The paper examines various strategies for enhancing the flexibility of data center energy use. One approach is to use backup power systems, such as uninterruptible power supplies, to support the grid during emergencies. Another method involves rerouting computing jobs to different data centers in other locations to balance energy demand. The authors also discuss implementing smart scheduling techniques that shift workloads to off-peak hours, reducing strain on the grid. Additionally, they highlight adjusting processor speeds by lowering CPU (central processing unit) and GPU (graphics processing unit) clock rates to limit power consumption when needed. Finally, the paper suggests pre-cooling data center equipment to limit the energy required for cooling during peak demand periods. Notably, experimental evidence shows that underclocking GPUs can cut power consumption by 40% with only a 22% performance loss, suggesting technical feasibility for demand-response interventions.

Despite these technical options, the authors find that real-world cost considerations and reliability concerns limit widespread adoption. Data center operators generally do not change their behavior in response to electricity prices, as job revenue far outweighs energy costs under normal conditions. For example, a GPU rented at $2 per hour consumes only $0.04 worth of electricity at average prices, making curtailment unattractive except during extreme price spikes. Surveys indicate that operators are reluctant to compromise reliability or deploy backup systems for ancillary services. Consequently, price-based incentives alone are unlikely to drive meaningful flexibility.

Read more on the EPIcenter Webpage
Listen to a podcast on the research here

The Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) in Georgia Tech’s Office of Commercialization announced two of its health technology (HealthTech) portfolio companies, Nephrodite and OrthoPreserve, earned the designation. 

Achieving this rare milestone underscores the caliber of founders, science, and support in ATDC’s 30-company HealthTech portfolio, the incubator’s largest focus area. It’s also a win for Georgia because it reflects the strength of the state’s health innovation ecosystem. 

“This designation is one of the strongest signals the FDA gives that a technology could change the standard of care,” said Greg Jungles, HealthTech catalyst at ATDC. “For ATDC to have two in the same year is remarkable.” 

The Breakthrough Device Program doesn’t waive evidence requirements, but it accelerates learning with the FDA, ATDC’s Jungles said. “That means shorter response times, more frequent meetings, and prioritized review. Teams avoid dead ends and align earlier on study designs and endpoints.” 

For the founders of both startups, their technologies come one step closer to moving their innovations to market. Nephrodite’s technology improves the lives of dialysis patients. OrthoPreserve’s device addresses challenges faced by those who suffer from chronic knee pain. 

Nephrodite: Advancing Continuous Artificial Kidney Technology 

Dr. Nikhil Shah and Dr. Hiep Nguyen, cofounders of Nephrodite, aim to improve care for dialysis patients with end-stage kidney disease who need transplants. These patients often spend three to four hours in a dialysis clinic up to three times a week. Being tethered to stationary machines with needles drawing blood via arm grafts complicates everyday activities — from work tasks to the ability to travel. 

Dialysis addresses chronic kidney disease, which means kidneys no longer work properly. The treatments filter out toxins, waste, and other fluids in the blood. Kidney disease costs Medicare $124.5 billion every year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And those costs are expected to rise because of increasing rates of kidney failure and chronic kidney disease. 

“Dialysis, while lifesaving when it was pioneered in 1952, is incredibly burdensome,” Shah said. Besides being a long process that keeps the patient in a fixed location, it’s physically tiring. “Taking out your blood continually many, many times over, and over the course of four hours is the equivalent of running the Boston Marathon, hitting the finish line, and then someone saying, ‘You're not done; go do it again,’ ” he said. 

A surgeon by training, with expertise in transplantation and oncology, Shah is also an adjunct associate professor in Tech’s School of Interactive Computing. He worked with Nguyen to develop a continuously functioning mechanical artificial kidney, leading to Nephrodite’s formation. 

The FDA’s breakthrough designation on its artificial kidney allows the company to pursue approvals to begin tests in human trials. 

The company traces its beginnings to a German aerospace facility outside Munich, where Nguyen and Shah watched engineers demonstrate a pediatric artificial heart — the Berlin Heart. 

“That’s how we got started,” Shah said. “Seeing an artificial heart that led us to think about doing this for kidneys — because the kidney space has been largely ignored for 70 years.” 

Backed by a German federal grant, Nephrodite grew, moving from Germany to Boston, Massachusetts, then to Austin, Texas, before calling Atlanta home. The company joined ATDC and tapped into other Georgia Tech programs. This included the Center for MedTech Excellence and the Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership. Nephrodite also drew on student talent as the researchers quietly worked on their continuous mechanical artificial kidney. 

Nephrodite began interviewing patients to find out what they wanted the artificial kidney needed to solve. 

They learned patients want the ability to be mobile. Patients also desire an alternative therapy to large needles being inserted into arm grafts because the injection sites are prone to infection and the grafts can fail. In addition, the process can be painful and disfiguring. Finally, patients want a quality of life independent of machines. 

“Those quality-of-life needs, especially being free and mobile, were absolutely universal,” Shah said.  

Nephrodite began developing the technology to build its device — a filter surgically implanted in the pelvis area. 

“We developed an implant designed to run constantly, connected to larger blood vessels in the pelvis to avoid arm graft failures, and paired with an external interface that lets patients sleep at night while the system removes toxins and excess fluid,” Shah explained. 

The device also has built-in sensors, with data uploaded to the cloud, enabling medical care teams to remotely monitor their patients while freeing patients from frequent in-clinic visits. 

Shah said Nephrodite’s device could restore everyday independence, while potentially lowering infection risk. 

“It's like having an actual kidney, but without all the issues of an unhealthy one,” Shah said.  

OrthoPreserve: Innovating a Minimally Invasive Meniscus Implant 
 
OrthoPreserve’s technology aims to address issues from people have with their meniscus, the C‑shaped piece of cartilage in a knee joint that acts as a shock absorber between the thigh bone and shin bone. 

Though patients undergo a now-routine surgery to address it, incomplete recoveries are also common. An estimated quarter of patients later experience recurring knee pain. No FDA-approved implant currently exists for this population. Now, OrthoPreserveis developing a minimally invasive, artificial meniscus implant to restore cushioning, relieve pain, and delay — or even prevent — knee replacement for some patients. 

“There are a million meniscus surgeries every year, and 25% of those patients still live with recurring pain,” said Jonathan Schwartz, OrthoPreserve’s founder and CEO. 

Patients can face daily pain from ordinary activities, such as prolonged standing or walking a dog. Other activities like jogging and recreational sports can trigger flares that can lead to swelling and prolonged discomfort, Schwartz said. “Those patients have no reliable options today,” he said. “We’re building a minimally invasive implant to restore cushioning and help people get back to the activities they love.” 

OrhoPreserve’s durable implant restores cushioning, and it could help people return to normal activities and delay invasive knee replacement. Along with this comes potential cost and recovery benefits for the healthcare system.   

Schwartz created the implant as his Georgia Tech master’s thesis in the lab of David Ku in the Lawrence P. Huang Endowed Chair for Engineering Entrepreneurship and Regents' Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. After industry experience, Schwartz returned to further develop the technology, building on Georgia Tech’s translational expertise 

OrthoPreserve has completed mechanical testing and a successful study. The company is raising a $2 million seed to complete validations and begin human trials, which Schwartz expects to start in 18 months. 

“The FDA breakthrough designation validates that nothing like this technology exists, and that it has the potential to disrupt the standard of care,” Schwartz said, adding the U.S.’ market opportunity is roughly $1.5 billion. “We finally have a minimally invasive option to bridge the gap between meniscus surgery and knee replacement.” 

What FDA Breakthrough Designation Means for ATDC’s HealthTech Startups 

Having a faster and clearer path is a derisking milestone for investors who are evaluating capital intensive medical device technologies, Jungles said. 

“This breakthrough device designation is a really big deal for medical device companies,” Jungles said, adding that startups often fear navigating the FDA approval process. “But this designation adds to the legitimacy of their technologies and the problemsthey are solving. The designation will help them get to market faster, assuming their data continues to meet expectations.” 

ATDC launched its HealthTech vertical in 2018, which is now sponsored by Catalyst by Wellstar ATDC’s HealthTech portfoilo companies include medical devices, biotech, and digital health, among other segments. 

ATDC’s Role in Accelerating HealthTech Innovation 

Nephrodite and OrthoPreserve’s founders noted ATDC’s coaching and programming as critical in navigating fundraising and regulatory milestones. Another factor, they said, was ATDC’s connection to Georgia Tech’s labs and facilities and prototyping support and clinical advisors from across metro Atlanta.  

“We meet with ATDC coaches every two to four weeks to troubleshoot and plan,” Schwartz said. “Having that level of seasoned guidance, all without consultant-level costs, has been huge.” 

Jungles added that two Breakthrough device designations in the same year reflects ATDC’s selection rigor, noting he’s evaluated hundreds of technologies since the HealthTech vertical launched. 

“It reflects the caliber of the companies in ATDC, specifically in the medical device space,” Jungles said. “It’s the strength of their teams, the persistence of the founders, and the collaboration of the ecosystem in Georgia and Atlanta.” 

Set in the heart of Tech Square on the Georgia Tech campus, this year’s event explores how energy systems, materials, technologies, supply chains, and policy must evolve in response to AI’s accelerating impact. As digital infrastructure expands and computation intensifies, the need for reliable, resilient, and sustainable power has never been more urgent. 

“Energy Day reflects Georgia Tech’s strength in connecting world-class research in materials and components with the infrastructure and partnerships needed to translate discovery into scalable energy technologies that serve industry, society, and the future economy,” said Eric Vogel, executive director of the IMS and the Hightower Professor in Materials Science and Engineering. 

Energy Day 2026 also marks an important milestone with the introduction of its first group of corporate sponsors: GE Vernova, Southern Company, Georgia Power, ExxonMobil, Southwire Spark, Gems Setra, and Tektronix. Their support reflects a shared commitment to advancing energy solutions. 

“Tektronix is excited to be part of Energy Day because advancing the future of energy starts with precise measurement and trusted insights,” said Christopher Bohn, president of Tektronix. “From power electronics and high voltage systems to grid scale renewables and AI driven control technologies, the breakthroughs discussed here directly align with the innovations we support through our products and solutions. Collaborating with Georgia Tech allows us to engage early with emerging research and the next generation of engineers—critical collaborators in building a cleaner, smarter, and more resilient energy ecosystem.”

The keynote address will be delivered by Vanessa Z. Chan, a nationally recognized leader at the intersection of innovation, commercialization, and emerging technologies. Chan will provide insights on accelerating technological discovery, emphasizing how AI is transforming energy and materials design. She will discuss how commercialization strategies must rapidly evolve across multidisciplinary energy domains from grid modernization to advanced batteries and clean manufacturing.

Building on the themes introduced in the keynote, the program transitions into a fireside chat with Georgia Tech EVPR Tim Lieuwen featuring Amit Kulkarni and Jim Walsh. Kulkarni is vice president of Product Management and Strategy for the Gas Power business within GE Vernova, where he oversees the world’s largest portfolio of power generation equipment. Walsh, vice president of GE Vernova’s Consulting Services, leads teams providing innovative solutions across the full spectrum of power generation, delivery, and utilization.

Next comes a policy-focused panel that will explore the surge in power demand driven by AI, how the United States is addressing today’s most urgent energy challenges, and the long-term implications of today’s decisions for a sustainable energy future. Bringing together leading voices in U.S. environmental and energy policy, the panel features Joe Aldy of Harvard University and former special assistant to the president for Energy and Environment; Al McGartland of New York University’s Institute for Policy Integrity and former Environmental Protection Agency lead economist and director of the National Center for Environmental Economics; and Kevin Rennert, fellow and director of the Comprehensive Climate Strategies Program at Resources for the Future and former staff member on the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.

The second panel focuses on critical materials — the foundation of advanced energy systems and digital technologies. As AI, data centers, and advanced energy technologies drive demand for critical materials, securing them now requires integration and coordination across the entire value chain. Panelists include Rachel Galloway, British consul general in Atlanta; Vijay Murugesan, head of Materials Intelligence and Digital Innovation at Amazon; Colin Spellmeyer, executive strategic sourcing leader at GE Vernova;  Charles Sims, Tennessee Valley Authority Distinguished Professor of Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Tennessee; and Nortey Yeboah, principal engineer at Southern Company. Together, they will offer perspectives on the policy and economic frameworks shaping the energy supply chain, from developing raw resources to manufacturing the technologies essential to future energy systems.

In the afternoon, participants can dive deeper into specialized topics through three focused technical tracks. 

• “Meeting the Demand for Power” will examine how emerging technologies, advanced nuclear systems, and renewable integration can work together to deliver reliable, resilient electricity.
• “Data Center Infrastructure and Resources” will explore innovations in thermal management technologies, energy-efficient computing, and the broader resource impacts of expanding digital infrastructure.
• “Grid Technologies and Markets” will highlight strategies for strengthening grid capacity, incorporating demand-side management, and optimizing carbon performance as energy systems evolve.

“Meeting the rapidly rising electricity demand driven by AI requires bold ideas, coordinated action, and research that moves at the speed of innovation,” said Yuanzhi Tang, executive director of the SEI. “Energy Day 2026 brings together the people and expertise needed to shape resilient, sustainable energy systems for the future. At Georgia Tech, we see this event as a catalyst for new partnerships, new solutions, and a shared commitment to strengthening the nation’s energy foundation.”

Energy Day 2026 is designed for researchers advancing emerging energy technologies, policymakers navigating shifting regulatory and geopolitical landscapes, industry professionals seeking insight into emerging tools and supply chains, and students preparing to enter one of the most consequential sectors of the decade. It also welcomes anyone interested in AI, sustainability, electrification, and critical materials. 

Join us to explore the future of energy. To learn more and register, visit: Energy Day 2026.

The Surge That Shattered New Orleans

On Aug. 29, 2005, early reports claimed New Orleans had “dodged the bullet.” But offshore winds funneled water into the city’s canals, triggering multiple catastrophic levee failures. The Lower Ninth Ward, where most fatalities occurred, was devastated as many residents, misled by comparisons to Hurricane Camille, chose not to evacuate. 

“Katrina’s storm surge was exceptional,” says Hermann Fritz, a civil engineering professor at Georgia Tech. “In some areas, we saw water levels over 27 feet — that’s like a three-story building.”

While much attention focused on New Orleans’ levee failures, Fritz points out that the surge’s sheer height and energy would have overwhelmed even more robust defenses in some areas. “Katrina showed us that nature can produce forces beyond our engineering designs,” he says.

A Disaster of Inequality

The storm didn’t strike evenly; it exposed and deepened existing social and economic inequalities. “The disaster hit lower-income Black neighborhoods hardest,” says Allen Hyde, associate professor of history and sociology. He notes how years of segregation, disinvestment, and discriminatory housing policies left these communities uniquely vulnerable. Hyde continues, “Many homes were in low-lying, flood-prone areas, and residents often lacked access to reliable transportation, making evacuation difficult or impossible.”

Georgia’s Changing Landscape: Migration and Impact

Katrina displaced hundreds of thousands and claimed a staggering toll of more than 1,800 lives. Georgia quickly absorbed many evacuees, reshaping its demographics and infrastructure. “Hurricane Katrina led to one of the largest displacements of people due to a natural disaster,” says Shatakshee Dhongde, a professor of economics. “It changed the demographics of Georgia in measurable ways, from school enrollment to the labor market.”

The U.S. Census Bureau tracked this migration, noting spikes in Louisiana-born residents in metro Atlanta. Local school districts enrolled hundreds of new students almost overnight, while housing markets saw increased demand from families looking for permanent homes. The arrival of so many displaced residents didn’t just strain schools and housing — it reshaped the state’s economy. Dhongde notes that evacuees often brought new skills, business ideas, and networks. At the same time, the state and local governments faced the financial burden of expanding social services, healthcare, and housing assistance. 

Dhongde adds, “The impact of a disaster doesn’t stop at the water’s edge. It travels with people, and those effects can last for years.” While the influx strained services, it also enriched Georgia’s cultural and economic fabric.

Hyde notes, “Gentrification made many neighborhoods unaffordable for former residents,” and adds that many Black evacuees didn’t return to New Orleans due to economic barriers and post-Katrina gentrification. Cultural communities scattered across cities like Atlanta, Houston, and Baton Rouge.

Lessons the Levees Still Teach

For Fritz, Katrina remains a wake-up call for coastal preparedness.  “We can’t stop hurricanes,” he says, “but we can improve how we design and maintain our defenses, and how we evacuate people before it’s too late.” He warns that climate change, with its potential to intensify storms, makes those improvements even more urgent.

Dhongde sees a parallel need for social and economic planning. “Disaster preparedness isn’t just about sandbags and levees,” she says. “It’s also about ensuring the communities receiving evacuees have the resources and support systems to integrate them successfully.”

Finally, Hyde stresses the importance of engaging youth and communities in preparedness efforts. “Youth advocacy programs, like those we’re piloting in Georgia, empower young people in marginalized neighborhoods with knowledge and agency to build long-term resilience. Disaster planning must be a community effort, inclusive and forward-looking.”

