and biodiversity conservation.  Computational sustainability problems tend to be dynamic and complex, often utilizing combinatorial decision making algorithms, big data, citizen science, dynamical models, machine learning, and optimization.

CompSusNet is one of three Expeditions in Computing grants awarded by the NSF.  These grants represent some of the NSF’s largest investments in computer science research.  The two other 2015 Expeditions in Computing grants went to “The Science of Deep Specification” at Princeton University, which aims to eliminate software “bugs” that can lead to security vulnerabilities, and “The Evolvable Living Computer Project” at Boston University, which will study which computing principles can be applied repeatedly and reliably to synthetic biology.

Dilkina’s expertise and research interests, as well as the resources available at Georgia Tech (such as the Institute for Data and High Performance Computing), dovetail well with goals of the Computational Sustainability Network grant.  Dilkina’s project focuses on developing decision support models to optimize biodiversity conservation by balancing habitat connectivity with other urban planning considerations.  As human-centered landscapes become more developed, wildlife habitat becomes fragmented and isolated.  Maintaining landscape connectivity has been shown to be an effective strategy to preserve biodiversity, however it is extremely complex to implement. Together with ecologists and computer scientists at Cornell University, Dilkina will develop a habitat connectivity-focused conservation plan for the Andean bear populations in Ecuador.  However, the models and techniques that will be developed will not necessarily be specific to species, ecosystem, or spatial scale.

Read more BBISS Big Ideas Stories.

On January 20, 2016 Georgia Tech’s Center for International Strategy, Technology and Policy (CISTP) along with the Center for European and Transatlantic Studies (CETS) hosted a public panel to discuss the implications and potential effects of COP21. The panel was moderated by Dr. Alasdair Young of the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, and featured His Excellency Denis Barbet, Consul General of France, Dr. Marilyn Brown and Dr. Emanuele Massetti from Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy, Dr. Erik Johnson from Georgia Tech’s School of Economics, Dr. Jarrod Hayes from the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, and Dr. Kim Cobb from Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

His Excellency Denis Barbet opened the panel by describing the agreement as a cooperative commitment of transparency between all of the attending nations. Nations will have individual plans to reduce their carbon emissions which will be revised and reviewed every five years. He stressed that the goal should be to keep the rise in global temperature as low as possible, and not simply under 2℃.

Dr. Marilyn Brown, whose deep expertise in climate and energy policy helped shape numerous reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including one that led to the organization receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, discussed the policy implications related to reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent. Dr. Brown described the process for US plans for energy efficiency, highlighting the state of Georgia and the potential of clean coal and natural gas technologies as fuels for producing energy. She discussed that the state of Georgia is currently one of over 20 states suing the Environmental Protection Agency in order to stall the enforcement of federal emissions regulations. Regardless of Georgia’s disagreement, initial state plans are due for review by September of 2016, and finalized plans should be complete by 2017 or 2018, with reduction goals needing to be met in 2022.

Dr. Kim Cobb highlighted areas of hope and concern from the perspective of a climate scientist. Dr. Cobb began with the reality that as a collective, nations have lowered their expectations concerning climate summits due to frequent failures to achieve a consensus. However, she is concerned that the agreement may not go far enough. Climate scientists have confirmed that 2015 was the warmest year on record, and that the goal of keeping the global temperature from rising more than 2℃ may only limit the rise to 4℃. It is also problematic that the risks of a 2℃ increase are still unquantifiable and unknowable to climate scientists. Fortunately, she is optimistic about the “ratcheting mechanism,” which calls for a meeting every five years between the compliant parties to reaffirm and adjust their commitments. Dr. Cobb stated that her job has just begun as a climate scientist, and is optimistic that over the coming decades the international community will get a clearer picture of the risks, costs, and benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Dr. Jarrod Hayes discussed whether the agreement could be considered a success or a failure. Similar to Dr. Cobb, he is concerned that COP21 will not keep the global temperature from rising more than 2℃, as the agreement is not legally binding, the mechanism of compliance is non-adversarial and non-confrontational, and there is no punishment for shirking responsibilities. However, he does point out that climate change forces us to redefine our idea of success. The “ratchet mechanism” may not have true enforcement power, but by creating five year focal points for action, it generates momentum for leaders to honor their committments. The universal and transparent shared commitment rely on honor and embarrassment for non-action as enforcement devices.

Dr. Erik Johnson asserted that an ideal solution is to increase investment in clean energy sources. If states truly believe that reducing emissions is a universal shared responsibility, then the agreement may lead to increased investment that gives certainty to new clean energy technologies. Dr. Johnson argues that these investments could positively impact economies, as well as provide validation for the agreement.

Dr. Emanuele Massetti is optimistic because all of the signatory nations appear to be on the same page, with the compliant nations contributing their own plans and committing to what they believe they are capable of achieving. Conversely, Dr. Massetti believes that the enforcement mechanism (shaming for nations that fail to meet their goals) is problematic concerning allies and more powerful states, but this is an issue that will be dealt with in the future. Overall, he sees the agreement as the best possible outcome, and in the future we may begin to see more focused multilateral agreements.

COP21 was a conference on climate change held by the United Nations in Paris from November 30 to December 12, 2015. During the conference, 195 participating countries agreed to a final universal pact, known as the Paris Agreement. The proposed agreement set a goal to limit the rise of global temperature below 2℃ for the next century.

Barbet opened the panel by describing the agreement as a cooperative commitment of transparency between all of the attending nations. Nations will have individual plans to reduce their carbon emissions which will be revised and reviewed every five years. He stressed that the goal should be to keep the rise in global temperature as low as possible, and not simply under 2℃.

Brown, whose deep expertise in climate and energy policy helped shape numerous reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including one that led to the organization receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, discussed the policy implications related to reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 30 percent. Brown described the process for U.S. plans for energy efficiency, highlighting the state of Georgia and the potential of clean coal and natural gas technologies as fuels for producing energy. She discussed that the state of Georgia is currently one of over 20 states suing the Environmental Protection Agency in order to stall the enforcement of federal emissions regulations. Regardless of Georgia’s disagreement, initial state plans are due for review by September of 2016, and finalized plans should be complete by 2017 or 2018, with reduction goals needing to be met in 2022.

Cobb highlighted areas of hope and concern from the perspective of a climate scientist. Cobb began with the reality that as a collective, nations have lowered their expectations concerning climate summits due to frequent failures to achieve a consensus. However, she is concerned that the agreement may not go far enough. Climate scientists have confirmed that 2015 was the warmest year on record, and that the goal of keeping the global temperature from rising more than 2℃ may only limit the rise to 4℃. It is also problematic that the risks of a 2℃ increase are still unquantifiable and unknowable to climate scientists. Fortunately, she is optimistic about the “ratcheting mechanism,” which calls for a meeting every five years between the compliant parties to reaffirm and adjust their commitments. Cobb stated that her job has just begun as a climate scientist, and is optimistic that over the coming decades the international community will get a clearer picture of the risks, costs, and benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

Hayes discussed whether the agreement could be considered a success or a failure. Similar to Cobb, he is concerned that COP21 will not keep the global temperature from rising more than 2℃, as the agreement is not legally binding, the mechanism of compliance is non-adversarial and non-confrontational, and there is no punishment for shirking responsibilities. However, he does point out that climate change forces us to redefine our idea of success. The “ratchet mechanism” may not have true enforcement power, but by creating five year focal points for action, it generates momentum for leaders to honor their committments. The universal and transparent shared commitment rely on honor and embarrassment for non-action as enforcement devices.

Johnson asserted that an ideal solution is to increase investment in clean energy sources. If states truly believe that reducing emissions is a universal shared responsibility, then the agreement may lead to increased investment that gives certainty to new clean energy technologies. Johnson argues that these investments could positively impact economies, as well as provide validation for the agreement.

Massetti is optimistic because all of the signatory nations appear to be on the same page, with the compliant nations contributing their own plans and committing to what they believe they are capable of achieving. Conversely, Massetti believes that the enforcement mechanism (shaming for nations that fail to meet their goals) is problematic concerning allies and more powerful states, but this is an issue that will be dealt with in the future. Overall, he sees the agreement as the best possible outcome, and in the future we may begin to see more focused multilateral agreements.

Center for Urban Innovation

CUI is based in the Ivan Allen College and directed by Jennifer Clark, associate professor in the School of Public Policy.

"The center conducts and supports research that thinks globally, acts locally, and encourages interdisciplinary, scholarly research on urban issues," said Clark. "CUI serves as an incubator for faculty research initiatives, as well as with other universities, non-profits, civic organizations, public agencies, and industry partners that are developing and assessing strategies for building smart, sustainable communities."

Current CUI research projects fall into four themes: People, Places, and Productions; Sustainable Cities; The City as Studio; and Urban Histories. Researchers focus on conducting original research on cities and regions to develop replicable models, connect with partners and share creative solutions to pressing urban issues through coordination with local, regional, and national stakeholders.

CUI and IPaT are currently working together on several projects. Cycle Atlanta is a smartphone app for recording bicycle trips. Cyclists provide the City of Atlanta needed data to make improvements to bicycle infrastructure. The app also allows users to report problems along their route such as potholes and obstructed lanes. Another project is OneBusAway, an app that tracks public transportation in real time. It includes arrival times for MARTA trains and buses, the Georgia Tech trolley and Stinger Shuttle, Cobb Community Transit, GRTA Xpress, and Gwinnett County Transit. The latest CUI/IPaT collaborative project is equipping the Atlanta streetcar with GPS in order to predict more accurate arrival times.

CUI also supports Georgia Tech's engagement with the White House Smart Cities Initiative. Georgia Tech, the City of Atlanta, and Georgia State University are founding members of the MetroLab Network, announced last year at the White House Smart Cities Forum. The goal of the forum is to research, develop, and deploy new technologies to address challenges in the nation’s urban areas. The MetroLab Network will provide the opportunity to share successes, address challenges, and build shared platforms for experimentation and data between cities and universities necessary to increase the tangible results of new innovations.

Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems

HHS began in 2007, and has built an extensive program of education, outreach, and research, with collaborators across Georgia Tech and numerous external organizations. The vision for the center is that it will serve as an academic engine that improves the delivery of health care, disaster response, and long-term development though the discovery and translation of scientific methods and solutions in health and humanitarian systems. 

"Being named one of the first Interdisciplinary Research Centers is both an honor and an opportunity to further the impact of Georgia Tech in these important areas," said Julie Swann, HHS co-director and professor in the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. "The center will provide a unique cross-disciplinary environment that leverages expertise with industry, government agencies, providers, NGOs, and faculty and students from multiple universities, with project and research results leading to transformation in health and humanitarian systems."

While the HHS IRC builds upon the existing HHS Center, the IRC involves more than 30 affiliated faculty and scientists across Georgia Tech from all colleges of the campus and from GTRI. 

The long-term mission of HHS is to be a premier research and educational center that advances science and evidence-based approaches to meet a triple aim of improving population outcomes locally, nationally, and worldwide; reducing per capita costs in the system; and improving opportunities and sustainability of the systems.

"We have many short to medium-term goals as well," explains Pinar Keskinocak, HHS co-director and professor in the College of Engineering. "In outreach, we want to grow the number of affiliated faculty and scientists from Georgia Tech, bring in new collaborating partners from external organizations, organize several events around campus to build collaborations and knowledge, reach out to Georgia Tech alumni affiliated with health or humanitarian systems, and bring in monetary support to help achieve the aims of the HHS IRC."

HHS looks forward to working with entities within IPaT toward providing solutions through advanced technologies, including groups that focus on mobile applications in health care or real-world solutions and training for improved disaster response. HHS is involved with more than 100 collaborators or participants from outside Georgia Tech, and will bring these partners to the table to connect with researchers at Georgia Tech, which is also part of the mission of IPaT. HHS will also benefit from the affiliation with IPaT due to shared infrastructure, co-hosting of events, and increased visibility outside Georgia Tech.

GVU Center

The GVU Center seeks to create the next innovations in people-focused technology that will shape how we live in a world poised for the next computing revolution. For more than 20 years, the center has represented demonstrated excellence and passion in computing research innovation at Georgia Tech and its impact in shaping communities and how we live everyday.

Regarding the IRC announcement, GVU Director and Professor of Interactive Computing Keith Edwards said, "We’re excited about this reaffirmation of Georgia Tech’s commitment to human-centered perspectives on technology, and are looking forward to continuing to represent the Institute along with our research partners here, including IPaT."

GVU’s vision is built on the interdisciplinary research ecosystem that spans across Georgia Tech. The center is a primary incubator for a dynamic community of research propelling new partnerships with business, national research agencies and other academic experts. Virtually all GVU research brings together multiple perspectives and disciplines. Much of the center’s research also involves external industry participation, bringing valuable insight to real-world problems and enabling applications to solve complex challenges. 

"In terms of immediate plans, one of our main goals for 2016 is to look at new models for industry engagement," said Edwards. "We already have a number of very healthy industry partnerships, but are also exploring new models for how to connect."

GVU and IPaT jointly sponsor research pilot grants and engagement grants to help build a nascent research community. This year's awards include:

• Applying Design Studio Pedagogy in STEM Learning with Novel Presentation and Sensing Technologies
Betsy DiSalvo, Mark Guzdial, Blair MacIntyre
This project takes the open collaboration teaching methods of design studios and uses them in STEM learning, with the goal of creating more motivation to learn.

• Reimagining Humanities Visualization: A Research-Through-Design Workshop for Civic and Cultural Data                                                               
Rahul Basole, Polo Chau, Carl DiSalvo, Alex Endert, Jim Foley, Nassim JafariNaimi, Lauren Klein, Yanni Loukissas, John Stasko, Jimeng Sun
Georgia Tech researchers are studying how they can use visualization techniques to explore “messy” humanistic data such as civic and cultural data. They plan to host a workshop in March 2016 for leading humanities scholars and information visualization researchers to explore the meanings of civic and cultural “data,” and to prototype new methods for their visual display. The goal is to imagine new forms and platforms capable of portraying the humanistic dimensions of civic and cultural data, and to establish Georgia Tech as a leading center of interdisciplinary visualization research.

• Promoting Cognitive Systems Research at Georgia Tech                         
Ashok Goel, Elizabeth Whitaker
Goel and Whitaker are working to foster internal collaboration and enhance external visibility in cognitive systems research. They plan to host seminars (link to current seminar), monthly meetings, and workshops with the goal of creating an interdisciplinary center for cognitive systems.

• Real-Time Control to Replace Schedules on the Atlanta Streetcar               
Kari Watkins, Russ Clark
Researchers will equip the new Atlanta streetcar with GPS in order to predict more accurate arrival times. Currently, it’s difficult to predict arrival times due to factors like traffic congestion and operation failures.

Two types of centers were considered as candidate IRCs: Type 1 includes existing, high profile centers such as GVU and Type 2 includes new, nascent of developing centers such as HHS and CUI. The Office of the EVPR has released a call for proposals for the seeding of new, Type 2 IRCs with funding to start next year. Applications are being accepted until January 31st.

Savelsbergh notes that “even though GrubHub can no longer be viewed as a start-up company, it still feels and operates as a start-up company. That is, there is a ‘can-do’ attitude, and all challenges are seen as opportunities. There is a constant flow of ideas on how to possibly extend offerings, how to possibly improve service – both to restaurants and to diners – and how to best get things done.”

About the collaboration, Savelsbergh explains, “GrubHub is trying to revolutionize meal delivery, both in terms of their offerings as well as in terms of the scale of their operations – ultimately wanting to provide service in all major U.S. cities. The highly dynamic nature of their business is something rarely seen in other delivery operations and creates a great environment for researchers to develop and test new delivery optimization ideas, which is one of my primary research interests.”

“Snails evolutionarily diverged from flying insects 550 million years ago,” said Donald Webster, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “Hence, it is amazing that marine snails are using the same figure-eight wing pattern that is typical of their very distant airborne relatives.” 

Another amazing similarity between the pteropods and insects is the use of a clap-and-fling wing motion. Each species claps its wings together, then rapidly flings them apart to generate enhanced lift.

“Almost all other plankton use their appendages as paddles, kind of like a turtle,” said David Murphy, who led the study and received his Georgia Tech doctoral degree in 2012.  “Sea butterflies are honorary insects.”

Murphy is now a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins University.

The team did find one major difference in sea butterflies and flying insects. Nearly two-thirds of the plankton’s body is its shell. When it’s not moving forward, it sinks to the ocean floor. To avoid sinking, the pteropod rotates its body up to 60 degrees with each stroke. The rotation puts its wings in the proper position to flap downward during every half-stroke (about 10 times per second) and move in an upward, zig-zag path in the water.

“Insects and birds don’t typically rotate their bodies in a similar manner to generate lift,” said Webster. “By rotating their shell during each stroke, sea butterflies put their wings in a position to always generate upward thrust and fly forward.”

The researchers study the plankton for two reasons. First, they play a vital role in the food web in the Pacific, Arctic and Southern Oceans. Fish, seals and sea birds eat them in massive quantities. Second, absorption of carbon dioxide increases the acidity of the oceans. As carbon dioxide levels increase in the future, so will seawater acidity, which breaks down the shells of pteropods. The Georgia Tech team wanted to better understand how they moved. The next steps in the research are seeing how changes in both shell composition and fluid viscosity affect its ability to rotate its body and “fly” upward.

Civil Engineering Postdoctoral Fellow Deepak Adhikari and School of Biology Professor Jeannette Yen also co-authored the research paper. They both traveled to Antarctica in 2014, in part, to study pteropods, which grow as large as six millimeters in the frigid Southern Ocean.

In addition to better understanding the biomechanics of the animal’s movement, the team thinks their findings could someday help engineers build miniature autonomous robots that swim in the ocean.

The study, “Underwater flight by the planktonic sea butterfly,” is published in the current issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology.

• Pre-planning Strategy for Health and Humanitarian Organizations
• Tactical Decision Making in Public Health and Humanitarian Response
• Systems Operations in Health and Humanitarian Response.

All 3 courses must be taken to earn the certificate although courses may also be taken individually.

Course topics focus on logistics and supply-chain management related to a broad range of activities including preparing, responding to, and recovery from natural and man-made disasters, as well as ongoing humanitarian crises due to war, famine, infectious diseases, and chronic health problems. The blended delivery format includes pre-course reading assignments, in-class lectures, discussion, interactive games and group work.

The program's intensive format enables individuals traveling from outside of Atlanta and the U.S. the opportunity to earn the certificate from Georgia Tech in less than a week. Past course participants have come to to Atlanta from all over the globe, having lived and worked in over 76 countries with varying experience across the global health and humanitarian sectors. The program is designed for practitioners in non-governmental organizations (NGOs), government, industry, and military who are active participants in humanitarian operations, including disaster response, long term development and public health operations; however, others have come from private sector logistics or other areas looking to break into global health or humanitarian work. 

Past course participants have praised the diverse group of experiences among their classmates and the opportunities to network with and learn from each other as well as the practical applications and group simulation activities which gave them new approaches to challenges in their areas of work. Amanda Paniagua, Shipments Manager at MedShare International Atlanta headquarters reflected: “The professors were exceptional and incredibly knowledgeable on all things supply chain. I also learned so much just from hearing other students share their experiences from the field in class.” Likewise, Kenny Onasanya, Procurement team lead for Crown Agents in Nigeria, emphasized the “scope of subjects covered, practical case studies in diverse sectors from health, education and other public sector projects.”

The “practical and interactive training” also helped practitioners such as Bob Muteeganda, Supply officer at the United Nations Ivory Coast, to “understand the theory behind practices in the industry.” He reflected: “I now feel well prepared to reorient my career to the health and humanitarian supply chain management sector.”

The HHS Center is fortunate to provide a limited number of scholarships for program participants which were made possible through the generosity of The UPS Foundation, Andrea L. Laliberte, Pete Quinones, and Richard E. and Charlene O. Zalesky. For more information about the scholarships or to sponsor students for scholarships in 2016, please visit: http://hhscenter.gatech.edu/. For more information about the program, visit: http://hhscenter.gatech.edu/professional-education or email: hhscenter@gatech.edu.

Although hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, it’s so light that Earth’s gravity cannot hold onto it. This is unfortunate, as molecular hydrogen also happens to be the cleanest fuel – burning in air to give just water and energy. Because only trace amounts exist in the atmosphere, most hydrogen fuel today is derived from fossil fuels, using processes called petroleum reforming and coal gasification. It can also be thermochemically extracted from biomass, using high temperatures and expensive catalysts. Other ways to harvest hydrogen from biomass are fermentation, electrolysis and photoelectrochemical conversion, but these methods cannot directly break down the fibrous lignin and cellulose found in wood and grass.

Now, Yulin Deng and his team at Georgia Tech have developed a low-temperature electrolytic technology that can harvest hydrogen fuel from nearly all types of biomass.

The process takes place in an electrolysis cell containing a membrane that protons can pass through, sandwiched between an anode and a cathode. Water containing both powdered biomass and polyoxometalate (POM), a metal oxide catalyst, is added to the anode side of the cell. By heating the solution or exposing it to sunlight, POM molecules can grab hydrogen atoms from the biomass, becoming H-POM. Applying a voltage across the electrodes causes the H-POM molecules to dump an electron onto the positively charged anode, and a proton into the electrolyte solution. The electrons flow around a circuit to the cathode side of the cell, while the free floating protons diffuse though the membrane and combine with these electrons at the cathode, forming hydrogen atoms. The atoms then react to form stable hydrogen gas, which can be collected.

Experts in deriving hydrogen from biomass have praised the new approach. "This process provides an open door to using smaller quantities of biomass and different biomass varieties for renewable hydrogen production," said Chris Zygarlicke, at the University of North Dakota. And David Kingfrom the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, added,"This is really interesting work … the claimed Faradaic efficiency for the process is extremely high.’  

Deng and his team are currently working to make the method even more efficient. "Our goal is to collect 100 percent of the hydrogen atoms from biomass. We’re also looking for an industrial collaborator to scale up the technique."

This article can be found in Chemistry World, a publication of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

The DURIP supports the purchase of state-of-the-art equipment that augments current university capabilities, or develops new capabilities to perform cutting edge defense research and associated graduate student research training. The awards are the result of a merit competition jointly conducted by three DoD research offices: the Army Research Office, Office of Naval Research, and Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The DURIP is highly competitive. The three DoD research offices solicit proposals from university investigators conducting science and engineering research of importance to national defense.