“Arts organizations contribute so much to the vibrancy of a community,” said Caley Landau, program manager for GAIN and marketing strategist at EI². “They help create a sense of place and provide the ‘something to do’ that small cities and towns want to offer residents, new workers, and prospective businesses. Our hope is to enhance the arts and cultural ecosystem in Middle Georgia by providing training and technical assistance to the organizations that produce art in the region.”

A Rural Community Already Investing in Placemaking

Perry was selected as the pilot location in part for its active downtown revitalization work and commitment to placemaking. Through the Georgia Economic Placemaking Collaborative, Perry city staff partnered with EI²’s Center for Economic Development Research to develop strategies for arts‑based community development.

“Working alongside the Georgia Tech team has been a wonderful experience,” said Alicia Hartley, downtown manager for the City of Perry. “We hope that participants walk away from the cohort inspired and empowered to activate their organizations in creative and meaningful ways.”

Listening First, Then Providing Targeted Support

The program will begin with a listening session to understand participating organizations’ needs. EI² will then design tailored workshops drawing from experts at Georgia Tech and beyond. Every other month, cohort members will meet for sessions on business practices, digital tools, operational efficiency, marketing, placemaking partnerships, and other areas that support long‑term sustainability.

“They sound like great ideas — murals, pop‑up exhibits, outdoor performances — but how do you really get down to the nuts and bolts of making them happen?” Landau said. “And how do you bring the right partners to the table? That’s what we’ll explore together.”

A Statewide Mission, Strengthened Through the Arts

As Georgia Tech’s economic development arm, EI² administers programs that support entrepreneurs, manufacturers, communities, and municipalities across the state and around the world.

“GAIN represents an important part of EI²’s comprehensive approach to economic development,” said David Bridges, vice president of EI². “It gives us another way to create impact in Georgia by applying our expertise to serve arts organizations that are vital to Georgia communities.”

Jason Freeman, associate vice provost for Georgia Tech Arts, noted that the pilot aligns with the Institute’s broader commitment to supporting arts, culture, and creativity statewide.

“Through GAIN, I’m excited to learn more about the arts ecosystem in Middle Georgia,” Freeman said. “The lessons we learn will inform both statewide collaborations and new initiatives emerging through our Creative Quarter innovation district on campus.”

Program Funding and Support

The pilot is funded through the NEA’s Our Town program, which supports projects integrating arts, culture, and design into community development. The Georgia Council for the Arts is partnering with EI² on cohort recruitment, curriculum development, and arts‑based placemaking strategies.

Recruitment has begun. Arts nonprofits and arts‑based businesses in Middle Georgia may apply at innovate.gatech.edu/gain/.

As artificial intelligence (AI) drives explosive growth in data centers, communities across the U.S. are facing rising electricity costs, new industrial development, and mounting strain on an aging power grid.

At Georgia Tech, several faculty members are approaching these sustainability challenges from different but complementary angles: examining how data center policy affects local communities, modeling how AI-driven demand reshapes regional energy systems, and building tools that help the public understand the tradeoffs embedded in grid planning. Together, their work highlights how better data, thoughtful policy, and public engagement can guide more resilient and equitable decisions in an AI-powered future.

AI’s Hidden Footprint: How Data Centers Reshape Communities

Ahmed Saeed studies the infrastructure most people never see. An assistant professor in the School of Computer Science and a Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) Faculty Fellow, Saeed focuses on how data centers — the backbone of modern AI — are built, operated, and regulated, and what their growth means for host communities.

“Data centers are the infrastructure for our digital life, so more of them are necessary to keep doing what we’re doing,” he said.

Data center energy consumption could double or triple by 2028, accounting for up to 12% of U.S. electricity use, according to a report by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. U.S. spending on data center construction jumped nearly 70% between May 2023 and May 2024, according to the American Edge Project.

Georgia is an AI data center hub, ranked fourth globally, with $4.6 billion in AI-related venture capital invested across 368 deals, the American Edge Project reported. At a recent town hall in DeKalb County, Georgia, Saeed helped residents connect AI’s promise to its local consequences. Training large AI models can require tens of thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs) running for days or weeks, driving an unprecedented wave of data center construction. AI-focused chips, he noted, can consume 10 to 14 times more power than traditional processors.

That demand often shows up as pressure on local infrastructure. Communities are increasingly concerned about electricity and water use, grid upgrades, and who ultimately pays. In Virginia, Saeed pointed to a legal dispute in which consumer advocates warned that data centers could raise electricity bills by 5% in the short term and up to 50% over time, while utilities argued those investments were inevitable and could benefit customers in the long run.

Environmental concerns add another layer. Saeed cited controversies over water use and backup diesel generators in states, including Georgia and Tennessee, alongside a recent Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ruling that tightened generator regulations. While diesel generators are clearly harmful, he cautioned that long-term, rigorous evidence linking data centers to regional health impacts remains limited.

Saeed’s research aims to reduce those impacts directly. By optimizing how workloads are scheduled across large server fleets, his team has demonstrated power savings of 4 – 12%, a meaningful gain if U.S. data centers approach projected levels of up to 12% of national electricity use by 2028.

For Saeed, data centers are akin to highways: essential to modern life, disruptive to nearby communities, and shaped by policy choices. The question, he argues, is not whether AI infrastructure should exist, but how transparently and fairly it is built.

Economist Probes the Energy Costs of the AI Boom

While headlines often frame AI as an energy crisis, Georgia Tech environmental and energy economist and BBISS Faculty Fellow Tony Harding is focused on measuring its real — and uneven — impacts. Harding, an assistant professor in the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy, uses economic modeling to examine how AI adoption affects energy use, emissions, and local communities.

In recent work published in Environmental Research Letters, Harding and his co-author analyzed how productivity gains from AI could influence national energy demand. Their findings suggest that, at a macro level, AI-related activity may increase annual U.S. energy use by about 0.03% and CO₂ emissions by roughly 0.02%.

“Those numbers are small in the context of the overall economy,” Harding said. “But the impacts are highly uneven.”

That unevenness is evident in where data centers are built. While Northern Virginia remains the country’s top data center hub, with 343 operational data centers, states like Georgia, which currently has 94 operational data centers, are rapidly attracting facilities due to reliable power and favorable tax policies. 

Harding’s latest research focuses on local effects, asking why data centers cluster in urban areas, how they influence housing markets, what happens to electricity prices, and whether they exacerbate water stress. Early evidence suggests large facilities can increase local electricity rates, contributing to public backlash and regulatory response. In Georgia, the Public Service Commission has begun requiring new, high power draw customers (like data centers) to cover more of the costs associated with grid expansion.

Harding’s goal is to give policymakers better evidence to design incentives and guardrails. “To manage these technologies responsibly,” he said, “we need a clear picture of their intended and unintended consequences.”

Gamifying a Strained and Aging Power Grid

Daniel Molzahn is tackling another side of the problem: how to modernize an aging power grid under growing demand. Electricity demand is expected to rise about 25% by 2030, driven by data centers, electric vehicles, and broadscale electrification. At the same time, much of the U.S. electricity grid is nearing the end of its lifespan, with many transformers being decades old.

To make these challenges tangible, Molzahn, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, developed a browser-based game with a group of students through Georgia Tech’s Vertically Integrated Projects program called Current Crisis. Players take on the role of a utility decision-maker, balancing reliability, wildfire risk, renewable integration, and affordability.

The game grew out of Molzahn’s National Science Foundation CAREER award and reflects his belief that complex systems are best understood experientially. Its initial focus is wildfire resilience, modeling how grid infrastructure can both spark and suffer damage from fires.

But resilience comes at a cost. Burying power lines, for example, reduces wildfire risk but dramatically increases expenses. Players must confront the same tradeoffs utilities face: improve reliability or keep rates low.

Molzahn hopes the game will help students and the public grapple with the realities of planning future power systems. “These choices aren’t abstract,” he said. “They shape affordability, resilience, and our path toward a cleaner grid.”

The project now involves nearly 40 students from across campus, supported by Sustainability NEXT funding and a collaboration with Jessica Roberts, former BBISS Faculty Fellow and director of the Technology-Integrated Learning Environments (TILES) Lab in the School of Interactive Computing.

“As a learning scientist, I look at how to engage people with science and scientific data and get people having conversations they might not otherwise have,” says Roberts, who hopes the seed grant helps the team determine first that they are going in the right direction and, second, how to broaden the impact.

One student, Stella Quinto Lima, a graduate research assistant in Human-Centered Computing, has made the game the focus of her doctoral thesis. Through the game, she wants players to notice their misconceptions about the power grid, energy use, and AI, and to use critical thinking to identify, question, and possibly undo those misconceptions.

 “I hope that we can really engage adults and help them see it’s not black and white. The game is not only about power grids, but how AI affects the grid, how it affects our lives, and how it will impact our future.”

The team plans to expand the game’s features, use it in outreach programs, and analyze player decisions as a source of data to study energy-system decision-making.

“We want to change the conversation about power and power grid stability, reliability, and sustainability, Roberts said, “and find a way to get this message to a larger public.”

The Georgia Institute of Technology and Augusta University have launched a collaborative effort to boost the city’s medical device innovation ecosystem. 

The interactive dashboard compiles and visualizes data gathered by Matisoff, along with Program and Operations Manager Michael Morley, offering a comprehensive view of SAF production, feedstock availability, and policy trends.

EPIcenter Research Associate Yang You has designed the dashboard to translate complex datasets into policy-relevant insights for decision-makers. By organizing key metrics into interactive visuals, the dashboard helps stakeholders assess market readiness and identify regulatory actions that could accelerate SAF adoption.

Emphasizing the importance of data-driven insights, Matisoff said, “The Department of Energy has a Grand Challenge to produce 3 billion gallons a year of Sustainable Aviation Fuel by 2030, and 35 billion gallons a year by 2050. By compiling and visualizing SAF data, we can help policymakers and researchers understand progress towards these goals, where the key opportunities and bottlenecks are – and how to move forward effectively”. 

Why SAF Matters
While aviation only accounts for about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions, it is a rapidly growing share, and decarbonizing this sector is considered one of the most challenging aspects of the energy transition. Produced from renewable feedstocks, sustainable aviation fuel offers a pathway to reduce lifecycle emissions from air travel without requiring major changes to aircraft or infrastructure. However, SAF production and deployment face hurdles related to cost, supply chain development, and policy support.

EPIcenter’s Director Laura Taylor highlighted the dashboard’s role in addressing these challenges:
“Sustainable aviation fuel is a cornerstone of decarbonizing air travel, but the market is complex and rapidly evolving. The dashboard provides clarity by organizing the relevant data in a way that’s accessible and actionable for decision-makers.”

“This tool is meant to bridge analysis and action,” said You. “By visualizing SAF production, capacity, and offtake dynamics, the dashboard allows policymakers and stakeholders to see where the market is moving, where gaps remain, and how targeted infrastructure investments or supportive policies could unlock scale.”

The EPIcenter SAF Dashboard is intended as a resource for industry leaders, policymakers, and researchers working to accelerate SAF adoption. By providing transparent, data-driven insights, Georgia Tech aims to support informed decisions that advance innovation and sustainability in aviation.

To explore the dashboard and learn more about Georgia Tech’s work on sustainable aviation fuel, visit EPIcenter’s SAF page. 

ASU 2023-08, the Financial Accounting Standards Board’s (FASB) newly enacted rule, aims to bring clarity and consistency to crypto asset reporting with the mandate for fair value reporting. Moon’s research, which examined a comprehensive set of companies from 2013 to 2022, looks at the exponential rise in corporate crypto investments and the diverse, and often inconsistent, ways firms have reported them.

In “Accounting for Cryptocurrencies,” Moon and his co-authors work to better understand this pivotal point in financial reporting with research that dives into why firms hold crypto – whether for mining, payment acceptance, or investment – and how reporting practices have evolved to meet this current moment.

Keep reading to learn more about Moon’s research and why it matters right now.

Why do companies hold cryptocurrencies, and how has this changed over time?

Companies hold cryptocurrency for three main reasons: they mine it, they accept it as payment, or they consider it an investment. Early on, most businesses kept crypto because customers used it to pay for goods and services. Around 2017, that trend declined, and more companies began mining crypto themselves. Today, mining accounts for about half of corporate crypto holdings, while payment acceptance and investment make up the rest.

What were the main challenges companies face when trying to report cryptocurrency holdings in their financial statements?

Until the end of 2023, there were no official rules on how companies should report cryptocurrency on their financial statements. Back in 2018, the Big Four accounting firms (Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG) stepped in with guidance, suggesting that crypto be treated like intangible assets, similar to things like patents or trademarks. This is known as the impairment model.

What is the difference between the “fair value model” and the “impairment model” for accounting crypto assets, and why does it matter?

The two accounting methods differ in how they handle changes in crypto value. The fair value model updates the value of a company’s crypto to match current market prices every reporting period. If the price goes up or down, the change shows up on the company’s income statement as a gain or loss.

The impairment model only lets companies record losses when the value drops below what they paid. If the price goes up, they can’t record the increase.

The difference in the two approaches can best be seen when crypto prices rise. Under the impairment model, companies’ balance sheets understate the true value of the crypto since the gains cannot be recorded. The fair value model allows companies to adjust the balance sheet value of crypto as market prices change.

What factors led ASU 2023-08 to favor fair value reporting?

When the FASB was trying to decide if they should add crypto accounting to their standard setting agenda, they reached out to the public for feedback. The response was overwhelming and most practitioners and firms called for the use of the fair value model. 

How do big accounting firms, like Deloitte or PwC, influence how companies report their crypto holdings?

When there aren’t official rules for complex issues like crypto accounting, the Big Four firms often step in to guide companies. In 2018, they recommended using the impairment model, which they viewed as most appropriate based on existing standards. After that, most companies switched from fair value reporting to the impairment approach.

Their guidance in 2018 was based on what was allowed under the standards at that time. With the new rule in place, the firms will likely help clients manage the transition.

Does using fair value accounting for crypto make a company’s stock price more volatile or its earnings reports more useful to investors?

The primary downside of using a fair value model for a risky asset like crypto is how volatility affects earnings.  Moon’s research suggests that stock price volatility increases for firms using the fair value model, and it doesn’t appear the model makes earnings more useful for investors. That said, the results should be viewed cautiously because the study’s sample largely consisted of smaller companies.

Why does this research matter right now?

This research matters because more companies are investing in cryptocurrency. That trend is only expected to grow. This research looks at how businesses handled crypto before official rules came out in 2023, showing that many treated it like traditional investments. This provides a baseline against which future research can evaluate the new rule. The research also warns that the fair value approach could make stock prices more volatile without necessarily making earnings reports more useful for investors.
 
Read More: Accounting for Cryptocurrencies

The Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) recently welcomed its first Hiring Our Heroes (HOH) Fellow to help address this growing need. Lukas Berg, a retiring U.S. Army officer, will be working with GTMI to support new education and training programs aimed at preparing Georgians for careers in advanced manufacturing.

“Lukas Berg brings a unique blend of operational experience, academic insight, and a deep commitment to service,” said Thomas Kurfess, executive director of GTMI. “His perspective will be invaluable as we work to build stronger connections between Georgia’s communities and the advanced manufacturing sector.”

Hiring Our Heroes is a nationwide initiative led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation that helps veterans and military spouses transition into civilian careers through short-term fellowships. Since 2021, Georgia Tech has hosted more than two dozen HOH fellows, beginning with U.S. Army veteran Erik Andersen, who now serves as interim deputy director for the Research, Electronics, Optics, and Systems Directorate at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), where he also helps lead the HOH program. 

Berg is the first fellow to be placed outside of GTRI, a sign of the program’s growing reach across campus and its potential to support a broader range of workforce development efforts.

“It’s been exciting to see how the Hiring Our Heroes program has grown at Georgia Tech,” said Andersen. “Berg’s placement at GTMI reflects the Institute’s commitment to connecting military talent with real-world innovation and workforce development. Veterans bring a unique perspective and skill set to these challenges, and I’m proud to see the program expanding to new parts of campus.”

Berg’s military career includes aviation command roles, teaching positions at West Point and the Joint Special Operations University, and deployments across multiple regions. At GTMI, he will be contributing to a new initiative that partners with rural school districts to introduce students to hands-on learning in advanced manufacturing, an effort designed to spark interest in high-potential career paths and support long-term workforce readiness.

With personal ties to Georgia Tech and a strong sense of purpose, Berg sees this fellowship as a meaningful next step. We spoke with him to learn more about what brought him to GTMI and how he views the role of manufacturing and workforce development in shaping the country’s future.

What inspired you to pursue a fellowship at the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute after your military service?

Last year, I visited Georgia Tech with many of the junior officers and pilots assigned to my helicopter battalion in Savannah. Our agenda included stops at the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute and the Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility, both of which struck me as being absolutely vital to maintaining the technological edge required to fight and win on the modern battlefield. Pursuing a fellowship at GTMI felt like a natural extension of my military service, and I suspected that it would put me back at the intersection of thinkers and doers (where I have always felt most at home). 

You mentioned your grandmother taught at Georgia Tech for over 30 years — how has her legacy influenced your academic and professional journey?

My grandmother, Maria Venable, was the first woman to serve as a full-time faculty member in Georgia Tech’s School of Modern Languages. She poured herself into both her family and her students, and I was lucky to count myself in both populations, as she agreed to tutor me for the AP German exam in high school (but only if I behaved as well as her students at Tech). Her example inspired me to pursue a teaching assignment at West Point halfway through my Army career, and I experienced the same joy in teaching that she did. It’s something that I will continue to do for the rest of my life, whether in a formal or informal capacity.

Can you share more about the specific initiatives you'll be working on at GTMI related to advanced manufacturing education?

Most immediately, I am joining a new GTMI initiative that partners with rural school districts to deliver several weeks’ worth of curriculum and hands-on practice in advanced manufacturing. We just kicked off a pilot program with Bainbridge High School in Decatur, and it’s exciting to see their students leveraging sophisticated systems to design and build Pinewood Derby cars that would make Cub Scouts across the country green with envy. Beyond this initiative, I hope to contribute to other efforts that get young people excited about careers in manufacturing and that assist adult learners in re-skilling and up-skilling for this high-potential industry.

What are you most looking forward to as you begin your fellowship at GTMI?

Georgia Tech feels like a physical and intellectual crossroads of modern civilization. I’m excited to not only contribute as a member of GTMI but also to learn about the countless other departments, institutes, and programs that are convening talent to solve the world’s thorniest problems. 

What skills or insights are you hoping to gain during your time at GTMI that will support your next career chapter?

As an Army officer, I’ve been stationed across the country and deployed around the world, but Georgia has always been home. (Gladys Knight’s “Midnight Train to Georgia” has been a fixture on my playlist since I left for West Point at the age of 17.) Now back with my family, I look forward to using my time at GTMI to learn about my home state and identify ways that I can contribute to its near and long-term prosperity, whether through roles in academia, government, or private industry. I also look forward to expanding my network in all these communities, as no single one has a monopoly on problem-solving.

Why do you believe rebuilding America’s industrial base and manufacturing workforce is critical to national security today?

As a career aviator, much of my professional life was spent agonizing over the availability of parts to repair my helicopters. It seemed like there were never enough, and they always took too long to get to me. This experience, coupled with lessons learned from our support of Ukraine’s self-defense, contrasted starkly with my recent study of America’s 20th-century role as the “arsenal of democracy.” I’m convinced that we need to regain that reputation, and I would like to see Georgia at the forefront of associated design, manufacturing, and education initiatives.  

How do you see veterans playing a unique role in strengthening the U.S. manufacturing workforce?

I think veterans are the most natural candidates in the world for roles in the manufacturing workforce. They possess the knowledge, skills, and abilities to be successful in most endeavors, but most are looking for ways to extend their service beyond their time in uniform. What better way than to contribute to a field that is so vital to our national security and prosperity?

What does “Progress and Service” mean to you, and what does it mean to you personally to be contributing to that mission?

I love Tech’s motto. I grew up in a family and community that reinforced at every turn the idea that our highest potential as human beings is realized when we serve others. This motivated my choice to serve in the military for the past 20 years, and it remains my North Star for this next chapter. I also love the idea of technological progress being the vehicle by which Georgia Tech collectively serves others, and I hope to accelerate this progress during my time at GTMI. 

If you could give one piece of advice to other service members considering a fellowship like this, what would it be?

Inventory your passions and define your purpose. Then start reaching out to people in related fields. I have been amazed at how generous people have been with their time and how eager they have been to help me find my second calling and related opportunities.

PEMBROKE, GA — For more than two decades, Ray Butler has run Butler’s Tire & Lube in the heart of Pembroke. He’s seen the town evolve, shrink, and now, rapidly grow — all during the time of his life as a local here. 

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is addressing these challenges with two technologies: the Broiler House Integrated Guided-Motion Excreta Saturation System (BHIG-MESS) and a protective chicken enclosure known as “chicken bubble.” BHIG-MESS addresses moisture concerns by removing poultry waste from the house regularly and automatically, which helps reduce ventilation needs and energy consumption. “Chicken bubble” uses an inflatable barrier to reduce the volume of air that needs conditioning, lowering energy expenses that are among the highest costs for farmers.

“One of the biggest challenges for poultry houses and farmers is maintaining the internal environment of the house,” said GTRI Principal Research Scientist Alex Samoylov. “While issues related to feed and water have been more or less resolved, creating an optimal environment within the house is still very much an art rather than an exact science.”

Poultry house energy costs are primarily driven by heating fuel and electricity for essential needs like keeping chickens warm, providing adequate lighting and powering ventilation systems. 

“How well farmers manage their energy costs directly impacts the health and productivity of the birds – and by extension, their profitability,” Samoylov said. 

BHIG-MESS consists of a specially designed tiled floor where manure falls through into a tray beneath, allowing for daily removal. In traditional houses, wood shavings absorb manure and it remains in place for the flock's entire stay. By clearing out the manure every day, BHIG-MESS significantly reduces moisture levels inside the house and, consequently, the need for intensive ventilation.

The “chicken bubble” system’s inflatable technology reduces the amount of air that needs to be ventilated and conditioned. By displacing a significant portion of air inside the house, farmers could cut these air requirements by at least half, Samoylov said. 

GTRI has conducted trials of BHIG-MESS at the University of Georgia’s (UGA) Poultry Experimental Center. During the trials, researchers replaced half of the floor with GTRI’s system and the other half remained traditional wood shavings. The birds were raised for seven weeks and GTRI collected data on manure accumulation, bird health and weight distribution. 

They observed that the birds on GTRI’s flooring system had significantly fewer instances of footpad dermatitis, a condition in chickens where the skin on the bottom of their feet becomes inflamed and irritated, often caused by wet and dirty litter. The system also demonstrated that it did not cause more chicken deaths compared to traditional methods. Chickens on the new system also had similar weight patterns and, in some cases, were healthier than those raised on the traditional wood shavings. 

GTRI plans to test “chicken bubble” in 2026, starting in controlled environments before moving to larger poultry houses. This project has been supported by GTRI’s Agricultural Technology Research Program (ATRP).Once more testing has been completed, GTRI plans to partner with commercial entities that would manufacture and distribute these technologies. Samoylov said his team envisions a partnership where these companies would handle production and installation while GTRI continues focusing on further research and technical refinement. 

“Our focus is on enhancing sustainability and profitability for the poultry industry,” he said. “By creating innovative solutions, we aim to secure food supply and help growers thrive.” 

Writer: Anna Akins 
Photos: Sean McNeil 
Additional Photo Credit: Alex Samoylov 
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia

For more information, please contact gtri.media@gtri.gatech.edu. 

To learn more about GTRI, visit: Georgia Tech Research Institute | GTRI

The durable, affordable, and highly customizable product debuted in Italy in the 1970s and continues to grow in popularity. Between 2010 and 2018, U.S. imports of engineered stone slabs increased by 800%. One report predicted that global demand will increase 5.4% each year, to reach 97 million square meters by 2028.

Sometimes referred to as manufactured stone or quartz (which is, confusingly, also the name of one of its main components), to the untrained eye, the material looks no different from natural stone. One of its biggest advantages is that it can be made to resemble marble, granite, or nearly any other stone.

Beneath the material’s familiar smooth surface, however, lie safety risks for engineered stone workers.

Research conducted by a team of Georgia Tech scientists demonstrates that everyone in a fabrication shop is at risk, not just the workers cutting and fashioning the material.

The group included members of the Enterprise Innovation Institute’s Safety, Health, and Environmental Services (SHES) program: Jenny Houlroyd, Hilarie Warren, Brandon J. Philpot, and Sean Castillo. Together with Jhy-Charm Soo of Georgia Southern University, they recently published their findings in Oxford Academic.

The study divided engineered stone workers into four risk groups and charted their relative exposure to the material’s chief hazard: respirable crystalline silica.

A “Toxic Product”

Engineered stone differs notably from its natural counterpart, both in composition and in danger to worker health.  

A stone slab cut from the ground, such as granite or marble, comprises several different minerals and typically has a concentration of 40% or less of mineral crystalline silica — usually quartz, which is the most abundant form of crystalline silica.

Engineered stone, however, can contain more than 90% silica. Slabs are produced when silica is crushed, combined with synthetic resins, and compressed using heat or pressure.

During fabrication, these slabs are cut and shaped by powered hand tools. The resulting dust contains tiny particles of respirable crystalline silica. Once inhaled, some of the particulate may stay in the lungs and cause an inflammatory response. 

While crystalline silica is released from both natural and engineered slabs during fabrication, the engineered slabs’ significantly higher percentage of silica poses a much greater risk to human health. 

A growing body of research indicates that breathing engineered stone dust leads to lung inflammation and can cause acute silicosis, an untreatable lung disease.

“I would classify engineered stone as a really toxic product,” said Houlroyd, manager of occupational health services at SHES. “When you have something that’s high-risk, you have to prepare for systems to fail and have backup measures.” 

Committed to Safety

Over six years, the SHES research group collected air-sampling data, making 17 visits to 11 Georgia stone fabrication shops. The shops had all requested air-sampling services offered by SHES. 

“The companies agree that by working with us, they commit to correcting the hazards and reducing exposures, as much as is feasible,” Houlroyd noted.

Because most kitchen and bathroom countertop fabrication shops are small employers, workers often complete a variety of tasks, resulting in a range of exposure factors.

The research team recommended that all manufactured stone fabrication workers wear respirators, such as an N95 mask. For employees who are the most exposed, they recommended a respirator with a powered air-purifying element or supplied air.

But personal protective equipment (PPE) alone does not ensure safe conditions.

“Most of the workers in this industry are relying on respirators as their primary source of protection, and they need a lot more to protect them,” explained Houlroyd. “PPE is the last line of defense, and safety needs to be addressed from all angles.”

Part of that multifaceted strategy includes repeated monitoring of air quality and equipment. It’s also crucial for employers to make sure that exposure risks are understood by all workers — not just employees, but also contract and day laborers, as well as those working for cash.

More Than Just a Job

As members of SHES, the Georgia Tech research team members are first and foremost health and safety consultants, with expertise spanning industrial hygiene, environmental compliance, and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations.

For Houlroyd, worker safety is not just a professional calling; it’s also a personal mission.

“My dad got sick with brain cancer from exposure to contaminants on the job, and he died four years ago,” she said. 

“Though he didn’t work in the manufactured stone industry, his story is representative of many people who go to work each day to feed their family, are not aware of workplace hazards, and then find themselves sick.” 

The public can play a part in worker safety, too.

“Consumers have a choice and can educate themselves about what type of countertop materials they choose to have installed — like how we look at food labels for nutritional information,” said Warren, who oversees the OSHA Training Institute Education Center at Georgia Tech.

“We should be aware of the risk to workers, as well as how the installation process in our homes should be properly managed to prevent dust contamination,” she added.

A Zero-Risk Solution

In 2024, Australia eliminated the risks associated with engineered stone fabrication. Despite having enacted stronger regulations in 2019, the country continued to see a rise in silicosis cases resulting from exposure to respirable crystalline silica. 

Australia’s solution? Enacting a ban on the import and fabrication of the material until its safe manufacture can be demonstrated. 

In their report, the Georgia Tech group recommends that the U.S. do the same. As Houlroyd put it, “I would love to see our country find a safer substitution and take this dangerous product off the market.”

____________________

Title: “Respirable dust and respirable crystalline silica exposures among workers at stone countertop fabrication shops in Georgia from 2017 through 2023”

Conflict of interest: Jenny Houlroyd has served as an expert witness in silicosis legal cases unrelated to this research. All other authors declare no conflict of interest.

Funding: The U.S. Department of Labor, Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) as part of the OSHA 21(d) Consultation Program grant.

DOI: https://academic.oup.com/annweh/advance-article/doi/10.1093/annweh/wxaf014/8116008?utm_source=advanceaccess&utm_campaign=annweh&utm_medium=email

The commendation acknowledged GaMEP for leveraging its world-renowned expertise and resources to advance manufacturing and economic prosperity across the state, supporting an industry that adds $82 billion to the economy and employs 425,000 residents, according to the National Association of Manufacturers.

This impact reflects decades of intentional growth and support for the industry. By 1960, more than 4,500 manufacturers had planted roots across Georgia — the result of strategic efforts by state leaders, with economic development assistance from Georgia Tech, to industrialize the economy. But growth brought new challenges. Manufacturers needed technical support to stay competitive. In response, the Georgia General Assembly voted to establish the Georgia Tech Industrial Extension Service (now known as the GaMEP). This created statewide field offices that provide a direct link between industry and innovation, delivering on-site technical expertise to help manufacturers thrive.

“Our role is to support those manufacturers so together we can help grow the state’s economy — and we’ve been really successful at that,” said Tim Israel, GaMEP director and EI2 associate vice president for corporate engagement/firm-based programs. “In 2024, Georgia experienced a significant return on its investment with the GaMEP generating an impressive $294 for every state dollar allocated to manufacturing projects. This remarkable outcome highlights the critical importance of the state’s strategic investments in strengthening Georgia’s manufacturing sector.”

Over the past decade alone, the GaMEP has provided assistance and education to more than 3,900 manufacturers across 144 counties, helping them create or retain 14,500 jobs, invest $1 billion in capital improvements, realize $3.5 billion in sales, and save nearly $450 million in costs. The GaMEP primarily serves small- to medium-sized manufacturers with 75% employing less than 250 workers. Its top-served industries include fabricated metal products, food, machinery, and chemical and transportation equipment manufacturing.

“When Georgia manufacturers become more productive and profitable, they hire more people, pay better wages, and stabilize local economies, especially in rural and underserved areas of the state,” said David Bridges, EI2 vice president. “This also creates pathways for career advancement for frontline workers who might not have had previous opportunities.”

Today, GaMEP’s reach spans 10 regions across the state, each led by a dedicated region manager who lives and works locally, offering manufacturers direct, knowledgeable connections to its expert team, valuable resources, and diverse partners.

“The GaMEP has been a trusted collaborator and valued partner in strengthening manufacturing across Georgia,” said Lloyd Avram, Georgia Association of Manufacturers CEO and president. “Together, we’ve supported thousands of manufacturers statewide — helping them embrace innovation, improve operations, and remain competitive. We appreciate their extensive expertise and shared dedication to advancing the industry, and we look forward to continuing our work together to ensure Georgia remains one of the best states for manufacturing.”

GaMEP’s impact and success by region, according to the Georgia Department of Economic Development regions:

Coastal Region

• Counties: Bryan, Bulloch, Camden, Chatham, Effingham, Glynn, Liberty, Long, McIntosh, and Screven.
• Manufacturers served: 269.
• Jobs created/retained: 283.
• Capital improvement investment: $23,171,292.
• Costs saved: $1,645,061.
• Sales realized: $13,965,000.
• Success story: Roger Wood Foods.

East Region

• Counties: Burke, Columbia, Glascock, Hancock, Jefferson, Jenkins, Lincoln, McDuffie, Richmond, Taliaferro, Warren, Washington, and Wilkes.
• Manufacturers served: 169.
• Jobs created/retained: 3,899.
• Capital improvement investment: $127,754,280.
• Costs saved: $14,771,582.
• Sales realized: $975,465,000.
• Success story: Nutritional Resources.

East Central Region

• Counties: Barrow, Clarke, Elbert, Greene, Jackson, Jasper, Madison, Morgan, Newton, Oconee, Oglethorpe, and Walton.
• Manufacturers served: 209.
• Jobs created/retained: 621.
• Capital improvement investment: $19,703,035.
• Costs saved: $2,535,494.
• Sales realized: $29,486,000.
• Success stories: Creature Comforts Brewing Company and Poly Tech Industries.

Metro Atlanta Region

• Counties: Cherokee, Clayton, Cobb, DeKalb, Douglas, Fayette, Fulton, Gwinnett, Henry, and Rockdale.
• Manufacturers served: 1,601.
• Jobs created/retained: 2,928.
• Capital improvement investment: $235,763,480.
• Costs saved: $112,083,262.
• Sales realized: $844,679,890.
• Success stories: Compass Technology Group, Construction Specialties, and Highland Forge.

Middle Region

• Counties: Baldwin, Bibb, Crawford, Houston, Jones, Monroe, Peach, Pulaski, Putnam, Twiggs, and Wilkinson.
• Manufacturers served: 170.
• Jobs created/retained: 972.
• Capital improvement investment: $121,814,846.
• Costs saved: $8,810,950.
• Sales realized: $300,213,400.
• Success story: Unified Defense.

Northeast Region

• Counties: Banks, Dawson, Forsyth, Franklin, Habersham, Hall, Hart, Lumpkin, Rabun, Stephens, Towns, Union, and White.
• Manufacturers served: 280.
• Jobs created/retained: 1,029.
• Capital improvement investment: $88,443,395.
• Costs saved: $63,999,228.
• Sales realized: $259,453,900.
• Success story: Freudenberg Sealing Technologies.