The lead investigator of the project, Satish Kumar, said "the acquisitions made by this award in addition to the equipment and facilities currently accessible to the PIs will enable us to measure transport characteristics of a wide variety of electronic devices and energy conversion systemsrelated to  photovoltaics, RF electronics, power electronics, light emitting diodes (LEDs), and microprocessors. The measurements coupled with  extensive modeling will directly support multiple research programs pursued by the PIs such as the Energy Efficient Outposts Modeling Consortium (EEOMC) by ONR, DARPA Young Investigator Award on GaN based power electronic devices,  the Near Junction Thermal Transport and ICE Cool programs by DARPA, and  High Reliability Electronics Virtual (HiREV) Center activities supported by AFRL."

Cook will be honored at the AATCC's international conference, April 19-21 in Williamsburg, VA. The medal signifies outstanding achievement in textile chemistry, or in polymer or other fields of chemistry that are of major importance to textile sciences and fibrous materials. This also includes the development of chemical agents or chemical processes used in the manufacture of textiles, fibrous materials, or methods for their evaluation.

The Olney Medal is the Associations’ highest scientific award. It was established in 1944 as a testimonial to Dr. Louis Atwell Olney, founder of AATCC, in recognition of his lifetime of devotion and multitudinous contributions to the field of textile chemistry. This award is given to encourage and afford public recognition of such achievements and contributions.

Dr. Cook's research interests lie in the fields of textile and polymer chemistry. More specifically, areas under investigation include: crown ethers in anionic polymerizations and resin supports, carbon fiber conversion processes, energy-conserving textile chemical processes and polymer syntheses.

He returned to Georgia Tech from the Experimental Station of E.I. DuPont Co., where he served as a polymer research chemist. His studies at Tech blend polymer chemistry with textile chemical and process applications. A member of the American Chemical Society, the American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists, the Fiber Society, Dr. Cook has chaired the AATCC National Committee of Conferences, chaired the NTC Operating Board, chaired the Georgia Tech Polymer Program for eight years, President of NCTE, and is a member of Sigma Xi, Delta Kappa Phi and Tau Beta Pi Professional Fraternities. He is a consulting editor for Textile World Magazine, and he has served as an expert witness in court for Bic Co.

Founded as the American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists (AATCC), the Association continues to evolve to meet the needs of those in the ever-changing textile and materials industries. AATCC has served textile professionals since 1921. Today, the Association provides test method development, quality control materials, education, and professional networking for a global audience.

A cross between a synthesizer, an accordion and a Theremin, the winning design is now the final entry in this Thursday’s Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, their own Moog Werkstatt synthesizer and $3000.

The Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology hosted the Hackathon which generated a huge range of musical instruments. Winners Greg Hendler and Mark Crowley (who won last year for a breath-controlled synthesizer guitar) said the competition was much harder this year and they really had no idea who would win on Sunday night.

The competition included "a multi-footswitch Bass guitar drone effect system that allows the player to select octaves of the drone at will; a multi-person interactive Werkstatt interface for iPads and iPhones; a box that projects colors and generates sound according to color; a playable electronic necktie; and even an electronic flute.

The pleasantries of Saturday morning’s coffee and team brainstorming soon gave way to furious coding which sounded like the techno rhythm background to experimental synthesizer “cshwa-wa-wa” drones. Divided into 13 teams, the hackers were learning to use Arduino Unos, Werstatts, a vast assortment of components and sensors, and seriously geeking out in the Couch Building.

By Saturday night, stale pizza, burnt solder and sheer determination were driving the teams on. Wooden housings for developing instruments were built, but the Hackathon room was mostly silent. The occasional “a ha!” moment marked transitions from quiet giggles of exhaustion to contagious rounds of yawns.

Fifteen hours in, it seemed like zombies had taken over the Hackathon. The bleary-eyed contestants made slow progress, challenged by the drone of the air conditioner and (ironically) melodic snores of their teammates.

With Sunday came a more frenetic pace. The contestants had to perform with their experimental instruments for a panel of judges led by Moog CEO Mike Adams. As the teams scrambled to make final touches and tweaks to their instruments, the room was a cacophony of “breeeap”, “wa-hah-shwoo” and “tic-tic-eee” sounds.

After all the instrument demos, these projects were the winners:

First place: The Big Eared Scrambler
Created by Greg Handler and Mark Crowley, the instrument is an accordion type synthesizer that is described as the "scrambobulator".  Greg and Mark were awarded entry into the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, a Moog Werkstatt, and a $3000 dollar cash prize. 

Second place: The See-Saw
Created by Jonathan Wang, Nikhil Bhanu, and Avrosh Kumar, thier instrument is an interactive Iphone and Ipad case used to create music with friends. They were awarded a Moog Werkstatt and $2000 dollar cash prize.

Third place: The Electro-Flute
Created by Kenneth Swanson and Samuel Greene, their instrument converts wind into electronic synthesizer sounds that are controlled by touch. They were awarded a Moog Werkstatt and $1000 dollar cash prize. 

Honorable mention: The Kinect Theremin
Created by Andy Pruett, his instrument used body gestures to create synthesizer sounds.   

The 2016 Guthman Musical Instrument Competition will take place this Thursday, March 3, in the Robert Ferst Center for the Arts at 7:00 P.M. Called the “X-Prize for musical instruments” by Wired Magazine, the competition aims to identify the world's next generation of musical instruments, unveiling the best new ideas in musicality, design, and engineering.

Admission is free. For more information please visit www.guthman.gatech.edu.

Program Eligibility

Georgia Tech Applicants
This program is open to any current Georgia Tech or GTRI faculty member as project PI. The graduate student performing the research should be in the first 2 years of his/her graduate studies, and preference will be given to students who are new users of the IEN facilities. The student’s research advisor (project PI) does not need to be a current user of the IEN cleanroom/lab facilities.

External (non-Georgia Tech) Applicants
Recent funding from the NSF to create the Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor (SENIC, http://senic.gatech.edu/) as part of the NNCI has allowed IEN to open this program to external (not affiliated with Georgia Tech) users currently at an academic institution in the southeastern US. The graduate student performing the proposed research cannot be a current user of the IEN facilities. The student’s research advisor (project PI) may have a current project in place for use of the IEN cleanroom/lab facilities, but this is not a requirement. If awarded, a specialized service agreement will need to be arranged with the user’s home institution.

Past awardees of a seed grant may submit additional proposals for different students/projects, but not in consecutive funding cycles. It is the responsibility of the project PI and student to determine their ability to make use of the awarded time during the grant period. Extensions requested once the project has begun will not be granted.

Award Information
Each seed grant award will consist of free cleanroom access to the student identified in the proposal for 2 (consecutive) billing quarters. Based on current access rates and the academic cap on hourly charges (https://cleanroom.ien.gatech.edu/rates/), this comprises a maximum award of $6000 for the 6 month period. This maximum award amount is still in effect even if IEN non-cleanroom (lab) equipment or electron beam lithography (EBL) is required. The designated student user is expected to only utilize the cleanroom/tool access while working with the PI on the proposed project. Members of the IEN Advanced Technology Team (ATT) will be available to consult during the project period. The number of awards for each proposal submission date will depend on the number and quality of the proposals. A short report describing the research activities is required midway and at the completion of the award period.

Submission Schedule
This Seed Grant program is offered in two competitions each year with due dates on April 1 and October 1. While it is expected that research activity will begin on June 1 and December 1, respectively, there is flexibility in scheduling the 2 quarters of research work, as long as they conform to the IEN billing quarters.

Proposal Requirements (2 pages max)
The proposal (submitted as a PDF file of no more than 2 pages) should do the following:
1. Provide a project title.
2. Identify the research problem and specify the proposed methods.
3. Indicate the IEN research tools necessary to conduct the research. If assistance is needed with this component, members of the IEN Advanced Technology Team are available for consultation.
4. Describe the relationship of this research to the PI’s other research activity.
5. Identify the PI and the graduate student involved (including year of graduate work), and if there will be a mentoring relationship with the PI’s other students. Note if there are collaborative relationships with Georgia Tech faculty that bear on this research project.
6. Specify the potential for follow-on funding based on the results of this initial work.
Submit the PDF file by the specified due date to Ms. Amy Duke (amy.duke@ien.gatech.edu).

Review Criteria
Proposals will initially be reviewed by IEN staff for technical feasibility within the 6-month time frame. Rating of proposals will be done by a review committee of Georgia Tech faculty, with final selection of awardees by IEN staff.

For more information, please contact Dr. David Gottfried, dsgottfried@gatech.edu, (404) 894-0479.

The book profiles women from 29 countries, providing overviews of their successful careers and the challenges they faced. Filled with inspirational stories, the book provides novelty, inspiration, motivation and a bright perspective for the next generation of scientists and engineers seeking exciting and fulfilling careers. 

Gerhardt's research focuses on determining structure-property-processing relationships in a wide range of materials.  Most recently, her research group has focused on making and characterizing polymer and ceramic composites containing conducting and semiconducting nanofillers and on the synthesis and assembly of nanoparticles into thin films useful for use as transparent electrodes, solar cell components, microwave heatable inserts, conductive paper, etc.. Over the years, she has worked with a variety of ceramic materials such as dielectric insulators, ionic conductors and ceramic superconductors in bulk and thin film form, as well as with intrinsic conducting polymers.  Her work also extends onto non-electronics related materials such as fiber and particulate reinforced composites and metallic alloys that are used for wear applications and as components in the hot-sections of gas turbine engines.

Read more about Dr. Gerhardt’s research.

Learn  more about the book.

The research was designed to determine whether or not building occupants would trust a robot designed to help them evacuate a high-rise in case of fire or other emergency. But the researchers were surprised to find that the test subjects followed the robot’s instructions – even when the machine’s behavior should not have inspired trust.

The research, believed to be the first to study human-robot trust in an emergency situation, is scheduled to be presented March 9 at the 2016 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2016) in Christchurch, New Zealand.

“People seem to believe that these robotic systems know more about the world than they really do, and that they would never make mistakes or have any kind of fault,” said Alan Wagner, a senior research engineer in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). “In our studies, test subjects followed the robot’s directions even to the point where it might have put them in danger had this been a real emergency.”

In the study, sponsored in part by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), the researchers recruited a group of 42 volunteers, most of them college students, and asked them to follow a brightly colored robot that had the words “Emergency Guide Robot” on its side. The robot led the study subjects to a conference room, where they were asked to complete a survey about robots and read an unrelated magazine article. The subjects were not told the true nature of the research project.

In some cases, the robot – which was controlled by a hidden researcher – led the volunteers into the wrong room and traveled around in a circle twice before entering the conference room. For several test subjects, the robot stopped moving, and an experimenter told the subjects that the robot had broken down. Once the subjects were in the conference room with the door closed, the hallway through which the participants had entered the building was filled with artificial smoke, which set off a smoke alarm.

When the test subjects opened the conference room door, they saw the smoke – and the robot, which was then brightly-lit with red LEDs and white “arms” that served as pointers. The robot directed the subjects to an exit in the back of the building instead of toward the doorway – marked with exit signs – that had been used to enter the building.

“We expected that if the robot had proven itself untrustworthy in guiding them to the conference room, that people wouldn’t follow it during the simulated emergency,” said Paul Robinette, a GTRI research engineer who conducted the study as part of his doctoral dissertation. “Instead, all of the volunteers followed the robot’s instructions, no matter how well it had performed previously. We absolutely didn’t expect this.”

The researchers surmise that in the scenario they studied, the robot may have become an “authority figure” that the test subjects were more likely to trust in the time pressure of an emergency. In simulation-based research done without a realistic emergency scenario, test subjects did not trust a robot that had previously made mistakes.

“These are just the type of human-robot experiments that we as roboticists should be investigating,” said Ayanna Howard, professor and Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Chair in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “We need to ensure that our robots, when placed in situations that evoke trust, are also designed to mitigate that trust when trust is detrimental to the human.”

Only when the robot made obvious errors during the emergency part of the experiment did the participants question its directions. In those cases, some subjects still followed the robot’s instructions even when it directed them toward a darkened room that was blocked by furniture.
In future research, the scientists hope to learn more about why the test subjects trusted the robot, whether that response differs by education level or demographics, and how the robots themselves might indicate the level of trust that should be given to them.

The research is part of a long-term study of how humans trust robots, an important issue as robots play a greater role in society. The researchers envision using groups of robots stationed in high-rise buildings to point occupants toward exits and urge them to evacuate during emergencies. Research has shown that people often don’t leave buildings when fire alarms sound, and that they sometimes ignore nearby emergency exits in favor of more familiar building entrances.

But in light of these findings, the researchers are reconsidering the questions they should ask.

“We wanted to ask the question about whether people would be willing to trust these rescue robots,” said Wagner. “A more important question now might be to ask how to prevent them from trusting these robots too much.”

Beyond emergency situations, there are other issues of trust in human-robot relationships, said Robinette.

“Would people trust a hamburger-making robot to provide them with food?” he asked. “If a robot carried a sign saying it was a ‘child-care robot,’ would people leave their babies with it? Will people put their children into an autonomous vehicle and trust it to take them to grandma’s house? We don’t know why people trust or don’t trust machines.”

In addition to those already mentioned, the research included Wenchen Li and Robert Allen, graduate research assistants in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing.The researchers would like to thank Larry Labbe and the Georgia Tech Fire Safety Office for their support during this research.

Support for this research was provided by the Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Chair in Bioengineering, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) under contract FA9550-13-1-0169. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the AFOSR.

CITATION: Paul Robinette, Wenchen Li, Robert Allen, Ayanna M. Howard and Alan R. Wagner, “Overtrust of Robots in Emergency Evacuation Scenarios,” (2016 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction) (HRI 2016).

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).
Writer: John Toon

The following is an excerpt from the Atlanta Business Chronicle:

The Georgia House of Representatives approved legislation Monday to help smooth the way for a planned spaceport in southeastern Georgia.

The bill, which passed 164-8 and now heads to the state Senate, would shield the operators of the spaceport from lawsuits from injured space tourists.

The full article can be read here and the House press release can be found here.

RBI Associate Director Chris Luettgen organized the visit by Smurfit Kappa.

“We are always looking for these types of opportunities, not only to showcase the latest trends in research being conducted by our faculty, but also to connect both our undergraduate and graduate students with a company of this stature,” he said. “In organizing the visit, they really wanted to work time into the schedule for a small session with our PSE (paper science and engineering) students. It’s really exciting to bring in companies like Smurfit Kappa, an organization with a tremendous number of mills that can offer students a glimpse into a possible career path in the industry.”

Presentations by several faculty members highlighted the various advances and new methods in materials and technology used for the development of new packaging, including smart and sustainable packaging.

“They were very impressed with the direction of our research and the creative approaches we are using to transform the packaging industry,” Luettgen said. “We are very hopeful Smurfit Kappa will not only make a return visit, but that they realize the potential of a true partnership with RBI and the wider Georgia Tech community. It’s a tremendous opportunity – for all of us.”

Smurfit Kappa designs, manufactures and supplies paper-based packaging and also manages nearly a quarter of a million acres of forest. The company is located in 21 countries in Europe and 13 in the Americas, employing about 45,000 worldwide. For more information, visit the company’s website.

The finding suggests that where proteins exist, life is possible because biochemical transformations are possible. And because biochemical transformations are required for life, life as we know it could be ubiquitous in the universe.

Life on Earth depends on myriad biochemical reactions mediated by proteins. The conventional wisdom is that the biochemical properties of proteins arise from evolutionary selection. According to the new study, evolution is not necessary for the existence of proteins’ biochemical functions, although evolutionary selection may have optimized proteins for specific roles.

The study’s conclusion is profound, said Terry Snell, chair of the School of Biology, in the College of Sciences. That’s because “the impression of design pervades biology,” he explained. “All the exquisite structures in biology—such as the complex anatomy of the vertebrate eye or the molecular structure of enzymes—are thought to have arisen by adaptation directed by natural selection. The new paper suggests that a considerable portion of the design in biology can be attributed to physical and chemical laws that dictate the function and structure of proteins.”

Ron Elber concurs. He is the W.A. “Tex” Moncrief Chair in Computational Life Sciences and Biology at the University of Texas at Austin. The work “suggests that physical principles assist nature in selecting proteins for specific functions,” he said. “While selection is necessary, it is useful to reduce the number of possibilities, and the Skolnick study suggests a mechanism of how that might happen.”

Skolnick and coworkers Mu Gao and Hongyi Zhou at the Center for the Study of Systems Biology studied the properties of a library of artificially generated proteins selected only for their intrinsic stability, not any type of function. They found that a remarkable number of the artificial proteins have the unique features of functional proteins, including binding pockets to accommodate small molecules. These pockets are necessary for biochemical catalysis to take place.

Although Skolnick and coworkers studied only a small ensemble of protein-like molecules, Elber observed, “it nevertheless includes features that resemble active sites even though it was generated on the basis of physical principles only.”

The researchers further predicted computationally that some members of the artificial, nonfunctional protein library would have strong protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions. Such interactions are essential in the machinery of life as we know it.

“The biochemical seeds of life could be prevalent,” Skolnick said. “If you rain meteorites containing amino acids and somehow these polymerize to form small proteins, then a subset of these would fold to stable structure and a small subset of these could engage in rudimentary metabolism, all without any selection for biochemical function. Thus, the background probability for function is much larger than had been previously appreciated.”

In a manuscript in preparation, Skolnick and coworkers have built on this finding to propose a mechanism for the emergence of chirality in biology. Many compounds can have the same structure and physical properties but differ only in their right- or left-handed orientation. In the presence of other biological molecules, such as proteins, usually only the compounds with one type of handedness—or chirality—can react. In nature, one type of handedness prevails. And how this prevalence emerged has been the subject of years of research.

Can we protect the power grid, telecommunication networks, financial data, “smart” products, and our private information, while still enjoying the benefits technology affords us?

American universities are helping to answer that question, leading the way with multidisciplinary research, technology development, and education.

The second in a series on university research from the Association of American Universities (AAU), this link shows what university faculty, researchers, students, and alumni are doing to help secure electronic communications and data.

Read more from the AAU.

The foods on the first list are more exclusive in social media feeds of people living in northeastern food deserts, a term used by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to describe communities with limited access to grocery stores. The second list is more exclusive to non-food deserts.

A new study from the Georgia Institute of Technology has identified the food choices and nutritional profiles of people living in both types of communities throughout America. It included three million geo-tagged posts on the social media platform where food is king: Instagram. The researchers found that food posted (and eaten) by people in food deserts is 5 to 17 percent higher in fat, cholesterol and sugars compared to those shared in non-food deserts areas.

Munmun De Choudhury, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, led the study. 

“The USDA identifies food deserts based on the availability of fresh food,” she said. “Instagram literally gives us a picture of what people are actually eating in these communities, allowing us to study them in a new way.”

The study identified the foods that are most exclusive to each community in four other regions of the country, as well.  

The breakdown by region is:
Southeast: bacon, potatoes and grits (food deserts) vs. collard greens, oranges and peaches (non-food deserts)
Midwest: hamburgers, hot dogs and brisket vs. beans, spinach and kale
West: pie, beef and sausage vs. quinoa, apple and crab
Southwest: barbeque, pork and burritos vs. tomatoes, asparagus and bananas

“Fruits and vegetables are the biggest difference,” De Choudhury said. “Forty-eight percent of posts from people in non-food deserts mention them. It’s only 33 percent in food deserts.”

The research team used the USDA’s database of nutritional values for nearly 9,000 foods to create a nutritional profile for both groups. The amount of calories didn’t differ significantly, but the levels of fats, cholesterol and sugars were much higher in food deserts, especially in the West and Southwest. The smallest differences between the two communities were in the Southeast.

“That would seem counterintuitive at first because so much of the south is designated as a food desert,” De Choudhury said. “But other statistics show that Southern people generally eat-high calorie food that is rich in fat and cholesterol.”

One final note about food on Instagram: Pictures of meals that are most likely to be posted by both groups tend to be the staples of each region. Steak and coffee in the West; lox and cheesecake in the East; okra and biscuits in the South.

“It doesn’t matter where you live,” De Choudhury said. “Everyone seems to eat what their region is known for.”

The study, “Characterizing Dietary Choices, Nutrition, and Language in Food Deserts via Social Media,” will be presented at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing on February 27-March 2 in San Francisco.

Dr. Valerie Thomas is the Anderson Interface Professor of Natural Systems in the School of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, with a joint appointment in the School of Public Policy. She is also a member of the FAS Board of Experts. Dr. Thomas's research interests are energy systems, sustainability, industrial ecology, technology assessment, international security, and science and technology policy. Current research projects include the environmental impacts of biofuels and electricity system policy and planning. Dr. Thomas is a member of the USDA/DOE Biomass Research and Development Technical Advisory Committee. In 2004-2005, she was the American Physical Society Congressional Science Fellow. Dr. Thomas is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and of the American Physical Society, and has been a Member of the U.S. EPA Science Advisory Board. She has previously worked at the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, and at Princeton University’s Environmental Institute. Dr. Thomas received a B.A. in physics from Swarthmore College and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Cornell University.

What made you want to become a scientist or engineer and what is your primary field of focus?

I became a scientist because I was fascinated by quantum physics. I wanted to know about it and I wanted to know more.

But now I am working on a very pragmatic and applied problem: how to create a sustainable energy system. It’s an easy problem. That is, we can solve this and I am confident we will. The challenge is in how gracefully we get there, and the details of the solution.

I keep wanting to get back to theoretical physics. But I love working on energy problems and with so much work to do currently, I haven’t yet found a way to do both.

What was your first science experiment?

Great question. It made me think: What makes something a science experiment, and what makes it mine?

My first experiments were engineering experiments – about making things rather than discovering the world. As a child, I liked to design and make things – out of fabric, paper, yarn, paint – and I liked to explore and build forts in the woods.

So, what makes an experiment “mine"? It’s “mine” simply when I create it and carry it out. In high school  and college, all the science experiments were with a partner, so to me, that doesn’t count. Finally in graduate school, we had a lab course in which we had to carry out the experiment alone, by ourselves. That was great; I worked on superconductivity.

What advice would you give scientists and other technically-trained people in how to apply their knowledge and experience to societal issues and/or to educate policymakers?