Northwest Region

• Counties: Bartow, Catoosa, Chattooga, Dade, Fannin, Floyd, Gilmer, Gordon, Haralson, Murray, Paulding, Pickens, Polk, Walker, and Whitfield.
• Manufacturers served: 387.
• Jobs created/retained: 1,090.
• Capital improvement investment: $ $92,948,931.
• Costs saved: $141,460,651.
• Sales realized: $326,366,408.
• Success story: Trenton Pressing.

South Region

• Counties: Appling, Bleckley, Candler, Dodge, Emanuel, Evans, Jeff Davis, Johnson, Laurens, Montgomery, Tattnall, Telfair, Toombs, Treutlen, Wayne, Wheeler, and Wilcox.
• Manufacturers served: 176.
• Jobs created/retained: 969.
• Capital improvement investment: $219,300,221.
• Costs saved: $6,596,254.
• Sales realized: $39,632,275.
• Success story: Healthy Pet.

Southeast Region

• Counties: Atkinson, Bacon, Ben Hill, Berrien, Brantley, Brooks, Charlton, Clinch, Coffee, Cook, Echols, Irwin, Lanier, Lowndes, Pierce, Tift, Turner, and Ware.
• Manufacturers served: 166.
• Jobs created/retained: 281.
• Capital improvement investment: $20,684,800.
• Costs saved: $3,098,700.
• Sales realized: $77,724,500.
• Success stories: CJB Industries and South Georgia Pecan.

Southwest Region

• Counties: Baker, Calhoun, Colquitt, Decatur, Dougherty, Early, Grady, Lee, Miller, Mitchell, Seminole, Terrell, Thomas, and Worth.
• Manufacturers served: 130.
• Jobs created/retained: 130.
• Capital improvement investment: $12,266,730.
• Costs saved: $1,682,790.
• Sales realized: $5,002,020.
• Success story: Sweet Grass Dairy.

West Region

• Counties: Chattahoochee, Clay, Crisp, Dooly, Harris, Macon, Marion, Muscogee, Quitman, Randolph, Schley, Stewart, Sumter, Talbot, Taylor, and Webster.
• Manufacturers served: 111.
• Jobs created/retained: 713.
• Capital improvement investment: $37,948,131.
• Costs saved: $3,197,600.
• Sales realized: $69,588,348.
• Success story: Oneda Corporation.

West Central Region

• Counties: Butts, Carroll, Coweta, Heard, Lamar, Meriwether, Pike, Spalding, Troup, and Upson.
• Manufacturers served: 234.
• Jobs created/retained: 1,658.
• Capital improvement investment: $90,750,763.
• Costs saved: $89,931,074.
• Sales realized: $615,900,002.
• Success stories: Complete Truck Bodies and Mountville Mills.

For more information about GaMEP’s impact, including impact by county, visit gamep.org/statewide-impact.

About the Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership
The Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership, a program of the Enterprise Innovation Institute at Georgia Tech, serves manufacturers by offering solution-based assistance that promotes top-line growth and reduces bottom-line cost. The GaMEP, a member of the U.S. Department of Commerce National Institute of Standards and Technology Manufacturing Extension Partnership, has advanced manufacturing and economic prosperity in Georgia since 1960. For more information, visit gamep.org and like/follow on Facebook, LinkedIn, X, and YouTube.

“Science Square Labs marks a pivotal step forward for Georgia Tech and for Atlanta’s growing life sciences ecosystem. We’re not only accelerating our research and innovation — we’re building powerful momentum across the region,” said Ángel Cabrera, president of Georgia Tech. “Our labs moving to this space will attract top talent and drive medical innovation. The move sets the stage for transformative discoveries, and we hope others will join us to continue Atlanta’s evolution into a global hub for medical breakthroughs.” 

This move comes as Georgia Tech saw a 46% increase in research awards from 2018 to 2024, evidence of the Institute’s fast-growing impact. By adding these labs, Atlanta strengthens its position on the national stage for advanced tech and life sciences innovation.  

Why It Matters 

• Saving lives: From early cancer detection and more innovative immune therapies to healing damaged tissues and managing chronic diseases, the research that will be conducted at Science Square tackles health issues millions face.
• Fueling a tech hub: By combining research powerhouses like Georgia Tech and Emory with next-gen laboratory facilities, Atlanta is building the brainpower and resources to compete with national tech centers.
• Economic growth: Science Square is helping attract top researchers, startups, and funding — bringing jobs, investment, and opportunities to Georgia. Most recently, Duracell announced they are moving their research and development headquarters to Science Square. 

Research for Real Life 

“We didn't have any training for advanced manufacturing in our area,” said Miller, vice president of Academic Affairs at Southern Regional Technical College (SRTC), which offers education and training programs in technical and manufacturing fields. “Companies had to go out and recruit people from Michigan to run their machines. That's when we said, ‘We don’t want that to happen — we need to be doing that right here.’”

That’s where the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) stepped in. Working with partner program Georgia Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing (Georgia AIM), GTMI helped connect SRTC with the resources and expertise needed to develop a robust training program tailored to the needs of local manufacturers.

Miller said at first, he was skeptical. “When GTMI said they wanted to be partners, I thought, ‘OK, this is another situation where we're going to talk for a minute, everybody says things and then goes away — and that’s it,’” said Miller. “That's not how it's been at all.”

Rather, it’s been a true partnership driven by SRTC, with curriculum focused on automation and robotics developed by the Technical College System of Georgia and GTMI. The curriculum is also shaped by local industry input to directly address workforce gaps in the region’s manufacturing sector. 

“As a state institution, we're here to serve you,” said Steven Sheffield, senior assistant director of Research Operations at GTMI and a point person of the partnership. “Tell us the problem, and we will work hard to try to solve it with you.”

Filling the Workforce Gap

Miller was committed to giving SRTC students the advanced manufacturing skills needed to stand out in the workforce. Yet the evolving manufacturing landscape and the needs of local manufacturers revealed gaps in SRTC’s curriculum, particularly in AI, automation, and robotics.

With GTMI and Georgia AIM researchers contributing key expertise to the expanded smart manufacturing curriculum, Miller noted the partnership is “opening our eyes to what we can do with AI. We're going to start integrating that into our programs.”

Beyond AI and robotics, SRTC leadership identified a crucial gap in their program: training in precision machining, a skill that local manufacturers like Check-Mate Industries sorely needed. 

“If we want to attract new business and industry to Georgia, we need to be able to show them we can provide a skilled workforce,” said Miller. 

To address this missing piece, GTMI and Georgia AIM helped procure funding to acquire and refurbish precision-machining equipment from longtime partner Makino. Georgia AIM also supported the renovation and outfitting of two SRTC lab spaces with additional updated equipment. 

Last fall, SRTC launched its new Precision Manufacturing & Engineering and Manufacturing Engineering Technology programs, with instructors trained by GTMI faculty in precision manufacturing. The new program at SRTC is one example of the ways GTMI experts are working with communities across the state to expand access to training and new technology.

“Not a lot of technical colleges have this type of machinery,” said Marvin Bannister, SRTC precision machining and manufacturing program chair. Instructors like Bannister received specialized training at GTMI’s Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility to ensure they felt confident teaching students how to operate the machinery. “Not only is it something else to add to my skill set, but the most important thing is that I'll be able to train other students who desire to learn on a machine like this.”

Because of SRTC’s expanded offerings, the technical college has strengthened partnerships and developed new internship programs with local manufacturers. “We all want the same thing,” said Miller, “which is to grow industry partnerships and to create a talent pipeline for our state.”

GTMI and Georgia AIM also support STEM programs with Thomasville area schools and internship programs for K-12 teachers with local manufacturers such as Check-Mate. These efforts deepen the connections between students and manufacturers, opening doors to future careers in the sector.

“We’re here to connect the dots and enable these types of partnerships,” says Steven Ferguson, a principal research scientist with GTMI and co-director of Georgia AIM. “When teams and their networks come together to solve a challenge for just one manufacturer, the impact can reach across an entire region.”

Wang is a recipient of the 2025 Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (ACM SIGCHI). The award recognizes Wang for his lifelong work on democratizing human-centered AI.

“Throughout my Ph.D. and industry internships, I observed a gap in existing research: there is a strong need for practical tools for applying human-centered approaches when designing AI systems,” said Wang, now a safety researcher at OpenAI.

“My work not only helps people understand AI and guide its behavior but also provides user-friendly tools that fit into existing workflows.”

[Related: Georgia Tech College of Computing Swarms to Yokohama, Japan, for CHI 2025]

Wang’s dissertation presented techniques in visual explanation and interactive guidance to align AI models with user knowledge and values. The work culminated from years of research, fellowship support, and internships.

Wang’s most influential projects formed the core of his dissertation. These included:

• CNN Explainer: an open-source tool developed for deep-learning beginners. Since its release in July 2020, more than 436,000 global visitors have used the tool.
• DiffusionDB: a first-of-its-kind large-scale dataset that lays a foundation to help people better understand generative AI. This work could lead to new research in detecting deepfakes and designing human-AI interaction tools to help people more easily use these models.
• GAM Changer: an interface that empowers users in healthcare, finance, or other domains to edit ML models to include knowledge and values specific to their domain, which improves reliability.
• GAM Coach: an interactive ML tool that could help people who have been rejected for a loan by automatically letting an applicant know what is needed for them to receive loan approval.
• Farsight: a tool that alerts developers when they write prompts in large language models that could be harmful and misused.  

“I feel extremely honored and lucky to receive this award, and I am deeply grateful to many who have supported me along the way, including Polo, mentors, collaborators, and friends,” said Wang, who was advised by School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) Professor Polo Chau.

“This recognition also inspired me to continue striving to design and develop easy-to-use tools that help everyone to easily interact with AI systems.”

Like Wang, Chau advised Georgia Tech alumnus Fred Hohman (Ph.D. CSE 2020). Hohman won the ACM SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation Award in 2022.

Chau’s group synthesizes machine learning (ML) and visualization techniques into scalable, interactive, and trustworthy tools. These tools increase understanding and interaction with large-scale data and ML models. 

Chau is the associate director of corporate relations for the Machine Learning Center at Georgia Tech. Wang called the School of CSE his home unit while a student in the ML program under Chau.

Wang is one of five recipients of this year’s award to be presented at the 2025 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2025). The conference occurs April 25-May 1 in Yokohama, Japan. 

SIGCHI is the world’s largest association of human-computer interaction professionals and practitioners. The group sponsors or co-sponsors 26 conferences, including CHI.

Wang’s outstanding dissertation award is the latest recognition of a career decorated with achievement.

Months after graduating from Georgia Tech, Forbes named Wang to its 30 Under 30 in Science for 2025 for his dissertation. Wang was one of 15 Yellow Jackets included in nine different 30 Under 30 lists and the only Georgia Tech-affiliated individual on the 30 Under 30 in Science list.

While a Georgia Tech student, Wang earned recognition from big names in business and technology. He received the Apple Scholars in AI/ML Ph.D. Fellowship in 2023 and was in the 2022 cohort of the J.P. Morgan AI Ph.D. Fellowships Program.

Along with the CHI award, Wang’s dissertation earned him awards this year at banquets across campus. The Georgia Tech chapter of Sigma Xi presented Wang with the Best Ph.D. Thesis Award. He also received the College of Computing’s Outstanding Dissertation Award.

“Georgia Tech attracts many great minds, and I’m glad that some, like Jay, chose to join our group,” Chau said. “It has been a joy to work alongside them and witness the many wonderful things they have accomplished, and with many more to come in their careers.”

To be more precise, it’s a liquid cooling system developed at Georgia Tech for electronics aimed at solving a long-standing problem: overheating.

Developed by Daniel Lorenzini, a 2019 Tech graduate who earned his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering, the cooling system uses microfluidic channels — tiny, intricate pathways for liquids — that are embedded within the chip packaging.

He worked with VentureLab, a Tech program in the Office of Commercialization, to spin his research into a startup company, EMCOOL, headquartered in Norcross.

“Our solution directly addresses the heat at the source of the silicon chip and therefore makes it faster,” Lorenzini said. “Our design has our system sitting directly on the silicon chips that generate the most heat. Using the fluids in the micro-pin fins, it carries the heat that’s produced away from the chip.”

That cooling solution is directly integrated into the electronic components, making it significantly more efficient than conventional cooling methods, because it enhances the heat dissipation process.

The result is a much lower risk of overheating and reduced power consumption, he said.

Lorenzini, who researched and refined the technology in the lab of Yogendra Joshi at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, was awarded a patent for the technology in September 2024.

Now, EMCOOL, which has five empoloyees, is actively pursuing venture capital funding to scale its technology and address the escalating thermal management challenges posed by AI processors in modern data centers.

The system uses a cooling block with tiny, pin-like fins on one side and a special thermal interface material on the other. There's also a junction attached to the block, with ports for the fluid to flow in and out. The cooling fluid moves through the micro-pin fins and helps to carry away the heat.

Since the ports are designed to match the shape of the fins, it ensures that the fluid flows efficiently and the heat is dissipated as effectively as possible at chip-scale. 

As electronic devices — from high-performance personal computers to data centers used for artificial intelligence processing — become more powerful, they generate more heat. This excess heat can damage components or cause the device to underperform.

Traditional cooling methods, which include fans or heat sinks, often struggle to keep pace with the increasing demands of the newer model electronics. Lorenzini’s microfluidic system addresses the challenge of overheating with his patented, more effective, compact, and integrated cooling solution.

With the guidance of Jonathan Goldman, director of Quadrant-i in Tech’s Office of Commercialization, Lorenzini secured grant funding through the National Science Foundation and the Georgia Research Alliance to further the research and build design prototypes.

“We immediately had the sense there was commercial potential here,” Goldman said. “Thermal management, or getting rid of heat, is a ubiquitous problem in the computer industry, so when we saw what Daniel was doing, we immediately began to engage with him to understand what the commercial potential was.”

Indeed, the initial focus for the technology was the $159 billion global electronic gaming market. Gamers need a lot of computing power, which generates a lot of heat, causing lag.

But beyond gaming systems, the company, which manufactures custom cooling blocks and kits at its Norcross facility, is eyeing more sectors, which also suffer from overheating, Goldman said.

The technology addresses similar overheating electronics challenges in high-performance computing, telecommunications, and energy systems.

“This work propels us forward in pushing the boundaries of what traditional cooling technologies can achieve because by harnessing the power of microfluidics, EMCOOL's systems offer a compact and energy-efficient way to manage heat,” Goldman said. “This has the potential to revolutionize industries reliant on high-performance computing, where heat management is a constant challenge.”

A program housed in Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute, SHES offers occupational safety, health, and environmental (OSHA) consulting and training services to manufacturers across the country and has worked extensively examining food-processing workers’ exposure to chemicals.

UCSF needed a partner with specific scientific expertise regarding employee exposure to a chemical used to limit bacterial growth during pork processing. SHES’ prior working relationship with UCSF also proved beneficial. In 2021, SHES industrial hygienist Brandon Philpot was the primary investigator (PI) for a collaborative project with a group from the UC system to develop safety training for workers fabricating engineered stone countertops.

“UC San Francisco’s School of Medicine was so impressed with our team's work, they came back to us for this much larger project,” said Jenny Houlroyd, Ph.D., manager of occupational health services at SHES. “We're trying to build meaningful relationships and leverage expertise across institutions.”

Study Parameters

The study was initiated when the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service division contracted with third-party experts to investigate whether increases in poultry and swine evisceration line speeds affected worker safety.

A secondary aspect of the study looked at the potential for an increase in worker exposure to peracetic acid (a food-safe chemical applied to surfaces in certain food-processing applications) when processing line speeds are increased.

“The study’s designers believed that ergonomics was the driving factor in worker safety, but they were unsure if by slaughtering and processing more animals per day, workers were also applying more peracetic acid,” said Houlroyd. “This is what the SHES team was asked to measure.”

In addition to tapping Georgia Tech’s expertise in industrial hygiene, UCSF brought in several other schools in the University of California system, primarily UC Berkeley, to assist with research.

Scope of SHES’ Role

“Our work with UC started in July 2024 and was completed in January 2025,” said Houlroyd, who served as the project’s PI and UC liaison.

Conducting the field research were SHES industrial hygienists Philpot, Sean Castillo, and Bob Hendry, as well as SHES OSHA Training Institute Education Center manager Hilarie Warren. The group traveled to six pork processing plants across the U.S. over 11 weeks.

Although the preferred method for industrial hygiene and worker exposure is to chart direct exposure to the workers themselves, the study did not allow employees to wear chemical monitors on the processing line for safety reasons.

“Our on-site sampling included putting on a variety of wearable monitors on ourselves,” Hendry said. “We’d then go to the various work areas in the plant where peracetic acid was used, stand next to the workers, and take readings.”