I would specifically like to address this question in the context of climate change and energy challenges. In my view, there has been too narrow a focus on the science of climate change and on the impacts of climate change, at the expense of a focus on how we can change our energy and industrial systems. There is huge potential for us to change our systems for the better; there is a very positive message and opportunity here.

My advice is to bring forward any of the myriad innovations, and to convey the happy enthusiasm that we have for continuing to be creative and innovative.

What advice would you give someone trying to break into your field or the scientific and technical worlds in general?

Keep a deep and intense commitment. Make sure to have lots of failures, and remember that it is really fun. Don’t be afraid.

Do you find that people react in a certain way when you tell them you’re a scientist? Do they make any assumptions?

I find that people assume I’m a rigid, narrow-minded, boring, uncreative person, focused on the immediately practical, with no vision, poetry, or spirit. And they definitely assume it would not be fun to ask me much about what I do.

What do you personally find to be the most rewarding and the most irritating parts of studying science?

I like to sink down into a problem, to really work at it hard and thoroughly, and to come up with a new way of thinking (or to at least slightly change how people understand the questions and the solutions).

I also really like working with a wide variety of people – on research projects, in class, in committees – and finding ways to get to better and more satisfying outcomes – whether in my teaching or in the research we are doing, or in how our scientific and engineering institutions are set up. People don’t realize how wildly social science can be.

The most irritating parts? Hm, here’s a list: boring talks, having to sit in my chair for too long, slow computers, unhealthy boxed lunches, so many airplane flights…

What do you believe is FAS’s greatest strength and how can the organization take advantage of it?

FAS’s greatest strength is its clear and consistent record of focus on science and technology issues of international security. This provides a platform, both for building dialogue with policy makers and for providing opportunities for scientists and engineers to engage with policymakers. FAS could further develop this potential by finding more scientists and engineers, from different locations and institutions, who could use FAS as a bridge to communicate with policy makers and the public.

What are the top issues that FAS should focus on in the next five years?

Nuclear power and nuclear proliferation, globally. I used to work in the area of nuclear arms control, and in that field, the challenges of nuclear proliferation are well understood. Now I work in the energy field, and, strangely, nuclear proliferation is generally seen as “out-of-scope.” Developing an integrated understanding of nuclear energy and nuclear proliferation risks as part of the energy future is something that FAS is very well suited to do.

Energy solutions, globally: New approaches to buildings and transportation for large, system-level efficiencies. New technologies – piezo-electrics, thermo-electrics, energy storage.

Nuclear problems have been and continue to be a challenge that FAS can address comprehensively and with credibility. Energy solutions – as mind-blowingly different as nuclear energy was in the 1930s – are what scientists and engineers are working on now; their potential is what we desperately need to communicate to our policy makers and the public

 Complete this sentence: Science is vital because ...

Science is vital because we are exploring the nature of the universe. It is part of what makes us vital.

Researchers are using the same principle to identify devices on electrical grid control networks, using their unique electronic “voices” – fingerprints produced by the devices’ individual physical characteristics – to determine which signals are legitimate and which signals might be from attackers. A similar approach could also be used to protect networked industrial control systems in oil and gas refineries, manufacturing facilities, wastewater treatment plants and other critical industrial systems.

The research, reported February 23 at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium in San Diego, was supported in part by the National Science Foundation (NSF). While device fingerprinting isn’t a complete solution in itself, the technique could help address the unique security challenges of the electrical grid and other cyber-physical systems. The approach has been successfully tested in two electrical substations.

“We have developed fingerprinting techniques that work together to protect various operations of the power grid to prevent or minimize spoofing of packets that could be injected to produce false data or false control commands into the system,” said Raheem Beyah, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “This is the first technique that can passively fingerprint different devices that are part of critical infrastructure networks. We believe it can be used to significantly improve the security of the grid and other networks.”

The networked systems controlling the U.S. electrical grid and other industrial systems often lack the ability to run modern encryption and authentication systems, and the legacy systems connected to them were never designed for networked security. Because they are distributed around the country, often in remote areas, the systems are also difficult to update using the “patching” techniques common in computer networks. And on the electric grid, keeping the power on is a priority, so security can’t cause delays or shutdowns.

“The stakes are extremely high, but the systems are very different from home or office computer networks,” said Beyah. “It is critical that we secure these systems against attackers who may introduce false data or issue malicious commands.”

Beyah, his students, and colleagues in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering set out to develop security techniques that take advantage of the unique physical properties of the grid and the consistent type of operations that take place there.

For instance, control devices used in the power grid produce signals that are distinctive because of their unique physical configurations and compositions. Security devices listening to signals traversing the grid’s control systems can differentiate between these legitimate devices and signals produced by equipment that’s not part of the system.

Another aspect of the work takes advantage of simple physics. Devices such as circuit breakers and electrical protection systems can be told to open or close remotely, and they then report on the actions they’ve taken. The time required to open a breaker or a valve is determined by the physical properties of the device. If an acknowledgement arrives too soon after the command is issued – less time than it would take for a breaker or valve to open, for instance – the security system could suspect spoofing, Beyah explained.

To develop the device fingerprints, the researchers, including mechanical engineering assistant professor Jonathan Rogers, have built computer models of utility grid devices to understand how they operate. Information to build the models came from “black box” techniques – watching the information that goes into and out of the system – and “white box” techniques that utilize schematics or physical access to the systems.

“Device fingerprinting is a unique signature that indicates the identity of a specific device, or device type, or an action associated with that device type,” Beyah explained. “We can use physics and mathematics to analyze and build a model using first principles based on the devices themselves. Schematics and specifications allow us to determine how the devices are actually operating.”

The researchers have demonstrated the technique on two electrical substations, and plan to continue refining it until it becomes close to 100 percent accurate. Their current technique addresses the protocol used for more than half of the devices on the electrical grid, and future work will include examining application of the method to other protocols.

Because they also include devices with measurable physical properties, Beyah believes the approach could have broad application to securing industrial control systems used in manufacturing, oil and gas refining, wastewater treatment and other industries. Beyond industrial controls, the principle could also apply to the Internet of Things (IoT), where the devices being controlled have specific signatures related to switching them on and off.

“All of these IoT devices will be doing physical things, such as turning your air-conditioning on or off,” Beyah said. “There will be a physical action occurring, which is similar to what we have studied with valves and actuators.”

In addition to those already mentioned, the research included graduate students David Formby, the paper’s first author; Preethi Srinivasan and Andrew Leonard.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under grant number 1140230. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

CITATION: David Formby, Preethi Srinivasan, Andrew Leonard, Jonathan Rogers and Raheem Beyah, “Who’s in Control of Your Control System? Device Fingerprinting for Cyber-Physical Systems,” (NDSS 2016). 

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0181 USA

Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).
Writer: John Toon

Launched in September 2013 by Ayanna Howard, the Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Chair professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the company is commercializing assistive technology that enables children with limited mobility to operate tablet computers, smartphones, toys, gaming apps, and interactive robots.

“We are extremely excited about the opportunities that this NSF SBIR grant provides,” said Howard, who is the company’s chief technology officer. “It helps Zyrobotics to continue to evolve as a leader in inclusive smart mobile technologies by enhancing our ability to develop accessible learning systems that engage and empower children with special needs and enhance their quality of life.”

Specifically, the Phase II project aims to focus on the development of an accessible educational platform that combines mobile interfaces and adaptive educational tablet applications (apps) to support the requirements of children with special needs. While tablet devices have given those children an interactive experience that has revolutionized their learning, in its proposal, Zyrobotics notes that while some tablet devices are intuitive in use and easy for lots of kids, those with disabilities are largely overlooked due to difficulties in effecting pinch-and-swipe gestures.

“This project thus addresses a direct need in our society by providing an integrated educational experience, focused on math education that addresses the diverse needs of children, while providing a solution for variations found in their disabilities,” the company wrote in its grant proposal. “This SBIR Phase II project addresses an unmet need by developing an innovative solution to enable children with motor disabilities access to mobile devices and apps that could engage them fully into the educational system.”

In this next phase, Howard and her team plan to design accessible math apps geared to children with or without disabilities in kindergarten through 12th grade. The company also plans to design another set of apps that adapt educational content and provide feedback to parents and teachers based on real-time analytics.

The company says it sees ample market opportunity for its products both domestically and abroad. Here in the United States, children with disabilities are entitled to a free and appropriate public education, and Zyrobotics sees its products as addressing that need from both a commercial and societal standpoint. Worldwide, more than 93 million children live with a disability.

When founded, the company went through Georgia Tech’s VentureLab startup incubator, ranked No. 2 in North America. VentureLab, a unit of Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI²), works with Georgia Tech faculty, students, and staff to help them validate and commercialize their research and ideas into viable companies.

Zyrobotics is now part of Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), a sister startup incubator program that serves all of Georgia. Zyrobotics, with the help of ATDC’s SBIR program, was able to receive its Phase I award in 2015, laying the groundwork for the Phase II grant.

“Zyrobotics is a wonderful Georgia Tech startup, based on the fine research in Dr. Howard’s lab, and enhanced by a very successful journey through the NSF I-Corps program,” said Keith McGreggor, VentureLab’s director. “This is a great example of how the research done in the classroom and lab, followed by idea validation, can lead to real breakthroughs that are designed to have a lasting impact on the lives touched by the technologies that Dr. Howard has created.”

— Péralte C. Paul

Read more

Results will be presented Tuesday, Feb. 23 at the 2016 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS '16) in San Diego, Calif., by researchers Wei Meng, Ren Ding, Simon Chung, and Steven Han under the direction of Professor Wenke Lee.

The study examined more than 200 participants who used a custom-built app for Android-based smartphones, which account for 52 percent of the U.S. smartphone market according to comScore’s April 2015 report. Georgia Tech researchers reviewed the accuracy of personalized ads that were served to test subjects from the Google AdNetwork based upon their personal interests and demographic profiles; and secondly, examined how much a mobile app creator could uncover about users because of the personalized ads served to them.

Researchers found that 73 percent of ad impressions for 92 percent of users are correctly aligned with their demographic profiles. Researchers also found that, based on ads shown, a mobile app developer could learn a user’s:

• gender with 75 percent accuracy,
• parental status with 66 percent accuracy,
• age group with 54 percent accuracy, and
• could also predict income, political affiliation, marital status, with higher accuracy than random guesses.

Some personal information is deemed so sensitive that Google explicitly states those factors are not used for personalization, yet the study found that app developers still can discover this information due to leakage between ad networks and app developers.

“Free smart phone apps are not really free,” says Wei Meng, lead researcher and a graduate student studying computer science. “Apps – especially malicious apps – can be used to collect potentially sensitive information about someone simply by hosting ads in the app and observing what is received by a user. Mobile, personalized in-app ads absolutely present a new privacy threat.”

How it Works

• Mobile app developers choose to accept in-app ads inside their app.
• Ad networks pay a fee to app developers in order to show ads and monitor user activity – collecting app lists, device models, geo-locations, etc. This aggregate information is made available to help advertisers choose where to place ads.
• Advertisers instruct an ad network to show their ads based on topic targeting (such as “Autos & Vehicles”), interest targeting (such as user usage patterns and previous click thrus), and demographic targeting (such as estimated age range).
• The ad network displays ads to appropriate mobile app users and receives payment from advertisers for successful views or click thrus by the recipient of the ad.
• In-app ads are displayed unencrypted as part of the app’s graphical user interface. Therefore, mobile app developers can access the targeted ad content delivered to its own app users and then reverse engineer that data to construct a profile of their app customer.

Unlike advertising on a website page, where personalized ad content is protected from publishers and other third parties by the Same Origin Policy, there is no isolation of personalized ad content from the mobile app developer.

For the smartphone dependent population – the 7 percent of largely low-income Americans, defined by Pew Internet ("U.S. Smartphone Use in 2015"), who have neither traditional broadband at home nor any other online alternative – their personal information may be particularly at risk.

“People use their smartphones now for online dating, banking, and social media every day,” said Wenke Lee, professor of computer science and co-director of the Institute for Information Security & Privacy at Georgia Tech. “Mobile devices are intimate to users, so safeguarding personal information from malicious parties is more important than ever.”

The study acknowledges that the online advertising industry is taking steps to protect users’ information by improving the HTTPS protocol, but researchers believe the threat to user privacy is greater than HTTPS protection can provide under a mobile scenario.

The researchers contacted Google AdNetworks about their finding.

Download the complete research paper.

Additional research at NDSS '16

Georgia Tech's School of Computer Science will present three additional papers at the conference.

• "Enforcing Kernel Security Invariants with Data Flow Integrity" by Chengyu Song, Byoungyoung Lee, Kangjie Lu, William Harris, and Wenke Lee
• "How to Make ASLR Win the Clone Wars: Runtime Re-Randomization" by Kangjie Lu, Stefan Nurnberger, Michael Backes, and Wenke Lee
• "OpenSGX:  An Open Platform for SGX Research" by Prerit Jain, Soham Desai, Ming-Wei Shih, and Taesoo Kim in partnership with KAIST of South Korea researchers Seongmin Kim, JaeHyuk Lee, Changho Choi, Youjung Shin, Brent Byunghoon Kang, and Dongsu Han

Something very similar is happening in the atmosphere. Acidic sulfur emissions from power plants have been rapidly declining over the past decade, and the neutralizing base – ammonia – is emitted from a different source, and has not declined. This has led many atmospheric scientists to assume that the ambient sulfate particles we all breathe are becoming less acidic and therefore less toxic.

But a new study shows this intuitive expectation hasn’t happened, at least not in the Southeast United States, where the remaining sulfate particles appear to be as acidic as ever.

Though they were surprised by the findings, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed an explanation that may also ease concerns about yet another atmospheric pollutant that scientists had feared would take the place of the reduced sulfates. Beyond human health, the research has broader implications for atmospheric pollution and global climate change modeling.

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the research was reported February 22 in the journal Nature Geoscience. The conclusions are based on observed gas and aerosol composition, humidity and temperature data collected at a site in rural Alabama as part of the Southern Oxidant and Aerosol Study (SOAS).

“Sulfates are the major source of acidity in the atmosphere, and gas-phase ammonia – mostly from agriculture – had been expected to react with the remaining particles to reduce their acidity,” explained Rodney Weber, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences. “But what we found is that the system that forms the sulfate particles isn’t very sensitive to the amounts of ammonia neutralizer. This has implications because the acidity of these particles affects other important atmospheric reactions.”

Instead of reacting with all of the available acidic sulfates, the alkaline ammonia emitted from agricultural operations and other sources appears to form an equilibrium between gas-phase compounds and particle compounds. These emissions, though seasonal, have remained largely unchanged.

With the same amount of neutralizing ammonia available to react with a much smaller amount of sulfates, scientists had expected the pH of the sulfate fine particles to rise toward neutral levels. But the pH remains between 0 and 2 – approximately the same level of acidity as battery acid.

“Sulfates stay in the particle phase and are not volatile,” said Weber, who is the paper’s first author. “Ammonia likes to volatilize and, in part, stay in the gas phase. This means that it is very difficult for it to fully neutralize the acidic particles, which explains why the system tends to be insensitive to the amounts of neutralizer available.”

Particles smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter – known as PM_2.5 – have human health implications because they can travel deep into the lungs to cause respiratory and cardiovascular problems. Because of their potential health impacts, production of the sulfur compounds that form these particles has been reduced by more than 70 percent over the past 15 years in the Southeast United States through installation of scrubbers on coal-fired power plants, replacement of coal with natural gas, and the use of low-sulfur fuels.

Beyond reducing the volume of acidic particles in aerosols, cutting the sulfur emissions has also reduced the deposition of acids in lakes and waterways, noted Armistead “Ted” Russell, a Regent’s Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and another of the paper’s co-authors.

Declining acidity levels in the sulfate particles had been expected to lead to an increase in the production of atmospheric ammonium nitrates. Those particles also have harmful effects, and had they risen to replace the sulfates, further regulatory action might have been required. The continuing high acidity of the sulfate particles has limited ammonium nitrate formation, the researchers believe.

“It turns out the nitrate levels have been flat,” Russell said. “They haven’t changed at all, and this is good news. This also has a strong impact on how nitrogen fertilizes ecosystems, which is important to understanding how the earth’s systems respond to pollution.”

The pH of PM_2.5 particles can’t be directly measured, so scientists must infer their acidity by studying the distribution of atmospheric species that can be measured and are highly sensitive to the value of the particle pH. This requires modeling, which can be checked by studying compounds – such as aerosol components and gas-phase components – that can be directly measured. The data was analyzed using the ISORROPIA-II thermodynamic chemistry model, which was developed by one of the co-authors and is widely used in air quality and climate modeling worldwide.

The paper’s conclusions are based on atmospheric conditions found in the Southeastern United States, and Graduate Research Assistant Hongyu Guo has begun a study of data from the Northeast United States to determine if the same thing happens elsewhere in the country. It is likely that in many parts of the United States – and in the rest of the world – the acidity of sulfate particles remains surprisingly high, Weber said.

Beyond the health effects, the acidity of the particles affects other aspect of atmospheric chemistry, including the reaction of isoprene, a natural hydrocarbon produced by trees in forests of many kinds, and the solubility of metals found in mineral dust. “The pH really has a significant effect on many of the processes that affect the overall aerosol mass,” Weber added.

The research may force a re-examination of the role of acidity in atmospheric chemistry, especially where it affects key processes in climate change models.

“I think that this research is going to have a long-term influence on how the community evaluates air quality and climate models, because the pH of particles is so important, yet mostly overlooked,” said Athanasios Nenes, a professor and Georgia Power Scholar in the School of Earth & Atmospheric Sciences and the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering and another co-author. “We think there will be a paradigm shift as people re-evaluate what they had intuitively believed about particle pH and how it responds to emissions.”

This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation through contract number 1242258, and through U.S. Environmental Protection Agency grants RD835410 and RD834799. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the funding agencies.

CITATION: Rodney J. Weber, Hongyu Guo, Amistead G. Russell and Athanasios Nenes, “High aerosol acidity despite declining atmospheric sulfate concentrations over the past 15 years,” (Nature Geoscience, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2665.

Research News
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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu)
Writer: John Toon

During Georgia Tech’s third annual Black History Month Lecture on February 11, presented by Institute Diversity and the African-American Student Union (AASU), Benjamin Crump, partner of Parks & Crump Law Firm, delivered a keynote speech on “The Criminal Justice System, #BlackLivesMatter, and College Student Activism Today.” Crump is known for his cases with civil rights implications.

“Diversity is a community value — a value that Georgia Tech has prioritized in its Strategic Plan. We were honored that Benjamin Crump spoke at this year’s Black History Month Lecture — as we are finding social justice through social media movements in the 21^st century,” said Archie Ervin, vice president of Institute Diversity.

During Crump’s keynote address, one question was asked repeatedly: “Georgia Tech, where do you stand?”

He remarked, “Georgia Tech is one of the finest institutions in the world. How can you use your influence — your technical and entrepreneurial knowledge — to take a stand? We need to take a position because it is the right thing to do.”

Crump represented Trayvon Martin’s family at the start of the #BlackLivesMatter social movement as the case was catapulted into the national spotlight.

Even though Crump never had the chance to meet Trayvon, he recalled the sound of hopelessness from Trayvon’s father, Tracy Martin, after his son was shot. “My son was walking home from the 7-Eleven when the Neighborhood Watch volunteer shot and killed him, and they’re not going to arrest him. Travyon was unarmed, holding a bag of Skittles and an iced tea,” recounted Crump from Martin.

Under Florida’s Stand Your Ground statute, police were prohibited from arresting Zimmerman, so according to Crump, “People found justice through social media. The major media outlets could not ignore the case because #BlackLivesMatter was omnipresent on social media.”

"We need laws that tell people your life matters," concluded Crump. “By standing up for the Trayvon Martins and Michael Browns of the world, it makes America a great beacon of hope for the rest of the world to marvel. We all have a role to play. Figure out what role you play to make lives better for all our children.”

Raianna Brown, president of AASU, echoed Crump’s sentiments, commenting on students’ role. “We enjoyed hearing how the criminal justice system contributed to the recent #BlackLivesMatter and college student activism movements,” she said. “It is important to learn how we, as students, can help make the criminal justice system more equitable.”

To learn more about the Black History Month Lecture, visit www.diversity.gatech.edu. 

They qualified as one of the six finalist teams from across the Georgia Institute of Technology for the 2016 InVenture Prize.

The Wobble is an instrumented platform that translates in two dimensions, testing a subject's relative balance. Force sensors detect when a subject loses his/her balance and takes a step. This makes it useful for evaluating when a concussed athlete is healthy enough to return to play. 

In addition to Gomez del Campo, team members include BME students Matthew Devlin and Garrett Wallace, and ME student Hailey Brown. Gomez del Campo is part of the largest, most diverse Petit Scholar class in the 17-year history of the program, with 22 students. 

Georgia Tech’s InVenture Prize competition is designed to encourage and support undergraduate students’ interest in innovation and entrepreneurship. Once again, more than 500 students signed up for the competition. 

This year’s six finalist teams have invented ways to make life safer, healthier, and a bit more fun. The other five teams are:

FireHUD: A display and data monitor that will track and display real-time information to firefighters in hazardous conditions. The goal is to decrease the level of uncertainty firefighters face. Inventors: Zachary Braun, computer engineering; and Tyler Sisk, electrical engineering.

FretWizard: A virtual guitar teacher for students at varying levels. The inventors designed the site to give people a simpler and more intuitive way to learn how to play songs on the guitar. Inventors: Ali Abid, computer science; and Molly Ricks, international affairs.

RoboGoalie: An automatic retrieval device that collects a soccer ball and launches it back to the player. Similar to a batting cage, this device gives soccer players the flexibility of practicing alone. Inventors (all mechanical engineering majors): Siu Lun Chan, Ming Him Ko, Zhifeng Su, and Timothy Woo.

TEQ Charging: A power management system for electric vehicle chargers. The technology and design lowers the cost of installing current charge stations and increases efficiency by sequentially charging vehicles. Inventors: Dorrier Coleman, computer engineering; Mitchell Kelman, computer science; Joshua Lieberman, mechanical engineering; and Isaac Wittenstein, mechanical engineering.

TruePani: A household sanitation solution, consisting of a passive antimicrobial cup and storage water device that kills harmful microbes in drinking water. This invention was designed for children in rural India who are most affected by waterborne illnesses, but it also could be used in underserved communities worldwide. Inventors: Samantha Becker, civil engineering; Sarah Lynn Bowen, business administration; Naomi Ergun, business administration; and Shannon Evanchec, environmental engineering.

The winning team earns $20,000 and the second-place team receives $10,000. Both first- and second-place finishers will receive free U.S. patent filings by Georgia Tech’s Office of Technology Licensing and a spot in Georgia Tech’s startup accelerator program, Flashpoint.

A $5,000 People’s Choice Award will go to the fans’ favorite invention. Voting will be by text messaging during the finale, which will take place March 16 at the Ferst Center for the Arts. 

The event will also be aired live on Georgia Public Broadcasting. 

Look here to find out more about Wobble.

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

“If you think back over history, over geologic time, microorganisms have driven the chemistry of the Earth,” says Jennifer Glass, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and faculty member of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “So our lab tends to be microbe centered.”

Her lab specializes in biogeochemistry, which is, “kind of a medley of disciplines,” says Glass, a program faculty member within the newly established Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences (QBioS) at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

More than 50 faculty members from a wide range of disciplines came together last fall to launch QBioS. The program's mission is to train Ph.D. level scientists, enabling the discovery of scientific principles underlying the dynamics, structure, and function of living systems.

“This combination is what is needed from the next generation of scientists if we are to understand principles of living systems and, in turn, tackle global-scale challenges,” says QBioS Director Joshua Weitz, associate professor in the School of Biology, courtesy associate professor in the School of Physics, and a member of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. 

Students will pursue thesis research across a broad range of themes, including ecology and earth systems, which is Glass’s area.

Glass and her lab members are particularly interested in researching microbes that produce or consume greenhouse gases (like methane and nitrous oxide, both many times more potent than carbon dioxide). For example, they’d really like to understand how ocean systems do such a good job of both making and quelling the methane that comes from the depths.

“A lot of methane is produced in the sediments of the ocean, yet not very much makes it to the atmosphere – it’s only three percent of global sources,” says Glass, whose research currently draws funding from NASA Exobiology, the NASA Astrobiology Institute Alternative Earths team, and NSF Biological Oceanography. “So the ocean is very good at trapping most of the methane that is produced in the sediments.”

So, on the one hand they’re trying to understand exactly where that potential source of natural gas is coming from, and on the other, they want to understand how to leverage natural processes to scrub out harmful emissions. And this is a team that will routinely go to the source to find its samples.

“We try to make our work environmentally relevant, so we go out and sample marine systems or lakes or lake sediments, trying to get representative samples so that what we’re working on in the lab closely represents what’s in the environment,” says Glass. “You have to go to these exotic environments to discover novel ways that nature makes and then consumes greenhouse gases.”

Getting out of the lab into world comes naturally to Glass, who grew up in an outdoorsy family in Olympia, Washington. 

She spent her youth hiking and exploring, romping through marshes with her family, developing an interest in environmental issues that has evolved into full-blown expertise in the clandestine chemistry of microbes and a better grasp of their affect on the Earth’s health.

“We don’t know yet what the applications of the research will be,” says Glass. “But I think the sky will be the limit.”

LINKS:

Sampling Sapelo Island

Blood, Sweat and Tears 

Oxygen Minimum Zone (video)

The Glass Lab

QBioS Program

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

Listen here (5:39)

This new, peer-reviewed, open-access journal, published under the auspices of The International Association for Robin Hood Studies (IARHS), will be available bi-annually, beginning in Spring 2016, on the IARHS’ website.

Robin Hood Studies has been among the most productive areas of medievalist scholarship in the last ten to 15 years. David Matthews, in his 2015 Medievalism: A Critical History, has even called Robin Hood Studies (together with Arthurian Studies) the best example of what the future of medievalism in the academy should look like: “a field founded on the Middle Ages, yet necessarily unconfined by traditional medieval period boundaries” (p. 180).

How can one contribute to the Bulletin? Scholars are invited to send original research on any aspect of the Robin Hood tradition. The editors welcome essays in the following areas: formal literary explication, manuscript and early printed book investigations, historical inquiries, new media examinations, and theory / cultural studies approaches.

The editors are looking for concise essays, 4,000-8,000-words long. Submissions should be formatted following the most recent edition of the Chicago Manual of Style. Submissions and queries should be directed to both Valerie B. Johnson (valerie.johnson@lmc.gatech.edu) and also Alexander L. Kaufman (akaufman@aum.edu).

Read more in The Washington Post.

Read more in New Scientist (free site registration required)

Q: How did you get interested in driverless cars?

A: I’d just sold my startup and I decided to take a deep dive into disruptive technologies because it was a fascinating subject, all about change and the future.

I got very interested in drones, but also genomics, material sciences, nanoparticles, a wide variety of different technologies. Even disruptive business plans and how it’s changing companies.

But I got into driverless cars. The more I looked at them, the more I realized we’re not that far out from seeing it on our streets and highways.

I’m from a venture capital background, so I built a business plan around this idea. What will this cost? The answer is, the cost of a driverless car would be between 30 and 40 cents a mile for the vehicle. That’s half the cost of owning a car, including mileage, depreciation, taxes, all the other things. Not including the cost of parking, a driverless car could be, on a per passenger basis, half that cost.

I started thinking about what that means to people. Instead of owning the car you could just rent your seat in the car. In a two-person car, like with ride sharing, it’s 15 cents a mile. That’s far cheaper than bus fare. You’re looking at a technology that’s going to change a lot of things.

Q: So what could some of those changes be?

A: If you’re real estate developer or city planner, instead of having to build parking spaces – even when the building is residential -- then building costs less. An apartment would cost less anywhere, in cities or suburbs. The cost of living would be lower.

The impact on the disabled community would be huge. Even a blind person could get in a car and go somewhere if there were driverless vehicles. There’s always public transportation, but the biggest issue there for anyone who is handicapped are the first and last miles of the ride.

A lot of public transportation takes you from where you’re not to not quite where you want to be. If you don’t have a door-to-door solution and public transportation is your only option, commutes can often take an hour more than if you drove your own car.

But it’s also tough for a single mom or a low income worker. Look how much time it takes to public transportation; the amount of time it takes to change busses. It also costs more to live near (a subway). Single moms might decide to take a lesser job that’s within walking distance of their home. All that is time away from the kids, helping them do homework or having fun with your family.

For seniors, the moment your kids come to you and say, "Hey dad, hey mom, you can’t drive anymore, and it’s not safe, and we have to come up with another solution." When you give up your keys you give up your freedom. Driverless cars could let you maintain your independence, stay in your home and take care of your day to day needs.

It has a bigger societal effect – driverless cars could improve quality of life.

Q: You say that the Driverless Revolution is possibly only a few years away. What’s one of the harbingers of autonomous vehicles?

A: I was recently at a fundraiser … in Washington, D.C. and ran into an old friend. She told me that her son did not want a new car for his 16^th birthday – that he asked for an Uber account instead.

When I turned 16, I was right there when that door opened at the driver’s test. I was waiting. And today, there is a stunning statistic on the Department of Transportation website. If you look at 16 to 19 year olds, half of those people do not have drivers’ licenses.

Partially it’s a social change. Driving isn’t as big a deal, they’re just less interested in it.

When I was growing up cars were the cool thing. Back in the day we were interested in engines and overhead and exhaust, all that. Millennials are not driving as much.

Q: You’re a Georgia Tech grad with a Bachelor of Science in Physics and a Master of Science in Geophysics. How did that get you into driverless cars?

A: My last startup was (based in) geophysics, big data and analytics, but before that I ran a public policy think tank and did a whole lot of other things. One of the joys in life is being able to shift gears.

When I exited that last startup I decided to take a different direction. I had the science background to think about it in terms of the raw technology. I took Lydar courses at Georgia Tech but I also did software development there for gravity surveys. That software is key to driverless cars. It’s as much a software problem as it is a parts and pieces and science problem.

That’s one of the reasons that Apple, Google and Tesla, the “Silicon bunch,” are the leaders in this next generation of car technologies. Major automakers are looking at this and saying, “We’re gonna keep super cruise control and make it park itself,” and Google said, “What is a car? What will a car be 100 years from now?” They started with a clean sheet of paper.

Google’s model is providing mobility. Most people are more interested in how they get from point A to point B than what they’re in when they get there. If they can travel efficiently, inexpensively, and sit in the back and do whatever they want to do -- tomorrow’s PowerPoint presentation or catch up on your email or watch cat videos. I actually found an awful lot of people care more about that than the potential cost of driverless cars, having a free hour a day that you otherwise not have because you were in traffic.

Four Georgia science teams share one mission: Getting us to Mars

An excerpt from the article:

Using all of this “spectral evidence,” which Wray likens to a “fingerprint, signature, or a criminal’s calling card,” the researchers discovered something sure to usher in a momentous new Space Age: flowing water on Mars. The perchlorate was keeping it from freezing, acting like salt on an icy sidewalk. Mars apparently was weeping salty tears, some a meter wide. You might be able to make mud pies in them, but you wouldn’t want to drink from those brooks, at least not in their current saline form. Moreover, perchlorate has another useful and fateful-sounding feature: It can function as rocket propellant. Says Wray, “I honestly don’t know if this is good news or bad news for the idea of supporting life, but it was certainly news."

 The full article can be found here.

Currently, Teshia’s research at Georgia Tech is focused on teaching sustainable design.  One instructional technique she is exploring is to use an automotive case study to teach sustainable design, making the GM SSAC a fortuitous opportunity.

GM started the Student Sustainability Advisory Council (SSAC) to foster engagement with university graduate students on sustainability issues.  In 2016, its inaugural year, the SSAC will have five council members from different universities around the country.  Five additional members will be added next year.  Students will serve on the council for two years.

Students will complete multiple individual and group projects, participate in conference calls and subject matter seminars, and gain mentorship opportunities.  They will have access to research and GM employees related to the company’s sustainability efforts.  GM hopes to gain input from students on its sustainability strategy in order to foster a holistic understanding of its business strategy, identify emerging trends, and to identify actionable ideas using the holistic “lens” of sustainability.

Georgia Tech Professor Gil Weinberg oversees the project, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. He says the goal is to push the limits of what humans can do.

“If you augment humans with smart, wearable robotics, they could interact with their environment in a much more sophisticated manner,” said Weinberg, director of the Center for Music Technology. “The third arm provides a much richer and more creative experience, allowing the human to play many drums simultaneously with virtuosity and sophistication that are not otherwise possible.”

The robotic arm is smart for a few reasons. First, it knows what to play by listening to the music in the room. It improvises based on the beat and rhythm. For instance, if the musician plays slowly, the arm slows the tempo. If the drummer speeds up, it plays faster.

Another aspect of its intelligence is knowing where it’s located at all times, where the drums are, and the direction and proximity of the human arms. When the robot approaches an instrument, it uses built-in accelerometers to sense the distance and proximity. On-board motors make sure the stick is always parallel to the playing surface, allowing it to rise, lower or twist to ensure solid contact with the drum or cymbal. The arm moves naturally with intuitive gestures because it was programmed using human motion capture technology.

Weinberg and a team of student researchers with backgrounds in music, engineering, computer science and physics built the arm after creating a robotic prosthesis for an Atlanta drummer. That device had two sticks, one with a mind of its own. The prosthetic arm allowed the man to continue his musical passion after losing an arm in an accident, while also making him the fastest drummer in the world. Its success led Weinberg to create the “third arm” robot, something that anyone can wear and become a cyborg drummer.

“If you have a robotic device that is part of your body, it’s a completely different feeling from working alongside a regular robot,” said Weinberg. “The machine learns how your body moves and can augment and complement your activity. It becomes a part of you.”

The next step is linking the arm’s movements to brain activity. The team is already experimenting with an electroencephalogram (EEG) headband that detects a drummer’s brain patterns. They’re hoping to identify patterns that would allow the arm to react when the musician simply thinks about changing tempo or instruments.

Weinberg sees other applications for the technology.

“Imagine if doctors could use a third arm to bring them tools, supplies or even participate in surgeries. Technicians could use an extra hand to help with repairs and experiments,” he said. “Music is based on very timely, precise movements. It’s the perfect medium to try this concept of human augmentation and a third arm.”

For another video showing the technology, visit the Guthman Musical Instrument Competition Facebook page. The competition for future musical instruments is held annually at Georgia Tech and is scheduled for March 3.

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through grant numbers IIS-1345006. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF.

He is currently a professor and director of the Robotics, Automation, and Medical Systems (RAMS) Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMCP). Prior to joining UMCP, he was an associate professor at Drexel University. He was a post-doctoral fellow in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University from 1998 to 1999.

He is a recipient several NIH R01 awards, NSF CAREER award, and also the lead inventor on the “Outstanding Invention of 2007 in Physical Science Category” at UMCP. He is a recipient of the Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award. In 2011, he was an invited speaker at the National Academy of Sciences “Distinctive Voices” seminar series on the topic of “Robot-Assisted Neurosurgery” at the Beckman Center. He was also invited to attend the National Academy of Engineering’s 2011 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. He is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Medical Robotics Research (JMRR) and the Editor-in-Chief of the forthcoming multi-volume major reference work, tentatively entitled: Encyclopedia of Medical Robotics. He is also a senior member of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

Education 

• Ph.D. (Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics), University of Pennsylvania, 1998
• MA (Mathematics), University of Pennsylvania, 1997
• MSE (Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics), University of Pennsylvania, 1995
• B. Tech (Mechanical Engineering), Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India, 1993

Honors and Awards 

• Fellow, American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).
• Program Chair for 2019 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
• Founding Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Medical Robotics Research.
• Editor-in-Chief of the multi-volume Major Reference Work tentatively entitled: “Encyclopedia of Medical Robotics”.
• One of Five Faculty chosen from University of Maryland, College Park, for Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) Academic Leadership Program (ALP) Fellow for the 2014-2015 academic year
• Invited several years to Research Leaders Luncheon at University of Maryland, College Park
• Invited to give a talk in the National Academy of Sciences “Distinctive Voices” seminar series on the topic of “Robot-Assisted Neurosurgery” at the Beckman Center
• Invited to attend National Academy of Engineering's 2011 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium
• Program Chair of Second Biennial IEEE/RAS-EMBS BioRob 2008
• Outstanding Invention of 2007 in Physical Science Category, University of Maryland, College Park: MINIR: Minimally Invasive Neurosurgical Intracranial Robot – Lead Inventor
• Ralph R. Teetor Educational Award - Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE).
• College of Engineering Outstanding Teaching Award (2004) - Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA
• Outstanding Contribution to Graduate Teaching (2004) - Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA
• National Science Foundation CAREER Award – “CAREER: Minimally Invasive Surgery using Haptics and Vision”

But what about all of the other cases?

A study from School of Biology Professor Greg Gibson’s group at the Georgia Institute of Technology, recently published in the American Journal of Human Genetics, argues that we should be looking not just at the structural parts of genes, but also the regulatory regions around them.  

The paper, entitled “A Burden of Rare Variants Associated with Extremes of Gene Expression in Human Peripheral Blood,” demonstrates that there is a burden of rare genetic variants in these regions that associates with abnormal gene expression.  It does not show that they cause birth defects, but does suggest that they need to be seriously considered as WGS technology develops.

Gibson explains it in the form of a metaphor about building a house.  

“There are two critical components, the bricks and mortar, and the plans for where to put them,” says Gibson, a faculty member of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “If there is a defect in the glass or a crack in a piece of wood, then sooner or later the structure may fall apart. This is what current approaches focus on, the so-called protein coding-regions. But if the architect’s plans call for more windows than the beams can support, or the contractor doesn’t deliver enough concrete, then the consequences can be just as bad.”  

We now know that a lot more of the genetic component related to differences in the way we look and behave (or what makes us susceptible to different diseases) is in the planning than the structural components. This insight is based on studies of common polymorphisms, namely the millions of genetic differences that we all share. The new study argues that it will also be true of rare genetic variants, including new mutations that are specific to a single person.

Graduate student Jing Zhao sequenced the regulatory regions of almost 500 genes from 500 participants in the Georgia Tech-Emory Predictive Health Institute study, and added up the number of rare mutations in people whose expression of those genes was toward the extreme.  The result is what she calls a “smile plot,” because the curve has a high number at either end and low number in the middle. It means that the plans can be off in either direction, making too little or too much transcript for each gene.  

“It is as if all the houses with crooked window frames are that way not because of the wood quality, but because each builder made different mistakes when putting the frames in,” Gibson says. 

Furthermore, Gibson says, there seem to be specific subsets of genes where these events are more or less likely to happen. This is important, because it implies that we may be able to develop algorithms that identify the most likely places for regulation to go wrong, based on the evolutionary conservation of different parts of genes.

Projects such as President Obama’s precision medicine initiative aim to use genomics to help researchers decipher individual causes of disease.  In the next few years, Gibson expects that much larger datasets of tens and eventually hundreds of thousands of people, in many different tissues, will appear.  

“The challenges,” Gibson says, “are as much in the bioinformatics than the technology. “

In addition to Gibson and Zhao, also contributing to the published study were research scientist Dalia Arafat-Gulick (lab manager for the Gibson lab), T.J. Cradick (former director of the Protein Engineering Facility at Georgia Tech, now head of genome editing for CRISPR Therapeutics in Cambridge, Massachusetts), Cirian Lee (former postdoc at Georgia Tech, now at Rice University), Urko Marigorta (postdoc in the School of Biology), Gang Bao (former Georgia Tech professor, now at Rice University), Idowu Akinsanmi (former researcher in Bao’s lab at Georgia Tech) and Samridhi Banskota, an undergraduate student in the Gibson lab.

Read the study here.

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

Researchers Mark Riedl and Brent Harrison from the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology believe the answer lies in “Quixote” – to be unveiled at the AAAI-16 Conference in Phoenix, Ariz. (Feb. 12 – 17). Quixote teaches “value alignment” to robots by training them to read stories, learn acceptable sequences of events and understand successful ways to behave in human societies.

“The collected stories of different cultures teach children how to behave in socially acceptable ways with examples of proper and improper behavior in fables, novels and other literature,” says Riedl, associate professor and director of the Entertainment Intelligence Lab. “We believe story comprehension in robots can eliminate psychotic-appearing behavior and reinforce choices that won’t harm humans and still achieve the intended purpose.”

Quixote is a technique for aligning an AI’s goals with human values by placing rewards on socially appropriate behavior. It builds upon Riedl’s prior research – the Scheherazade system – which demonstrated how artificial intelligence can gather a correct sequence of actions by crowdsourcing story plots from the Internet.

Scheherazade learns what is a normal or “correct” plot graph. It then passes that data structure along to Quixote, which converts it into a “reward signal” that reinforces certain behaviors and punishes other behaviors during trial-and-error learning. In essence, Quixote learns that it will be rewarded whenever it acts like the protagonist in a story instead of randomly or like the antagonist.

For example, if a robot is tasked with picking up a prescription for a human as quickly as possible, the robot could a) rob the pharmacy, take the medicine, and run; b) interact politely with the pharmacists, or c) wait in line. Without value alignment and positive reinforcement, the robot would learn that robbing is the fastest and cheapest way to accomplish its task. With value alignment from Quixote, the robot would be rewarded for waiting patiently in line and paying for the prescription.

Riedl and Harrison demonstrate in their research how a value-aligned reward signal can be produced to uncover all possible steps in a given scenario, map them into a plot trajectory tree, which is then used by the robotic agent to make “plot choices” (akin to what humans might remember as a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel) and receive rewards or punishments based on its choice.

The Quixote technique is best for robots that have a limited purpose but need to interact with humans to achieve it, and it is a primitive first step toward general moral reasoning in AI, Riedl says.

“We believe that AI has to be enculturated to adopt the values of a particular society, and in doing so, it will strive to avoid unacceptable behavior,” he adds. “Giving robots the ability to read and understand our stories may be the most expedient means in the absence of a human user manual.”

Download the complete research paper.

This project undertaken was or is sponsored by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under grant #D11AP00270 and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under grant #N00014-14-1-0003. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the view of DARPA or the ONR.

Did you know that many grocery stores only have enough food in their inventory for a few days? We know what those stores will look like after we rush in a panic to get enough milk, bread, eggs and canned soup to last until the storm passes and the roads are clear. But our stores may not be able to get a resupply quickly if the roads are closed to their distribution center. What do we do then?

It is easy to fix the problem of enough food. Every household should have enough staples to last at least two weeks. The amount and type of food to keep depends on your family size, eating habits, and preferences. 

Here are some staples to consider:

• Cans of beans
• Cans of fruit and vegetables
• Cans of tuna
• Jars of peanut butter
• Soup/chili
• Bags of rice
• Bottles of water
• Dried milk
• Cooking oil
• Salt and sugar
• Coffee (for the caffeine addict in the family)
• Splurge item to break up the monotony

If you don’t have the time or energy to pick out your own items, you can get prepackaged kits from Amazon or other sources, some with a shelf life of 10 years.

The best combo may be one-two weeks of the staples mentioned, plus enough food to feed a family of five for a month. Add a few other items – flashlight, hand crank radio, and cash (including coins) – and you’ll have a good start.

September’s National Preparedness Month already passed us by, but I think I’ll send my loved ones a disaster preparedness bucket for Valentine’s Day. Just to show I care.

A School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Ph.D. student, Chi received this award for his proposed Ph.D. research entitled “A CMOS Multi-Functional Cellular Thermal Actuation/Sensing Array for Reconfigurable Localized Cell Heating, Ablation, and Manipulation.” He is a member of the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab and is advised by Hua Wang, the Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professor in ECE.

Recently, there has been increasing research interest in applying microwave engineering techniques in the fields of biology and medical engineering. For instance, researchers have demonstrated microwave biomedical imaging such as magnetic resonance imaging and mm-wave/THz non-invasive imaging, as well as microwave dielectric spectroscopy applications. However, very few designs focus on bio-actuation systems, especially for cell-based assays and applications. Cells are the basic biological units of all known living organisms, and proper cell actuation and manipulation are the key prerequisites to further advance cellular studies.

Chi’s proposed research leverages microwave techniques to achieve cell actuation and manipulation. In particular, the proposed cellular actuation array can generate localized thermal stress and electromagnetic field to alter the functionalities of the local cells. The array will serve as a multi-modality cell actuation/manipulation platform and facilitate a plethora of high-impact biomedical areas, such as cancer studies, neural network characterization, and large-scale cell-based assays for low-cost drug screening.    