Each SHES team member upheld consistent sampling standards, but they were stationed at different sites. As a result, Castillo said, “It was up to us to use professional judgment to evaluate where the areas of concern were. We had to make sure we were very organized so that if I was at one site one week and Bob came out the next week, we could replicate our data almost one-to-one.”

Importance of Worker Interviews

The USDA study received Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval, which is needed if researchers interact with human subjects. Houlroyd noted that because the USDA study was considered formal research, IRB approval was necessary.

Although conducting worker interviews was not a requirement of their participation, the SHES team set up a special room where they interviewed employees on ergonomic issues and musculoskeletal disorders.

“We were able to take the load off from our collaborators and, in doing so, speed up their process so that they could finish their research earlier,” said Castillo.

Philpot stressed the importance of worker interviews to the study. “The process was good for collecting background information on what the employees were going through, day in and day out, to see if there’s anything that we could do to help their situation.”

By putting workers at ease, he and his teammates were able to gain their trust and listen to their concerns. “They could actually see that we cared about what's going on,” Philpot said.

According to Houlroyd, “One of the reasons the UC group loved Brandon and Sean and Bob so much is that we've had so much experience doing interviews, we were quick to jump into that role and help them. Our team knows that there is dignity in all labor, so we approach workers with respect. We meet the workers where they are, and we speak to them not as an academic, but human to human.”

Study Results

Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su reported that the USDA study found that faster line speeds did result in an increased risk of injuries, but that this risk “could be mitigated with other controls, specifically having more workers on the line and having effective ergonomic plans.”

The results of the peracetic acid research conducted by SHES, however, were inconclusive. “Was there more exposure at the faster line speed?” asked Houlroyd. “We found one plant where it was true, but it wasn't consistently true at all the plants, so it was determined that there should be more research.”

Regardless, she welcomed the chance to strengthen collaborative ties with the UC system and celebrated the meticulous and compassionate work conducted by SHES.

“I am so grateful for this team for traveling to remote locations in our country and spending 11 weeks in slaughterhouses,” said Houlroyd. “I had no doubt that we could do it, and we did it well.”

“At Georgia Tech, innovation isn’t just about discovery — it’s about solving real-world challenges,” said Executive Vice President for Research Tim Lieuwen. “Georgia Quick Start ensures that cutting-edge research in advanced manufacturing translates into practical training solutions. Together, we are equipping Georgia’s workforce with the skills needed to drive economic growth and industry advancement.”

As manufacturing technologies and artificial intelligence continue to evolve, U.S. manufacturers increasingly require skilled workers experienced in advanced manufacturing. For decades, Georgia Quick Start, administered by the Technical College System of Georgia, has been addressing this need and has been recognized as the country’s top workforce training program for 15 years. 

Now, researchers at Georgia Tech will collaborate with Georgia Quick Start to enhance these efforts by developing Extended Reality (XR) training programs, providing a scalable and experiential solution to meet the growing demand for training. 

“We have been so successful for so many years because we stay focused on relevance, flexibility, and responsiveness,” said Scott McMurray, deputy commissioner for Georgia Quick Start. “This partnership is an example of how Quick Start is able to develop and deliver effective training even for companies working on the leading edge of advanced manufacturing technologies.”

Extended Reality, Scaled Training

XR technologies use a combination of virtual and augmented reality to create immersive, interactive experiences. By simulating real-world manufacturing environments and processes, XR has the potential to allow trainees to practice and refine their skills in a controlled, risk-free setting through standardized training experiences. This not only enhances the learning experience but also ensures consistency in training quality across a large workforce.

“Virtual reality scales training by gamifying complex tasks and removing the need for costly or hazardous physical equipment. Augmented reality scales on-the-job training by providing adaptive, context-aware guidance exactly when and where it’s needed, reducing the need for expert supervision,” said manufacturing XR researcher Mohsen Moghaddam, Gary C. Butler Family associate professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “Together, they make training more consistent, up-to-date, accessible, and safe, especially for workers who may hesitate to ask for assistance from peers or supervisors out of fear of judgment.”

The collaboration will leverage Moghaddam’s research and the AR/VR training space within the expanded Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility, providing a state-of-the-art environment for developing and deploying XR training technologies. Researchers from the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) and Georgia AIM(Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing) will also play pivotal roles in the development of these training programs.

“Partnerships like these highlight the power of the integrated University of Georgia and Technical College System of Georgia’s workforce development ecosystem,” said Thomas Kurfess, Regents’ Professor and GTMI executive director. “Our country not only needs the creation of new jobs but also the skilled workforce to fill them. At Georgia Tech and GTMI, we are serving as an enabler of innovation in that workforce development.”

A Strategic Move to Atlanta
Duracell's decision to relocate its R&D facility from Bethel, Connecticut, to Atlanta, Georgia, underscores the strategic advantages offered by Georgia Tech and Atlanta’s booming innovation ecosystem. The new hub is scheduled to open in Summer 2026.

“This collaboration is a testament to our ongoing efforts to bridge academia and industry, fostering an environment where innovative ideas can thrive and lead to groundbreaking advancements," said Ángel Cabrera, Georgia Tech president.  

Economic and Technological Impact
The investment is expected to have a substantial economic impact on the region. With average salaries projected at $120,000, the creation of 110 jobs will provide valuable opportunities for local talent. Duracell's presence will also enhance the battery research, development, and manufacturing activities already thriving in Georgia.

“Georgia has set itself apart as a leader in attracting innovative companies with our research institutions, world-class logistics network, and pro-business environment,” said Gov. Brian Kemp in a press release. 

A Long-Standing Relationship With Georgia
Duracell's relationship with Georgia dates back to 1980, with the company running a manufacturing facility in LaGrange and a distribution plant in Fairburn that began operation in 2000. 

“We’re excited about the opportunities the move to Atlanta will bring,” said Liben Hailu, chief technology officer at Duracell. “This move is a significant milestone for Duracell, as we continue to drive innovation in battery technology for many years to come."

Science Square: A Hub for Innovation
Science Square, developed in partnership with commercial real estate firm Trammell Crow Co., is a premier destination for life sciences and technology companies. Spanning 18 acres, the multiphase development features more than 1.8 million square feet of lab and office space, along with apartments and retail space. Its first phase opened last year, and Duracell's new hub will occupy a substantial portion of the building.

In Georgia, where rural communities often face barriers to accessing advanced education in science and technology, Georgia Tech is leading a transformative effort to bridge the gap. The Rural Computer Science Initiative, designed by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC), is redefining computer science education for underserved school districts.

The program, inspired by Georgia state representative Todd Jones, connects Georgia Tech faculty and students with rural schools to co-teach engaging computer science lessons while supporting local teachers in developing the skills needed to independently teach these subjects. As Rep. Jones explains, “At the end of the day, your birthplace should not determine the type of education you receive here in our state.” 

Empowering Teachers and Students 

Through a combination of remote teaching and in-class collaboration, the program is already active in 40 school districts, with plans to expand in 2025. The program's co-teaching model enables rural teachers to upskill while offering students dynamic, hands-on learning opportunities. Shiona Drummer, a participating computer science teacher in Twiggs County noted, “It's been really good to me because I did not have a background in computer science. Being a part of the program has influenced my teaching in that I know I have colleagues I can call on.” 

For students, the program unlocks new possibilities. 

"It's been fun. It's something new,” shared a Twiggs County student. “You get to just express yourself,” she continued. “Most classes, you just sit there, pretty much just bored. This class, you get to interact with things, and it’s just more fun.” 

These reactions reflect the initiative's broader goals: to inspire students, foster their confidence, and connect their education to real-world challenges. Lizanne DeStefano, CEISMC’s executive director, emphasizes this point: “The way that we've designed the Rural CS Initiative is that the student work is embedded in real-life problems, particularly those that affect our rural communities.” 

Preparing for the Future Workforce 

Beyond classroom learning, the program is helping shape Georgia’s future workforce to meet the demands of a rapidly evolving tech landscape. Rep. Jones highlights the initiative's broader implications: “We’ve given [students] that opportunity and that springboard to be able to do things they possibly may never have had the opportunity to do. It provides a greater educated workforce — one that brings us into 2030, 2040, and 2050 with the advent of AI, autonomous vehicles, and other technological advancements.” 

The initiative is also tackling one of the pain points for rural communities: the belief that young people must leave their hometowns to find well-paying, high-value jobs. DeStefano explains, “We’re using this as a way to show how students can remain in their communities, contribute to them with a computer science degree or knowledge, and still be an important cog in the global workforce.” 

How the Initiative Works

The professional development aspect of the Rural Computer Science Initiative helps ensure that the teachers can sustain the program’s impact long after Georgia Tech’s involvement. 

Leigh McCook, who leads the initiative at GTRI, outlined the process: “We first meet with the teachers, providing professional development to walk through the modules and show them how they should get involved in the classroom. Then we co-teach the first week and guide problem-based learning in the second week to assess student comprehension.” 

Ensuring that cutting-edge topics such as artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and robotics are paired with a problem-based learning approach, is how Georgia Tech is properly equipping rural students with 21st-century skills. 

“Knowledge is power,” said Rise’ Jenkins, principal at Twiggs County High School. “Once you show students what’s available to them and the access they have, they just readily embrace the idea of learning.” 

An initiative that moves beyond education into more of a transformation, this program aims to prepare students for careers in emerging fields while ensuring Georgia remains competitive in the global economy. CEISMC’s DeStefano notes, “We’re not thinking about filling jobs today; we’re thinking about filling jobs for the next decade.”

A New Era for Blockchain Technology
Associate Professor Zikas emphasizes the fundamental differences between blockchain and the common architecture used by traditional financial systems like banks. While banks rely on private ledgers maintained by centralized entities, blockchain uses decentralized ledgers accessible to all participants. This transparency, he explains, is a double-edged sword: it enhances accountability but raises privacy concerns.

Zikas highlights blockchain’s potential to revolutionize global financial transactions by offering a consistent, borderless mechanism for transferring assets. “The process of sending bitcoin from a U.S.-based user to a U.K.-based user is identical to transferring bitcoin domestically,” he explains. This contrasts sharply with traditional international banking, which is fraught with delays and fees.

The associate professor also notes that Trump’s previous administration had a mixed stance on crypto. Whilebeing cautious, it supported regulating initial coin offerings and funding blockchain research. In contrast, the Biden administration’s stance, spearheaded by the Securities and Exchange Commission, created uncertainty in the crypto space, and is believed to have contributed to pushing crypto entrepreneurship out of the U.S. and into a prolonged “crypto winter.” 

Building a Regulatory Framework
Agam Shah, a blockchain researcher, underscores the importance of clear regulations in fostering crypto adoption. “A well-structured regulatory framework can encourage institutional participation by reducing uncertainties and risks while protecting retail investors,” he notes.

He highlights the damage caused by unregulated practices, such as wash trading, which happens when you sell a security at a loss and buy a “substantially identical” security within 30 days before or after the sale. High-profile failures like cryptocurrency exchange FTX, eroded public trust, with many users losing money. Shah believes that the Trump administration’s positive sentiment toward bitcoin, coupled with his administration’s pro-crypto stance, could lay the groundwork for comprehensive policies that foster innovation while safeguarding investors.

Shah also points to advancements in blockchain technology, such as tools to detect fraudulent activities, as critical to maintaining market integrity. “Technological developments will play a pivotal role in ensuring transparency and fairness in the crypto space,” he adds.

Navigating Challenges and Opportunities
Despite the optimism surrounding anticipated policies, Zikas and Shah suggest a cautious approach. Zikas stresses that users and policymakers need to be made aware of the reach (and limits) of the technology.  For example, while blockchain can offer privacy benefits, common blockchain ledgers are not completely immune to techniques that can uncover identities. And, although absolute privacy is technologically feasible, it can facilitate illicit activities. Shah, meanwhile, stresses the importance of balancing innovation with market stability, particularly given the crypto market’s volatility and the challenges posed by Basel III endgame — the latest update to global capital standards — set to take effect in 2025.

Looking ahead, both Zikas and Shah agree that clear and actionable policies will be essential for positioning the U.S. as a global leader in blockchain technology. As Trump’s administration aims to transform the U.S. into a crypto powerhouse, the coming months will be pivotal in shaping the future of digital assets and blockchain innovation.

By fostering a balanced approach that combines regulatory clarity with technological innovation, the U.S. could solidify its leadership in the global crypto economy — while ensuring the ecosystem remains transparent and secure.

While this has stimulated economic growth, especially in Medellín, Antioquia’s capital and largest city, it has also introduced challenges such as rising costs and gentrification, with certain neighborhoods becoming less affordable.

Comfama is a nonprofit organization that strives to grow the middle class by providing social and economic services to families. The organization has begun a groundbreaking project in collaboration with the Business Analytics Center (BAC) at the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business to enhance its ability to forecast and meet the needs of the population.

Determining the Future of Compensation Funds

Comfama is a “compensation fund.” In Colombia, these private, nonprofit organizations have been created to improve the lives of workers and their families. They provide social services for recreation, culture, education, preventive healthcare, housing assistance, loans, and more. There are 42 compensation funds across the country that play a vital part in the country's social security system, according to Santiago García Rivera, head of the Information and Analytics Laboratory at Comfama.

For companies in Colombia, participation in a compensation fund is mandatory. Each fund collects a 4 percent payroll tax from affiliated companies to provide monetary subsidies to workers and their families. "We have about 121 thousand companies affiliated with Comfama, which includes about 1.4 million workers. When you take into account their families, that's around 2.7 million people we serve, plus a large group of non affiliated people that use our services," said García Rivera.

For Comfama, economic and demographic shifts have complicated the prediction of how many people will use its services. "Recognizing these challenges, Comfama is embracing data-driven solutions. We want to build a robust prediction model to help us forecast what will happen to our affiliated population in the future," he said.

The Georgia Tech Connection

This is where Georgia Tech comes in. One of García Rivera's colleagues at Comfama, Juan David Penagos, head of Ventures and New Business Development, knew about the Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute Medellín Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center and suggested they reach out to see whether they could put a project together with business analytics students. Sara Araujo Santos, managing director of Development for Latin America for the Center, contacted Sherri Von Behren, the BAC's corporate engagement manager, about possibly creating an MBA business analytics practicum project to help Comfama.

Von Behren contacted Jonathan Fan, a faculty member of the Information Technology Management group in the Scheller College. Fan leads students in transforming data into business solutions through the Business Analytics Practicum course, which is offered in the fall for graduate students and in the spring for undergraduates.  Fan immediately saw the value of the opportunity for his MBA students and set up a practicum in which they are developing predictive models using time series data and macroeconomic variables.

There are two teams assigned to the project: Team Data Paisa Squad with Aaron Payne, MBA ‘26 (team lead), Lissette Chavez, MBA ‘25, and Boris Taganov, MBA ‘25, and Team The Growth Gurus of Antioquia, with Justin Siegel, MS in Analytics ’25 (team lead), Srinjoy DasMahapatra, MBA ’25, and Vinaya Vinigalla, MBA ’24. Haofei Qin, Ph.D. candiate at Scheller helped mentor students along the way. 

They meet weekly with the Comfama team, which includes analysts and data scientists Alejandra Bernal, Susanna Londoño, and Wbeimar Ossa. The teams discuss their progress and address any challenges they face that week. With less than two months to go, they're seeing results.

Fan has been pleased with the results so far. “This cohort was truly outstanding,” he said, speaking of his students. ”They approached complex topics with clarity and creativity, and their collaborative spirit led to innovative ideas and enlightening discussions. They handled challenging subjects effortlessly, always coming up with fresh and interesting perspectives."

Managing the Present and Predicting the Future

Regarding the work of Team Data Paisa Squad, Aaron Payne remarked, "One of our key successes has been developing a model framework that provides accurate forecasts and adapts to changes in external economic indicators. By integrating machine learning techniques alongside traditional time series models, we've increased our forecasts' robustness. Additionally, the collaboration with Comfama's internal team has been highly productive, enabling us to align our technical solutions with their business needs. The early feedback on our findings has been positive."

Payne stated that one of the main challenges they've faced has been combining data from multiple sources, as each source has different levels of detail and accuracy. Ensuring these data sets are consistent and reliable has been difficult, especially for economic factors that may not directly match Comfama's internal data. Another challenge is adapting standard forecasting models like SARIMAX—Seasonal AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average with eXogenous variables— to account for external influences like government policies or unexpected economic changes.

"This experience has reinforced the value of experiential learning in advancing my business analytics skills. Working with real-world data, especially in a dynamic organization like Comfama, has provided a deeper understanding of how to apply advanced analytical methods to solve practical business problems. The practicum has helped bridge the gap between theory and practice, giving me confidence in using these tools to drive decision-making in real business environments," said Payne.

The practicum is more than just about numbers, though. It's about understanding the lives behind the data points. As Fan reminds his students, "A model is just a model, but those data points represent individual lives. We want to understand the mechanism or the story behind the data."

We talked with John Taylor, the Frederick Law Olmsted Professor and associate chair for graduate programs and research innovation in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Neda Mohammadi, city infrastructure analytics director in Georgia Tech’s Network Dynamics Lab to get some answers. These are edited highlights from an interview.  