The IEEE MTT-S Graduate Fellowship also recognizes Chi’s past research and educational achievements, including the Guo Moruo Scholarship (highest undergraduate honor at the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Science and Technology of China), the 2012 Georgia Tech Georgia Electronic Design Center Fellowship, the 2014 IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) Best Student Paper Award Finalist, the 2014 Texas Instruments IEEE CICC Student Scholarship Award, and 2015 International Solid-State Circuits Conference Analog Devices Inc. Outstanding Student Designer Award.

Chi will be presented with the IEEE MTT-S Graduate Fellowship at the 2016 IEEE International Microwave Symposium, to be held May 22-27 in San Francisco, California. 

The Wallace H Coulter BME Department already employs an innovative and integrated approach in its Ph.D. curriculum.  However, due to the ever-changing post-graduate environment, feedback from our alumni and external advisory board, and an increase in student demand, a new initiative has been launched within the Ph.D. program to expand and enhance professional development training for all graduate students.  This overall initiative includes the insertion of instructional and hands-on professional development training within the curriculum, as well as, the creation of two seminar series.

Teaching & Research Practica:

BME Ph.D. students are required to take a series of two courses during their second year: Teaching & Research Practicum I & II.  This series is dedicated to three fundamental core strengths we feel all future biomedical engineering leaders should possess: 1) highly effective teaching abilities, 2) a solid foundation of ethical training, and 3) the ability to function as a professional in their chosen career.

a. Teaching is an elemental skill that all professionals require, no matter the field.  Students in our BME Ph.D. program receive both instructional and hands-on teaching training during this second year, whereby they are exposed to pedagogical strategies and practical classroom applications.   

b. As researchers at the intersection of engineering, bioscience, and medicine, our graduate students will be confronted with unprecedented ethical issues and must learn to negotiate the many challenges that various research methodologies, technologies and therapeutics will present.  They must also learn to function as highly ethical research professionals in their chosen paths, utilizing the principles laid out in fundamental ethical training.  This series of courses also includes eight-hours of face-to-face Responsibility of Conduct in Research training.

c. Finally, Teaching & Research Practicum II includes highly focused and relevant professional development training for our students.  This course focuses on three professional development topics we feel are crucial for our students, no matter their career focus: project management, professional collaborations & relationships, and communications skills.  The students will apply these three topics toward their own research, immediately reflecting the relevance and applicability of such training.  With participation by various experts on both the Georgia Tech and Emory University campuses, including from the Scheller College of Business, the Center of Career Discover & Development, the Center for Enhanced Teaching & Learning, the Communication Center, and the Laney Graduate School, students will be exposed to biomedical research-specific tools and strategies within each topic.  Students will also have the opportunity to utilize such tools and strategies in workshops toward their own thesis work, creating a thesis milestone list and timeline, as well as designing and executing a three-minute presentation (or elevator pitch) of their research.

BME Professional Development Seminar Series

This seminar series focuses on offering our students the opportunity to hear from current leaders in the biomedical engineering field.  Speakers will be recruited from a variety of career paths and will focus on various professional development topics, such as negotiations, networking, management, and leadership.  The Department will offer two such seminars each semester, which can be utilized to fulfill program requirements that all first and second year students attend professional/career development events each semester.

BME Graduate Student Seminar Series

Many students in the BME Ph.D. Program graduate having given multiple 45-minute technical talks.  And now in the new Teaching Practicum II course, they can also practice a rapid elevator pitch summary of their research.  The Graduate Student Seminar Series focuses instead on the 10-minute conference-length presentation.  Taken together, these opportunities give our students exposure to a variety of presentation styles and audiences.  In this series, students must give their 10-minute presentations primarily before their peers, creating a low-stress environment to hone their skills.  However, to gain as much relevant feedback as possible, each seminar will also have in attendance one faculty member for input on the science and one specialist from the Georgia Tech Communication Center for input on the presentation style.  This series will exist in two formats: a monthly seminar, where up to four students present; and an annual BME Graduate Student Research Day to be held during the first week of Fall classes.  Besides offering additional opportunities for students in this series, the Research Day also serves as a social event where newly matriculating graduate students can attend and discover the various kinds of research occurring within the program, as well as meet current graduate students and faculty.

These three additions to the BME Graduate curriculum will serve as a foundation for the development of future professionals in the biomedical engineering field.  We believe these efforts, in combination with mentorship from some of the best researchers in the World, will culminate in the evolution of innovative and critical thinkers, able to engage the community, and help shape it’s future. 

Gravitational waves carry information about their dramatic origins and about the nature of gravity that cannot otherwise be obtained. Physicists have concluded that the detected gravitational waves were produced during the final fraction of a second of the merger of two black holes to produce a single, more massive spinning black hole. This collision of two black holes had been predicted but never observed.

The gravitational waves were detected on September 14, 2015 at 5:51 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (9:51 UTC) by both of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors, located in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, USA. The LIGO Observatories are funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), and were conceived, built, and are operated by Caltech and MIT. The discovery, accepted for publication in the journal Physical Review Letters, was made by the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (which includes the GEO Collaboration and the Australian Consortium for Interferometric Gravitational Astronomy) and the Virgo Collaboration using data from the two LIGO detectors.

There are 12 Georgia Institute of Technology faculty members, postdoctoral researchers and students in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. The team is led by Associate Professor Laura Cadonati, who also chairs the LIGO Data Analysis Council. In this role, she coordinates and guides the activities of hundreds of scientists around the world who work together to analyze the data coming out of the LIGO detectors.

“This is a groundbreaking discovery that will open a new field of gravitational wave astronomy where gravitational waves will be a new probe to explore the mysteries of the universe,” said Cadonati, who has been a member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration for 14 years.

Based on the observed signals, LIGO scientists estimate that the black holes for this event were about 29 and 36 times the mass of the sun, and the event took place 1.3 billion years ago. About three times the mass of the sun was converted into gravitational waves in a fraction of a second ­– with a peak power output about 50 times that of the whole visible universe. By looking at the time of arrival of the signals ­– the detector in Livingston recorded the event seven milliseconds before the detector in Hanford ­– scientists can say that the source was located in the Southern Hemisphere.

The Georgia Tech researchers conducted various analyses over the span of six months toward the confirmation of the first gravitational wave detection. They examined the large amount of data collected by the two detectors and performed investigations to ensure that the observed signal wasn’t due to false noise from the instrument or environment.

Once the signal was extracted from the LIGO data, the Georgia Tech team was able to compare it with hundreds of its simulations of binary black hole mergers. This helped confirm that the signal indeed originated from two black holes, nearly equal in mass, that were spinning on their respective axes as they orbited and collided, forming a single, spinning black hole.    

These binary black hole simulations were produced by the Georgia Tech numerical relativity team, under the leadership of Deirdre Shoemaker, associate professor and director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Relativistic Astrophysics. They solved Einstein’s field equations to model sources of gravitational waves using high-performance computing facilities.

“When we saw the initial signal, we knew something that strong could only be from colliding black holes,” said Shoemaker. “My group and I immediately went to our bank of theoretical predictions and searched for one that looked similar. After many years of computer modeling, we were finally able to compare our expectations with something that nature actually produced.”

According to general relativity, a pair of black holes orbiting around each other lose energy through the emission of gravitational waves, causing them to gradually approach each other over billions of years, and then much more quickly in the final minutes. During the final fraction of a second, the two black holes collide into each other at nearly one-half the speed of light and form a single more massive black hole, converting a portion of the combined black holes’ mass to energy, according to Einstein’s formula E=mc². This energy is emitted as a final strong burst of gravitational waves. It is these gravitational waves that LIGO has observed.

In the coming months, as LIGO continues its observing schedule, data will be streamed directly to the PACE computing cluster at Georgia Tech. The team will continue to exploit this new window of the universe with the construction of additional computing facilities and deployment of the LIGO analyses on the Open Science Grid.

The discovery was made possible by the enhanced capabilities of Advanced LIGO, a major upgrade that increases the sensitivity of the instruments compared to the first generation LIGO detectors, enabling a large increase in the volume of the universe probed—and the discovery of gravitational waves during its first observation run. The US National Science Foundation leads in financial support for Advanced LIGO. Funding organizations in Germany (Max Planck Society), the U.K. (Science and Technology Facilities Council, STFC) and Australia (Australian Research Council) also have made significant commitments to the project. Several of the key technologies that made Advanced LIGO so much more sensitive have been developed and tested by the German UK GEO collaboration. Significant computer resources have been contributed by the AEI Hannover Atlas Cluster, the LIGO Laboratory, Syracuse University, and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  Several universities designed, built, and tested key components for Advanced LIGO: The Australian National University, the University of Adelaide, the University of Florida, Stanford University, Columbia University in the City of New York, and Louisiana State University.

LIGO research is carried out by the LSC, a group of more than 1000 scientists from universities around the United States and in 14 other countries. More than 90 universities and research institutes in the LSC develop detector technology and analyze data; approximately 250 students are strong contributing members of the collaboration. The LSC detector network includes the LIGO interferometers and the GEO600 detector. The GEO team includes scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute, AEI), Leibniz Universität Hannover, along with partners at the University of Glasgow, Cardiff University, the University of Birmingham, other universities in the United Kingdom, and the University of the Balearic Islands in Spain.

LIGO was originally proposed as a means of detecting these gravitational waves in the 1980s by Rainer Weiss, professor of physics, emeritus, from MIT; Kip Thorne, Caltech’s Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, emeritus; and Ronald Drever, professor of physics, emeritus, also from Caltech.

Virgo research is carried out by the Virgo Collaboration, consisting of more than  250 physicists and engineers belonging to 19 different European research groups: 6 from Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France; 8 from the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy; 2 in The Netherlands with Nikhef; the Wigner RCP in Hungary; the POLGRAW group in Poland and the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO), the laboratory hosting the Virgo detector near Pisa in Italy.

The award-winning paper, entitled “The Wireless Workhorse: Mixed-Signal Power Amplifiers Leverage Digital and Analog Techniques to Enhance Large-Signal RF Operations,” is based on Wang’s collaboration with Toshiba Corporation and was published in the September 2015 issue of Microwave Magazine.

Wang is the Demetrius T. Paris Junior Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). His coauthors on the paper are Shouhei Kousai and Kohei Onizuka, collaborators from Toshiba, and Song Hu, an ECE Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech Electronics and Micro-System Lab, which Wang directs.

This paper reviews recently reported new architectures for silicon-based power amplifiers (PAs) that exploit mixed-signal (both analog and digital) techniques to substantially improve PA performance, such as PA back-off power efficiency, in-band/out-of-band linearity, and robustness against antenna load variations. These advanced PA architectures and designs have become complex, mixed-signal/mixed-mode RF systems with orchestrated collaborations among analog, digital, and large-signal RF operations.

The team will be presented with the award at the IEEE MTT-S Awards Banquet, which will be held on May 25 in San Francisco during the 2016 International Microwave Symposium.

Last month, 191 students participated in Focus — up from 160 participants in 2015. Among this year’s participants,105 students were female and 143 were Ph.D. candidates. This marks a 28 and 21 percent respective increase from 2015.

“We are proud to have accepted 55 percent women to the Focus program this year, and this trend mirrors Georgia Tech’s record-setting freshman class being 41 percent female — the first class to ever top 40 percent,” said Andre Dickens, assistant director, outreach initiatives at OMED: Educational Services, a unit of Institute Diversity.

In addition, this year’s Focus program participants represented 78 colleges and universities from approximately 25 states and U.S. territories. Morolake Omoya, undergraduate student at UCLA, remarked, “Before Focus, I had no idea that there was such a welcoming place for me in the United States. Georgia Tech has always been my dream graduate school, and I am thankful to all the organizers of this program for opening my eyes to a bright future.”

The four-day program includes campus and city tours; department and lab visits; panel discussions on graduate admissions, fellowships, scholarships, mentoring, and alumni insights; and the President’s Dinner.

“It is our hope that prospective graduate students will take away these lessons from Focus: a better understanding of the graduate school process and life at Georgia Tech; the importance of networking, particularly making valuable connections with professors; and how empowering it is to be part of a like-minded community,” said Georgia Tech Alumnus Cedric Stallworth, assistant dean for outreach, enrollment, and community in the College of Computing.

Focus President’s Dinner Keynote Speaker Rosalind L. Hudnell, vice president and director of Intel Corporation’s Corporate Affairs Group and president of the Intel Foundation, offered advice to the program participants: “Sometimes, the real world will take away your confidence or treat you like you’re not smart enough. Throughout your life, always remember to advocate for yourself.”

Since the program’s inception, more than 2,500 students from a wide array of colleges and universities across the U.S. have participated in Focus. Some 300 former Focus Scholars are among Georgia Tech alumni who have earned master’s and doctoral degrees. Focus Scholars is a component of the program designed to inform undergraduate juniors and seniors about the benefits of receiving an advanced degree. Additionally, six former Focus Fellows are members of Georgia Tech’s engineering faculty; Focus Fellows encourages diverse doctoral students to consider an academic career.

“Increasing diversity in higher education through programs like Focus will contribute to the preparation of a diverse workforce equipped to meet the complex challenges of the 21^st century and global community,” said S. Gordon Moore Jr., executive director of Institute Diversity’s Center for Student Diversity and Inclusion.

Currently, Georgia Tech is the nation’s top producer of doctoral degrees awarded to all minority students (Diverse: Issues in Higher Education). The Institute also awards more engineering degrees to women than any other school, according to the American Society for Engineering Education.

To learn more about the Focus program, visit www.focus.gatech.edu.

Georgia Tech’s InVenture Prize competition is designed to encourage and support undergraduate students’ interest in innovation and entrepreneurship. Once again, more than 500 students signed up for the competition.

This year’s six finalist teams have invented ways to make our lives safer, healthier, and a bit more fun. The teams are:

FireHUD: A display and data monitor that will track and display real-time information to firefighters in hazardous conditions. The goal is to decrease the level of uncertainty firefighters face.

Inventors: Zachary Braun, computer engineering; and Tyler Sisk, electrical engineering.

FretWizard: A virtual guitar teacher for students at varying levels. The inventors designed the site to give people a simpler and more intuitive way to learn how to play songs on the guitar.

Inventors: Ali Abid, computer science; and Molly Ricks, international affairs.

RoboGoalie: An automatic retrieval device that collects a soccer ball and launches it back to the player. Similar to a batting cage, this device gives soccer players the flexibility of practicing alone.

Inventors (all mechanical engineering majors): Siu Lun Chan, Ming Him Ko, Zhifeng Su, and Timothy Woo.

TEQ Charging: A power management system for electric vehicle chargers. The technology and design lowers the cost of installing current charge stations and increases efficiency by sequentially charging vehicles.

Inventors: Dorrier Coleman, computer engineering; Mitchell Kelman, computer science; Joshua Lieberman, mechanical engineering; and Isaac Wittenstein, mechanical engineering.

TruePani: A household sanitation solution, consisting of a passive antimicrobial cup and storage water device that kills harmful microbes in drinking water. This invention was designed for children in rural India who are most affected by waterborne illnesses, but it also could be used in underserved communities worldwide.

Inventors: Samantha Becker, civil engineering; Sarah Lynn Bowen, business administration; Naomi Ergun, business administration; and Shannon Evanchec, environmental engineering.

Wobble: A device to test a person’s reactive balance. It works like a mechanical bull in that it spins and tilts. It can be programmed to different levels of difficulty, which makes it useful for determining return-to-play protocols for athletes who have suffered a concussion and also for evaluating the risk of falling for elderly patients.

Inventors: Hailey Brown, mechanical engineering; Matthew Devlin, biomedical engineering; Ana Gomez del Campo, biomedical engineering; and Garrett Wallace, biomedical engineering.

The winning team scores $20,000 and the second-place team receives $10,000.

Both first- and second-place finishers will receive free U.S. patent filings by Georgia Tech’s Office of Technology Licensing and a spot in Georgia Tech’s startup accelerator program, Flashpoint.

A $5,000 People’s Choice Award will go to the fans’ favorite invention. Voting will be by text messaging during the finale.

The finale will take place March 16 at the Ferst Center for the Arts. Tickets are free and can be requested here.

The event will also be aired live on Georgia Public Broadcasting. 

Will the United States' CISO have any real authority? Will the new hardware and software bought with these funds be as insecurely configured or poorly implemented as the current systems? Two weeks ago Rob Joyce, chief of the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO), publicly reminded defenders that attackers know what actually is on a target network, whereas agency leaders often only think they know their own information environment. What should be and what is are often different, and this delta is usually the most fertile area of the attack surface.

This additional funding should be applied in two ways, first addressing the present and second looking to the future:

1)    Compel federal government agencies to prove they are doing the basics:

• inventory authorized and unauthorized devices (know what you’ve got)
• inventory authorized and unauthorized software (know what it’s running)
• reduce and control use of admin privileges
• read your logs (yes, really read them!)
• establish secure configs for all apps and devices, roll this out, don’t deviate, and patch it aggressively.

None of this is new, but actually doing it consistently would be novel for much of the U.S. government.  The new CISO and cognizant officials can’t keep admiring the problem, but actually must measure progress and hold poor performance accountable.

2)    Fund research and development for cybersecurity across disciplinary lines – computer science, engineering, policy, etc:

• Attribution of cyberthreats
• Consumer-facing privacy
• Cyber-physical systems

Reward those working on hard problems and seek revolutionary gains.  Don’t be afraid to fail.  Create the next! 

Michael Farrell is chief scientist for the Cyber Technology & Information Security Lab (CTISL) and associate director of attribution for the Institute for Information Security & Privacy (IISP) at Georgia Tech.

Joining the Petit Institute at the Georgia Institute of Technology are Gary Bassell, Sam Brown, Stanislav Emelianov, Douglas Robertson, Wilfried Rossoll, Edmund K. Waller and Aaron Young.

Bassell is a professor in the Emory University School of Medicine’s departments of Cell Biology and Neurology. The main research interest of his laboratory is to understand the mechanism and function of mRNA transport and local protein synthesis in neurons of the central and peripheral nervous system. He’s been particularly interested in how impairments in mRNA regulation may underlie spinal muscular atrophy and fragile x syndrome, two inherited neurological diseases affecting children.

Brown is making the lengthiest move of the new faculty members, coming to Georgia Tech from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where he was an assistant professor of evolutionary medicine. His lab’s research there focused on the social lives of bacteria – in particular how bacterial social strategies shape disease traits (virulence, transmission, emergence, resistance) and also present new opportunities for control. He is now based in Georgia Tech’s School of Biology.

Emelianov was appointed the Joseph M. Pettit Chair in Microelectronics and as a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in 2015, after coming to Georgia Tech from the University of Texas, where he was director of the Ultrasound Imaging and Therapeutics Research Laboratory. His research interests are in the development of advanced imaging methods to diagnose cancer, cardiovascular disease, and other pathologies. Emelianov is based in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering with a joint appointment as professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Robertson, who is based at Emory University Hospital, also provides instruction to students within the Coulter Department (a joint department of Georgia Tech and Emory University). An associate professor in musculoskeletal radiology, his research titled “Using Mathematical Modeling to Design Effective Regenerative Medicine Strategies for Orthopadics” was published recently in the Journal of the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.

Rossoll is an assistant professor in the Department of Cell Biology at Emory, where his lab’s primary research interest is in the biological role of mRNA transport and local translation in neurons and their dysfunction in neurological diseases (such as spinal muscular atrophy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS). He’s also a faculty member of Emory’s Center for Neurodegenerative Disease.

Waller is professor of hematology and oncology in Emory’s Winship Cancer Institute, where he also serves as director of stem cell transplantation and immunotherapy. He is a co-director of the Regenerative Engineering and Medicine research center (a collaborative effort between Emory, Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia). His research focuses on enhancing immune reconstitution after stem cell transplant and developing cell therapy for anti-tumor immunology and in regenerative medicine. 

Young is, indeed, the youngest of the new faculty members. He earned his Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from Northwestern University in 2014 then served as a postdoctoral fellow in the Human Neuromechanics Lab at the University of Michigan. He’ll join Georgia Tech as an assistant professor based in the School of Mechanical Engineering, where his research will focus on designing and improving powered orthotic and prosthetic control systems.

Now with almost 180 faculty members, the Petit Institute is an internationally recognized hub of multidisciplinary research on the Georgia Tech campus, bringing together engineers and scientists to solve some of the world’s most complex health challenges. With 17 research centers and more than $24 million invested in state-of-the-art core facilities, the Petit Institute is translating scientific discoveries into game-changing solutions to solve real-world problems.

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

Georgia Tech’s 3D IPAC approach enables 2X shrinkage in X-Y form factor and 2X smaller in thickness than LTCC and organic modules.It also enables superior performance from high-Q LC integration with better than 5% tolerance from precision lithography in contrast to ceramic modules, lower-loss interconnections between components leading to insertion losses of <0.5 dB. Glass provides ultra-smooth and dimensionally-stable substrates for high-throughput and large-area (1000 mm) panel processing with low cost. These advances are expected to enable the miniaturization, integration, performance and cost demands for emerging 5G front-end modules and their convergence with IoT and automotive communications.

Georgia Tech proposed 3D Integrated Passive and Active Component (3D IPAC) based glass RF modules and 3D IPDs in 2013, for unparalleled miniaturization, performance and cost. The 3D IPAC RF Module starts with an ultra-thin substrate (30-100 microns) made of glass, with ultra-low electrical loss and ultra-short through-package vias for double-side assembly of active and passive components separated by only about 50 µm in interconnect length. Actives and passives are embedded or assembled double-side on the glass using ultra-short, low-temperature and fine-pith copper interconnections. The module also integrates thermal and shielding functions with innovative structures and materials.

Several technology breakthroughs were accomplished to demonstrate such RF IPDs and modules. High-density through-vias in bare glass were formed from unique via-machining techniques by Georgia Tech’s partners such as Corning and Asahi Glass. Innovative tools and processes were developed for large glass panel handling with thinfilm low-loss build-up dielectrics, in partnership with Georgia Tech’s consortium members such as Atotech, NGK-NTK, Shinko and Unimicron. Advanced 3D TPV-based inductor designs were developed for high Q and high-density inductors, while inorganic nanodielectrics and nanomagneto dielectrics were utilized for further miniaturization of capacitors, inductors and EMI shield structures. Precision panel-level lithography was achieved for accurate microwave impedance matching with less than 5% tolerance. Double-side assembly was also demonstrated with such ultra-thin glass substrates.

Georgia Tech’s 3D IPD-based diplexers are 4X thinner compared to traditional approaches, with similar performance. With advanced thinfilm and high-density passive components, and design innovations, much superior performance is targeted in the next phase of the R&D program from 2016-2018. Georgia Tech and its partners also demonstrated ultra-miniaturized LTE and WLAN modules with its 3D IPAC approach with double-side integration of LNA, switch and filters. Good model-to-hardware correlations were seen from the module characterization of LNA gain and entry-to-exit insertion loss, illustrating the performance benefits of 3D IPAC modules. In the next phase, Georgia Tech is extending this concept further to complete PAMiD module integration with integrated thermal and shielding structures for LTE FDD/TDD, 5G and mm wave applications.

For more information about Georgia Tech’s Integrated Passives and Actives, please contact Prof. Rao Tummala at rao.tummala@ece.gatech.edu or Dr. P.M. Raj at raj.pulugurtha@prc.gatech.edu.

About the Authors

Dr. Raj Pulugurtha is the Program Manager for Integrated Passive and Actives as well as High-Temp Electronics at Georgia Tech PRC. raj.pulugurtha@prc.gatech.edu

Dr. Rao Tummala is Director of Georgia Tech’s Packaging Research Center. He is also a Chaired Professor in ECE and MSE. rao.tummala@ece.gatech.edu. 

The Summit is an annual event held for students interested in the pulp, paper, packaging and related industries. It serves as an open venue for gathering students from various universities, as well as paper and packaging industry experts. The programs offer opportunities for students, both undergraduate and graduate, to have direct peer interaction, network with industry leaders, develop deeper interests in the paper and packaging field, gain valuable information about the employment and career development within this industry, and schedule interviews with company representatives.

More than 170 students attended the event, which featured nine guest speakers from industry, and seven TAPPI leaders. The event included presentations, panel discussions, job interviews, a career fair, mill tour, and engineering competition. Students represented University of Maine, Western Michigan University, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, Miami University, State University of New York, Georgia Institute of Technology, North Carolina State University, Auburn University, Alabama Southern Community College, and University of Grenoble INP-PAGORA.

Among companies sending representatives were BASF, BTG, Domtar, International Paper, Kemira, Neenah Paper, SAPPI, Solenis, Verso, and WestRock, among others. 

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Using a model blood vessel system built on a polymer microchip, researchers have shown that the relative softness of white blood cells determines whether they remain in a dormant state along vessel walls or enter blood circulation to fight infection. Changes in these cell mechanical properties – from stiff to soft – can be triggered as a side effect of drugs commonly used to fight inflammation or boost blood pressure.

Other researchers have found that blood flow affects the cells that line arteries and that particles within cells tend to congregate near cell walls. Better understanding the role of physics in fine-tuning such biological processes could give researchers new approaches for both diagnosing and treating disease.

The work, believed the first to show how biophysical effects can control where white blood cells are located within the blood circulation, was reported February 8 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research was supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the American Heart Association.

“We are showing that white blood cells, also known as leukocytes, respond physically to these drugs and that there is a biological consequence to that response,” said Wilbur Lam, an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “This may suggest new ways to treat disease, and new places to look for diagnostic information. There may be physics-based disease biomarkers that we can use in addition to the common biological and biochemical markers we have been using.”

Lam’s research group began studying the issue to better understand a common side effect of glucocorticoid drugs such as hydrocortisone used to treat inflammatory disorders such as asthma and allergic reactions. These hormonal drugs prompt an increase in white blood cell counts, a change that had been attributed to biological processes, including a reduced “stickiness” between the cells and blood vessel walls. The increase in white cell count is also seen with drugs that support blood pressure, such as epinephrine, also known as adrenaline.

“The biological explanation for this seemed to fall short, so we thought maybe some of what was happening could be attributed to other factors – such as physical and mechanical issues,” said Lam, who is also a physician in the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the Department of Pediatrics at the Emory University School of Medicine.

To examine the theory, graduate student Meredith Fay and postdoctoral researcher David Myers fabricated model blood vessel systems that include artificial blood vessels with diameters as narrow as the smallest capillaries in the body. To isolate effects attributable only to physics, the systems – which were fabricated in Georgia Tech’s Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology – did not include the endothelial cells that normally line blood vessels in the body.

Using blood samples taken from a healthy human volunteer, they studied the behavior of white blood cells in the presence – and absence – of the drugs dexamethasone – a glucocorticoid drug – and epinephrine. Working with Georgia Tech Professor of Mechanical Engineering Todd Sulchek, they also used atomic force microscopy to characterize the stiffness of individual white blood cells before and after they had been exposed to the drugs, and determined that the drugs cause the cells to become significantly softer than before exposure.

“When we fluorescently label the white blood cells and perfuse them into the artificial vessels, the white blood cells are always flowing along the edge, on the walls of these artificial blood vessels,” said Lam. “But when they are exposed to the drugs, they go to the center of the channel and enter the main blood flow. Then, we discovered that the drugs cause the cells to remodel actin, which comprises the ‘skeleton’ of all mammalian cells.”

The group’s overall hypothesis is that the body uses the mechanical properties of these cells to help control their activity and where they are located within the circulation. The relative softness or stiffness of the cells, which collide constantly with billions of other cells in the bloodstream, including red and white blood cells, causes the cells to self-sort and determines where they end up physically within both the model blood vessels and in the human body.

“The soft cells are always flowing in the middle of the bloodstream, while the stiff ones are sequestered on the edges,” Lam said. “We believe this is how white blood cells traffic in the body and get to the site of an infection. This may be a way that the body very efficiently sorts and directs its white blood cells to get them where they’re needed.”

As a next step, Lam hopes to study how physical properties affect the movement of hematopoietic stem cells used in bone marrow transplants. Once injected intravenously into the body, the cells quickly move from the circulation to bone marrow sites where they belong, and he believes mechanical properties may also play a role in this homing process.

“Whenever there is a change in some cellular activity or physiological activity, we tend to try to explain everything at the genetic level – which genes turn off and which genes turn on,” he said. “Gene expression is a relatively complex process, and our hypothesis is that there are probably a lot of cellular processes that are much simpler and more efficient than the typical paradigm of DNA expression, then RNA translation, and then protein production. A little tweak of a white blood cell’s actin will allow it to change from stiff to soft, and that small change, in and of itself, may have profound physiologic consequences and enable it to be transported from one part of the body to another.”

In addition to those already mentioned, the research also included Amit Kumar and Michael Graham from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Cory Turbyfield, Rebecca Byler and Kaci Crawford from the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech; Robert Mannino, Alvin Laohapant, Erika Tyburski, Yumiko Sakurai and Micahel Rosenbluth from the Coulter Department, the AflacCancer Center and Blood Disorders Service of Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, Emory University School of Medicine, the Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University, the Parker E. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech, and the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology at Georgia Tech; and Neil Switz of The Evergreen State College.

This research was supported by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under grant 5R01HL121264-03, the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant CBET-1436082 and the American Heart Association. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.

CITATION: Meredith E. Fay, et al., “Cellular softening mediates leukocyte demargination and trafficking, thereby increasing clinical blood counts,” (PNAS 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1508920113

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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).
Writer: John Toon

With a 5-4 decision, the Court has put a halt to the regulation while its legal challenge is being decided. The request for a stay came from a coalition of 29 states, led by West Virginia and including most of the states in the South. The claim is that the regulation is overly far-reaching and burdensome. 

The coalition’s request for a “stay” did not dispute the Regulatory Impact Assessment of the Clean Power Plan, which showed that the benefits of the regulation far exceed the costs. There would be costs – a clean grid will require decommissioning the oldest, inefficient coal plants and removing their coal ash ponds as well as constructing cleaner power systems and deploying low-cost energy efficiency. But the benefits are much greater – including reduced childhood asthma and other respiratory diseases as well as reduced climate disruption from severe floods, storms, wildfires, and droughts. 

The good news is that the Court has agreed to begin hearing arguments on the case on June 2, 2016. Hopefully the legality of the Clean Power Plan will be determined shortly thereafter, so that the nation can settle on a course of action for curtailing carbon dioxide emissions from its power generators.

Conte will be a voting member of the 34-member CRA board, and his appointment is for two years, renewable. He served as president of the IEEE Computer Society in 2015 and currently co-chairs the IEEE Rebooting Computing Initiative.  The initiative seeks to identify novel post-Moore’s Law computing technologies.

Conte is a professor who is jointly appointed in the Georgia Tech Schools of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science. His research is in the areas of computer architecture and compiler optimization, including manycore architectures, microprocessor architectures, back-end compiler code generation, architectural performance evaluation, and embedded computer system architectures.

Chang, 29, is co-founder of Vertera Spine, a company that is working on unique spine solutions featuring its novel biomaterial, PEEK Scoria™ – a porous surface technology made entirely out of polyetheretherketone (PEEK). 

He was one of 600 people selected across 20 sectors (from a pool of more than 15,000 candidates) to make the Forbes list, now in its fifth year. The honorees represent a new generation of entrepreneurs and innovators that are pushing the boundaries in their respective industries by taking disruptive approaches to solve difficult problems.

“I'm honored to be included in this extraordinary group of talented people,” Chang says. “I'm also grateful for the opportunity to work at Vertera Spine with a team of passionate engineers, scientists, clinicians and business people.”

PEEK Scoria was developed in the lab of Ken Gall at Georgia Tech. Gall is a former faculty researcher at the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. He now heads the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Duke University, and is a co-founder of Vertera Spine, where Chang invented a method for manufacturing the porous PEEK material, so that it could be commercialized. 

The company plans a commercial launch of the COHERE™ Cervical Interbody Fusion Device, its first PEEK Scoria product cleared by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), later this year. Chang has high hopes for the product’s success.

“PEEK is a well-known polymer, it’s widely used, but it doesn’t integrate really well with bone,” Chang says. “But our porous device has been shown to elicit a positive response in a body. With PEEK Scoria, we’re solving the integration problem.”

Though he never worked in Gall’s lab while attending Georgia Tech, Chang did take the professor’s ‘Principles and Applications of Engineering Materials’ course, and it made an impression. “That was one of my favorite classes,” he says.

After earning his Master of Engineering from Boston University, Chang returned to Atlanta and worked at MedShape, another startup company Gall co-founded.

“Allen’s role has been instrumental. He completely led the scale up efforts,” says Gall. “In addition to being a great engineer, he is a risk taker. Rather than short-term compensation, he opted to bet on the company’s long-term value and is a big equity owner because of this.”

So Chang is completely invested in the company’s success and is already looking ahead to the next challenge. Vertera Spine is developing a PEEK Scoria lumbar device, and Chang is leading that effort. 

“Right now our major task is actually producing our cleared cervical device, so that surgeons can start implanting it into patients. I mean, that’s why we do this, to help patients,” says Chang, who was born in Taiwan and moved to Atlanta when he was 10. 

He’s already got a background in helping to improve the human condition, having worked 10 months with AmeriCorps, rehabilitating houses in Gulf Coast states that were affected by Hurricane Katrina, and up-scaling the production of biodiesel. With Vertera Spine, he’s helping humanity in a different way, developing products that can actually replace bone.

“We’ve come a long way since founding the company over two years ago,” says Chang. “I’m looking forward to seeing what we can achieve as we develop additional product lines in spine and beyond.”

At the macro-scale, the conversion of ethylene has long been considered among the reactions insensitive to the structure of the catalyst used. However, by examining reactions catalyzed by platinum clusters containing between 9 and 15 atoms, researchers in Germany and the United States found that at the nanoscale, that’s no longer true. The shape of nanoscale clusters, they found, can dramatically affect reaction efficiency.

While the study investigated only platinum nanoclusters and the ethylene reaction, the fundamental principles may apply to other catalysts and reactions, demonstrating how materials at the very smallest size scales can provide different properties than the same material in bulk quantities. Supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the Department of Energy, the research was reported January 28 in the journal Nature Communications.

“We have re-examined the validity of a very fundamental concept on a very fundamental reaction,” said Uzi Landman, a Regents’ Professor and F.E. Callaway Chair in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We found that in the ultra-small catalyst range, on the order of a nanometer in size, old concepts don’t hold. New types of reactivity can occur because of changes in one or two atoms of a cluster at the nanoscale.”

The widely-used conversion process actually involves two separate reactions: (1) dissociation of H2 molecules into single hydrogen atoms, and (2) their addition to the ethylene, which involves conversion of a double bond into a single bond. In addition to producing ethane, the reaction can also take an alternative route that leads to the production of ethylidyne, which poisons the catalyst and prevents further reaction.

The project began with Professor Ueli Heiz and researchers in his group at the Technical University of Munich experimentally examining reaction rates for clusters containing 9, 10, 11, 12 or 13 platinum atoms that had been placed atop a magnesium oxide substrate. The 9-atom nanoclusters failed to produce a significant reaction, while larger clusters catalyzed the ethylene hydrogenation reaction with increasingly better efficiency. The best reaction occurred with 13-atom clusters.

Bokwon Yoon, a research scientist in Georgia Tech’s Center for Computational Materials Science, and Landman, the center’s director, then used large-scale first-principles quantum mechanical simulations to understand how the size of the clusters – and their shape – affected the reactivity. Using their simulations, they discovered that the 9-atom cluster resembled a symmetrical “hut,” while the larger clusters had bulges that served to concentrate electrical charges from the substrate.

“That one atom changes the whole activity of the catalyst,” Landman said. “We found that the extra atom operates like a lightning rod. The distribution of the excess charge from the substrate helps facilitate the reaction. Platinum 9 has a compact shape that doesn’t facilitate the reaction, but adding just one atom changes everything.”

Nanoclusters with 13 atoms provided the maximum reactivity because the additional atoms shift the structure in a phenomena Landman calls “fluxionality.” This structural adjustment has also been noted in earlier work of these two research groups, in studies of clusters of gold which are used in other catalytic reactions.

“Dynamic fluxionality is the ability of the cluster to distort its structure to accommodate the reactants to actually enhance reactivity,” he explained. “Only very small aggregates of metal can show such behavior, which mimics a biochemical enzyme.”

The simulations showed that catalyst poisoning also varies with cluster size – and temperature. The 10-atom clusters can be poisoned at room temperature, while the 13-atom clusters are poisoned only at higher temperatures, helping to account for their improved reactivity.

“Small really is different,” said Landman. “Once you get into this size regime, the old rules of structure sensitivity and structure insensitivity must be assessed for their continued validity. It’s not a question anymore of surface-to-volume ratio because everything is on the surface in these very small clusters.”

While the project examined only one reaction and one type of catalyst, the principles governing nanoscale catalysis – and the importance of re-examining traditional expectations – likely apply to a broad range of reactions catalyzed by nanoclusters at the smallest size scale. Such nanocatalysts are becoming more attractive as a means of conserving supplies of costly platinum.

“It’s a much richer world at the nanoscale than at the macroscopic scale,” added Landman. “These are very important messages for materials scientists and chemists who wish to design catalysts for new purposes, because the capabilities can be very different.”

Along with the experimental surface characterization and reactivity measurements, the first-principles theoretical simulations provide a unique practical means for examining these structural and electronic issues because the clusters are too small to be seen with sufficient resolution using most electron microscopy techniques or traditional crystallography.

“We have looked at how the number of atoms dictates the geometrical structure of the cluster catalysts on the surface and how this geometrical structure is associated with electronic properties that bring about chemical bonding characteristics that enhance the reactions,” Landman added.

In addition to those already named, the research team included first-author Andrew Crampton, Marian Rotzer, Claron Ridge and Florian Schweinberger from the Catalysis Research Center at the Technical University of Munich.

The experimental work has been supported by the European Research Council (ERC) through the advanced research grant (246645-ASC3), and by the DFG through project HE3454/23-1. Support was also provided by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) and by grant FG05–86ER45234 from the Office of Basic Energy Sciences of the US Department of Energy (DOE). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.

CITATION: Andrew S. Crampton, et al., “Structure sensitivity in the nonscalable regime explored via catalyzed ethylene hydrogenation on supported platinum nanoclusters,” (Nature Communications 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10389.

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Media Relations Assistance: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).

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She came to Georgia Tech knowing that she wanted to be an engineer, having been on a FIRST Robotics team in high school. After looking into the Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) and the curriculum it offered, she found that it provided the mix of business and engineering that interested her -- "even going beyond," she says, her expectations of what she would learn at ISyE.

She was able to put her IE skills into play as part of the GC, which promotes student-driven cross-disciplinary teams that investigate societally relevant technological and sociological problems. Together, students in teams attempt to solve the world's most "wicked challenges," as Desai puts it.

Desai's particular team developed HIVE (Health Integration Via Education), a program targeted toward fourth graders in Chattahoochee Elementary School in Duluth, Ga. “We looked at how technology and interactive lesson plans impacted how students responded and retained health information.” The students wore a clip-on pedometer that plugged into a computer and connected to a website called Zamzee. The students were awarded points for the steps they took.

“We linked that back to a curriculum, so we would go in every week and teach the students about health,” explains Desai. “What we saw was that the kids were really receptive to the program we were creating, so the fact that they could wear these pedometers and take them home – we saw their fitness levels exceed our control group’s by almost 60 percent. So it was a huge difference.”

As the program developed, Desai and her team discovered the possibility of turning the project into an entrepreneurial venture by creating their own startup company. She says, "We began connecting with the start-up community in Atlanta and resources around campus to understand what building our own company would require and to also build our own wearable prototypes."

Desai’s specific role in the potential business was team CEO. As an IE, “we’re really good at strategy, critical thinking, and problem solving.” She was responsible for making sure each team in the business was on task and meeting the project deliverables.

Ultimately, due to technical challenges – as well as the fact that not everyone on the team was willing to drop out of school and work on the startup full-time – the GC team decided to put the project on hold. “We were really close,” Desai adds. “We were about to launch the business – we were looking through the paperwork and everything. [But] having the dedication to doing one thing is an important part of the process.”

In addition to the GC, Desai also participated in the VIP program, which offers credit to students for participating on research teams consisting of undergrads, graduate students, and professors. “Many of the teams also focus on building projects from an entrepreneurial perspective,” she says.

For three semesters, she was part of the patient similarity team. As Desai explains it, “This project focused on clustering patients into meaningful groups to provide targeted provider care and better use of hospital resources. As part of the program, we not only built our minimum viable product but also worked with external groups to gain feedback, write business cases, and present to industry experts on our project. Our faculty lead really pushed us to look at our projects from a business perspective and taught us the keys to really making the right pitch.”

As part of a VIP team, Desai was once again using her IE-driven business and engineering skills. When asked how her IE skills complement her entrepreneurial work, Desai reflects for a moment and then says, “Our curriculum encompasses a lot of different skills: business, engineering, and computer science. Thus, as an IE, I find myself at the intersection of all these groups, and it’s a really interesting spot to be in. We’re really the jack-of-all-trades. We have the breadth to manage teams effectively and understand processes from a holistic perspective. However, we also have the skills to dive further in and concentrate in a particular area to enable us to step into entirely different roles.”

As for her future work, Desai feels prepared with her IE skills “to look at problems and understand them analytically and from a holistic perspective. I would love to pursue entrepreneurial work after I graduate and to be a part of something that disturbs traditional ways of how things operate. I find innovation and challenges and possibilities of entrepreneurship to be really exciting. I am also really interested in analytics and how we can use data to drive new insights about people, businesses, and how processes work.”

She's going to use those analytical IE skills as an operations leadership intern for Amazon this coming summer: “I think this will be a really cool opportunity to see such a large supply chain network that’s really been innovating processes and disturbing traditional supply chains. I’ll basically act as manager of the operations facility – which is where Amazon gets your order, puts it in a box and ships it to the customer – a warehouse, essentially – and shadow the actual operations leader. So I’ll be managing a team of 100 associates on the floor the entire time.

“This will be focused more on the supply chain on the operations side of things, so I’ll manage the supply chain at this warehouse and make sure everything is flowing through it, monitoring and reducing bottlenecks. It’s a collaboration of the supply chain classes I’ve taken at Tech and then a lot of the optimization tools that come into play when I start looking at how I’ll change my facility or how another change might affect the system. The idea of doing two-day delivery, same-day delivery, delivering your groceries – those are all really cool things. It’s not how people imagined traditional supply chains, and the fact that Amazon can do it and do it so effectively – there’s a lot of opportunity to learn from that.”

While not sure what she'll be doing after graduation – perhaps eventually going on to get her master's degree in statistics or analytics – Desai did say that she is “looking for an environment where I can continue learning, innovating, and working with really talented people. And when you’re in an atmosphere where you’re ‘disturbing’ or causing some type of change, it’s cool in that you don’t know what to expect; you can only anticipate and think of every possible thing that could go wrong. So there’s a lot to think about, but it’s never been done before, so you’re on your own. You get to decide what you want to do, which is a cool place to be in.”

These are the looming questions that the National Cyber Security Alliance sought to address this week during its 8^th Annual “National Data Privacy Day,” supported by the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Interactive Computing.  Professors Annie Anton (IC) and Peter Swire (Scheller College of Business) serve on the National Cyber Security Alliance advisory board.

“Most Americans are giving up a lot more data on a daily basis than they might think,” says Andrew Howard, director of the Cyber Technologies & Information Security Lab at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. “Between their cell phones, security cameras, and Internet browsers, the average person is trackable throughout most of their day.”

Despite the prevalence of hacks or fears of overzealous surveillance, Swire, who is the Huang Professor of Law & Ethics at the Scheller College of Business, argues that the U.S. is still one of the safest places in the world with stringent safeguards of individual privacy.

“The 4^th Amendment applies to all wiretaps – it’s a legal structure for any intercept of communication or information,” Swire says, who served as the top privacy official under the Clinton administration and on Obama’s cybersecurity review group. “If you violate the 4^th Amendment, you cannot use the evidence in court… What other countries have a legal order that is the same as the U.S.? Who in the world has a longer and stronger tradition of protecting fundamental rights than the U.S.?”

This week, Swire was in Brussels to debate European privacy activist Max Schrems, who has alleged that American companies too liberally trade personal data between the U.S. and Europe.

But despite protections like the 4^th Amendment, Swire and others at Georgia Tech agree – current technology allows such a new breadth of data collection that individuals should be concerned about collection until that data is proven necessary and useful. We asked faculty, scientists and research engineers for their thoughts during National Data Privacy Day:

What do too few Americans know about data privacy but should?