Q: What is a digital twin? 

Taylor: A digital twin is an intelligent, adaptive system that pairs virtual and physical worlds. In community development work, a Smart City Digital Twin (SCDT), like those used in Warner Robins and Columbus, pairs a real city to its digital counterpart to generate data-driven feedback loops of interactions between cities’ three main components: (1) human systems, which includes government, industry, and residents; (2) infrastructure systems, which are physical systems and the services they provide; and (3) technology systems, such as devices, sensors, and data analytics infrastructure. 

Q: They’ve been used in manufacturing for some time. How is that different from a SCDT?

Taylor: They're somewhat easier to implement in a manufacturing context, because everything's under control, under a roof. They model all the different manufacturing machinery and they use that to see when a part might need to be changed, and when they need to do maintenance. And they can play with the system, using real-time running data to see what happens if this piece does wear out. How bad would it be? They could either adjust that piece or adjust that machine or maintain it, whatever it might be, based on the scenario analysis. 

Q: How does that translate to the less controlled environment of a city? 

Taylor: It involves replicating multiple systems. For example, if a tall building is on fire, there will be multiple systems brought into play. First, you can see what's happening in the city at a basic level. You can see that there's traffic building up, for example. The next level is, why is it happening? And that's where it gets a little bit more interesting. Most of the digital twin work that we've seen — that anyone's doing out in the world — is to understand why things are happening the way they're happening. But really, the value starts to unlock the third and fourth levels. 

The third level is the “what if” scenario. In the context of a city, for example, in Midtown they've just installed new traffic signals. Hopefully, someone tested that out in advance. But one “what if” analysis could be: We've got bad traffic in Midtown. What if we put these traffic signals in the Tech Square area? What effect will that have on the flows in the city? With a digital twin, you can know that before you install the lights. That is one of the big opportunities. 

The fourth level is the idea that the infrastructure could start to intervene on behalf of the citizens. And so in the example of the tall building fire, the traffic signals might preemptively allow the fire trucks through. But they could also do other things like make all of the signals around the building red, so no traffic is moving and there's more space for people to evacuate the building. That would be something we might allow the systems to do for us. 

Q: How is that different from, for example, a project in Valdosta that allows first responder vehicles to change the traffic lights so they can get to an emergency more quickly? 

Mohammadi: A digital twin will update itself based on data that keeps coming in. If you think about the interaction with the traffic signal, it doesn't care about what happened five minutes ago, 10 minutes ago. At that moment, they know that the driver probably has a better situational awareness than the automated system. So they let the driver interfere and put useful inputs into the systems to make a better decision. 

The digital twin is accumulating data as it comes because it is based on prediction. The definition of prediction is looking at past data and, based on past experience, predicting what's likely to happen in the future. We know that time is a moving target. As we move on, things that happened in the past accumulate. There are more things that we know. A digital twin is really at the edge of this moving target. 

Q: Tell us about the river safety project in Columbus, which uses a digital twin to create an alert system to prevent drownings in the Chattahoochee River. The city was recently named a Smart 20 award winner by Smart Cities Connect for the Citizen Safety Digital Twin project.  

Taylor: A good project from our perspective involves a complicated enough scenario where multiple sensors are involved. With the river safety project, we had to understand and predict water levels with a water level sensor. We use visual sensing to understand, if people were in the environment when hazardous conditions might begin to occur, whether we could get them out of harm's way before they get swept away into the water. 

We had to build a digital twin of the entire river basin, so we would know just what the danger is if the water level rises this much. Are the islands that people are standing on before the water level rises going to vanish? 

That one was particularly interesting to us. If you look at the smart city digital twin work we did first, it was related to energy consumption. We're increasingly excited about having a more direct effect on people's lives. This one is stopping people from drowning. 

Q: Tell us about the digital twin you developed for the Warner Robins’ Citizen Safety Digital Twin for Community Resilience project, which deploys dynamic license plate reader cameras to help deter crime. It received the Intelligent Community Forum’s Smart21 Community Award at the 2024 Taipei Smart City Summit and Expo. 

Taylor: This project is pretty complicated from our perspective, because we had to build a geographic information systems (GIS) map of the city. We also have to know where crimes have been occurring. We've got more than 10 years of crime data, including very recent crime data. We're deploying sensors in part to deter crimes, but also to detect and collect more information about crime patterns. It comes down to taking the information about where crimes are occurring and coupling that with predictions about routes people would take if they did commit a crime, so that the car would come into view of one of the cameras. We don't hide the camera; we put it on a very visible structure, where we predict most likely the crimes are going to occur this week. We put this very visible thing to discourage people from doing anything once they realize they're being watched. And we found that it did in fact, reduce crimes in those high-crime spots by 20%.

Q: What are some other ways communities can use digital twins? 

Taylor: We published something this spring, and we're working on a funding proposal now, about how ambulances move around during a period of inundation — coastal flooding, coastal inundation, or heavy rains. We’ve met with Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah about this. We looked at data in Virginia Beach to see if, in real time as the flooding is changing, we could deploy ambulances in different parts of the city ahead of where they're needed. It’s ambulance routing during a natural disaster event.

Q: Are there limitations to smart city digital twin technology?

Taylor: When we travel around and we present this, some clever student or faculty member will say, “Wouldn't a great research project be to figure out how to build a central platform for the collection of this data or a standard format for the way this data should be sent so that all the systems can talk to each other?” And they’re right. It's difficult to get the value across a whole city if you're only looking at one system at a time. A future research topic is figuring out those data flows and the centralization of that data. 

Researchers from the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) created the Large Pre-Trained Time-Series Model (LPTM) framework. LPTM is a single foundational model that completes forecasting tasks across a broad range of domains. 

Along with performing as well or better than models purpose-built for their applications, LPTM requires 40% less data and 50% less training time than current baselines. In some cases, LPTM can be deployed without any training data.

The key to LPTM is that it is pre-trained on datasets from different industries like healthcare, transportation, and energy. The Georgia Tech group created an adaptive segmentation module to make effective use of these vastly different datasets.

The Georgia Tech researchers will present LPTM in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, at the 2024 Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024). NeurIPS is one of the world’s most prestigious conferences on artificial intelligence (AI) and ML research.

“The foundational model paradigm started with text and image, but people haven’t explored time-series tasks yet because those were considered too diverse across domains,” said B. Aditya Prakash, one of LPTM’s developers. 

“Our work is a pioneer in this new area of exploration where only few attempts have been made so far.”

[MICROSITE: Georgia Tech at NeurIPS 2024]

Foundational models are trained with data from different fields, making them powerful tools when assigned tasks. Foundational models drive GPT, DALL-E, and other popular generative AI platforms used today. LPTM is different though because it is geared toward time-series, not text and image generation.  

The Georgia Tech researchers trained LPTM on data ranging from epidemics, macroeconomics, power consumption, traffic and transportation, stock markets, and human motion and behavioral datasets.

After training, the group pitted LPTM against 17 other models to make forecasts as close to nine real-case benchmarks. LPTM performed the best on five datasets and placed second on the other four.

The nine benchmarks contained data from real-world collections. These included the spread of influenza in the U.S. and Japan, electricity, traffic, and taxi demand in New York, and financial markets.   

The competitor models were purpose-built for their fields. While each model performed well on one or two benchmarks closest to its designed purpose, the models ranked in the middle or bottom on others.

In another experiment, the Georgia Tech group tested LPTM against seven baseline models on the same nine benchmarks in zero-shot forecasting tasks. Zero-shot means the model is used out of the box and not given any specific guidance during training. LPTM outperformed every model across all benchmarks in this trial.

LPTM performed consistently as a top-runner on all nine benchmarks, demonstrating the model’s potential to achieve superior forecasting results across multiple applications with less and resources.

“Our model also goes beyond forecasting and helps accomplish other tasks,” said Prakash, an associate professor in the School of CSE. 

“Classification is a useful time-series task that allows us to understand the nature of the time-series and label whether that time-series is something we understand or is new.”

One reason traditional models are custom-built to their purpose is that fields differ in reporting frequency and trends. 

For example, epidemic data is often reported weekly and goes through seasonal peaks with occasional outbreaks. Economic data is captured quarterly and typically remains consistent and monotone over time. 

LPTM’s adaptive segmentation module allows it to overcome these timing differences across datasets. When LPTM receives a dataset, the module breaks data into segments of different sizes. Then, it scores all possible ways to segment data and chooses the easiest segment from which to learn useful patterns.

LPTM’s performance, enhanced through the innovation of adaptive segmentation, earned the model acceptance to NeurIPS 2024 for presentation. NeurIPS is one of three primary international conferences on high-impact research in AI and ML. NeurIPS 2024 occurs Dec. 10-15.

Ph.D. student Harshavardhan Kamarthi partnered with Prakash, his advisor, on LPTM. The duo are among the 162 Georgia Tech researchers presenting over 80 papers at the conference. 

Prakash is one of 46 Georgia Tech faculty with research accepted at NeurIPS 2024. Nine School of CSE faculty members, nearly one-third of the body, are authors or co-authors of 17 papers accepted at the conference. 

Along with sharing their research at NeurIPS 2024, Prakash and Kamarthi released an open-source library of foundational time-series modules that data scientists can use in their applications.

“Given the interest in AI from all walks of life, including business, social, and research and development sectors, a lot of work has been done and thousands of strong papers are submitted to the main AI conferences,” Prakash said. 

“Acceptance of our paper speaks to the quality of the work and its potential to advance foundational methodology, and we hope to share that with a larger audience.”

SubjECTive-QA is the first human-curated dataset on question-answer pairs from earnings call transcripts (ECTs). The dataset teaches models to identify subjective features in ECTs, like clarity and cautiousness.   

The dataset lays the foundation for a new approach to identifying disinformation and misinformation caused by nuances in speech. While ECT responses can be technically true, unclear or irrelevant information can misinform stakeholders and affect their decision-making. 

Tests on White House press briefings showed that the dataset applies to other sectors with frequent question-and-answer encounters, notably politics, journalism, and sports. This increases the odds of effectively informing audiences and improving transparency across public spheres.   

The intersecting work between natural language processing and finance earned the paper acceptance to NeurIPS 2024, the 38th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. NeurIPS is one of the world’s most prestigious conferences on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) research.

"SubjECTive-QA has the potential to revolutionize nowcasting predictions with enhanced clarity and relevance,” said Agam Shah, the project’s lead researcher. 

“Its nuanced analysis of qualities in executive responses, like optimism and cautiousness, deepens our understanding of economic forecasts and financial transparency."

[MICROSITE: Georgia Tech at NeurIPS 2024]

SubjECTive-QA offers a new means to evaluate financial discourse by characterizing language's subjective and multifaceted nature. This improves on traditional datasets that quantify sentiment or verify claims from financial statements.

The dataset consists of 2,747 Q&A pairs taken from 120 ECTs from companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange from 2007 to 2021. The Georgia Tech researchers annotated each response by hand based on six features for a total of 49,446 annotations.

The group evaluated answers on:

• Relevance: the speaker answered the question with appropriate details.
• Clarity: the speaker was transparent in the answer and the message conveyed.
• Optimism: the speaker answered with a positive outlook regarding future outcomes.
• Specificity: the speaker included sufficient and technical details in their answer.
• Cautiousness: the speaker answered using a conservative, risk-averse approach.
• Assertiveness: the speaker answered with certainty about the company’s events and outcomes.

The Georgia Tech group validated their dataset by training eight computer models to detect and score these six features. Test models comprised of three BERT-based pre-trained language models (PLMs), and five popular large language models (LLMs) including Llama and ChatGPT. 

All eight models scored the highest on the relevance and clarity features. This is attributed to domain-specific pretraining that enables the models to identify pertinent and understandable material.

The PLMs achieved higher scores on the clear, optimistic, specific, and cautious categories. The LLMs scored higher in assertiveness and relevance. 

In another experiment to test transferability, a PLM trained with SubjECTive-QA evaluated 65 Q&A pairs from White House press briefings and gaggles. Scores across all six features indicated models trained on the dataset could succeed in other fields outside of finance. 

"Building on these promising results, the next step for SubjECTive-QA is to enhance customer service technologies, like chatbots,” said Shah, a Ph.D. candidate studying machine learning. 

“We want to make these platforms more responsive and accurate by integrating our analysis techniques from SubjECTive-QA."

SubjECTive-QA culminated from two semesters of work through Georgia Tech’s Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program. The VIP Program is an approach to higher education where undergraduate and graduate students work together on long-term project teams led by faculty. 

Undergraduate students earn academic credit and receive hands-on experience through VIP projects. The extra help advances ongoing research and gives graduate students mentorship experience.

Computer science major Huzaifa Pardawala and mathematics major Siddhant Sukhani co-led the SubjECTive-QA project with Shah. 

Fellow collaborators included Veer Kejriwal, Abhishek Pillai, Rohan Bhasin, Andrew DiBiasio, Tarun Mandapati, and Dhruv Adha. All six researchers are undergraduate students studying computer science. 

Sudheer Chava co-advises Shah and is the faculty lead of SubjECTive-QA. Chava is a professor in the Scheller College of Business and director of the M.S. in Quantitative and Computational Finance (QCF) program.

Chava is also an adjunct faculty member in the College of Computing’s School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE).

"Leading undergraduate students through the VIP Program taught me the powerful impact of balancing freedom with guidance,” Shah said. 

“Allowing students to take the helm not only fosters their leadership skills but also enhances my own approach to mentoring, thus creating a mutually enriching educational experience.”

Presenting SubjECTive-QA at NeurIPS 2024 exposes the dataset for further use and refinement. NeurIPS is one of three primary international conferences on high-impact research in AI and ML. The conference occurs Dec. 10-15.

The SubjECTive-QA team is among the 162 Georgia Tech researchers presenting over 80 papers at NeurIPS 2024. The Georgia Tech contingent includes 46 faculty members, like Chava. These faculty represent Georgia Tech’s Colleges of Business, Computing, Engineering, and Sciences, underscoring the pertinence of AI research across domains. 

"Presenting SubjECTive-QA at prestigious venues like NeurIPS propels our research into the spotlight, drawing the attention of key players in finance and tech,” Shah said.

“The feedback we receive from this community of experts validates our approach and opens new avenues for future innovation, setting the stage for transformative applications in industry and academia.”

Georgia AIM Week, which takes place Sept. 30 – Oct. 4, is hosted by Georgia Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing (Georgia AIM). The week kicks off at Georgia Tech's John Lewis Student Center with the debut of the Georgia AIM Mobile Studio. The vehicle will tour the state during the week to showcase how a wide range of organizations, including public schools, manufacturers, and technology startups, are using AI. The week will conclude on Oct. 4, National Manufacturing Day, at the University of Georgia in Athens. 

Funded by a $65 million federal Economic Development Administration grant, Georgia AIM launched in September 2022 and connects 16 projects across the state, all working to develop a manufacturing workforce skilled in smart technologies and to deploy innovation in the manufacturing industry. Georgia AIM is one of the largest federally funded initiatives of its kind in the country to connect economic development with AI in manufacturing to foster advancements in innovation and workforce development. The grant project is led by Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute.

“Georgia AIM Week allows us to showcase the incredible work that we have accomplished in partnership with a range of organizations over the last two years,” said Donna Ennis, Georgia AIM co-director. “Artificial intelligence and smart technologies are a game-changer for small and medium manufacturers, and learning these technologies opens doors for our workforce. Georgia AIM is working across the state to ensure Georgia can take advantage of these new technologies, and Georgia AIM Week is highlighting these efforts.”

Along with the kickoff and wrap-up events, Georgia AIM Week events will occur in Atlanta, Augusta, Dawsonville, LaGrange, McDonough, Moultrie, Savannah, and Warner Robins. Virtual “Hour of Coding” activities for 6th to 12th graders are also planned from noon to 1 p.m. each day that week. 

Manufacturing-focused events will be hosted by the Georgia MBDA Business Center, Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership, and the Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility located at Georgia Tech.

Georgia AIM’s work across the state includes K-12 initiatives to connect STEM and problem-solving activities to students, new labs and equipment at Technical College System of Georgia campuses, a new program for cybersecurity training at the Cyber Innovation & Training Center with Augusta University, and new workforce development programs that include training and apprenticeships and fellowships that align with local manufacturing needs. Overall, more than 3,000 students and 1,500 teachers in K-12 schools have connected with new science-based challenges. New programs are connecting Southwest Georgia career academies to advanced technologies, and the number of robotics programs for K-12 schools in Middle Georgia has doubled. 

Georgia AIM funding created the AI-Enhanced Robotics Center at the Veterans Education Career Transition Resource (VECTR) Center in Warner Robins, where 24 students have received AI-Enhanced Robotic Manufacturing Specialist technical training certificates. Georgia AIM has also connected with dozens of manufacturers and communities across the state, assisting with technology implementation and pilot projects to help incorporate smart technologies.

About Georgia AIM
Funded by a $65 million grant from the federal Economic Development Administration, Georgia AIM is a network of projects across the state that connect the manufacturing community with AI and smart technologies and a ready workforce. Georgia AIM works across all geographies and demographics to bring traditionally underrepresented participants to manufacturing spaces, specifically rural residents, women, people of color, veterans, and those without a college degree. Georgia AIM projects include K-12 education, Georgia’s universities and technical colleges, workforce education, regional partnerships, nonprofits, and support for emerging technologies and manufacturers.

For more information on Georgia AIM, please visit georgiaaim.org.

The NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Southeast Hub is a five-year project based on the I-Corps model, which assists academics in moving their research from the lab to the market. 

Led by Georgia Tech’s Office of Commercialization and Enterprise Innovation Institute, the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub encompasses four states — Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and Alabama. 

Its member schools include:

• Clemson University 
• Morehouse College 
• University of Alabama 
• University of Central Florida 
• University of Florida 
• University of Miami 
• University of South Florida 

In January 2025, when the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub officially launches, the consortium of schools will expand to include the University of Puerto Rico. Additionally, through Morehouse College’s activation, Spelman College and the Morehouse School of Medicine will also participate in supporting the project. 

With a combined economic output of more than $3.2 trillion, the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub region represents more than 11% of the entire U.S. economy. As a region, those states and Puerto Rico have a larger economic output than France, Italy, or Canada. 

“This is a great opportunity for us to engage in regional collaboration to drive innovation across the Southeast to strengthen our regional economy and that of Puerto Rico,” said the Enterprise Innovation Institute’s Nakia Melecio, director of the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub. As director, Melecio will oversee strategic management, data collection, and overall operations​. 

Additionally, Melecio serves as a national faculty instructor for the NSF I-Corps program. 

“This also allows us to collectively tackle some of the common challenges all four of our states face, especially when it comes to being intentionally inclusive in reaching out to communities that historically haven’t always been invited to participate,” he said. 

That means bringing solutions to market that not only solve problems but are intentional about including researchers from Black and Hispanic-serving institutions, Melecio said. 

Keith McGreggor, director of Georgia Tech’s VentureLab, is the faculty lead charged with designing the curriculum and instruction for the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub’s partners. 

McGreggor has extensive I-Corps experience. In 2012, Georgia Tech was among the first institutions in the country selected to teach the I-Corps curriculum, which aims to further research commercialization. McGreggor served as the lead instructor for I-Corps-related efforts and led training efforts across the Southeast, as well as for teams in Puerto Rico, Mexico, and the Republic of Ireland. 

Raghupathy “Siva” Sivakumar, Georgia Tech’s vice president of Commercialization and chief commercialization officer, is the project’s principal investigator. 

The NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub is one of three announced by the NSF. The others are in the Northwest and New England regions, led by the University of California, Berkeley, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, respectively. The three I-Corps Hubs are part of the NSF’s planned expansion of its National Innovation Network, which now includes 128 colleges and universities across 48 states. 

As designed, the NSF I-Corps Southeast Hub will leverage its partner institutions’ strengths to break down barriers to researchers’ pace of lab-to-market commercialization. 

"Our Hub member institutions have successfully commercialized transformative technologies across critical sectors, including advanced manufacturing, renewable energy, cybersecurity, and biomedical fields,” said Sivakumar. “We aim to achieve two key objectives: first, to establish and expand a scalable model that effectively translates research into viable commercial ventures; and second, to address pressing societal needs.

"This includes not only delivering innovative solutions but also cultivating a diverse pipeline of researchers and innovators, thereby enhancing interest in STEM fields — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.”

U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams, D-Atlanta, is a proponent of the Hub’s STEM component. 

“As a biology major-turned-congresswoman, I know firsthand that STEM education and research open doors far beyond the lab or classroom.,” Williams said. “This National Science Foundation grant means Georgia Tech will be leading the way in equipping researchers and grad students to turn their discoveries into real-world impact — as innovators, entrepreneurs, and business leaders. 

“I’m especially excited about the partnership with Morehouse College and other minority-serving institutions through this Hub, expanding pathways to innovation and entrepreneurship for historically marginalized communities and creating one more tool to close the racial wealth gap.” 

That STEM aspect, coupled with supporting the growth of a regional ecosystem, will speed commercialization, increase higher education-industry collaborations, and boost the network of diverse entrepreneurs and startup founders, said David Bridges, vice president of the Enterprise Innovation Institute. 

“This multi-university, regional approach is a successful model because it has been proven that bringing a diversity of stakeholders together leads to unique solutions to very difficult problems,” he said. “And while the Southeast faces different challenges that vary from state to state and Puerto Rico has its own needs, they call for a more comprehensive approach to solving them. Adopting a region-oriented focus allows us to understand what these needs are, customize tailored solutions, and keep not just our hub but our nation economically competitive.” 

But Galicia, who is pursuing master’s degrees in business and public administration, found herself doing just that as an Enterprise 6 Intern in the Safety, Health, Environmental Services group at Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute.

Because some of her family members work in manufacturing, construction, and landscaping, she felt a strong personal connection to the group’s mission to help employers reduce workplace hazards.

“To come to work, learn the educational side, and go home and educate my family is something I've been very fortunate to do,” Galicia said. “Everyone who works in these environments works to be able to feed their family and have a place to live. They don't know how serious these hazards are that they come across each day. We’re able to tell people, ‘This chemical’s harming you, this air is harming you, this safety hazard is harming you.’ It’s saving lives.”

Galicia was one of seven Enterprise 6 students from Georgia universities who put the skills they’ve honed in labs and classrooms into a host of dynamic economic development projects across the state this summer.

Launched in 2021, the Enterprise 6 program allows University System of Georgia undergraduate and graduate students to work in the economic development space. In the past three years, 31 interns have been selected.

The Enterprise Innovation Institute is the nation’s longest-running and most diverse university-based economic development organization. Since launching its founding program more than 60 years ago, it has expanded to serve a wide range of businesses of all sizes while also increasing its focus on socioeconomic development, providing resources, support, and skills to local communities.

Enterprise 6 interns receive practical, real-life work experience and $25 an hour for a 20-hour work week, as well as mentorship from a research faculty member and biweekly check-in meetings. The program is made possible by funding from the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research.

“Our Enterprise 6 internships immerse students from Georgia Tech and other universities in the work of socioeconomic development across our programs that serve communities and business,” said Enterprise Innovation Institute Vice President David Bridges. “Students don’t always see direct parallels between socioeconomic development and their courses of study, but this experience is designed to help make those connections.”

That was the case for Anshika Nichani, who interned with the Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership. “Cybersecurity, supply chain, and Industry 4.0 projects provided me with invaluable experience and have been instrumental in my development across multiple domains,” said Nichani, a computer science major.

“I learned more here than in some of my classes. It was also fascinating and enjoyable to learn about general workplace practices and dynamics.”

For Shreya Dudeja, an undergraduate studying business administration in the Scheller College of Business, the internship enabled her to learn about the inner workings of university finance, tracking processes, and delving into research and policy. What she especially appreciated about the internship was “the fact that I could work with so many different people. It's a very collaborative environment.”

Ciera Hudson is a Georgia Tech mechanical engineering student who will graduate in December. Hudson, who grew up singing and playing the flute, chose an Arts Innovation internship and has discovered some overlap between her major and her creative passions.

As an engineering student, she said, “I've had a lot of opportunities to learn about how products are developed and the whole life cycle from concept to completion.” She sees similarities between that process and designing an arts program that meets a client’s particular needs.

Samuel Hutto, an economics major at Georgia College and State University, worked with Georgia Tech’s Center for Economic Development Research (CEDR), building surveys and collecting and organizing data on municipalities throughout the state.

What he enjoyed most about his experience was CEDR's team. “They've been very accepting and relaxed. They're very easy to work with,” said Hutto, who added, “I've learned more about how research can truly affect people's lives.”

Students participated at various stages in their educational and career paths. EI2 Global intern Ejaz Ahmed, for example, is a Ph.D. student in the School of Public Policy with previous work experience, and Georgia Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing intern Byron Fair enjoyed a successful military career before joining Scheller’s MBA program.

Krystle Richardson, program operations manager for Enterprise 6, supports students throughout their internships, helping them to fine-tune goals and navigate challenges while connecting them with relevant resources at the Enterprise Innovation Institute and Georgia Tech.

“I’m thrilled when interns extend their time with us as student workers or graduate research assistants,” she said. “Some even secure full-time positions.”

One such intern is Hanyu “Hannah” Lu. After her experience in the 2023 Enterprise 6 cohort, she completed a master’s degree in computational science and engineering at Georgia Tech. Lu then went on to work as a student employee at the Enterprise Innovation Institute, and she’s recently been hired as a data analyst in the organization’s Office of the Vice President.

“The success of the Enterprise 6 Internship program stems from both our exceptional interns — bright, driven individuals who eagerly apply their classroom knowledge to real-world projects — and our dedicated leaders who provide them with meaningful and valuable experience that shapes their career paths,” said Richardson.

“We hope the interns’ experiences will have a lasting, positive impact on their careers and lives.”

Since its inception in 2014, CREATE-X has worked to infuse a spirit of entrepreneurship at Georgia Tech. From supporting eight teams in its inaugural cohort, the program has grown to support the launch of over 100 startups this summer, bringing the total to 560 startup teams boasting a total portfolio valuation of over $2 billion. In the last year, the program has expanded internationally and looks to continue building opportunities for its students. 

“Our mission is to instill entrepreneurial confidence. We believe that entrepreneurship is a life skill,” says Rahul Saxena, CREATE-X director. “Georgia Tech students are capable of creating startups. We’re just giving them the tools and resources to do it. We want every Tech student to have this advantage when starting their business.”

At the kickoff for Startup Launch, the program’s summer startup accelerator, CREATE-X co-founder Chris Klaus spoke on the landscape of startups. “The secret sauce for unicorns is colleges. The number of unicorns is increasing, and I expect that trend to continue. This is the perfect place to build a startup,” he said. 

Startup Launch has concluded for the summer, and the founders are preparing to showcase their solutions at Demo Day.

Register Now

“We invite you to become part of shaping what comes next. Support these founders as they creatively solve real-world issues. See future industry leaders be born. Join us for the culmination of these founders’ hard work, passion, and ingenuity at Demo Day,” Rahul said. 

Demo Day 2024 registration is open. Tickets are free but limited. Don’t miss this chance to witness the future of innovation and entrepreneurship. For more information, visit the CREATE-X website.

“This IAC is a great example of the ways in which Georgia Tech is serving all of Georgia and the Southeast,” said Tim Lieuwen, executive director of Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) and Regents’ Professor and holder of the David S. Lewis, Jr. Chair in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering.

“We support numerous small and medium-sized enterprises in rural, suburban, and urban areas, bringing the technical expertise of Georgia Tech to bear in solving real-world problems faced by our small businesses.”

Georgia Tech’s IAC, which serves Georgia, South Carolina, and North Florida, is administered jointly by the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership (GaMEP), part of the Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2). The organization has performed thousands of assessments since its inception in the 1980s – usually at the rate of 15 to 20 per year – and typically identifies upwards of 10% in energy savings for clients.

The assessment team, overseen by IAC associate director Kelly Grissom, comprises faculty and student engineers from Georgia Tech and the Florida A&M University/Florida State University College of Engineering.

In addition, Georgia Tech leads the Southeastern IACs Center of Excellence, which partners the institution with fellow University System of Georgia (USG) entity Kennesaw State University, local HBCU Clark Atlanta University, and neighboring state capital HBCU Florida A&M University.

Although mechanical engineering has historically been the chief area of concentration for IAC’s interns, the program currently accepts students across a range of disciplines. “Increased diversity from that standpoint enriches the potential of the recommendations we can make,” said Grissom.

Students are integral to the program, as is Grissom’s role in facilitating their experiences with client engagement and technical recommendations.

“Kelly is the reason our program has been recognized,” said Randy Green, energy and sustainability services group manager at GaMEP. “He works tirelessly to ensure that assessments are accomplished with success for our manufacturers and students.”

“We also recognize our partnership with the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and with IAC program lead Comas Haynes, Ph.D., who works diligently to keep us on track and connected with our sponsors at the U.S. Department of Energy,” Green added.

The DoE accolade represents “a ‘one Georgia Tech’ win,” symbolic of the synergistic relationships forged across the Institute, said Haynes, who also serves as the Hydrogen Initiative Lead at Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) and Energy branch head in the Intelligent Sustainable Technologies Division at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. Haynes specifically cited Green’s “technical prowess and managerial oversight” as another key to the IAC program’s success.

Said Devesh Ranjan, Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair and professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, “It is truly an honor for Georgia Tech to be named the Department of Energy Industrial (Training and) Assessment Center of the Year. Clean energy and manufacturing have been a focus for the Institute and the Woodruff School for a long time, and GTRI, EI2, and SEI have collaboratively done phenomenal work in helping manufacturers save energy, improve productivity, and reduce waste.”

To check eligibility and apply for assistance from Georgia Tech’s IAC, click here.

“Georgia has a problem with access to care — the whole country does,” said Meghan Meredith, a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) who has spent much of her academic career studying the problem, which is particularly acute in rural, lower-income places.

Many of these places have been designated “maternity care deserts” by the March of Dimes. If a county doesn’t have any obstetric care or providers, it’s considered a desert. Another commonly used measure is whether a pregnant woman lives within 50 miles of critical care obstetrics (CCO). 

These measures are often referred to in academic literature and popular media to highlight a lack of healthcare access, and by public policy leaders trying to address the issue. But it’s become evident to Georgia Tech researchers that they just don’t add up.

“These measures don’t capture the complete picture,” said Meredith. “They aren’t an accurate representation of access to care.”

And that’s what concerns Meredith and her faculty advisor, ISyE Assistant Professor Lauren Steimle.

“We’ve been interested in access to maternal care for a long time, and in countless news stories, the maternity care desert measure is reported on,” Meredith said. “We recognized the limitations, so we thought, ‘Let’s write a paper that explains how this measure is not a complete representation of access.’”

They published their work recently in the journal BMC Health Services Research.

Modeling the Landscape

To study these measures of access, Meredith and Steimle used the same kind of computer-based mathematical model that helps companies decide where to place a new distribution center, retail outlet, or even electric car charging stations: a facility location model.

“This model helps us determine where to place facilities, so demand is sufficiently covered with the fewest number of facilities,” said Steimle. “There are tons of potential applications for this model, but we’re using it for healthcare.” For this study, they used the model to identify where Georgia would need to expand healthcare facilities to improve access under the commonly used measures. 

Here’s some of what the researchers found:

• Of the 1,910,308 reproductive-age women in Georgia, 104,158 (5.5%) live in maternity care deserts, while 150,563 (7.9%) live more than 50 miles from CCO services; 38,202 live in both situations.

• Fifty-six counties in Georgia meet current “maternity care desert” measures, which means eliminating these deserts would require 56 new obstetric hospitals. That would increase the number of obstetric hospitals statewide from 83 to 139 (a 67% increase). 

• Strategically expanding 16 hospitals (a 19% increase) would reduce the number of reproductive-age women living in deserts by half.

• 82% of reproductive-age women designated as living in maternity care deserts live within 25 miles from an obstetric hospital.

The researchers conclude that policymakers should be warned: Using the maternity care desert measure alone as a basis for where and how to invest in healthcare resources isn’t a great idea.

“If we really want to improve pregnancy outcomes, our measures of access should promote risk-appropriate and regionalized care systems,” Steimle said.

Turns out, Georgia is already headed in that direction.

Counting Counties: One Size Doesn’t Fit All

To illustrate the problems with the maternity care desert measure, Steimle compared Georgia with a very different state on the opposite side of the U.S.: Nevada.

“A major problem with the maternity care desert measure is its emphasis on county-by-county infrastructure,” she said. “It’s a one-size-fits-all approach that doesn’t tell the whole story about access to care.”

For example, Georgia has 159 counties and more than three times the population of Nevada. Meanwhile, Nevada has twice the square mileage of Georgia — and 16 very large counties. 

At 18,147 square miles, Nye County is Nevada’s largest, and it’s been labeled a maternity care desert. There’s also lots of actual desert in Nye, which is larger than nine U.S. states. So, it’s difficult to accurately compare a vast jurisdiction like Nye with, say, central Georgia’s Lamar County. Lamar, also labeled a desert, is a mere 185 square miles in size. It's also surrounded by counties that are veritable oases of care.

“A lot of people in Georgia may be falsely labeled as not having access, at least geographically speaking, when in fact they have services nearby,” noted Steimle. “Meanwhile, in a state like Nevada, some women may be labeled as having access, but might be very far from obstetric hospitals in their county.”

Steimle also point out that measuring access on a county-by-county basis ignores efforts to coordinate care across the whole state. “The maternity care desert model doesn’t hold up. And it doesn't reflect Georgia’s approach to a regionalization system.”

Since 2009, the Georgia Department of Public Health has organized the state into six geographic perinatal regions (the perinatal period covers pregnancy, childbirth, and early postpartum). The idea is to coordinate the delivery of health services to ensure people in all regions have access to risk-appropriate maternal care.