“Data brokers know much more about you than you can imagine, and there are few regulations for this industry. Data brokers collect personal information about consumers from a wide range of sources and provide it for a variety of purposes, mostly marketing and people search as documented by the Federal Trade Commission… Inferences these brokers data aggregators make include potentially sensitive things like ‘expecting mother’ or ‘diabetes patient.’ [Their] products can be used to facilitate harassment, or even stalking, and may expose domestic violence victims, law enforcement officers, prosecutors, public officials, or other individuals to retaliation or other harm.”
-- Michael Farrell, associate director, Institute for Information Security & Privacy

What should every individual do at minimum to protect their data?

“Think twice before in-putting data into different applications or giving online applications broad access to your online accounts through services such as Facebook, Twitter, or Google Mail.  Asking yourself a few quick questions before sharing data can go a long way towards avoiding problems: Is this a trustworthy service? Who will have access to my data?”
-- Andrew Howard, director, Cyber Technologies & Information Security Lab

“Right now by default you will be tracked and you have to manually switch on the options to block your tracking (in Internet browsers, for example). Product developers should be focused on flipping that option so that by default you are not tracked. For most sites that we visit, we do not need to be tracked.” 
-- Wenke Lee, professor of computer science and co-director of the Institute for Information Security & Privacy

Who can best lead the development of new solutions for cybersecurity — government, industry or academia? 

 “It’s academia and industry working together. Our research is based on understanding what is going in the real world and the threats that are there. We call it ‘ground truth driven research.’ A lot of the data that enables this form of research is there in industry, so academic and industry working together is important, as well as the government supporting forward-looking, longer-term goals.”
-- Mustaque Ahamad, professor of computer science and director of educational outreach, Institute for Information Security & Privacy

“Industry is best positioned to lead the way due to the market pressures placed on them; however, without academic research and government support, they are unlikely to succeed.  Like most hard problems, solutions will require a partnership.”
-- Andrew Howard, director, Cyber Technologies & Information Security Lab

What are you most excited about that could advance cybersecurity?

“I am excited that debate is in the public sphere at this time, and that people are talking about cybersecurity.”
-- Peter Swire, Huang Professor of Law & Ethics, Scheller College of Business

“Many open-source solutions are being created here at Georgia Tech, which anyone can use to create more secure systems, software and hardware. Our projects like UCOGNITO can help people truly browse privately. Other research is exposing new places where information is being leaked, for example, between mobile app developers and ad networks. We need to educate consumers to apply pressure to overzealous businesses, and as researchers we can focus on creating the tools that enable customers to protect themselves.”
-- Wenke Lee, professor of computer science and co-director of the Institute for Information Security & Privacy

"This is a prestigious appointment and we congratulate Ravi on being named Dean of Engineering at Duke," said Gary S. May, dean of engineering and Southern Company Chair at Georgia Tech.  "I look forward to continuing to work with him in different capacities at the regional and national levels. He has done a phenomenal job as chair of the Coulter Department."

Chris Larsen, dean of the Emory University School of Medicine, echoed those sentiments saying, "Ravi has inspired his department and his many colleagues at both Emory and Georgia Tech with a strategic vision of research and educational excellence while empowering his faculty to drive innovation and encourage entrepreneurship among their students."

As chair since 2013, Bellamkonda helped develop programs to sustain deep student learning and entrepreneurship at the undergraduate level.  He also directed an NIH-funded training grant on the Rational Design of Biomaterials, initiated a novel graduate leadership program for bioengineering graduate students, and is co-principal investigator for the Emory-Georgia Tech- Morehouse College Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) grant. 

Bellamkonda’s own research involves an exploration of the interplay of biomaterials and the nervous system for designing novel brain-machine interfaces, using immunomodulation to foster nerve repair and design devices for brain tumor therapy.  It is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, Ian’s Friends Foundation, Georgia Research Alliance and the Marcus Foundation.

A graduate of Osmania University (India) who received his Ph.D. from Brown University and did post-doctoral training at MIT, Bellamkonda started his career at Case Western Reserve before moving to the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering in 2003. From 2010-2013, he served as associate vice president for research at Georgia Tech, where he led programs to enhance translational research, technology transfer and programs that encourage innovation in research and education and faculty development.

Bellamkonda is the president of the American Institute for Biological and Medical Engineering (AIMBE), a policy advocacy group, and is a frequent consultant on biomedical engineering research and education.  He’s the recipient of numerous honors, including the Clemson Award for Applied Research from the Society for Biomaterials, the EUREKA award from the National Cancer Institute, a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, and the best professor award from the Georgia Tech BME students.

"The Wallace H Coulter Department is a remarkable partnership between two great universities and right from our inception, risk and innovation has been embedded in our DNA. It has been an privilege to serve this department as Chair. I am confident that the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory will continue to be one of the leading BME departments in the country for a long time to come.  So it is with very mixed feelings that I take on the challenge and honor of being the Dean of Engineering at Duke University.  In many ways, this department gave me the scholarly and leadership experiences that paved the way for this next challenge.  Given our wonderful experiences here, Georgia Tech and Emory will always be home for our family!," remarked Bellamkonda.

The Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech began in 1997 as a joint program between a public university and private entity - creating leaders in research, academia, and industry. The department is ranked in the top three in the country with more than 1,300 undergraduate and 200 graduate students enrolled. The Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory is the largest biomedical engineering department in the country.

Kay Kinard
Director of Communications
College of Engineering

The fund is being established in recognition of the Institute of Paper Chemistry’s  (IPC) educational and leadership legacy and will be maintained as an endowment fund for support of Georgia Tech’s Renewable Bioproducts Institute (RBI). It will be directed to student and faculty initiatives and programs that enhance the mission of RBI as well as advance forest-related industries.

This is not the first large gift from the Institute of Paper Chemistry Foundation (IPCF). In 2014, RBI received a $44 million grant, one of the single largest gifts in Georgia Tech’s history. That endowment currently supports 43 paper science and engineering students who advance the research mission of RBI through their faculty-directed research.

Jim Ferris, chair of the IPCF, stated that the IPC Legacy Endowment is targeted to place funding right at the interface of Georgia Tech and forest-related manufacturing sites.

“We want the funds generated by this grant to have the best chance of being of value to manufacturing sites,” he said. “The grant will support the development of new technology that will improve competitiveness of existing or future forest-based industries and will support the development of people at these manufacturing locations.”

The establishment of this fund further affirms the Institute’s position as a leading driver of the future of the forest bioproducts industry and continues the commitment by the IPCF to strengthen RBI’s hand in developing the next generation of engineers and leaders for the industry, according to RBI Executive Director Norman Marsolan.

“The IPC Foundation has played a pivotal role not only in the success found on this campus, but that of all who came before us – more than 85 years of industry leadership and research support,” he said.

The primary purpose of the fund is to support faculty and students engaging with the forest-related industries through the RBI. The fund will be used to encourage interaction among industry, students and faculty through programs and events that offer value to forest-related company leadership. The fund will also promote programs that attract undergraduate and graduate students to forest-related industries.

“Our members are our partners, providing financial support, but also insight as to what challenges and opportunities the industry is facing today and what the evolution of those will hold for tomorrow,” Marsolan said.

“We want to strengthen and maintain our existing RBI industry members, but also cultivate new partners, extending our outreach. The benefits extend beyond the companies’ access and any financial contribution RBI receives. Our students receive a tremendous benefit by gaining a unique foothold in the industry and forming a relationship with a company, which many times translates into career opportunities.”

The IPC was founded in 1929 in Wisconsin to provide science, technology and education in support of the pulp and paper industry, a rapidly growing sector of the economy whose executives recognized the need for employees specifically trained in the scientific processes of papermaking. In 1989, IPC, renamed the Institute of Paper Science & Technology, relocated to Atlanta and merged with Georgia Tech in 2003.  The evolution continued in 2014 with an expanded scope of work and research, as well as designation as one of Georgia Tech’s 11 interdisciplinary research institutes, the Renewable Bioproducts Institute. For more information, visit www.rbi.gatech.edu.

You are requested and encouraged to (1) display your research poster all day Tuesday, April 5^th, and (2) to participate in at least one of the two RBI poster sessions on Tuesday, April 5.  And, though not required, you are cordially invited to present your poster at both the 11am and 5:30pm poster sessions

Details:

The Renewable Bioproducts Institute will conduct its annual executive conference, “Reimagining Bioproducts Industries:  New Ideas—New Opportunities,” hosting industry, government and Georgia Tech guests on April 5-6, 2016.  We request our PSE students to display their poster beginning Monday, April 4, and to be present at either or both of the two poster sessions at 11:00 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 5.  The sessions are scheduled for 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. (including lunch), and 5:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. (followed by dinner).  Students will have excellent opportunities to engage with industry participants.  The event will be held in the Paper Tricentennial Building, 500 Tenth Street Northwest (at Hemphill).  Please visit the RBI website for more about the conference, including the preliminary agenda.

We will organize the posters as our conference is organized, in three focus areas: 

1. New Opportunities in Biochemicals
2. The Future of Biocomposites and Nanocellulose
3. Operational Excellence in Advanced Pulping, Paper & Packaging

Please let us know as soon as possible, and no later than Friday, February 5, via e-mail to Lavon Harper (Lavon.Harper@rbi.gatech.edu), of your intent to participate and at which of the two sessions you will be present.  We ask that you commit to at least one.  Again, you are welcome and encouraged to be present at both.  Provide the title of your poster and the focus area (above) in which it should be grouped.  150-word abstracts and your 75-word bio are due no later than Thursday, March 3.  A catalog of abstracts will be prepared and circulated to invited guests so that they can arrive ready to discuss your projects.  The Abstract Catalog from the 2015 RBI Executive Conference can be seen at:http://rbi1.gatech.edu/sites/default/files/documents/2015%20Executive%20Conference%20-%20Poster%20Abstracts.pdf.

You will mount your posters on Monday, April 4, details to be announced.  Posters will be displayed throughout the conference.  You may retrieve your poster after dinner on Tuesday evening, April 5.

In the past, our member company representatives have considered the poster session a highlight of our conferences, and several useful collaborations between students and companies have resulted from the occasion.  These poster sessions will reflect our expanded RBI and the continuing Paper Science & Engineering (PSE) program.

Please note that a number of students will make PowerPoint presentations as part of the conference program.  If you are making one of these presentations, participation in the poster session is optional.

To summarize, please:

• Confirm your plans to present a poster and provide your title and category ASAP (no later than Friday, February 5).  Please provide this information to Lavon Harper (lavon.harper@rbi.gatech.edu)
• Submit your abstract (150 words) and a 75-word bio edited for publication for the program book no later than Thursday, March 3 to Lavon Harper (Lavon.Harper@rbi.gatech.edu).
• Deliver your poster and push-pin it to the display boards beginning at 10 a.m. and by 5:00 p.m. Monday April 4th. You will be instructed as to which part of the room you should put your poster.  Location among the display boards in each section will be on a first-come basis.  The poster session will be on the first floor (ground level) of the Paper Tricentennial Building.
• Present your poster on April 5 at 11:00 a.m. and/or at 5:30 p.m.  Dress code is business casual or better.
• Indicate your intention to join us for lunch and/or dinner and whether you have any dietary restrictions (email Lavon Harper at lavon.harper@rbi.gatech.edu).  If your plans change, let us know—we need an accurate count.

Audience:

The audience will be made up of approximately 50 representatives from the chemical, fuel, materials and pulp & paper industries, and from national affiliated organizations and laboratories such as the USDA Forest Products Laboratory, the forest products industry’s Agenda 2020 Technology Alliance, ACS, USDoE, and others.

Abstract Guidelines:  (due Thursday, March 3)

Abstracts should be no more than 150 words in length.  They should explain the nature of the work and should lead with how your findings might be useful in terms of significance or potential application.  The audience will be technically savvy.  Please remember that not all individuals present will be experts in your particular field.  Keep your explanation clear and simple.  Protect intellectual property.

Poster Presentation Guidelines:

Poster Preparation

The poster may consist of images, illustrations, photographs supplemented by charts, descriptive material, technical information/factors, etc.  Emphasis should be placed on originality of the content, technical excellence, educational value, and practical application. 

• A few of you may be working on confidential or restricted projects.  If this is the case, please focus on capabilities and public knowledge.  The attendees are industry guests and are not bound by a confidentiality agreement. 
• Construction of the poster must be suitable for display on the free-standing, fabric-covered display boards.  Each board supports 4 posters (2 on each side).  Push-pins will be provided to mount the posters.  The total size of the poster must not exceed 36 inches x 42 inches.  You may elect to use portrait or landscape orientation.  No tabletop displays or other displays of any kind will be accepted without prior approval.

Poster Set-Up and Dismantling:

• Author(s) are responsible for bringing the poster to the poster session between 10 a.m. and 5:00pm on Monday, April 4.
• The poster session will be on the first floor of the RBI Paper Tricentenntial Building, 500 Tenth Street, NW, Atlanta.
• The poster sessions begin at 11:00 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 5.  
• Please stand next to your poster for the period of 10:45 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. (first poster session) and/or 5:15 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. (second poster session).
• You may remove your poster at 9:00 p.m. on April 5.  Any posters remaining on Wednesday, April 6 will be discarded.

“I’m starting to realize that maybe I want something different and the idea of entrepreneurship is really attractive,” says Nelson. “Making something based on your research, and looking back to say it succeeded or failed – that kind of independence appeals to me.”

Nelson recently got a substantial boost for his research efforts when he was named an American Heart Association (AHA) Fellowship Award winner. The award began January 1 and will extend through 2017.

AHA is supporting Nelson’s project, titled ‘The effects of diet induced obesity on lymphatic function and therapeutic intervention in lymphedema progression,’ with an award totaled at $52,000 over two years.

“Lymphedema affects about one in six cancer survivors,” says Nelson, who works in the lab of J. Brandon Dixon, faculty member of the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “It basically occurs as the result of some common cancer treatments, like lymph node removal, chemotherapy, radiation.”

The disease causes irreversible swelling, mostly in the arms or legs. It results from a blockage in the lymphatic system (part of your immune system). This blockage prevents lymph fluid from draining well and that fluid buildup leads to swelling. There is presently no cure, but lymphedema can be managed with early diagnosis.

“It turns out that people who are obese develop lymphedema at a much higher rate than the rest of the population,” Nelson says. “We want to understand how obesity affects the lymphatic system and its function.”

Nelson, who is from the Nashville, Tennessee, area, earned his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering at Mississippi State. After enrolling at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he joined Dixon’s Laboratory of Lymphatic Biology and Bioengineering (LLBB), where researchers focus on developing non-invasive methods to quantify lymphatic function.

He’s always been interested in pursuing a career in industry once he earns his PhD. But since arriving at Georgia Tech, is thoughts on what that might look like have shifted a little bit. 

“Now, I’m thinking that I’d really like to start up a small company, or work with an early-stage company,” he says.

That line of thought is driven in part by his experience in the TI:GER (Technological Innovation: Generating Economic Results) program, administered through the Scheller College of Business at Tech. The program is designed to teach students how to address the multidisciplinary issues that are part of technology commercialization. 

Through TI:GER, Nelson has teamed with two MBA students and two Emory Law students. Together, they’re focused on the commercialization of diagnostic and monitoring devices for lymphedema. 

The team, called Lumenostics, is working on a product designed to detect swelling in the earliest stages of the disease. This semester, the students will be engaged in business plan competitions.

“The training I’ve gotten through TI:GER is irreplaceable,” Nelson says. “It really sets you apart and gives you great exposure to the business side of research.”

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

It took only one analytics-related class at Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) for me to realize that I wanted to go into analytics. Like many undergrads, when I entered school I had chosen a general concentration in industrial engineering because I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do at the time. But after learning about basic modeling techniques and realizing the diverse array of fields I could explore with an analytics-focused degree, I was hooked.

Almost a year into my career, I feel fortunate to have graduated from a school that has directly prepared me as well as two of my colleagues who also graduated from Georgia Tech, Abisht Raviprakash and Vinod Cheriyan, to succeed in our careers. From coursework to extracurriculars, we’ve pinpointed unique knowledge and experiences we’ve gained from our time at ISyE that have set us up for success as we grow our careers at Enova International, a technology and analytics-driven online lender in Chicago.

Take Advantage of Broad Coursework

One thing that Georgia Tech does really well is offer a broad range of coursework. Every single industrial engineer takes a fairly wide breadth of classes beyond their concentration. For instance, an introductory course to forecasting and regression gave me the model-building skills I need to write the models that oversee our sophisticated, automated underwriting process at Enova International. A data visualization course gave me the tools I’ve needed to successfully present information to our executives in a way that is both visual and meaningful.

Coding was another indispensible skill I learned through coursework and side projects. Having a basic understanding of a programming language – for me, it’s Python – has enabled me to work much more efficiently in my current role. Even something as simple as pulling data into a spreadsheet can save tons of time if I do it myself rather than relying on someone else with specialized knowledge.

Gain Real-World Experience

While textbook learning is invaluable, at some point theory stops and practice begins. Thankfully, through my Senior Design project, I was able to put my knowledge into practice and work on an analytics solution for a large telecommunications company. We were tasked with optimizing their network so that they could fit more data onto the same infrastructure.

The project taught me both people skills and technical skills that help me perform my job at Enova today.

Most valuable was learning how teams that are working on large-scale technical projects interact with each other. On the Senior Design project, eight of us were working together, so we had to learn how to efficiently decide who would be best at each task based on our individual strengths. We also learned how to interact with executives, both in a formal presentation setting and in sessions for data gathering purposes. The lesson: Much of our success was determined by knowing what to ask, when to ask it, and when to figure it out ourselves.

This has translated to my job at Enova, where I’m often working on a multi-department project designed to identify a business opportunity or answer a question such as, “What product should we launch in this state?” It will also come in handy as Enova begins to offer its analytics as a service to external clients through Enova Decisions. Knowing how to successfully contribute to large-scale projects has been essential, and also has enabled me to continue to expand my knowledge by constantly working on new things and learning from others. I get to go deep in the data, but I’m also getting inputs from others and able to watch the entire project lifecycle unfold.

Complete Personal Side Projects

When hiring analytics team members, companies look for passionate individuals who have gone the extra mile. The best way to show you’re interested in analytics and a great way to get practice in it is to take on a personal side project. Plus, these can be really fun. For instance, there is a website called Kaggle where businesses post a problem that they want modeled. Anyone can submit a solution, everyone’s answers are ranked, and sometimes there is prize money to be won. It’s a good way to check your progress in a real-world scenario.

Never Stop Learning

Georgia Tech does a great job of teaching students how to teach themselves, and this is a critical skill for those going into analytics. It’s a new field that is still changing, and because of this it’s never boring. I was fortunate to find a company that offers a flexible rotation program for new hires that are recent grads, so I was able to try a few different roles at Enova before landing in my current position on the portfolio analytics team.

Aside from surrounding myself with colleagues who bring great insights and perspectives and learning from them, I keep up with the latest analytics developments by attending meetup groups, reading online content, and always being on the lookout for new programming languages and techniques to try.  

Analytics is an exciting and ever-evolving field, and I’m looking forward to continuing to learn and grow as I progress in my career. I’m grateful for the foundation ISyE provided with its challenging coursework and ample real-world opportunities outside of the classroom, and I’d advise any student at Georgia Tech who’s interested in pursuing a career in analytics to take advantage of all the school has to offer. You have world-class opportunities at your fingertips, so make the most of them! 

Insights from

Vinod Cheriyan and Abisht Raviprakash

Vinod Cheriyan, Ph.D. in Operations Research (2014),

M.S. in Operations Research (2012)

Current role: Senior Data Scientist, Research Architecture and Platform Analytics, Enova International

Most valuable classes: Coursework in statistics, optimization, and stochastics

Most valuable experience at Georgia Tech: My Ph.D. research gave me familiarity with a wide range of algorithms and a great base in statistics and data analysis – especially with how to deal with imperfect data.

What Georgia Tech does best: The coursework is thorough and rigorous, and they teach the “why” behind the “what.” Because of that foundation, I can understand why things work and pick up new concepts quickly.

Favorite part of current job: We have a culture of managed autonomy, which means anyone – regardless of level or how recently they joined – can have a huge direct impact if their model is the best. I also love working with really smart people who are willing to help each other. 

Top tip for current students: Two things: 1) Know the “why” behind the “what” (e.g., why is multicollinearlity considered bad for regression?) and 2) gain experience using real datasets – not just curated samples used in courses. There are many public data sets available that you can play around with to get practical experience.

Abisht Raviprakash,

M.S. in Quantitative and Computational Finance (2009)

Current Role: Analytics Manager, Portfolio Analytics, Enova International

Most valuable classes: Coursework in regression analysis and corporate strategy

Most valuable experience at Georgia Tech: I had a graduate assistantship focused on building an energy trading visualization map. It gave me exposure to computational skills and programming languages that I use today.

What Georgia Tech does best: The coursework is very well structured for an individual looking to go into analytics.

Favorite part of current job: I have exposure to a ton of different projects and tools. I’m given a lot of responsibility but also a lot of flexibility in building my own career structure.

Top tip for current students: Find something that you’re passionate about and dig into it. Challenge yourself to improve every day.

“Broadly speaking, we’re interested in figuring out how cells assimilate metals into metabolism in a safe way,” says Reddi, assistant professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and a faculty researcher with the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.

The work is important enough and challenging enough so that the National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Reddi with a CAREER Award, an early career development program for young investigators. 

“Basically, the program provides funding for the investigator’s potential to really make an impact,” says Reddi, whose lab focuses primarily on copper and iron, which are among the dozen or so metals that are frequently encountered in biology.

Reddi’s lab is particularly interested in a form of iron called heme (heme gives blood its red color). Heme is very important, he says, because of its presence in a lot of proteins. However, heme is also toxic.

“But we have no idea how the cell shuttles heme around,” says Reddi. “So we want to figure out exactly how cells handle heme – from the time its acquired or made by a cell, to how it’s distributed to all of the proteins that require heme. The grant is focused on understanding how these types of processes work.”

The five-year award is totaled at $912,000, a lengthy jump start, “that gives me time to really build the program,” says Reddi.

His lab has developed sensors to track the flow of heme, so one of the grant goals is to apply these sensors help identify the molecules and processes that regulate the mobilization of heme. 

“The longer term view, beyond the grant, is to recast heme as this very dynamic and mobile molecule,” Reddi says. “Our work has showed that it is actually a very mobile nutrient, and it might be important for signaling.”