Build a Better Model

Each of Georgia’s perinatal regions has a “hub” — a major care center serving as an administrative unit to enable the coordination and delivery of maternal care services. For example, The Emory Perinatal Regional Center at Emory University Hospital is the coordinating center for the 39-county metro Atlanta region. 

This regionalization strategy also tries to address the problem of hospital closures, a troubling trend that leads to more deserts. In Georgia, 12 hospitals have closed since 2013; 18 rural hospitals are currently at risk of closure. And this new Georgia Tech study indicates that Georgia would somehow need to add 56 new facilities to eliminate the state’s maternity care deserts — at least by the standards used by the March of Dimes.

“Eliminating maternity care deserts in Georgia would mean adding a larger number of obstetrics facilities to make sure every county has an obstetric hospital,” Steimle said. “But this is likely unrealistic with the current economic forces pushing hospitals to close their obstetric units. With that many facilities in Georgia, some facilities would have a very small number of deliveries, which is not economically sustainable.”

In other words, eliminating maternity care deserts in Georgia wouldn’t sufficiently address the larger problems related to access to care. Instead, Steimle and Meredith advocate for approaches that simultaneously consider the different dimensions of an ideal maternal healthcare system, not just access alone.

For this initial study, Steimle and Meredith just focused on spatial access. They haven’t yet addressed the complex issues of racial disparities, insurance access, or other hurdles facing reproductive-age women in Georgia. That may be coming.

“This is a start,” Steimle said. “Our future work entails thinking about how to come at this with the goal of maximizing or improving outcomes for women.”

And as policy leaders across the country begin to address the maternal mortality crisis, Steimle believes her team’s approach using more sophisticated tools can be helpful. So far, they’ve shared their results with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and members of the Georgia, Iowa, and Nevada departments of public health.

“How do we make measurements that point us toward our end goals? Our tools as mathematical modelers can really help us think through the system holistically and think through strategies before trying them in the real world,” Steimle said. “Think of it as a policy sandbox.”

CITATION: Meghan Meredith, Lauren Steimle, and Stephanie Radke. “The implications of using maternity care deserts to measure progress in access to obstetric care: a mixed-integer optimization analysis.” BMC Health Services Research (June 2024)

doi.org/10.1186/s12913-024-11135-4

However, many households, particularly those of low socioeconomic status, are “smartphone-dependent,” meaning they rely purely on their smartphone for internet access. As a result, their connection may be unstable or slow, and they may be constrained by data caps that limit how much they can use the internet. This puts them at a disadvantage compared to households with internet access through smartphones and other broadband connections at home and work, perpetuating digital inequality between disadvantaged and advantaged households. 

The smartphone dependence of many disadvantaged households begs the question: If mobile internet service was better – e.g. if it was faster, more reliable, and/or didn’t come with data constraints – could that reduce digital inequality and level the playing field? Researchers from the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business and Southern Methodist University Cox School of Business studied this question and found the answer is “yes.”

Karthik Kannan, assistant professor of IT and Operations Management at the Cox School of Business and Georgia Tech Ph.D. graduate, led the project. “I was interested in the effect of data caps. For example, when you have 10GB of data per month and use more, you are charged extra, or your connection is throttled,” said Kannan. “So, I partnered with a large telecommunications provider to study what happens when their subscribers switched from capped to unlimited data plans. I was particularly interested in differences between high-income and low-income households.”

Kannan, along with Eric Overby, Catherine and Edwin Wahlen Professor of Information Technology Management, and Sri Narasimhan, Gregory J. Owens Professor of Information Technology Management, at the Scheller College of Business, found that while all households increased their data use after switching to an unlimited plan, the increase was significantly larger for families of low socioeconomic status.

“That was our initial finding: that improving mobile internet service by removing the data cap had disproportionately large benefits for disadvantaged households,” said Overby. “But that didn’t mean much in and of itself. If those households weren’t using the additional data for ‘enriching’ purposes like accessing educational, health care, or career-related data, the additional data consumption wouldn’t translate into positive social benefits. Indeed, years of research on digital inequality have consistently shown a ‘usage gap’ in which advantaged households take fuller advantage of internet access improvements than disadvantaged households. The result is that internet improvements often exacerbate inequality. So, we dug deeper.”

Specifically, the researchers leveraged the telecommunication provider’s data categorization system to study changes in the consumption of educational data. They found that disadvantaged households experienced disproportionate increases in education data consumption (as well as in overall data consumption) after switching to unlimited mobile data. Although advantaged households increased their education data consumption by approximately 15MB (or about three digital textbooks) per month after switching to unlimited data, disadvantaged households increased their education data consumption by approximately 24MB (or about five digital textbooks) per month.

 “We can’t be sure that these disproportionate increases in education data consumption will help disadvantaged households narrow gaps in educational outcomes. However, this is clearly a step in the right direction,” said Kannan. 

 The research is directly relevant to the Federal Communications Commission’s 2023 inquiry into the effects of data caps on disadvantaged households. Narasimhan explains, “Let’s say that based on their inquiry, the FCC decides to limit the use of data caps. A logical question is: will that do any good? In other words, will disadvantaged households take advantage of their improved mobile internet service in a way that can reduce digital inequality? Prior to our research, we didn’t really know. But based on our research, the answer is yes.”

 The research paper is forthcoming in Management Science and available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4173558.

Popov is director of civic partnerships and research with Osavul, a Kyiv, Ukraine, information security startup founded in 2022. 

Using artificial intelligence, the company’s software allows governments, non-governmental organizations, media, and other private sector clients to collect and analyze data from online networks and platforms to fight disinformation and cyberattacks. It launched just as war broke out in Ukraine.

“The invasion was not only on the ground, which was military with military force, but also with the minds of people,” Popov said. “So, with the disinformation attacks happening almost every day — two or three times a day — this is our response. It's a way to guide agencies and businesses to protect them from these harmful narratives and the harmful effects of these attacks.”

Popov and 18 other entrepreneurs — mostly from Ukraine but some from other countries, including Sri Lanka, Jordan, Fiji, Botswana, Brazil, and Mongolia — were at Georgia Tech’s Encore for several weeks in the spring as part of a U.S. State Department program.

That effort, the Global Innovation Through Science and Technology Initiative (GIST), connects innovators from emerging economies who want to scale with faculty experts and ecosystem builders from the U.S. who can help them succeed.

GIST is working with Nakia Melecio, who heads the Innovation Lab initiative at Georgia Tech’s economic development arm, the Enterprise Innovation Institute. Melecio has been tapped to lead several GIST-related ecosystem-building efforts in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America.

While at Tech, the entrepreneurs met with campus leaders, researchers, and economic development experts from across the Institute, including the Office of Commercialization, VentureLab, CREATE-X, International Initiatives, and the Enterprise Innovation Institute’s EI2 Global.

“We've got the opportunity to share not only our resources, but our best practices to help these innovators blaze a trail within their own ecosystems and also figure out how to penetrate the U.S.,” Melecio said, adding that Georgia Tech is slated to host a cohort of entrepreneurs from Egypt later in the summer.

“We’re excited here at the Enterprise Innovation Institute to provide the level of coaching, support, and access that these founders need so they can be successful and hit their goals.”

The visiting entrepreneurs are just as excited.

“It's very interesting to be here because the ecosystem of startups is quite huge in Atlanta and in Georgia,” Popov said. “It's a good opportunity to be here with people who know what they're doing and know how they're doing it.”

Expanding her network and eyeing global expansion drew Ariuntuya Altangerel, co-founder and CEO of Brighton EdTech in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, to Georgia Tech.

The language learning startup was founded in 2011 to help facilitate, in an interactive way, mastery of English. Altangerel is exploring how the model can be replicated beyond her home country of 3.3 million people.

“We have a very small population, so for startups, we have no choice but to go global so that they can scale,” she said. Being at Georgia Tech is also giving her and the other GIST-hosted entrepreneurs opportunities to be fully immersed in a successful startup ecosystem.

“In our country, the startup ecosystem is at the seed level. It's growing faster and faster, but still, there are fewer opportunities for us to get an investment,” she said. “I just see this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to dive into this ecosystem and learn as much as possible.” 

Nevindaree Premarathne is the founder and CEO of The Makers in Sri Lanka, a company that aims to inculcate innovation habits in children through hands-on STEM activities and community building. The Makers has partnered with educational institutions, non-governmental organizations, and private enterprises to reach underprivileged schools and empower female students in STEM.

“We are getting a lot of knowledge from Georgia Tech,” Premarathne said, noting her company ships its activity boxes to 10 countries and is looking to scale. 

“As a country, we have a small ecosystem,” she said. “We want to improve our network here, and seek investment opportunities and partnerships. It's really important for us, because of the space that we are working on in education.”

Learning how to crack the U.S. market is what Vlad Popov sought to achieve for his company, Platma, a two-year-old, no-code software development platform based in Kyiv.

“Our goal specifically is to find investors there and make a partnership that will help us in the U.S. market,” said Vlad Popov, who serves as Platma’s marketing director.

The war in Ukraine is driving some of those growth plans. “The war even accelerated us in this case, because we understand that every day can be the last day, so we work as hard as possible,” he said, adding that the team mostly works remotely but workdays are often interrupted by warning sirens, electricity disruptions, and missile strikes.

“Starting a business is good because you provide jobs for people, you pay taxes, you help the economy become strong — it’s important to start a business, even if it's hard.”

• Grow healthcare research, innovation, and workforce development practice. 
• Expand EI2 Global's international footprint. 
• Support VentureLab's National Science Foundation I-Corps activities.

“Nakia has been instrumental in helping to expand Georgia’s life sciences community and ecosystem,” said David Bridges, vice president of the Enterprise Innovation Institute, Georgia Tech’s chief economic development arm. “Leading Innovation Lab already builds on a foundation he created since joining us in 2019 and further supports our broad economic development mission.”

He's already leading in the healthcare research practice expansion with his work in the MedTech Center and running the ScaleUp Lab Program for deep tech innovation.

Under Melecio’s leadership as founding director, the MedTech Center, which has the Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership and Global Center for Medical Innovation as partners, has worked with and evaluated the innovations of more than 200 companies. Since launching in 2021, the MedTech Center’s 66 active startups have raised $13.1 million in investment capital and an additional $6.4 million in federal, non-dilutive funding grants.

In 2023, the MedTech Center was selected to join the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health’s ARPA-H Investor Catalyst Hub to accelerate the commercialization of practical, accessible biomedical solutions.

He is supporting Georgia Tech’s efforts to collaborate with Atlanta University Center schools — Spelman College, Clark-Atlanta University, Morehouse College, and the Morehouse School of Medicine — to collaborate with those minority-serving institutions as they build out capacity for their scientists and researchers to create more life sciences technology companies, following an award from the Economic Development Administration.

Similarly, Melecio is working with the University of Alabama at Birmingham on a collaborative project in biologics and medical devices to move more of its researchers’ innovations out of the lab and into commercial markets.

As Innovation Lab lead, Melecio, who has secured more than $5.76 million in federal grants and awards to Georgia Tech, will also work to develop biomanufacturing partnerships for Georgia Tech.

With EI2 Global, the Enterprise Innovation Institute’s program that fosters economic opportunity through collaborations with universities, innovators, governments, and nonprofit organizations worldwide, Melecio will serve as an instructor on Lab-to-Market and CREATE-X programming for entrepreneurs. He will also create and provide educational content for EI2 Global’s university and ecosystem partners.

Closer to home, his Innovation Lab work includes ongoing projects as a principal in VentureLab, a program of Georgia Tech’s Office of Commercialization. In that capacity, he will work on VentureLab’s National Science Foundation-related Innovation Corps (I-Corps) programming. Those efforts, overseen by Commercialization Vice President Raghupathy "Siva" Sivakumar, include the NSF I-Corps Hub Academy, where Melecio will serve as director.

“Our efforts with Innovation Lab are centered around finding new opportunities, new markets, and new industries by leveraging our areas of expertise at the Enterprise Innovation Institute and Georgia Tech to build economic development capacity in the life sciences and biosciences space,” Melecio said.

“We’re looking to take a broader perspective, away from being hyper-focused in one or two niche areas in life sciences, to ensure that we maximize opportunities to support new ideas, build stronger practice areas in this space, and secure funding to bring those innovations to scale.”

Bridges, who was named Fulbright Specialist in February of 2024,  will complete a project at the Digital Coalition in the Slovak Republic that aims to exchange knowledge and establish partnerships benefiting participants, institutions, and communities both in the U.S. and overseas through a variety of educational and training activities within Public Administration.

Bridges is one of over 400 U.S. citizens who share expertise with host institutions abroad through the Fulbright Specialist Program each year. Recipients of Fulbright Specialist awards are selected on the basis of academic and professional achievement, demonstrated leadership in their field, and their potential to foster long-term cooperation between institutions in the U.S. and abroad.

The Fulbright Program is the flagship international educational exchange program sponsored by the U.S. government and is designed to build lasting connections between the people of the United States and the people of other countries. The Fulbright Program is funded through an annual appropriation made by the U.S. Congress to the U.S. Department of State. Participating governments and host institutions, corporations, and foundations around the world also provide direct and indirect support to the Program, which operates in over 160 countries worldwide.

Since its establishment in 1946, the Fulbright Program has given more than 400,000 students, scholars, teachers, artists, and scientists the opportunity to study, teach and conduct research, exchange ideas, and contribute to finding solutions to shared international concerns.

Fulbrighters address critical global issues in all disciplines, while building relationships, knowledge, and leadership in support of the long-term interests of the United States. Fulbright alumni have achieved distinction in many fields, including 60 who have been awarded the Nobel Prize, 88 who have received Pulitzer Prizes, and 39 who have served as a head of state or government.

For further information about the Fulbright Program or the U.S. Department of State, please visit eca.state.gov/fulbright or contact the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs Press Office by telephone 202.632.6452 or e-mail eca-press@state.gov.

Carter was recently named the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s chair of the Environment, Manufacturing, and Critical Materials Subcommittee, a group that concerns itself primarily with contamination of soil, air, noise, and water, as well as emergency environmental response, whether physical or cybersecurity.

Carter was recently named the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s chair of the Environment, Manufacturing, and Critical Materials Subcommittee, a group that concerns itself primarily with contamination of soil, air, noise, and water, as well as emergency environmental response, whether physical or cybersecurity.

Because AMPF’s focus dovetails with subcommittee interests, the facility was a fitting stop for Carter, who was welcomed for an afternoon tour and series of live demonstrations. Programs within Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute — specifically the Georgia Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing (Georgia AIM) and Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership (GaMEP) — were well represented.

“Innovation is extremely important,” Carter said during his April 1 visit. “In order to handle some of our problems, we’ve got to have adaptation, mitigation, and innovation. I’ve always said that the greatest innovators, the greatest scientists in the world, are right here in the United States. I’m so proud of Georgia Tech and what they do for our state and for our nation.”

Carter’s AMPF visit began with an introduction by Tom Kurfess, executive director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute; Steven Ferguson, principal research scientist and managing director at Georgia AIM; research engineer Kyle Saleeby; and Donna Ennis, the Enterprise Innovation Institute’s director of community engagement and program development, and co-director of Georgia AIM.

Ennis provided an overview of Georgia AIM, while Ferguson spoke on the Manufacturing 4.0 Consortium and Kurfess detailed the AMPF origin story, before introducing four live demonstrations.

The first of these featured Chuck Easley, Professor of the Practice in the Scheller College of Business, who elaborated on supply chain issues. Afterward Alan Burl of EPICS: Enhanced Preparation for Intelligent Cybermanufacturing Systems and mechanical engineer Melissa Foley led a brief information session on hybrid turbine blade repair.

Finally, GaMEP project manager Michael Barker expounded on GaMEP’s cybersecurity services, and Deryk Stoops of Central Georgia Technical College detailed the Georgia AIM-sponsored AI robotics training program at the Georgia Veterans Education Career Transition Resource (VECTR) Center, which offers training and assistance to those making the transition from military to civilian life.

The topic of artificial intelligence, in all its subtlety and nuance, was of particular interest to Carter.

“AI is the buzz in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “Whether it be healthcare, energy [or] science, we on the Energy and Commerce Committee look at it from a sense [that there’s] a very delicate balance, and we understand the responsibility. But we want to try to benefit from this as much as we can.”

He continued: “I heard something today I haven’t heard before, and that is instead of calling it artificial intelligence, we refer to it as ‘augmented intelligence.’ I think that’s a great term, and certainly something I’m going to take back to Washington with me.”

Said Ennis, “It was a pleasure to host Rep. Carter for a firsthand look at AMPF, which is uniquely positioned to offer businesses the opportunity to collaborate with Georgia Tech researchers and students and to hear about Georgia AIM.”

She added, “At Georgia AIM, we’re committed to making the state a leader in artificial intelligence-assisted manufacturing, and we’re grateful for Congressman Carter’s interest and support of our efforts.”