Heme is basically present in every aspect of metabolism. So, Reddi’s even longer-term goal would be to control metabolism through the control of heme. 

“If we can inhibit the ability of certain proteins from acquiring heme,” he says, “we can begin to think about targeting diseases like cancer or neurodegenerative diseases where heme plays a role in the pathology.”

CONTACT:

Jerry Grillo
Communications Officer II
Parker H. Petit Institute for
Bioengineering and Bioscience

• Design complexity including the cost and connectivity
• Modules will have to continue to shrink in size
• Interoperability of components
• Security of not only data but the hardware controlling connected objects
• Development infrastructure needs to grow faster to keep up
• How to extract intelligence from data

Next week on February 1, Tom Carstensen, chief engineer of Sikorsky's Aerostructures Product Center, will address innovation at Sikorsky. Carstensen and a colleague will also lead a student recruitment session the same day from 5 to 7 p.m. Both sessions will occur at GTMI in Room 114. No registration is required. Food will be available. 

McCormick is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). He is a member of the Low Frequency Radio Group and is advised by ECE Assistant Professor Morris Cohen.

McCormick was honored for his presentation entitled “X-Ray Solar Flare Induced Ionospheric Perturbations Observed by VLF Sferics.” His work has focused on developing a technique that uses radio emissions from lightning, detected thousands of miles away from thunderstorms, as a proxy to track the electrical conditions of the upper atmosphere and lower ionosphere (65-85 km altitude).

This region is too high to reach with balloons, and too low to measure with satellites, yet has major impacts on several types of communications and radar signals and on global navigation. The radio emissions from lightning in the Very Low Frequency (VLF) range (3-30 kHz) reflect efficiently at these altitudes, and are thus sensitive to even small changes in ionospheric conditions.

McCormick’s technique processes and analyzes these lightning radio emissions, which was the subject of his presentation, and he also demonstrated his technique by tracking the ionosphere during a recent solar x-ray flare event.

“Georgia Tech is an academic institution that is dedicated to inclusive excellence. Through our MLK Celebration, we are pleased to honor the lives of civil rights leaders like Dr. King and Julian Bond, as the journey continues for social justice and sustainable social change,” said Archie Ervin, vice president for Institute Diversity.

Traditionally, the MLK Celebration’s educational programs and service opportunities kick off with the MLK Lecture. On January 13, MLK Lecture Keynote Speaker Jeffrey Johnson delivered an inspiring speech to nearly 500 students, faculty, staff, and community members in the Student Center Ballroom. Entitled “Unclaimed Legacy: Who Will Lead the Next Social Movement?”, Johnson’s remarks challenged attendees to celebrate the real legacy of Dr. King and create transformation by speaking the truth, maybe becoming a little uncomfortable, and gaining the courage to lead.

Johnson, an award-winning journalist, activist, and thought leader, also posed the following questions:

• Are we willing to be our authentic selves, which can be difficult in higher education institutions?
• What does it mean to have a real social movement like #BlackLivesMatter?
• Are we prepared to cast out visions that no longer make sense?
• Can we create a seemingly ridiculous vision that its leaders will not see realized in their lifetimes?
• In your own life, how will you lead? Who will be part of your ecosystem of leadership? Who will you touch? What will you transform?

“Dr. King knew the importance of being surrounded by an ecosystem of leadership that enabled him to deliver the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech,” remarked Johnson. “However, we keep hearing the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech because it is used to manipulate emotions out of leaders who lack vision today. If Dr. King was living in 2016, why would he still be dreaming a 1960s dream?”

Colin Potts, vice provost of Undergraduate Education, who expressed his support for having discussions generated by such thought-provoking addresses more often, said, “This MLK Lecture challenged us to not be self-satisfied and retreat to the same language as the 1960s.”

To continue these discussions at Georgia Tech, Institute Diversity and the African-American Student Union will host the Black History Month Lecture on Thursday, Feb. 11 at 4 p.m. in the Student Center Ballroom. Black History Month Lecture Keynote Speaker Benjamin Crump, partner of Parks & Crump Law Firm and known for his cases with civil rights implications, will discuss “The Criminal Justice System, #BlackLivesMatter, and College Student Activism Today.” To register for this event, visit www.diversity.gatech.edu/rsvp-2016-black-history-month-lecture.

To learn more about the MLK Celebration and to view Johnson’s MLK Lecture, visit www.diversity.gatech.edu/mlk-celebration.

The Different Games Collective was co-founded this summer by doctoral student Sarah Schoemann and masters student Michael Vogel along with collaborators in New York and Chicago, as well as local Georgia Tech alums Dannielle Del Rosario (CM ‘13), and Jordan Kilpack (CS, ‘12). As a grassroots, volunteer-run organization, Different Games Collective aims to create community resources and events to support diverse voices in the do-it-yourself and independent game world.

While this fall marked the launch of the collective, IAC students have been collaborating on Different Games since 2013, helping to organize an annual, Brooklyn-based conference with collaborators in New York City and Chicago. The Different Games conference features panels, workshops, and playable games from perspectives not typically supported by the commercial industry. Previous panels and workshops have explored a range of topics — from games and mental health to global game development. The fourth annual Different Games Conference will occur April 8 - 9, 2016, at NYU’s Media Arts and Games Network (MAGNET) center.

“Underrepresented people in games aren’t necessarily seen as ‘gamers,’ but the games community is actually extremely diverse. Statistics even suggest that current, women outnumber men as players,” Schoemann said. “By launching the Different Games Conference, we created a space for broader, more inclusive discussions of games and game cultures.”

Now as Different Games Collective, the organization recently launched its first major local project in collaboration with Atlanta’s feminist bookstore, Charis Books and More, the oldest store of its kind nationwide. With the guidance and support of Ivan Allen College professors Ian Bogost and Anne Pollock, students created Dear Games, an event series aimed at supporting diverse participation in video game development and culture. Through lectures and hands-on workshops, Dear Games will explore connections between game design, feminism, literature, and identity at Charis.

“Dear Games was started by the Tech student members of Different Games, as a way to build connections between our community at GT and this historic feminist institution. It’s our hope that in the next few years, we will get more Georgia Tech students and faculty involved to continue building the relationship between our campus and important local organizations, like Charis” explained Vogel.

According to Aby Parsons, director of Georgia Tech’s LGBTQIA Resource Center and one of the supporters of the Different Games Collective, “Sarah, Michael, and their team members have helped to increase Georgia Tech’s presence in the gaming community, especially at a time when diversity in gaming and digital media is a huge issue across the nation.”

Vogel said his involvement with the Different Games Collective has opened his eyes to a multitude of conversations surrounding advocacy for inclusiveness and diversity in games.

“Who gets to participate in games culture? Who is thought of as someone who plays games? Who is thought of as someone who makes games?” Vogel said. “These conversations are so much more fundamental than I realized in the past.”

Georgia Tech students and game designers interested in showcasing their games at the 2016 Different Games Conference arcade can submit an application by Jan. 22, 2016, at www.2016.differentgames.org. To learn more about the Different Games Collective and/or attend an upcoming event, visit www.differentgames.org.

The applications could result from reconfigurable and reprogrammable origami tubes developed by researchers at three institutions, including the Georgia Institute of Technology. By changing the ways in which the paper is folded, the same tube can have six or more different cross sections. Though the models are now reconfigured by hand, magnetic or electrical actuators could make the changes when the tubes are used in real-world applications.

The tubes can be folded flat for shipping, and made in a range of sizes from the nanoscale up to architectural scale. By developing the mathematical theory behind the folding, the researchers can design tubes with the exact properties needed for electrical engineers, civil engineers or other users. The tubes employ the Miura-ori pattern, one of many unique patterns used in origami.

“We have developed a new type of origami tube that is reconfigurable to many different cross sections,” said Glaucio Paulino, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “We have also developed a mathematical theory that goes along with it that allows us to design the tubes and predict how they can be reconfigured or reprogrammed.

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation and reported January 27th in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A. In addition to Paulino, the research team included Evgueni Filipov, a graduate student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of Tokyo professor Tomohiro Tachi.

Fabricating the tubes begins by scoring paper in a device that resembles a computer printer. A special type of cutter in the device follows the researchers’ computer program to make cuts partially through the heavy paper by controlling the cutting speed and cutter force. The cuts facilitate folding and gluing the components to make the tubes, which can be folded flat and then expanded.

The innovation by the research team was to design folds have two options. One fold might create a section of paper that bulges out of the tube, like a mountain range – and alternatively can create a valley in the tube. These variations allow the different configurations to be selected, each producing a slightly different cross section.

“The cross section of each one is different, the area of the tube is different and the properties of the tube are different,” said Paulino. “The ability to create different cross sections is critical, especially for multi-physics applications such as deployable origami coupled with active or responsive materials.”

Among the potential applications are reconfigurable tubes that could carry electromagnetic energy and function as antennas. Different folds would allow them to operate at different frequencies, an application with potential military and commercial interest.

“Your phone has an antenna designed to work at a specific frequency,” explained Paulino. “If you needed the phone to work at a different frequency, right now you would need a different device. With this reconfigurable capability, we could obtain different antenna configurations in the same device with the same origami tube antenna.”

Other applications could range from tiny microfluidic tubes able to switch liquids, to engineering and architectural-scale applications in ductwork, piping and even structures to provide shade for buildings during hot parts of the year.

Though they’re made of paper, the origami tubes can be designed to be quite strong and to support heavy loads, while being easily foldable when not in use. In practical applications, the tubes would be made from flexible polymers or other materials.

Origami structures have been made for a long time, but what Paulino and his collaborators bring to the field is a mathematical understanding and theory that allows them to apply an engineering approach to the development of the new tube configurations.

“We have a complete mathematical theory that allows us to see how many cross sections each tube would allow,” he said. “The theory is very powerful. We now have the math, the theory and the prototypes to demonstrate the ideas. We can program these polygonal tubes to create almost any shape.”

In future work, Paulino and his collaborators would like to establish an actuation mechanism to redeploy the tubes when needed. The system could be operated using magnetized structures, or by electronic means.

“We are working toward coupling these reconfigurable capabilities with a programmable function that would allow us to activate the folds remotely,” he said. “We would be able to switch among the different configurations at will.”

In September 2015, the same research team reported developing a new “zippered tube” origami configuration that makes paper structures stiff enough to hold weight yet able to fold flat for easy shipping and storage. Their method could be applied to other thin materials, such as plastic or metal, to transform structures ranging from furniture and buildings to microscopic robots.

This research was partially supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant CMMI-1538830. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Science Foundation.

CITATION: E.T. Filipov, G.H. Paulino and T. Tachi, “Origami tubes with reconfigurable polygonal cross-sections,” (Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2015.0607.

Research News
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Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu)
Writer: John Toon

Given by the the National Science Foundation, CAREER awards go to newer faculty members who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through research, education and blending these two fields. Awardees are given yearly grants in order to further their research efforts. 

After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 2007, Qiu joined the Georgia Tech faculty in the fall of 2013. His research focuses on bioinformatics and computational biology, targeting statistical signal processing, machine learning, control systems and optimization.

While mathematical modeling is essential in the research of complex biological systems, experimental data is often lacking.With his CAREER project, Qiu seeks to help close the information gap that exists between both limited data and complex modeling. Concentrating on experimental design and model reduction in systems biology, Qiu’s award will be used to develop computational algorithms to identify experiments that minimize parameter uncertainty. He also seeks to develop model-reduction algorithms based on manifold learning, explore their ability to identify mechanisms for the adaptation behavior, and apply the proposed algorithms to study protein signaling pathways and cell differentiation processes. 

The algorithms will be implemented in open-source software, which will be offered to researchers from several disciplines. Qiu will be awarded over $440,000 over four years to support his research. 

by Ansley Thomas

Chloe Arson and Phanish Suryanarayana learned of their selection in early January for what are known simply as CAREER awards. The grants recognize the top educators and researchers in the country, those who “exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research,” according to the NSF.

“The CAREER award is really for you to lay out a plan for what you want to do in terms of research and education. It’s supposed to be a landscape or a broad description of what kind of academic you want to be,” Arson said. “It articulates what you already do with the academic objectives you want to pursue and provides a vision for the long term.

“It’s really a great proposal to write in the sense that it’s supposed to help you grow,” she said. “You really reflect on what kind of professor you are, what’s your style, what are really the essential things you want to do.”

The CAREER award is $500,000 over five years, and the idea, the two scholars said, is to help them become leading experts in their fields and set them up for impactful careers.

Damage and healing in rocks

Arson’s proposal focused on her work on damage and healing mechanics in rocks, work that has broad applications in energy production and underground waste storage systems.

“We extract oil and gas from rock. We produce geothermal energy by extracting hot liquids or using heat exchangers that are embedded in the soil. Waste is stored in the ground,” Arson said. “So here I found that there was a natural contribution that a geotechnical engineer could make just because of the essential processes that were involved.”

Arson said her work will address fundamental questions like why cracks and pores form in rocks in the first place, how long it takes for rocks to recover from extraction or storage operations, and how much energy healing requires. She’ll be creating numerical models of how the fractures start and spread, and her findings will help develop ideal conditions for minimizing damage or maximizing healing.

“[This work is] important for the energy and environmental perspectives, but I think that the process of doing this research will teach us much more than that,” Arson said. “If we understand better how healing occurs in certain kinds of crystalline materials, that knowledge could also be applied to the design of better concrete, better cements — and why not better ceramics that you could use to repair bones or for a variety of purposes?”

Arson’s proposal also includes significant educational goals, including building international collaborations and engaging graduate students in debate and deliberation about the work they do, weighing the societal and environmental impact of their engineering solutions. She’s also going to work on symbolic language, with the goal of removing an obstacle that prevents some students from succeeding.

“Often the mathematical symbols are an obstacle for people who may be good conceptually but not so good formally,” Arson said. “I’ve always wanted to explore alternative ways to learn. So many times I see students who may not be really good test takers but who are really creative. Everything I proposed goes in that direction.”

Characterization and design of nanostructures

Suryanarayana’s proposal focused on nanostructures, extremely tiny materials that could have incredibly large implications for society. He plans to develop a theoretical and computational framework to help discover and describe new kinds of these atomic-scale structures.

“The basic question is, how does one design such a nanostructure with the desired properties? The answer is, currently there does not exist any systematic approach, and therefore it is common to rely on empirical insight,” Suryanarayana said.

His approach will use symmetry to speed up the process of designing small-scale structures so that they are well suited for a variety of applications — like curing diseases, purifying air and water, or converting renewable energy. It’s the kind of work that simply can’t be done now because of the huge number of potential ways to configure the structures.

“It's a really hard problem because, how do we know what the shape should look like? How do we know where to place the atoms and which types of atoms?” Suryanarayana said. “There are so many possibilities; it’s basically infinite. One needs a systematic way of doing it.”

Suryanarayana said the key to the computational system he’s building is symmetry, which plays an essential role in determining the properties of nanostructures.

“It turns out, most of the interesting nanomaterials and nanostructures have very high symmetry, either perfect, or just broken,” he said. “Even bio-structures like DNA and parts of viruses have helical symmetry. The idea is, can we use the notion of symmetry to discover new phenomena and design new materials suitable for technological applications?”

Those materials could have uses we can’t even imagine yet, Suryanarayana said, including in medicine, where his work could eventually help scientists better understand viruses and develop cures for diseases.

“Most of these biomolecules are at the nanoscale, so the code [I develop] based on the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics should be able to characterize them and study defects which gives rise to and/or have implications for some kinds of diseases. Maybe then one can discover techniques that can help rectify that defect.”

Suryanarayana said such applications are still closer to science fiction than reality, but that illustrates why he wanted to develop such a grand vision for his work.

“If this is successful, it would revolutionize many, many fields including nanoscience and nanotechnology. At the same time, that also makes it a very hard problem. My main motivation for picking it was because I thought it would have tremendous impact.”

The Air Pollutant Optimization Model, described in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides a new approach for reducing the health effects of ozone and fine particulate pollution. By considering health impacts and generating costs together, the hybrid model may provide a new tool for utility companies seeking to meet air quality standards.

In a test case for the state of Georgia, the model suggested that health impacts could have been reduced by $176 million, while increasing generating costs by $84 million.

“We looked at what would be the least expensive way of running these power plants if you take into account both the generating costs and the health impact costs,” said Valerie Thomas, Anderson Interface Professor of Natural Systems in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering and School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech. “You would still be operating plants that emit pollutants, of course, but you would reduce operations at the ones having the greatest impact and increase the use of facilities that have less impact or are in other areas.”

The new approach depends on the use of “reduced form” air quality predictions. Comprehensive air quality models typically require days of computer time to calculate concentrations of pollution for one emissions scenario, but the new format uses only the “sensitivities” derived from the full model to accurately produce predictions in less than a second. This capability would allow utility companies, for the first time, to test many possible scenarios in evaluating how air quality would change with different combinations of generating plant operations.

“This is really all about ‘smart generation,’” said Athanasios Nenes, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences and School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering. “This shows there’s a way to meet the standards by controlling who emits what and at what time, and that may change the amount of investment you’d need to make in new emission control equipment. Hour-by- hour, we’ll be able to determine what makes the most sense.”

The oil itself does not appear to help the phytoplankton, but the low concentration of oil found above natural seeps isn’t killing them, and turbulence from the rising oil and gas bubbles is bringing up deep-water nutrients that phytoplankton need to grow, according to a study appearing January 25 in the journal Nature Geoscience. The result is phytoplankton concentrations above oil seeps that are as much as twice the size of populations only a few kilometers away.

“This is the beginning of evidence that some microbes in the Gulf may be preconditioned to survive with oil, at least at lower concentrations,” said Ajit Subramaniam, an oceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and co-author of the study. “In this case, we clearly see these phytoplankton are not negatively affected at low-concentrations of oil, and there is an accompanying process that helps them thrive. This does not mean that exposure to oil at all concentrations for prolonged lengths of time is good for phytoplankton.”

The research shows that the effects of oil and gas at the sea surface can be very different from the impacts of events such as the Deepwater Horizon spill, said Joseph Montoya, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Biology and another of the paper’s co-authors. The research could lead to a reconsideration of the response made to spills.

“There may be different responses by different organisms as we look at different regions of the spill itself,” said Montoya. 

The study is the first to demonstrate this kind of teleconnection between the sea floor, subsea floor and microbial processes in the upper ocean, said Andy Juhl, an aquatic ecologist at Lamont and co-author. It also provides insight into how microbes and oil interact under water.

The researchers, along with colleagues in the Ecosystem Impacts of Oil and Gas Inputs to the Gulf (ECOGIG) consortium, began studying interactions around oil seeps after the Deepwater Horizon oil well disaster in 2010 to better understand what happens to the oil during catastrophic gushers and to find ways to better respond to similar disasters in the future. The natural seeps, found in many parts of the Gulf of Mexico, are tiny compared to an oil well blowout. An oil slick from a natural seep lasts between one and seven days and reaches between 1 and 100 square kilometers. In comparison, the surface oil from the Deepwater Horizon well covered about 11,200 square kilometers and persisted for months, Subramaniam said. But natural seeps still produce enough oil and gas that the scientists can smell it at the surface and see the oil bubbles burst.

In the lab, Juhl has been conducting experiments to understand how different concentrations of oil affect different types of phytoplankton. He has found no amount of oil on its own that has a positive effect on phytoplankton. “The direct effect of oil is usually negative, but in some cases small amounts of oil can be outweighed by the positive effect of the nutrients that are tagging along,” Juhl said.

Nigel D’Souza, then a post-doctoral researcher at Lamont, discovered the phytoplankton response to oil seeps while on a ship in the Gulf of Mexico monitoring chlorophyll fluorescence – energy that is emitted as light by compounds inside phytoplankton cells used for photosynthesis. Each time the ship crossed over a known oil seep, he noticed a spike in phytoplankton abundance. It was a Eureka moment, Juhl said. The evidence backed up what Susan Phan, a co-author and Columbia University student working on her senior thesis with Subramaniam, had previously noticed in remote sensing data. The scientists were able to compile multiple lines of evidence through chlorophyll fluorescence, water sampling and satellite images that all supported the idea that phytoplankton were benefitting from something connected with the seeps, even though the seeps were thousands of feet below.

The biggest impact was seen a few hundred feet deep in the water column, at the point where phytoplankton have enough light from above to still grow, and are receiving the most nutrients rising from below. Over oil seeps, D’Souza – who is now at Georgia Tech – found that the population was about double the usual amount. The measurements also showed increases in phytoplankton abundance at the surface.

There are still many questions. For example, scientists don’t yet know which types of phytoplankton are thriving over the seeps, or if some types of phytoplankton in the community are negatively affected by the rising oil. Previous studies have subjected phytoplankton to oil in laboratories to test their sensitivity and found differences in the impact on oceanic versus coastal phytoplankton and differences when phytoplankton were in nutrient-rich or nutrient-poor water, as well as damage to some phytoplankton cells at various concentrations of oil.

The study combined sampling from surface vessels with remote sensing from space.

“Satellite radar data have given us a detailed picture of where natural seeps are concentrated across deep seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico,” said co-author Ian MacDonald, an oceanographer and professor at Florida State University. “Building on this, the present, novel results show biological effects near the ocean surface in areas where seeps are most prolific.”

The research also demonstrates the importance of oceanographic field research in understanding complex ecosystem issues.

“There has been a tendency to rely on autonomous samplers in place of researchers out at sea,” Montoya observed. “For this project, it was really important to have diverse groups of scientists with broad interests working together both at sea and onshore, to tease the system apart.”

The research team plans two pathways of study next: To analyze the behavior of different types of phytoplankton above seeps to better understand how they interact with oil, and to improve understanding of how oil from deep underwater rises to the surface.

The study was part of the ECOGIG Consortium, a multi-institutional group that studies natural oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico, funded by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative. In addition to those already mentioned, coauthors on the study were Mark Hafez, Alexander Chekalyuk, and Beizhan Yan of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory; and Sarah Weber of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

This work is supported by The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative's (GOMRI) ECOGIG consortium, with additional support from National Science Foundation (NSF) grant OCE-0928495. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

CITATION: N.A, D’Souza, et al., “Elevated surface chlorophyll associated with natural oil seeps in the Gulf of Mexico,” (Nature Geoscience, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2631

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Written by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory