This new printer is capable of rapid production of high-quality plastic parts with a suite of materials ranging from high-performance engineering materials, USP-VI (bio-compatible) certified materials, and flexible elastomers. Additionally, it allows for rapid fabrication of watertight, high-resolution parts (up to 1600 x 900 DPI with 32 micron layers) while yielding fully cured parts direct from the machine.

“I think it's a really exciting addition to the suite of additive manufacturing capabilities on campus,” said Tim Trent, manager of the Craft Lab and faculty member of IPaT. “These are industry-standard machines that provide us the opportunity to experiment with some different capabilities that complement the capabilities of other equipment on campus. In particular, the bio-compatible materials is a super exciting feature as it means we can do proof-of-concept prototypes in materials that would be acceptable for medical devices.”

Previous projects leveraging the technology of Craft Lab 3D printers include:

* The Wild Dolphin Project from the Contextual Computing Group. Compared to traditional fused deposition modeling machines, the resin-based multi-jet process allowed the team to fabricate fully waterproof cases to house their custom electronics for deployment in the Atlantic Ocean.

* A. Fatih Sarioglu's work in cancer research building 3D-printed traps lined with antigens to capture the white blood cells in a sample. The fine resolution needed for the microfluidics work combined with the need for a bio-compatible material made the previous generation Projet an ideal choice. Sarioglu is an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

The Craft Lab’s newest ultra-high-definition 3D printer will continue to support work like the projects mentioned above while advancing material options, reducing manufacturing time, and providing support for new features previously unavailable in the older model.

About the Craft Lab:
​​​​​​​The Craft Lab is a unique makerspace sponsored by the Institute for People and Technology which is designed to promote craft and algorithmic making. The equipment in the lab is particularly well-suited for wearable/flexible electronic systems and is available to anyone interested in making soft objects. The lab includes equipment like sewing machines, CNC knitting and embroidery machines, soldering irons, and 3D printers. Lab users must complete a lab training session before being allowed to access the lab. It is located in the Technology Square Research Building (TSRB), Room 225B. Questions about the lab should be directed to Tim Trent, lab manager, at tim.trent@gatech.edu.

Fresh from earning a doctorate in computer science at Washington University in St. Louis, Zegura arrived as the College’s third female faculty member. In her role with the networking and telecommunications group, Zegura’s work fell into a category of computing research that many would consider “more traditional” — but she never saw things through a traditional lens.

“One of the things that really stands out to me from those early years is that the College very deliberately hired in a way that was pushing the boundaries of what people thought of as computing,” said Zegura. “They hired key faculty in traditional areas of research like mine but were intentional about also hiring people (like Amy Bruckman) who were thinking in creative and new ways about what computing could be.”

For the first 10 years of her career, Zegura focused on digging into the incredible amount of work expected of a new faculty member. In the early days of the College of Computing, it was not uncommon for computing faculty to be asked to step in to fill teaching gaps in areas that were not yet staffed up by new instructors. For example, Zegura was asked to teach a discrete math course even though that was outside of her research area. She jumped in wholeheartedly and ended up loving her work with the undergraduate students in the course — so much that she has returned today to teaching a discrete math course with more than 250 students.

This passion for new challenges and dedication to her role as a teacher have become hallmarks of Zegura’s career at Georgia Tech. It was also during the first 10 years of her faculty career that Zegura began to build her community at Tech — friendships that would transform her future.

“The job is challenging. You’re prepared for some of it, but you’re not prepared for all of it. I really valued my faculty friends from the beginning because they became my critical support system. The people that you’re hired with become good friends. And especially later, when my kids were born and my colleagues’ kids were born, it was so important to have that community.”

It was during what Zegura sees as the second phase of her career when things became “surprising.” In 2002, she was asked to step in as interim dean of the College of Computing during the search for Dean Peter Freeman’s successor. Prior to this, she was asked to oversee space planning for the College during a critical growth period. These two new roles began what Zegura jokingly calls the “slippery slope of administration.”

After Rich DeMillo was hired as the new dean, Zegura was asked to take on the role of associate dean during another transformative time in the life of the College. It was during that period that Schools were first formed within the College, and Zegura was named as the first chair of the School of Computer Science.

During her time as chair, the Computing for Good collective was launched as a social good initiative consisting of Georgia Tech faculty, partners, and computer science students. Zegura, Santosh Vempala, and Michael Best created a computing course with a focus on issues of social justice, and the course was taught for eight years (and is still taught, in a different iteration, as part of today’s Online Master of Science in Computer Science program). These years were filled with impactful collaborations with programs like the Carter Center’s Mental Health Program in Liberia, which empowered students in the Computing for Good course to assist with software and support for a national monitoring program for mental health resources.

Zegura then moved to other methods for involving students in social good projects, including a six-year summer internship program called Civic Data Science, and, most recently, establishing a Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) team called Bits of Good.

She served as the chair of the School of Computer Science until 2012. It was an exhilarating time, and it was also an incredibly busy time. At that point in Zegura’s career, she was ready for a well-deserved sabbatical.

Her sabbatical year took a surprising turn when she decided to take one of Beki Grinter’s Human-Centered Computing courses. Grinter initially offered alternatives to Zegura taking the course alongside the other students. But Zegura persisted and showed up for class every Wednesday, completed all the assignments, and gained new knowledge to enhance her ability for expanded human-centered research consistent with social good.

When the Quality Enhancement Plan for the Institute opened the call for topic proposals in 2014, Zegura collaborated with other faculty concerned about community activism and issues of social justice and put together a concept paper for what would ultimately become Georgia Tech’s Serve-Learn-Sustain program.

“I had an itch to do research that was in line with my educational focus on computing for good,” said Zegura. “I discovered that there is a set of people at Tech who are interested in trying to help students work in their communities and bring value to their communities through that work. I wanted to discover how my research could further that goal.”

Working closely with program co-creator Beril Toktay, professor of operations management and the Brady Family Chairholder in the Scheller College of Business, Serve-Learn-Sustain proposed a path for Georgia Tech students to learn to create sustainable communities through engagement with content and context. Since its launch in 2016, the program has grown to encompass six Signature Programs that include a Sustainable Cities minor, the Sustainable Communities Summer Internship Program, the Innovating for Social Impact Program, RCE Greater Atlanta, and an array of events and workshops.

“I really think the focus on sustainability and community engagement — those ideas were a bit ahead of their time. To be talking in 2014 [when this idea was first developed] about sustainability, climate change, the importance of community — that’s very much in the national conversation now, but it wasn’t as much at that time.”

Then, seemingly just as Zegura was settling into a new phase of her work, which includes her current role as a Regents’ Professor and the Stephen Fleming Chair in the College of Computing, the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

“I think we all went through something very challenging and unimaginable," said Zegura. “It changed things, and it’s going to take time to settle into a new version of how education works. I believe that learning has a significant social and community component — that's an idea that is central to my work. This [the pandemic] impacted all of that.”

As campus adjusted and sought a new normal, one thing that crystalized even further for Zegura is that internet access is directly related to issues of equity. As a result, one of her current projects involves creating an Android-based app to help tribal and other communities across the U.S. take network coverage measurements and have those measurements reported to the Federal Communications Commission. This ongoing Rockefeller Foundation-funded project is part of a process challenging a lack of cellular provider coverage.

As a researcher, Zegura has big ideas about exciting, impactful projects. As a teacher, she remains deeply passionate about her work with Georgia Tech students. As a woman in computing, she feels excited about the collective of female faculty who now lead in computing — and across campus. As only the second woman to receive Georgia Tech's Class of 1934 Distinguished Professor Award, she hopes she’ll see many more women awardees in the future.

“I feel proud and grateful. I’m proud to receive this award, and I’m so grateful for my relationships with my students and collaborators over these 30 years,” she said. “I’m continually looking for ways to do something big, beyond my own research, and I’m excited for what’s to come for the future of my work.”

Something big is surely in Zegura’s future, but ask any of her colleagues or students, and they will assure you that something big has already been accomplished.

Quotes From Colleagues

“The field of computing often falls into the trap of focusing on advancing itself while neglecting its impact on society. Ellen is one of those educators who intentionally resists this trap, teaching her students to use their skills to solve problems in their own communities. She is teaching the next generation to think of computing holistically, as a major factor in social problems and solutions. Ellen is an innovative teacher who cares deeply, and I am glad to see her recognized for it.” - Charles Isbell, Dean of the College of Computing and John P. Imlay Jr. Chair

“Ellen's technical excellence and passion for contributing to societal good have made her a role model for many faculty in our School and College. Her research achievements in networking include the development of an influential internet topology model and the foundations of Software-Defined Networking. Her dedication to teaching is evidenced by the fact that she has taught classes at every level (from 1000 to 8000) and created a unique course on Technology and Sustainable Community Development (SLS 3110) as part of Georgia Tech's Serve-Learn-Sustain QEP. Her internal and external service and leadership have been exemplary, including serving as chair of the Computing Research Association board, an organization that represents all Ph.D.-granting computer science departments in the U.S. It is truly a joy to see Ellen receive this well-deserved recognition.” - Vivek Sarkar, Chair of the School of Computer Science and Stephen Fleming Chair in Telecommunications in the College of Computing

“Ellen Zegura has been an ally and advocate for women in the College of Computing for the 17 years that I have known her. She is someone who has a vision and expedites it. We are all better off for having her in our community!” - Rosa Arriaga, Associate Professor and Associate Chair of Graduate Studies, School of Interactive Computing

“Ellen has often mentioned that, while on leave, she took a class from me. Obviously, she was a fantastic student, and I was delighted to have her be part of a community of scholars all focused on human-centered computing. Since then, her research has continued to balance a deep knowledge of the fundamentals of how technology works, with a constant attention to the people who will have that computing experience. It’s a very impressive balancing act that she has managed for many years now. On a more personal note, Ellen has been a mentor and friend to me ever since I arrived at Georgia Tech. Her leadership has been a major inspiration to me, and I'm thrilled that she’s won this award. Thank you, Ellen!" - Beki Grinter, Professor and Associate Dean for Faculty Development, School of Interactive Computing

“As an advisor and mentor, Ellen is unrivaled. Her decades of experience in networking research, her visionary ability to apply computing to under-supported social problems, and her warm, fun-loving personality make every conversation with her transformative. If I acquire but a small fraction of her skills — working across disciplines to address pressing challenges and create sustainable partnerships — while studying under her, I will be thrilled." -Eric Greenlee, Computer Science Ph.D. Student

A recent executive order issued by President Joe Biden seeks to establish "new standards for AI safety and security" while addressing consumer privacy concerns and promoting innovation. Georgia Tech experts have examined the key elements of the order and offer their thoughts on its scope and what comes next.  

A Precautionary Tale 

The order calls for the development of standards, tools, and tests to ensure the safe use of AI. From voice scams and phishing campaigns to larger-scale threats, the technology’s potential dangers have been widely documented. But Margaret Kosal, associate professor in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, says that additional context is often needed to dispel hysteria. 

"No one is going to be hooking up AI to launch nuclear weapons, but AI capabilities may enable targeting, or enable the command and control and the decision-making time to be compressed,” she said.  
 
The order will create an AI Safety and Security Board tasked with addressing critical threats. Companies developing foundation models that "pose a serious risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health and safety” will be required to notify the federal government when training the model and required to share the results of all red-team safety tests — a simulated cyberattack to test a system's defenses.  

Since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, a CNBC report details a 1,267% rise in phishing emails. Srijan Kumar, assistant professor in the College of Computing, attributes the increase to the technology's availability and an inability to rein in "bad actors."  

He says these scams will only continue to get more sophisticated and personalized. They “can be created by knowing what you might be willing to fall prey to versus what I might fall prey to,” said Kumar, whose systems have influenced misinformation detection on sites like X (formerly Twitter) and Wikipedia. “AI is not going to autonomously do all of those bad things, but this order can ensure there are consequences for people who misuse it.”  

A Delicate Balance 

Building an AI platform requires large amounts of data regardless of its intended application. Two primary goals of the executive order are protecting privacy and advancing equity.  

To protect personal data, the order tasks Congress with evaluating how agencies collect and use commercially available information and address algorithmic discrimination.  

Acknowledging that everyone should be allowed to have their voice represented in the outputs of AI data sets, Deven Desai, associate professor in the Scheller College of Business, noted, "There are people who don't want to be part of data sets, which is their right, but this means their voices won't be reflected in the outputs.”   

The order also includes sections to address intellectual property concerns among inventors and creators, though legal challenges will likely set new precedents in the years ahead.  

When that time comes, Kosal says that defining “theft” in the context of AI becomes the true challenge and that, ultimately, money will play a significant role. "If you spit out a Harry Potter book and read it yourself, nobody will care. It's when you start selling it to make money, and you don't share proceeds with the original people, then it becomes an issue," she said.   

What Does AI-Generated Mean? 

The order instructs the Department of Commerce to develop guidelines for content authentication and watermarking to label AI-generated content. Desai questions what it means for something to be truly created by AI.  

An important distinction lies between using AI to assist a writer in organizing their thoughts and using the technology to generate content. He likens the trend to the music industry in the 1980s.  

"Synthesizers really changed people's ability to generate music and, for a while, people thought that was horrible. They can just program the music. They're not. I am still the human responsible for that music, or that article in this case, so what is the point of the label?" he asks. 

As AI assistance becomes commonplace in content creation, trusting the source of information is increasingly important. Recently, articles published on Sports Illustrated's website featured AI-generated content provided by a third-party company that had used a machine to write the content and create fake bylines. Sports Illustrated, which may not have known of the problem, ran the material without disclosure to readers. CEO Ross Levinsohn was ousted shortly after the story broke.  

“Perhaps if the third party had disclosed its use of AI software, SI would have been able to assess how much AI was used and then chosen not to run the material, or to run it with a disclaimer that AI helped write the material,” Desai said. "Of course, even if they label the content as AI-generated, a reader still won't know exactly how much of the content came from AI or a human.” 

AI and the Workforce 

As AI systems and models become more sophisticated, workers may become more concerned about being replaced. To counteract these concerns, the order calls for a study to examine AI’s potential impact on labor markets and investments in workforce training efforts.  

Kumar compares the rise of AI to similar technological innovations throughout history and sees it as an opportunity for workers and industries to adapt. "It's less a matter of AI replacing workers and more of reskilling people to use the new technology. It's no different from when assembly lines in the auto industry were created."  

Promoting Innovation and Competition 

The power to harness the full potential of AI has initiated a race to the top. Desai believes that part of the executive order providing resources to smaller developers can help level the playing field.   

"There is a possibility here for markets to open up. Current players using models that weren't built with transparency in mind might struggle, but maybe that's OK." 

The issue of reliability and transparency comes into focus for Desai, especially as it relates to government usage of AI. The order calls on agencies to "acquire specified AI products and services faster, more cheaply, and more effectively through more rapid and efficient contracting."  

When taxpayer dollars are at stake, government can’t afford to trust a technology it doesn’t fully understand — a topic Desai has explored elsewhere. "You can’t just say, ‘We don’t know how it works, but we trust it.’ That’s not going to work. So that’s where there may be a slowdown in the government’s ability to use private sector software if they can’t explain how the thing works and to show that it doesn’t have discriminatory issues.” 

What's Next 

Promoting and policing the safe use of AI cannot be done independently. Georgia Tech experts agree that participation on a global scale is necessary. To that end, the European Union will unveil its comprehensive EU AI Act, which includes a similar framework to the president's executive order.  

Due to the evolving nature of AI, the executive order or the EU's actions will not be all-encompassing. Law often lags behind technology, but Kosal points out that it's crucial to think beyond what currently exists when crafting policy.  

Experts also agree that AI cannot be regulated or governed through a single document and that this order is likely the first in a series of policymaking moves. Kosal sees tremendous opportunity with the innovation surrounding AI but hopes the growing fear of its rise does not usher in another AI winter, in which interest and research funding fade. 

Fadpad is a multilayered add-on that goes directly on top of a menstrual pad to collect a blood sample. The blood sample is then shipped to a lab for testing. The fadpad team has shown that their approach can effectively detect biomarkers present in diseases like HPV, HIV, and other sexually transmitted infections. They recently earned one of the top prizes at the 2023 Collegiate Inventors Competition at the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

The fapad team includes Rhea Prem, who graduated with a bachelor of science in computer engineering; Netra Gandhi, who graduated with a bachelor of science in biomedical engineering; Ethan Damiani, who will graduate with a bachelor of science in biochemistry this fall; and Girish Hari, who will be completing a master of science in computer science this fall.

NaloPak is a design-driven carry sling bag allowing a wearer to quickly access two Naloxone nasal sprays to quickly reverse an opioid overdose. The specially designed bag system also advertisers that the wearer is carrying this lifesaving medicine. Instructions to use Naloxone are also highly visible if the medicine needs to be rapidly deployed to save a life.

NaloPak was envisioned by Rae Bloom who is an industrial design student graduating next spring 2024.

This year’s sole finalist was a product application named “becalming.” The future vision of her app is to combat bad mental health practices. It’s a product that is still in the early stages of design and development. Becalming is spearheaded by Sai Sanjana Prakash, who is pursuing a bachelor of science in both biomedical engineering and computer science.
 

This year’s fall 2023 competition judges were:

• Russell Clark, Institute for People and Technology at Georgia Tech
• Rahul Saxena, CREATE-X at Georgia Tech

The purpose of the event was to let students relax, decompress, bond, and gain new insight into the capabilities of the Craft Lab which provides equipment such as industrial sewing machines, knitting and embroidery machines, 3D printers, and a number of other tools. Tim Trent, manager of the Craft Lab, and Arianna Mastali, a graduate research assistant in the lab, hosted 12 DM students at this community event.

Student feedback from the event included:

• “It was a supersensory experience for me. Throughout my life, I feared the sewing machine, but the experience yesterday of understanding the mechanics of it and the wonderful workings of the sewing machine after using it has made me mindful of the possibilities. Also, the aspect of community building through knitting is an exciting concept and takeaway.”
• “The [Craft Lab] experience was transformative, I learned quite a few things, and it was a safe space to be outside my comfort zone in terms of trying out something new. It was a great opportunity to meet new people within different fields of expertise.”
• “It was interesting to learn about and see a nitty gritty industrial sewing machine and the rotational knitting machine. I learned more about the equipment in the Craft Lab.”
• “I liked the bringing people together aspect of the event, sharing what we know, crafts we have done, and the digital media/computational craft we can do [using the lab].
• “I could definitely see this event happening again where we meet and do a particular craft for a day.”

“It is incredibly rewarding to see student-led events like this happen,” said Trent. “When I first envisioned the Craft Lab, I was excited by the potential to take equipment that was already being used for research and open its accessibility and use to create a community space for folks to explore and learn new things. The feedback and energy over the past year, as seen in events like this DM student night, have re-affirmed the importance of the lab spaces IPaT provides, and I'm excited to see where we can progress forward.”
 

About the Craft Lab:
The Craft Lab is a unique makerspace sponsored by IPaT which is designed to promote craft and algorithmic making. The equipment in the lab is particularly well-suited for wearable/flexible electronic systems and is available to anyone interested in making soft objects. The lab includes equipment like sewing machines, CNC knitting and embroidery machines, soldering irons, and 3D printers. Lab users must complete a lab training session before being allowed to access the lab.

The Emerging Leaders Program is a collaboration between the Office of the Provost, the Office of the Executive Vice President for Research, the Institute for Leadership and Social Impact, and the Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty. Over the course of six months, participants take part in several activities—workshops, small-group work, and coaching—to contribute to leadership development. Zeagler is joining the eighth cohort of Georgia Tech’s Emerging Leaders Program. This is the first year the program has been open to senior and principal non-tenure track faculty and research faculty.

Zeagler’s research background encompasses industrial design, fashion design, and human centered computing. During his time at Georgia Tech, he has taught and created new and interdisciplinary coursework for the College of Computing, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, and the College of Design. Zeagler became part of the IPaT team in 2013 helping create the Wearable Computing Center and acted as its program manager. As IPaT’s co-director of strategic partnerships for IPaT, he is engaging with both external and internal partners to develop rewarding research and scholarly endeavors.

His interest in fashion (Master of Arts in fashion, Domus Academy, Milan), industrial design, textiles (Bachelor of Science, industrial design, Georgia Tech, minor in textile manufacturing) and computing (Ph.D. in human centered computing, Georgia Tech) drives his research on electronic textiles and on-body interfaces at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a member of the NASA Wearable Technology Cluster and interacts with the NASA Georgia Space Grant Consortium

Georgia Tech’s eighth cohort of faculty members selected for the Emerging Leaders Program can be found here.

Made from beautifully fabricated steel and eight mobile arms, medusai can play percussion and strings with human musicians, dance with human dancers, and move in time to multiple human observers.

It uses AI-driven computer vision to know what human observers are doing and responds accordingly through snake gestures, music, and light. Gil Weinberg, the director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology, knows it’s unsettling. Wienberg is also a faculty member of the Institute for People and Technology.

Read the full story at Georgia Tech's Center for Music Technology.

The CEAR Hub lead principal investigator is Russell Clark, senior research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology and faculty member of the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT). Several members of the CEAR Hub team are affiliated with IPaT.

About the CEAR Hub
Coastal flooding, extreme heat, and other climate hazards are growing threats to communities throughout Georgia’s coast. These threats are especially critical for historically marginalized groups, who often face the most severe impacts and have the least ability to cope.

CEAR Hub is a project that joins community organizations, local governments, and educational institutions together to develop the knowledge, tools, and strategies that make our communities more resilient. CEAR Hub partners work alongside members of vulnerable communities to create fair and just solutions to the climate challenges through community-led research, training, and outreach.

“Congratulations to this year’s grant awardees, which bring together a diverse set of scholars advancing important new lines of interdisciplinary inquiry,” said Michael Best, executive director of IPaT. “The funded projects in the arts, assistive healthcare, AI, and beyond will further Georgia Tech’s impact at the intersections of people and technology.”

The goal of the IPaT/GTRI co-sponsored research and engagement grants for 2023-2024 is to promote research activities involving faculty and students from many disciplines represented in IPaT. Five winning projects were selected based on their early-stage research which have a high probability of leading to extramural funding and include a strong interdisciplinary component. Engagement grants are also designed to foster new engagements and collaborations, whether internal or external to Georgia Tech.

The goal of the IPaT/IDEaS co-sponsored research include identifying prominent emerging research directions on the topics of artificial intelligence (AI), shaping IDEaS future strategy in this initiative area, and building an inclusive and active community of Georgia Tech researchers. Proposals could include external collaborators, identifying and preparing groundwork for competing in large-scale grant opportunities in AI, and AI use in other research fields.

Congratulations to the winning project teams listed below:

Proposal title: Artificial Intelligence Based Abstract Review Assistant (AIARA)
Team members: Michael Cross, research scientist, GTRI; Paula Gomez, senior research engineer, GTRI; Mark Riedl, professor, associate director of the Georgia Tech Machine Learning Center, School of Interactive Computing
Award and sponsors: $20,000 (IPaT/GTRI)
Overview: Scientific committee members are promoting the use of artificial intelligence tools such as Google’s BARD and OpenAI’s Chat GPT to help with the blind review process to support the peer review process such as articles submitted for annual science-related conferences. Considering that the peer review process is made up of well-structured tasks that include analysis of a set number of abstract components (title, keywords, structure, outcomes, references) or paper components (the introduction, methods, results, discussion, length, clarity and structure), peer review is an excellent candidate for trained AI to address topics such as duplicate submissions, self-plagiarism, incomplete reviews, comment quality assessment, and the overall standardization of scores for the final selection of articles.

Proposal title: Toward Fairer Diagnosis and Care of Type 2 Diabetes: A Long-Term and Pipeline-Level View
Team members: Gabriel Garcia, assistant professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering; Juba Ziani, assistant professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering; Jovan Julien, postdoctoral fellow, Harvard Medical School
Award and sponsors: $16,034 (IPaT)
Overview: Type-2 Diabetes Mellitus (T2DM) is one of the most common chronic diseases in the United States, affecting about 10% of Americans. While T2DM is irreversible, its early disease stages – i.e., pre-diabetes – are reversible. Accordingly, early screening, detection, and treatment are critical to reducing the rates of progression to T2DM and mitigating the adverse effects of T2DM among those who already have it. Yet, in the United States, T2DM can often go undetected until its later stages with each missed detection stage leading to worsening health outcomes and increasing financial burden. Further, people from disadvantaged and underserved groups often face lower access to care, leading to more missed detection and greater downstream disease burden. In this research, our goal is to build a mathematical model to optimize investments across screening and treatment resources while reducing disparities across disadvantaged populations.

Proposal title: ASTRO! - Manysourcing the Design and Behavior of Future Robotic Guide Dogs
Team members: Bruce Walker, professor, School of Psychology and School of Interactive Computing
Award and sponsors: $15,375 (IPaT)
Overview: ASTRO! is an interdisciplinary collaborative project to engage many people in the ideation and creative design of future robotic guide dogs. As the technology and engineering advance towards a robotic assistant, we also must consider design and human-robot interaction issues. We will ask many people--through interviews, focus groups, and surveys--what capabilities a robotic guide should have. We will also ask how they should look and feel. We will consider how they will behave. And finally, we will investigate how humans and robotic assistants will communicate. Students in many classes at Georgia Tech and beyond will study various aspects of this research and design challenge. We will also host a weekend “design-a-thon” for ideating and brainstorming robot designs and interaction patterns, and crafting up all kinds of prototypes and mockups. The outcomes of this project will influence the design of robotic assistants, and more broadly will help us design advanced technology so it is accepted into society.

Proposal title: Data-Driven Platform for Transforming Subjective Assessment into Objective Processes for Artistic Human Performance and Wellness
Team members: Milka Trajkova, research scientist, School of Literature, Media, and Communication; Brian Magerko, professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication
Award and sponsors: $15,000 (IPaT/IDEaS)
Overview: Artistic human movement at large, stands at the precipice of a data-driven renaissance. By leveraging novel tools, we can usher in a transparent, data-driven, and accessible training environment. The potential ramifications extend beyond dance. As sports analytics have reshaped our understanding of athletic prowess, a similar approach to dance could redefine our comprehension of human movement, with implications spanning healthcare, construction, rehabilitation, and active aging. Georgia Tech, with its prowess in AI, HCI, and biomechanics is primed to lead this exploration. To actualize this vision, we propose the following research questions with ballet as a prime example of one of the most complex types of artistic movements: 1) What kinds of data - real-time kinematic, kinetic, biomechanical, etc. captured through accessible off-the-shelf technologies, are essential for effective AI assessment in ballet education for young adults?; 2) How can we design and develop an end-to-end ML architecture that assesses artistic and technical performance?; 3) What feedback elements (combination of timing, communication mode, feedback nature, polarity, visualization) are most effective for AI- based dance assessment?; and 4) How does AI-assisted feedback enhance physical wellness, artistic performance, and the learning process in young athletes compared to traditional methods?

Proposal title: Voice+: Locating the Human Voice in a Technology-Driven World
Team members: Andrea Jonsson, assistant professor, School of Modern Languages; Stuart Goldberg, associate professor, School of Modern Languages
Award and sponsors: $3,800 (IPaT)
Overview: The Voice + Research Lab is an Interdisciplinary Voice Studies Lab that explores the human voice from a variety of perspectives and integrates knowledge and methodologies from different disciplines. It encompasses a wide range of topics related to the voice, including vocal production, vocal health, cultural and historical aspects of vocal expression, and the artistic and expressive use of the voice. Interdisciplinary voice studies aim to provide a holistic understanding of the voice and its multifaceted aspects, fostering collaboration among experts in various fields to explore sound and structures of the human voice.

“Congratulations to the two awardees and all the finalists who represent the best that Georgia Tech has to offer,” said Michael Best. “Departing from previous years, this year we only awarded two prizes making them even more precious. Next year we will return to awarding multiple prizes among the finalist,” said Best.

Congratulations to the newly named Foley Scholars for 2023-2024 who are:
 

• Karthik Seetharama Bhat, Ph.D. student in Human-Centered Computing, in the
  in the doctoral category who was awarded $5,000.
• Arianna Mastali, master’s student in Human-Computer Interaction, in the
  master’s category who was awarded $1,000.

The finalists in the Ph.D. category were Karthik Seetharama Bhat, Arpit Narechania, Sachin Pendse, and Alexandra Teixeira Riggs.

The finalists in the master’s category were Arianna Mastali and Josey Benandi.

A short description of each finalists’ unique research along with their Georgia Tech faculty advisor is listed below:

Karthik Seetharama Bhat is a Ph.D. student in Human-Centered Computing and is advised by Neha Kumar. Bhat’s research explores the future of carework by studying how emerging technologies can support and augment caregiving interactions and relationships. His research examines telehealth efforts in India to understand technology adoption for formal and informal caregiving across socioeconomic, geographic, and cultural boundaries. He is designing new technologies and technology-aided workflows as probes into the potential futures of telehealth. He is also examining the role that emerging AI and data-driven technologies (like conversational agents) could play in informal care environments. He has partnered with ARMMAN—a Mumbai-based NGO that is employing mHealth technologies towards improving maternal and child health outcomes through information provision and care delivery to pregnant women and new mothers. He is also working on the design and deployment of a chatbot that can perform automated tasks that reduce burdens on community health workers who moderate a chat-based online health community for maternal and child health. This is a collaborative study with researchers at IIIT Delhi, India, and SWACH Foundation—an NGO in Haryana, India, that runs multiple WhatsApp-based online health communities for maternal and child health, serving thousands of pregnant women and new mothers from rural and urban regions of north India.

Arpit Narechania is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science, advised by Alex Endert. Narechania designs mixed-initiative, guidance-enriched interfaces that facilitate visual communication of appropriate and timely guidance between users and systems, and promotes the design of new visualization tools for enhanced human-data experiences from data preparation through analysis. He also develop tools that augment visualization interfaces with the querying power of natural language. A recent team research project of his examined how misrepresentation using fertility maps could change how funds are distributed to different locales and how people perceive the state of fertility in India. This project involved 16 cartographers and GIS experts from 13 global organizations such as the World Bank, UN, NASA, CDC. His team findings revealed that even the most expert map-makers find choosing appropriate binning methods challenging; this is due to limited knowledge, lack of awareness of harmful implications of using arbitrary binning methods, and organizational protocols conflicting with cartographic principles and map-maker’s preferences. His research team invented “Resiliency”, a new “goto” binning method. As a result of this research, the World Bank invited him, Dr. Clio Andris, and Dr. Alex Endert [fellow team members] to give a talk, and the United Nations offered to integrate this new map-making method into their website.

Sachin Pendse is a Ph.D. student in Human-Centered Computing and is advised by Munmun De Choudhury and Neha Kumar. Pendse is addressing mental health challenges and the positive role that technology can play. There are diverse and effective approaches to treating mental health concerns, but the process of being diagnosed and finding care can be extremely intimidating. Individuals in distress are confronted with diverse barriers, including the stigma associated with being labeled as mentally ill, the trial-and-error process of determining the medication or forms of therapy that work best for an individual, and economic or cultural factors that limit access. Navigating the pathway to care can be an ordeal as taxing as the experience of mental illness itself. He is working to better understand where technology-mediated support may be able to reduce and eliminate mental health-related barriers. He examines the role that identity and culture play in how people experience distress, and studies people from diverse backgrounds, including people in geographically sparse areas, people with limited financial means to access care, and people from minority backgrounds. He is using a mixed methods approach to understand the role that technology-mediated mental health support systems (such as helplines, online support communities, or Google search results) play in helping connect individuals in distress with effective, culturally valid support as they journey upon a pathway to care.

Alexandra Teixeira Riggs is a Ph.D. student in Digital Media, advised by Anne Sullivan. One of Riggs’s research projects, entitled “Button Portraits: Embodying Queer History with Interactive Wearable Artifacts,” is a wearable experience that explores Atlanta’s queer history using artifacts from the Gender and Sexuality Collections at Georgia State University. The project uses archival buttons from the collection to reveal oral histories of two Southern queer activists, linking the activists’ own objects to specific audio fragments. As a case study, “Button Portraits” offers insights on how wearability, embodiment, and queer archival methods can shape the design and experience of tangible historical narratives and their ability to call for reflection on our relationships to archival materials and history. By designing tangible experiences that center around queer community, history, and identity, she hopes to continue to express, loudly and proudly, that queer and trans people have always existed and will continue to exist, and that the design of technology, importantly, must center these histories, communities, and identities.

Arianna Mastali is a master’s student in Human-Computer Interaction, advised by Melody Jackson. Mastali has been working on a wearable activity and gait detection monitor for sled dogs and other canine athletes, called WAG’D. During her last undergraduate semester, she discovered the field of animal-centered computing. The WAG’D device consists of an IMU and a load cell and is focused on measuring gait anomalies

and pull force in order to minimize injuries within sled dog racing. Her research team conducted several interviews with mushers and veterinarians who have been a part of the Iditarod in order to learn about the most common injuries in sled dogs and the existing methods to detect them. This work has significance as it will not only help better detect injuries, but will help dog owners and veterinarians better monitor dogs in order to prevent injuries.

Josey Benandi is a master’s student in Human-Computer Interaction, advised by Agata Rozga. Benandi is currently working on a project called the Care Coordination Study, which is funded by the AI-CARING Institute through the National Science Foundation. This project involves conducting qualitative research in the form of semi-structured interviews with people diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment and their informal caregivers, so that we may better understand how these folks manage their day-to-day activities, what challenges they face in doing so, and how they go about overcoming those challenges. The Care Coordination Study has been a joint effort between myself, Dr. Agata Rozga, Dr. Tracy Mitzner, and other students, where Josey has taken the lead role in all research activities. She is seeking to create a qualitative codebook of the findings which will serve as a guide for other researchers within AI-CARING and beyond whose work may require precedent real-world data regarding the experiences of those diagnosed with and those coordinating care for those diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment.
 

About the James D. Foley Endowment

The James D. Foley Endowment, established in 2007, is named for Dr. James D. Foley, professor and founder of the GVU Center (now integrated with IPaT as of January, 2023) at Georgia Tech. The award was established by Dr. Foley's colleagues and GVU alumni to honor his significant contributions in the field of computing, his influence on the work of others, and his dedication to the development of new research directions.

Funds from the Foley Endowment are used to support the students and research activities of the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), including the Foley Scholars Fellowships, awarded annually to two graduate students on the basis of personal vision, brilliance, and potential impact. Foley Scholars are selected by an advisory board comprised of alumni, current faculty, and industry partners during the fall semester.

Projects associated with the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center (RERC) on Technologies to Support Aging Among People With Long-Term Disabilities, also known as “TechSAge,” are exploring the potential of technology to support people aging with disabilities.

TechSAge recently received a $4.6 million grant from the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research to support another five years of work — the project’s third five-year grant.

“We aren’t starting from scratch,” said Elena Remillard, TechSAge project coordinator who also serves as the site principal investigator for Georgia Tech. “Our team has spent years establishing an infrastructure of research resources, like our participant registry, building technology prototypes, and contributing to the limited knowledge base on aging with disability. We’re ready to dive into the research.”

TechSAge projects include a Smart Bathroom developed to optimize the environment for safe transfers by individuals with limited mobility, a Zoom-based tai chi exercise program, fall detection devices for wheelchair users, robotic showers, wayfinding robots, and rehabilitation training programs.

The goal of TechSAge is to meet the needs of people aging with long-term disabilities where they live, work, and play by conducting advanced engineering research and developing innovative technologies. “It’s about more than meeting basic needs at home,” Remillard said. “People with disabilities are living longer, working longer, and should be able to continue engaging in all the activities they need and want to do. We’re developing user-centered tech solutions to support a wide range of everyday activities, from self-care to exercise.”

TechSAge started at Georgia Tech 10 years ago, first led by Tech faculty members Jon Sanford, Wendy Rogers, and Tracy Mitzner as co-directors. Today, the RERC is a multi-site center including faculty from Georgia Tech, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Georgia State University.

The current project director is Laura Rice, associate professor of kinesiology and community health at Illinois. The leadership team includes Sanford, now research professor of occupational therapy at Georgia State; Rogers, now professor of kinesiology and community health at Illinois; Mitzner, principal research scientist at Person in Design; and Remillard, senior research scientist at the Center for Inclusive Design and Innovation in the College of Design at Georgia Tech.

The research projects engage students at all levels, including undergraduates, graduates, and postdocs, and emphasize training in universal design and accessibility.

Over the last five years, the team has focused on ramping up their interventions and technology solutions to assist older adults with long-term disabilities. Sanford and Georgia Tech researcher Brian Jones have spearheaded the smart bathroom utilizing Georgia Tech’s Aware Home, directed by Jones and supported by Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology. It is a three-story, 5,000-square-foot facility designed to facilitate research and develop innovations in a controlled home environment.

“We developed the smart bathroom to explore how the bathroom environment should automatically adjust to the changing needs of older adults with disabilities over the course of a day or the long term. That goal requires real-time measurement as a user approaches the bathroom and as they interact with the bathroom environment and fixtures during the process of transferring on and off the toilet, or into and out of the bathtub, or shower,” said Jones.

“We have instrumented the space with sensors in the floor, the toilet seat, and the grab bars used for toilet transfer or bathing. We have designed everything to allow for lots of flexibility in the environment, which allows users to adjust the fixtures to their preferences. The Aware Home at Georgia Tech is a valuable resource for this research. During this next phase of funding, we will advance our bathroom transfer studies while further automating the smart bathroom environment and repackage some of the components to move into real homes with a long-term goal of reducing falls.”

Nicole Méndez Dial, associate manager for school relations, and Erika Becerra, senior recruiter, both from Walt Disney Animation Studios, delivered career information about Disney in a panel format with four Georgia Tech faculty members who have expertise in animation and filmmaking. Joining Dial and Becerra were:

• John Thornton, senior academic professional and director of film and media production, Ivan Allen College.
• Brian Magerko, professor and director of graduate studies in digital media, Ivan Allen College.
• Maribeth Coleman, Regents' Researcher and director of research, IPaT.
• Jay Bolter, professor and director of computational media, Ivan Allen College.

Opening remarks and introductions were delivered by Kelly Ritter, chair of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. Clint Zeagler, co-director of strategic partnerships with IPaT, ended the event with information and closing remarks.

The discussion started with interdisciplinary collaboration and the future of work in animation and film. It ended with detailed information about animation careers with Walt Disney Animation Studios, including computer graphics, animation, visual effects, storytelling, production, and technology. Disney also stressed the importance of attending SIGGRAPH, the international Association for Computing Machinery's special interest group on computer graphics and interactive techniques, which holds a major conference each year. Dial said that Disney’s animation studios interact with the research community through global collaborations. Their publications can be found here: disneyanimation.com/publications.

Located in California, Walt Disney produced its first animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in 1937. The studio is marking 100 years of animation filmmaking since its inception in 1923.

“The Craft Lab is a new makerspace launched during GVU’s 30th anniversary. What is exciting to me is that we’ve gathered crafting tools and industrial precision machines in a single location,“ said Trent. “I have never seen a makerspace at Georgia Tech with the types of capabilities we have concentrated in our new lab.”

Trent also supports the IPaT/GVU prototyping lab. This lab houses 3D printers, a waterjet, CNC mills, CNC Router, saws, metal grinders, drill press, and other tools found in traditional makerspaces including surface-mount printed circuit board production and silk screening. The prototyping lab is located in the TSRB basement, Room S21.

“The Craft Lab has industrial machines that can really help folks when they have gotten past the initial prototype stage of their research,” said Trent. “For example, if someone needed to make 100 versions of something like sensor embedded clothing to deploy it, being able to have the speed and consistency of our industrial sewing machines could be critical to meet research timelines and prototype creation needs.”

In addition to managing laboratories, Trent provides diverse operational support for IPaT that spans audiovisual services, website management and programming, and event support.

“Tim is an asset to IPaT and the IPaT community. He never hesitates to assist in any capacity,” said Cynthia Moore, assistant director for business operations for IPaT. “During our annual Foley Scholars event, Tim was readily available and jumped in where needed, from assisting with A/V needs to providing tours of IPaT's labs. As a research technologist, Tim has become the go-to person for all things lab support, A/V needs, and so much more for IPaT.”

“Tim Trent and his research faculty colleagues at IPaT are a critical component of Georgia Tech’s complex research enterprise,” said Maribeth Gandy Coleman, director of research for IPaT and a Regents’ Researcher.

“The mission of IPaT is to advocate for and support the use of human-centered techniques throughout the research life cycle. Toward this goal, IPaT provides a variety of core facilities and services for the campus community, which spans a wide array of disciplines. Tim’s unique expertise lies at the intersection of technology, human computer interaction, and design coupled with many years of experience in research operations. This skill set allows him to support faculty and students throughout the human-centered design process of user experiences that involve the integration of computing devices with the physical world and objects. Tim helps researchers utilize our lab facilities to create a wide range of prototypes, starting with low fidelity prototypes using cardboards and paper all the way to systems ready for deployment with complex embedded hardware and tangible 3D components.

“He is an experienced human computer interaction researcher, which means that he understands the methods employed by the IPaT community as well as the requirements of systems intended for scientific experiments. Tim’s contributions to Georgia Tech research both catalyze new projects that otherwise might not be possible and amplify their impact, to the benefit of society,” said Coleman.

On Aug. 24, the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) sponsored its first fall program aptly named Considering People and Technology. This large IPaT community event focused on people and technology, past and present, and kicked off with a GVU Brown Bag lecture presented by IPaT's new executive director, Michael Best. His talk was titled, “Considering IPaT: Celebrating the Past and Inventing the Future.”

After the lecture, IPaT offered a tour of its labs, a panel discussion featuring distinguished members of the Georgia Tech community in a continuing discussion about people and technology, and ended with a high-spirited reception for guests and speakers. More than 115 people across Georgia Tech, Emory, and other organizations attended Best’s talk delivered to this standing-room-only crowd in the first-floor ballroom in the Technology Square Research Building. This was followed by another large crowd that attended the panel discussion held later in the afternoon.

The panel discussion, focused on the future of people and technology, was moderated by Maribeth Gandy Coleman, director of research for IPaT and a Regents’ Researcher. She is a computer scientist focused on developing novel and scientifically validated systems at the “human technology frontier” designed for purposes such as training, rehabilitation, and cognitive therapy.

Eight distinguished Georgia Tech faculty members across academic disciplines participated in the discussion:

• Gen. Philip Breedlove, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe and distinguished professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.
• Margarita Gonzalez, principal researcher and senior technologist for digital innovation at the Georgia Tech Research Institute in the Information and Communications Lab.
• Tansu Celikel, chair of the School of Psychology, College of Sciences.
• Matthew Gombolay, assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing.
• Lisa Marks, assistant professor in the School of Industrial Design, College of Design.
• Sabir Khan, associate professor and director of the Architecture International Education Program in the School of Architecture, College of Design.
• Kirk Bowman, Regents' Entrepreneur and John R. Wilcox Term Professor of Global Development and Identity in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.
• Ruthie Yow, service learning and partnerships specialist, Serve-Learn-Sustain.

Julia Kubanek, Georgia Tech’s vice president for Interdisciplinary Research, delivered closing remarks for the event.

Considering IPaT: Celebrating the Past and Inventing the Future

“This is a really exciting time to be part of the IPaT family. What IPaT is doing in my estimation cannot be underestimated in terms of the intellectual promise and real-world impact,” said Best. “In addition to IPaT moving to a brand-new space on campus, we’ve also merged with the GVU Center, which has combined two intellectual and research powerhouses along with extraordinary communities where useful synergies and economies of scale will let us build not 1+1=2, but 1+1=20.”

Best, who just started his first year as IPaT’s executive director, is looking for ways to build on IPaT’s strengths to make sure that Georgia Tech’s interdisciplinary community is thinking about the people and technology nexus so that it’s meaningful, creative, and fun when conducting research in partnership with IPaT.

“There is nothing out there, whether it's climate change or political upheaval, that do not have a profound people and technology interface,” said Best. “If you care about global challenges and responding to them, IPaT is the place to be. This is where it's happening.”

Best went on to connect his global perspective to responses to any global challenge. “I'm a professor in the Sam Nun School of International Affairs, I’ve worked with the United Nations, and all of my research work prior to the pandemic occurred outside of the U.S. I'm going to bring my global and international perspective to what I do as the executive director of IPaT. I think that there's an enormous amount of opportunity for building global engagements, especially if we’re focusing on global challenges.”

IPaT is one of 10 Georgia Tech interdisciplinary research institutes (IRI). The goal of these IRIs is to bring together researchers from different disciplines to address topics of strategic importance to Georgia Tech.

IPaT activities encompass industry and community partnership programs, industry engagement projects, and providing research infrastructure and laboratories. It also provides thought leadership, performs outreach and communication to the general public about research, provides research seed and engagement grants, and organizes symposiums and speaker events. This is in addition to the research engineers and scientists who also provide software design and development support.

Panelists Share Thoughts on the Future of People and Technology

Maribeth Gandy Coleman, director of research for IPaT, encouraged each panelist to share challenges or opportunities in the future related to people and technology. Here are some of the thoughts they shared:

• Gen. Philip Breedlove recalled major advances in cockpit fighter technology ranging from better aircraft handling, new laser range targeting, and the arrival of night vision inside pilot helmets. He envisions artificial intelligence (AI) assisting fifth-generation aircraft fighter pilots by processing data from a myriad of sensors, synthesizing the data to the most important things, and displaying this information in a way that is immediately usable and visible to the pilot to fulfill the need for different types of missions. He also stated that sixth-generation fighter planes are probably being designed with new pilot-plane advancements further incorporating AI.
• Margarita Gonzalez commented that although AI advances seem to be accelerating, AI cannot imitate human empathy, emotional understanding, human imagination, human intuition, and our human capacity to self-reflect. She acknowledged Peter-Paul Berbeek’s work on technology mediation theory, and more broadly the morality of technology. She remarked, “One of the greatest challenges that we face is to holistically understand the implications of our technology-mediated existence.” According to Gonzalez, “The future opportunity in the people and technology space is to update or upgrade our normative framework, the set of ethical principles and values that guide our behavior, and creative technology integration through our lives.”
• Tansu Celikel said, “we’re entering a new era where AI will be integrated into everything and it’s time to start thinking about human AI core evolution.” He was referring to the cognitive evolutionary pressure for humans to be able to keep up with the additional AI intelligence that is emerging alongside human intelligence. He remarked that new cognition for humans and human-made devices will give rise to new technologies that will then become part of society and we’ll need to be co-evolving with these advancements as a community.
• Matthew Gombolay previously worked with the U.S. Navy to help improve ship defenses with decision support tools to help a naval tactical action officer decide what weapons and countermeasure defenses to deploy, along with when, where, and how, among a set of distributed ships to defend themselves against a raid of enemy anti-ship missiles. He stated, “There is actually no middle ground where a machine and the human are collaborating and communicating to decide what are my possible lifesaving options?” He stressed that cultural factors, team factors, and profession-related factors influence decision-making in different settings. “I think that we need to invest a lot in defining cultural-specific components for AI, and then enabling end users to actually be able to communicate with these systems and decide what is the most efficacious course of action and collaborate on making that happen.”
• Lisa Marks commented that the best invention humans have created was string. And the invention of string led to spindles and whorls, which became the basis for gears and pulleys, in combination with the invention of the loom, which became a basis for computation and computers. “When I started working at Georgia Tech, I did not expect that my research in lace was going to go to outer space and the depths of the ocean,” said Marks. She said that AI will be helping to create new, complex structures, such as coral building objects, or other objects with specific properties to help solve more of tomorrow’s problems such as the loss of coral or the collection of space debris.
• According to Sabir Khan, “History is full of examples where technology was partly responsible for the destruction of people, cultures, and society.” He said AI will be part of the future in warfare. He also said that we’ll need to be more mindful of the intersection of society and technology as advancements are achieved.
• Kirk Bowman emphasized that new technologies can empower one group over another and more inequality can result, such as the invention of barbed wire to separate or corral people. He also noted that new technology can help bridge inequality such as the use of Velcro, instead of pins, by female football players to help keep their head scarves attached to enable them to play in a world championship. He stressed that one of the opportunities that we have is think more deeply about whether local communities need a new technology or need, perhaps, a lower technology solution.
• Ruthie Yow said, “In our group, we imagine that communities are not people in places with problems, but rather they are people in places with gifts and strengths.” She utilizes asset-based community development, which is about the identification of assets, the connection of assets, and the mobilization of assets in a local community. She recalled a project requiring seniors to interact with an app to help save home energy, but the problem was seniors couldn’t use the app. The solution was to pair young people in the community with seniors to help them use the app. This intergenerational collaboration delivered many benefits to both the seniors and the teens and made a positive impact in the community. She sees future technology opportunities as a way to mobilize gifts and to draw together the strengths of communities.

Julia Kubanek closed the event by saying, “Our goal [at Georgia Tech] is to be able to open our minds, use the imagination that technology does not bring us, immerse ourselves in an environment that's new to us, like the new communities that Ruthie deals with, and teach our students and ourselves how to think more critically to solve problems and make new discoveries.”

* Alexa Hanna, a senior majoring in computer science, presented “Integrating Esports Into Cybersecurity Education.”

* Amrita Manickandan, a junior majoring in computer science, presented “Augmented Reality Aircraft Maintenance Project.”

* Corinne Cutts, a sophomore majoring in psychology, presented her experience working with the Cognitive Empowerment Program focusing on the installation of smart home technology and safety.

* Geehoon Jung, a junior majoring in computer engineering, presented work and research related to the Aware Home. The home is an interdisciplinary research facility aimed at addressing the fundamental technical, design, and social challenges for people in a home setting. Machine learning approaches for indoor location using the Apple watch and Bluetooth were explored.

* William Dyches, a junior majoring in electrical engineering, presented a proposed solution and analysis of using satellites to deliver water level sensor information to support the Coastal Equity and Resilience Hub, which  is working to help communities across coastal Georgia reduce the impacts of extreme weather and climate change.

* Suchir Sur, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering, helped to develop a working simulation of a moving toilet system to assist people with impairment issues or disabilities. His research was done with Georgia Tech’s Aware Home research team.

* Ritu Atreyas, a junior majoring in computer science, worked on a user interface related to CellWatch, a mobile app that allows you to record, view, and analyze cellular connectivity. This research project is focused on measuring and characterizing the availability and quality of mobile broadband in rural areas.

IPaT congratulates each intern for helping to further people and technology research this summer.

Regents’ distinctions may be granted to outstanding faculty members for a period of three years by the BOR and are awarded only after unanimous recommendation from the president of the recipient’s university, their chief academic officer and dean, and three additional members of the faculty who are named by the university president. Approval by the chancellor and the BOR Committee on Academic Affairs is also required. These distinctions are given to those who make outstanding contributions to their respective institutions.

Coleman received her bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in computer science from Georgia Tech. She has more than 23 years of experience as a research faculty member in catalyzing, funding, and conducting transdisciplinary research programs in the areas of computer science and human computer interaction, with a focus on augmented/virtual reality and wearable technologies applied to healthcare, assistive technology, education, and the future-of-work.

In 2017, she received the GVU 25th Anniversary Impact Award. In 2022, she was one of three finalists for an Atlanta Women in Technology award in recognition of her research contributions as well as her record of supporting historically underrepresented groups in the technology field. Additionally, she presented a TEDx talk on the importance of diversity in teams in the context of her NASA-funded augmented reality research program.

She currently leads a team of a dozen full-time research faculty within IPaT, along with a large community of student assistants. In her role as director of research, she is charged with developing processes to help connect principal investigators and teams across campus with research faculty to provide continuity and capacity to their research programs.

The DoN S&T Board is a discretionary federal advisory committee that provides independent recommendations on matters relating to the Department of the Navy's scientific, technical, manufacturing, acquisition, logistics, medicine, and business management functions. These matters include, but are not limited to, the pressing and complex scientific and technological problems facing the Department of Defense in such areas as research, engineering, organizational structure and process, business and functional concepts, and manufacturing. The board will help to identify new technologies and new applications of technology in those areas to strengthen national security. Membership on the board consists of private and public leaders, with a diversity of background, experience, and thought in support of the DoN S&T Board mission.

Kurfess’ appointment to the board was confirmed by the secretary of defense in August.

The University System of Georgia (USG) Board of Regents announced 12 first-time Georgia Tech appointments to Regents’ distinctions for 2023 and affirmed the renewal of existing distinctions for four esteemed faculty members.  

“IPaT is and will continue to be the heart and soul of Georgia Tech’s research enterprise, bringing a human-centered approach to understanding the impact and potential of a very broad range of technological innovations,” says Best. “It’s the Interdisciplinary Research Institute that most robustly unites the humanitarians, policy experts, and social scientists of Ivan Allen College with designers, architects, artists, ethicists, scientists, and engineers.” 

When IPaT brings together these different mindsets, each with an equal seat at the table, Best says, they can have the greatest possible impact on humanity’s challenges. He cites the explosion of capabilities in artificial intelligence (AI) — and the attendant problems that are also emerging — as one example of how this approach puts people at the center of any inquiry.

“We need to put the questions of responsible and sustainable AI first and foremost,” he says. “Any time we’re thinking about the next deep learning algorithm, we need to have all the right people in the room — ethicists; policymakers; cultural anthropologists — experts capable of addressing the whole range of issues we’re seeing.”

Understanding Challenges Around the Globe

Best also believes that a global perspective, as well as getting out of the lab and into the field, are key to IPaT’s future. He wants to expand the institute’s international footprint. He has conducted most of his research outside the United States, primarily focusing on understanding the impact of information and communication technologies — such as mobile phones — on social, economic, and political development. He was also director of research for the Georgia Tech-Shenzhen campus and founding director of the United Nations University Institute on Computing and Society in the People’s Republic of China.

“If we try to solve our global challenges from a domestic, blinkered viewpoint, we actually won’t solve them at all,” he says. “You can’t solve a global challenge without understanding the challenge from a global perspective.”

While leading IPaT, Best will retain his appointment as a professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Interactive Computing, where he directs the Technologies and International Development Lab. He says that his students are always in the field.

“My students are conducting research, working with community partners, engaged with civil society or community-based organizations,” he says. “It is always life-changing for them.”

A Living Organization

Since its inception, IPaT has gained recognition for its work in health and assistive technologies, in addition to smart cities and infrastructure technology. Best sees IPaT’s focus broadening to include human-centered approaches to a wider range of technological innovations in areas such as sustainability, entertainment and the arts, and others.

In consultation with its stakeholders, faculty, and staff, IPaT will be looking to identify some of these new challenges and potential new directions over the next few months. Best expects they will look closely at areas where people and technology intersect with political and social justice issues.

In Best’s view, this is very much in keeping with IPaT’s history and character.

“IPaT is a living organization and always has been — rethinking, recommitting, and occasionally pivoting,” he says. “We are identifying what the next generation of research challenges will be. We’re a research community, and we know that every once in a while, you need to embrace a new question.”

Note: The College of Computing's GVU Center merged with IPaT in 2023.

One of these researchers, Salimah LaForce of the Center for Advanced Communications Policy (CACP), said it’s clear that Covid-19 changed many aspects of our lives, and we need to continue studying those changes to prepare for an ever-more uncertain future. 

“The Covid-19 pandemic ushered in a sea change for how we engage,” LaForce said. “It’s changed how we work and how we receive health services, even attitudes about the same. I think and hope, in some cases, that those changes are here to stay. So it’s exceedingly important that we continue to evaluate the technology-mediated ways in which we engage with one another and our systems to understand the intended and unanticipated outcomes, and to develop strategies and policies to mitigate, if not eliminate, negative consequences. 

Here’s a roundup of some of the pandemic-related research recently published by Ivan Allen College faculty: 

How Ivan Allen College Researchers Helped Make Covid-19 Tests Better 

“The Critical Role of Engineering in the Rapid Development of COVID-19 Diagnostics: Lessons from the RADx Tech Test Verification Core” 

Sarah Farmer and Amanda Peagler, research scientists, Center for Advanced Communications Policy 

Farmer and Peagler wrote this paper with authors from Georgia Tech and Emory University whose work involves evaluating Covid-19 tests under a federal grant. It details the characteristics of successful tests and the team’s evaluation process as part of the Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics (RADx) initiative. Georgia Tech and CACP’s HomeLab were crucial partners in that effort. 

The researchers found three main characteristics led to the success of these diagnostic tests. They found that tests using samples from the nose were more likely to be approved because it is easier to process those samples than those taken from saliva or breath. They also found that tests using signals such as color changes or fluorescence to indicate results were more successful than tests using other methods. Finally, the most successful tests came from companies that considered manufacturing and human factors early in the design process — a particularly crucial consideration for Farmer, Peagler, and their colleagues in CACP. 

“The pandemic accelerated a shift in diagnostic testing. Previously, testing mainly occurred in clinics, hospitals, and labs. Now, testing happens where the patient is, in places such as clinics, schools, workplaces, and homes,” Farmer said. “Anyone can do these tests instead of just trained professionals. It’s more important than ever to make the tests easy to use for all kinds of users and in all kinds of environments. 

“Now we need to make sure tests are more accessible, improve accuracy and speed, and incorporate detection of additional viruses such as flu and RSV. The knowledge we’ve gained can help in other areas of testing for different health conditions,” Farmer said. “We hope this work will help us be ready for future pandemics.”

Pai, a first-year student in the two-year MS-HCI program, has already helped Starbucks design its app to entice customers to try new menu items.

Pai and fellow MS-HCI students had more opportunities on Feb. 6 to meet industry representatives during Interactivity@GT.

Organized by MS-HCI at Georgia Tech and the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), Interactivity@GT replaces the former GVU Spring Showcase. The event provides Ph.D. and master’s students with the chance to promote their research and design work.

A keynote speech by Karen Holtzblatt, co-founder of InContext Enterprises and co-creator of contextual inquiry, kicked off the half-day event. Contextual inquiry is considered industry standard practice for gathering field data to understand how technology impacts the way people work.

After the keynote, MS-HCI students made one-minute pitches about their work to industry representatives for potential employment opportunities. Along with Ph.D. students representing IPaT, the MS-HCI students then showcased their research through a two-hour poster and networking session.

“I think this event is unique,” said Dick Henneman, director of the MS-HCI program at Georgia Tech. “Other programs might have a job fair, but our students are making connections with alumni and other company-sponsored projects.

“Right now, there’s a bit of a slump in the tech market. Our students have something unique that sets them apart, and that’s being from our MS-HCI program, which distinguishes them from the person who went to a 12-week UX bootcamp.”

Companies participating in Interactivity@GT included Starbucks, Cox Enterprises, Delta Air Lines, FanDuel, HSBC, NCR, State Farm, Infoblox Home Depot, and Verizon.

Carrie Bruce, the assistant director of the MS-HCI program, said the program has built a strong network of connections since it started almost 30 years ago. MS-HCI alumni have provided a stable core for that network.

“We’ve pushed out a lot of fabulous students who’ve been in industry for 10 years or more, and now they’re in leadership positions,” she said. “We’ve got people who know our program from varied perspectives at companies around the world.”

Pai said he connected with an MS-HCI alumni working at Starbucks who was happy to advise him on his first-year research project.

“She gave us some much-needed industry feedback and guided us on how we’re supposed to do something or what we could have done better,” he said.

Working with the alumna, Pai gained insight into how Starbucks customers think about their environment when they’re using the app. Pai found that many customers use the app to order items they are already familiar with, and they are unlikely to deviate from their routine.

Pai suggested the idea of drink maps, which tell customers which menu items are trending at nearby stores. Seeing a drink they haven’t tried trending at other stores might persuade customers to try something new.

“The experience gives us immediate insight into what is expected of us in industry,” Pai said. “We’re learning the methods in class but also learning how they are applied in industry, which helps us to build things and processes that would work in industry.”

The MS-HCI program at Georgia Tech is a four-semester interdisciplinary program and a collaborative effort among four Georgia Tech schools — the School of Interactive Computing, the School of Industrial Design, the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, and the School of Psychology.

For more information about the program and the admission process, visit the MS-HCI website.
 

Visit the original story posted by the College of Computing to see more pictures.

The grant will fund the researchers’ top two projects — designing and installing a public information kiosk and organizing a summer camp that uses environmental data to teach data literacy to middle schoolers.  

Air Quality Index (AQI) data that is readily available helps people decide whether it’s safe for a morning jog or to send their kids outside to play. However, the researchers want to help people understand the big picture.  

“The AQI is good for helping make just-in-time decisions,” said Roberts, an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing who researches how technology influences social learning experiences. 

 “It doesn’t help us think about what’s causing all this. ‘How can I allocate my resources toward pollution mitigation efforts? What should I do as far as where I live and the situation around me?’”  

Data visualization provides perspective

Roberts said most people know enough about AQI that they understand safe and dangerous levels, which helps them in the present. However, environmental and air quality data that provides insight into long-term trends and solutions tends to be more complex.  

“There are a lot of questions about how to get from this AQI value — this little number on your phone — to all the complex online data repositories that are available,” she said. “Air quality sensors spit out data all the time, but people don’t know how to access them. There’s nothing that bridges this simple number with these complex numbers.”  

To solve this problem, Roberts approached Endert, an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing and faculty member of the Institute for People and Technology, who designs interactive visualization tools that make data more understandable.  

“What excites me about this project is that it allows people to reason about their data through the visualization of air quality and places where they live and allows them to ask questions,” Endert said. “‘Why is it worse over here but not as bad where I live? What’s causing that? Why is it bad this time of the year but better at other times?”  

Read more at cc.gatech.edu >>

The Center’s Democracy Program and Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology are supporting one fellowship during the spring 2024 academic semester for a doctoral candidate researching the intersection of technology and democratic governance.

“I am thrilled to visit Georgia Tech again and celebrate our strong partnership,” said Carter Center CEO Paige Alexander. “There is an important relationship between technology and democracy. Together, we are committed to promoting secure and transparent technologies that reinforce democratic principles.”

The fellow, Daniel Nkemelu, who is from Nigeria, is working closely with the Carter Center’s Democracy Program director, data scientist, and members of the digital threats to democracy initiative.

The fellowship builds on the institutions’ long collaboration, including with Michael Best, executive director of the Institute for People and Technology, who played an important role in establishing this fellowship.

“From social media platforms to computer-based voting machines, technologies today are profoundly impacting democracies across the globe,” said Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera. “This new fellowship and our ongoing partnership with The Carter Center express a shared commitment to strong democracies supported by secure technologies.”

The fellowship began in January. It aims to advance the fellow’s research agenda and give access to experts in democratic elections and participatory democracy. The fellow will also connect the Carter Center’s Democracy Program with Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology research.

###

Contact: In Atlanta, Maria Cartaya, maria.cartaya@cartercenter.org

The Carter Center
Waging Peace. Fighting Disease. Building Hope.

A not-for-profit, nongovernmental organization, The Carter Center has helped to improve life for people in over 80 countries by resolving conflicts; advancing democracy, human rights, and economic opportunity; preventing diseases; and improving mental health care. The Carter Center was founded in 1982 by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter and former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, in partnership with Emory University, to advance peace and health worldwide.

Visit our website CarterCenter.org | Follow us on X @CarterCenter | Follow us on Instagram @thecartercenter | Like us on Facebook Facebook.com/CarterCenter | Watch us on YouTube YouTube.com/CarterCenter

About the Georgia Institute of Technology
The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is one of the top public research universities in the U.S., developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its more than 47,000 undergraduate and graduate students, representing 50 states and more than 148 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in Europe and Asia, and through distance and online learning.

As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1.2 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society. 

The Wild Dolphin Project is the world’s longest-running underwater dolphin research project, and this week, the organization is celebrating its 40th anniversary.

Georgia Tech is marking the occasion with a fun and engaging video illustrating the interactive computing technology its researchers have created to help marine biologists studying dolphin behavior and communication in the open ocean.

Referred to as the “Jane Goodall of the sea” by National Geographic, Denise Herzing is the founder and research director of the Wild Dolphin Project. She and Georgia Tech College of Computing Professor Thad Starner began collaborating in 2011 on interactive technologies to aid the project’s study of a specific pod of Atlantic spotted dolphins.

See how Scott Gilliland, senior research scientist in Georgia Tech's Institute for People and Technology, is supporting their research as he demonstrates the CHAT (cetacean hearing augmented telemetry) device.

Read the full article and view the video from the College of Computing >>

CIC aims to build entrepreneurial confidence, people-centered mindsets, and encourage innovation while responding to today’s global challenges and opportunities. Innovative projects in the contest are expected to align with the 17 United Nations sustainability goals and can fall within IPaT’s current research focus areas.

“It seemed only natural that the Convergence Innovation Competition would one day expand beyond our campus walls,” said Michael Best, executive director of IPaT and professor with the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. “Georgia Tech attracts talent across the world and our researchers collaborate with many international institutions and faculty. With the Asian expansion of CIC, we are creating a competition where global teams can tackle global challenges, showcasing meaningful innovations which align with IPaT’s people-centered research.”

During his most recent and very tightly scheduled Asian innovation competition roadshow tour this spring, Best visited Sun Yat-sen and Yuan Ze University in Taiwan; Universiti Tenaga Nasional, Universiti Malaya, Multimedia University, and Universiti Putra in Malaysia; and King Mongkut's University of Technology North Bangkok in Thailand.

All of these universities were excited to partner with Georgia Tech and be among the first southeast Asian anchor universities to help sponsor and support the competition according to Best who is also a professor in the School of Interactive Computing.

Best was specifically seeking to identify faculty fellows at each university who would be responsible for advertising the CIC Asia opportunity among students at their university, encouraging team submissions, while also providing advice and mentorship to participating student teams.

As added support, the Shenzhen Georgia Tech Education Foundation is helping to organize this year’s competition with the assistance of Shelton Chan, managing director of the foundation.

CIC semi-finalists will receive travel support to attend a gala competition on December 7th in Taiwan. The finalist will go on to receive travel support to visit innovation events and engage with entrepreneurship programs at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. In addition, the semi-finalist teams will receive $1,000 while the finalist team will receive $2,000 to help launch their ideas.

Detailed information about this year’s Asian Convergence Innovation Competition can be found here: https://research.gatech.edu/ipat/cic

To stay informed by global experts as it plans potential policies on the subject, the WHO has created the Technical Advisory Group on Social Connection (TAG-SC). The 20-member committee will serve as an advisory body to guide the WHO on how it can increase political visibility, measure the extent of the problem, and identify effective interventions.

Munmun De Choudhury, an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing, is one of three U.S. experts on the internationally diverse committee.

De Choudhury is renowned for her research on the role of social media and how it shapes and influences mental health. She will serve a two-year term on the advisory group, providing insight to the TAG-SC on how social media and other technologies can affect loneliness and social connection.

“TAGs are the highest level of technical advisors at WHO and are noted to wield significant power as an independent body in shaping evidence-based policies and reforms on issues threatening global health,” De Choudhury said. 

“My involvement will center around how social media use relates to mental health and well-being outcomes, spanning varied populations, platforms, and cultural contexts, including the Global North and the Global South.” 

The advisory group’s findings will be part of a report that the WHO shares with its member states and partners. The report could guide relevant discussions within the United Nations General Assembly.

“We’re thinking about this question on a global stage, and an organization like WHO can help make this a global focus,” she said. “It’s an issue that is of significance everywhere in the world.”

The WHO estimates that loneliness and social isolation can increase the risk of mortality by 14-32%, which is on par with other well-known risk factors such as smoking and excessive drinking. The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the problem.

“The harmful effects of loneliness are not just harmful mentally, but there are physical health aspects,” De Choudhury said. “Studies have shown that people who felt lonely have shorter life spans than those who felt supported. 

“There is an increased risk of things like cardiovascular disease or stroke, and suicide rates are also higher. To ensure our society wants to feel good and healthy, we must tackle this as a problem.”

The TAG-SC will advise the Secretariat of the WHO Commission on Social Connection, which comprises two co-chairs and nine commissioners tasked with making the harms of social isolation and loneliness a global health priority.

De Choudhury said the first step for TAG-SC is to measure the global impact of loneliness. They will do this by developing culturally aware measurement tools to assess the problem in different parts of the world. The process will inform any research, data collection initiatives, or interventions WHO may recommend.

“To take on this challenge, we must figure out the extent of the problem,” she said. “Before we can collect any data or identify potential mitigation strategies, we need to know what we should be measuring, and that’s where this committee plays a role.”

This recognition is the second major committee appointment De Choudhury has received in the last two years. She recently advised the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) on a 250-page report in December detailing social media’s impact on the health of adolescents and children.
 

Photo by Terence Rushin/College of Computing.

It’s a complex issue that is, unfortunately, awash in misunderstanding and misinformation. What’s more, according to Richard DeMillo, professor and founder of the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP) at Georgia Tech, there is a tendency in technology fields to hyperfocus on technical problems at the expense of complex social realities. “There are famous mathematicians who trained their students to not worry about the real world,” DeMillo says. “But the real world has a way of intruding.”

As a new dean at Georgia Tech in the early 2000s, DeMillo saw voting technology burst into national headlines after the highly contested presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Congress authorized billions of dollars for states to purchase voting machines, with little to no oversight, and Georgia’s secretary of state was one of the biggest spenders of these federal funds in an attempt to create what DeMillo remembers as “an unambiguously unbiased way of voting.” DeMillo and his cybersecurity colleagues at Georgia Tech put this idea to the test. “It didn’t take much to hack a voting machine in 2002,” he says.

DeMillo has since developed the Safe and Secure Elections research group, an interdisciplinary team from computer science, systems engineering, cognitive science, and international affairs that works on election security in the U.S. and abroad.

Read more about Georgia Tech's support of this public interest technology (PIT) >>

READ MORE >>

Using ultrasound imaging technology coupled with a custom-built guidance tool, they invented a guidance system to help physicians navigate needles into the spine accurately and safely. In 2020, they were awarded a Phase I grant from the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research program, followed by a Phase II grant in 2021.

Ethos Medical’s co-founders Cassidy Wang, CEO, and Lucas Muller, CTO, personally oversaw the study held in the Technology Square Research Building lab space, working with physicians from local hospitals to better understand the human factors of their novel device.

The study was designed and moderated by Maureen Carroll and Stephen Jones of Creature, an award-winning industrial design firm based in Atlanta.

“Creature and our engineering partner, Enginuity Works, are working to improve the design, human factors, and usability of the system. By using the L[ux] Lab and bringing in emergency room doctors, we can observe physicians using the system and evaluate how well our system integrates with their work process,” said Carroll, founder of Creature.

Several Georgia Tech students from the SimTigrate Design Lab were also present, gaining hands-on experience with the planning and execution of such a study.

Part of the study’s goals are to assess how emergency room clinicians may adapt their existing workflow for performing lumbar punctures to one that incorporates this new needle guidance system while considering realistic procedural and safety constraints. A second goal is to evaluate the ability of clinicians to accomplish specific tasks that require interaction with the user interfaces of the system and identify interfaces and interactions that they perceive to be unintuitive or difficult to perform.

The L[ux] Lab, part of the SimTigrate Design Lab space, is an interdisciplinary research lab using evidence-based design to improve the medical experience for patients and providers. SimTigrate – combining concepts of simulation and integration – grew out of the Healthy Environments Research Group which involved Georgia Tech and Emory University with the goal of improving healthcare outcomes. The lab is affiliated with the Georgia Tech College of Design and is led by Jennifer DuBose, executive director of the SimTigrate Design Lab and principal research associate in the College of Design.

“We’re fortunate that the L[ux] Lab’s simulated clinical environment is so conducive to medical device usability testing, and we’re grateful for all the support shown by Jennifer and the rest of the folks at SimTigrate,” said Wang, CEO of Ethos Medical. “We’ve already begun making improvements to address the friction points discovered during the clinicians’ hands-on interactions. We’re also seeing that many of these practitioners are excited about the capabilities our device brings to the point of care, both for lumbar punctures and beyond!”

How do we understand, at a large scale, ways to make it easier for consumers to have confidence in public infrastructure? That is a major issue holding back electrification for many consumer segments.

- Omar Asensio, Associate Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology and Climate Fellow, Harvard Business School | Director, Data Science & Policy Lab

Omar Asensio, associate professor in the School of Public Policy and director of the Data Science and Policy Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his team have been working to solve this trust issue using the Microsoft CloudHub partnership resources. Asensio is also currently a visiting fellow with the Institute for the Study of Business in Global Society at the Harvard Business School.

The CloudHub partnership gave the Asensio team access to Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI to sift through vast amounts of data collected from different sources to identify relevant connections. Asensio’s team needed to know if AI could understand purchaser sentiment as negative within a population with an internal lingo outside of the general consumer population. Early results yielded little. The team then used specific example data collected from EV enthusiasts to train the AI for a sentiment classification accuracy that now exceeds that of human experts and data parsed from government-funded surveys.

The use of trained AI promises to expedite industry response to consumer sentiment at a much lower cost than previously possible. “What we’re doing with Azure is a lot more scalable,” Asensio said. “We hit a button, and within five to 10 minutes, we had classified all the U.S. data. Then I had my students look at performance in Europe, with urban and non-urban areas. Most recently, we aggregated evidence of stations across East and Southeast Asia, and we used machine learning to translate the data in 72 detected languages.”

We are excited to see how access to compute and AI models is accelerating research and having an impact on important societal issues. Omar's research sheds new light on the gaps in electric vehicle infrastructure and AI enables them to effectively scale their analysis not only in the U.S. but globally.

- Elizabeth Bruce, Director, Technology for Fundamental Rights, Microsoft

Asensio's pioneering work illustrates the interdisciplinary nature of today’s research environment, from machine learning models predicting problems to assisting in improving EV infrastructure. The team is planning on applying the technique to datasets next, to address access concerns and reduce the number of “charging deserts.” The findings could lead to the creation of policies that help in the adoption of EVs in infrastructure-lacking regions for a true automotive electrification revolution and long-term environmental sustainability in the U.S.

- Christa M. Ernst

Source Paper: Reliability of electric vehicle charging infrastructure: A cross-lingual deep learning approach - ScienceDirect

The Georgia Tech Rural Computer Science Initiative offers co-teaching lessons prepared by Georgia Tech professors. The program offers virtual classes in computer science to help develop career pathways by exposing high school students to critical areas such as coding, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, sensors, and data visualization. The program is funded by the Georgia General Assembly.

The initiative, launched in 2022, includes 16 school districts, 19 high schools, and has taught 1,329 students. Continued growth of the program is expected in 2024 as the number of districts participating will grow to 24 school districts.

The program is run by Lizanne DeStefano, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing (CEISMC), and Leigh McCook, director with the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). There are now thirteen Georgia Tech employees supporting the program across CEISMC, GTRI, and IPaT.

The meeting was designed to gather feedback and envision future directions to make the program even more successful.

The seven selected Georgia Tech students for IPaT’s 2024 summer research internship program, and projects, and their research mentors are:

• Sameer Arora, a computer science sophomore, who will work with Peter Presti, senior research scientist, on the prolonged exposure therapy iOS mobile app.
• Siddharth Jain, undergraduate student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
• Seongjin Kim, an electrical engineering sophomore, who will work with Celeste Mason, research scientist, on a passive haptic learning and rehabilitation project.
• Nathan Lin, a computational media senior, who will work with Peter Presti and Brian Jones, principal research scientist, on the Aware Home smart bathroom project.
• Grace Littler, an architecture undergraduate, who will work with Jennifer DuBose, executive director of the SimTigrate Design Lab. The SimTigrate Design Lab is an interdisciplinary research lab using evidence-based design to improve the medical experience for patients and providers.
• Matthew Perry, a computer engineering junior, will work with the Aware Home researching gait speed and the smart bathroom.
• Shreya Sasmal, a computational media junior, who will be working with Kala Jordan, research scientist, and Maribeth Coleman, director of research for IPaT, on an augmented reality/artificial intelligence project. 

“We are pleased to be able to offer this fellowship program to the people of Liberia,” said Steven McLaughlin, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs. “The value of a Georgia Tech degree is well-documented and programs such as this one help us deliver on our commitment to empower people of all backgrounds and stages of life to learn and contribute to technological and human progress.”

Michael Best, executive director of IPaT, made the announcement during a luncheon hosted at Georgia Tech on May 11. Joseph N. Boakai, the 26th president of the Republic of Liberia, attended along with a Liberian delegation and representatives from the University Consortium for Liberia (UCL). The UCL provides scholarships, facilitates student exchange programs, study abroad opportunities, and service-learning initiatives between Liberia and partner organizations worldwide. This was President Boakai’s first official visit to the U.S. since becoming president in January.

“Education is the key to building a successful nation, and Georgia Tech is making great research and academic contributions to the Republic of Liberia and to the world,” said President Boakai. “The OMSCS fellowship program will provide the people of Liberia with an additional opportunity to benefit from this relationship and help advance our country.”

The OMSCS program, where coursework is done asynchronously, is one of Tech’s most successful global degree programs and is designed for students seeking a top-ranked degree with the flexibility to fit their studies around work and family commitments.

The purpose of the president’s visit was to thank assembled UCL members for their partnership in Liberia’s post-conflict development. In addition to Georgia Tech leadership, UCL members from Clark Atlanta University, Kennesaw State University, Fort Valley State University, Savannah State University, and the University of Georgia were also in attendance, along with Cynthia Blandford, UCL president.

Best, who also serves as a professor with Tech’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and School of Interactive Computing, has a longstanding relationship with Liberia. His involvement began in 2005, just two years after the end of their civil war. His research focuses on information and communication technologies for social, economic, and political advancement. In Liberia, he has partnered in the development of their national information and communications technology and telecommunications policy, created and deployed technology-focused workforce development programs, outfitted computer facilities for public sector units, helped found the iLab Liberia technology and innovation hub, and developed novel digital systems to support that country’s post-conflict healing and reconciliation.

“President Boakai’s visit to Georgia Tech, just four months into his administration, underscores our deep ties and lasting partnership,” said Best. “These new OMSCS fellowships were received with remarkable enthusiasm, demonstrating that the relationship between the Republic of Liberia and Georgia Tech continues to flourish.”

“It was an uncertain time for all of us,” said Yeo. “This loss changed my focus.” 

For Yeo, thoughts and dreams of designing cars for Hyundai in Korea turned instead toward medicine. The shock of his father going from no signs of illness to gone forever developed into a quest for medical answers that might keep other families from experiencing the pain and loss his family did — or at least making it less likely to happen.  

Yeo’s own research and schooling in college pointed out a big problem when it comes to issues with sleep and how our bodies’ systems perform — data. He became determined to invent a way to give medical doctors better information that would allow them to spot a problem like his father’s before it became life-threatening. 

His answer: a type of wearable sleep data system. Now very close to being commercially available, Yeo’s device comes after years of working on the materials and electronics for an easy-to-wear, comfortable mask that can gather data about sleep over multiple days or even weeks, allowing doctors to catch sporadic heart problems or other issues. Different from some of the bulky devices with straps and cords currently available for at-home heart monitoring, it offers the bonuses of ease of use and comfort, ensuring little to no alteration to users’ bedtime routine or wear. This means researchers can collect data from sleep patterns that are as close to normal sleep as possible.  

“Most of the time now, gathering sleep data means the patient must come to a lab or hospital for sleep monitoring. Of course, it’s less comfortable than home, and the devices patients must wear make it even less so. Also, the process is expensive, so it’s rare to get multiple nights of data,” says Audrey Duarte, University of Texas human memory researcher.  

Duarte has been working with Yeo on this system for more than 10 years. She says there are so many mental and physical health outcomes tied to sleep that good, long-term data has the potential to have tremendous impact. 

“The results we’ve seen are incredibly encouraging, related to many things —from heart issues to areas I study more closely like memory and Alzheimer’s,” said Duarte. 

Yeo’s device may not have caught the arrhythmia that caused his father’s heart attack, but nights or weeks of data would have made effective medical intervention much more likely.  

Inspired by his own family’s loss, Yeo’s life’s work has become a tool of hope for others.  

A team of researchers from the College of Computing at Georgia Tech has developed a framework for assessing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs).

Ph.D. students Mohit Chandra and Yiqiao (Ahren) Jin are the co-lead authors of the paper Better to Ask in English: Cross-Lingual Evaluation of Large Language Models for Healthcare Queries. 

Their paper’s findings reveal a gap between LLMs and their ability to answer health-related questions. Chandra and Jin point out the limitations of LLMs for users and developers but also highlight their potential. 

Their XLingEval framework cautions non-English speakers from using chatbots as alternatives to doctors for advice. However, models can improve by deepening the data pool with multilingual source material such as their proposed XLingHealth benchmark.     

“For users, our research supports what ChatGPT’s website already states: chatbots make a lot of mistakes, so we should not rely on them for critical decision-making or for information that requires high accuracy,” Jin said.   

“Since we observed this language disparity in their performance, LLM developers should focus on improving accuracy, correctness, consistency, and reliability in other languages,” Jin said. 

Using XLingEval, the researchers found chatbots are less accurate in Spanish, Chinese, and Hindi compared to English. By focusing on correctness, consistency, and verifiability, they discovered: 

• Correctness decreased by 18% when the same questions were asked in Spanish, Chinese, and Hindi. 
• Answers in non-English were 29% less consistent than their English counterparts. 
• Non-English responses were 13% overall less verifiable. 

XLingHealth contains question-answer pairs that chatbots can reference, which the group hopes will spark improvement within LLMs.  

The HealthQA dataset uses specialized healthcare articles from the popular healthcare website Patient. It includes 1,134 health-related question-answer pairs as excerpts from original articles.  

LiveQA is a second dataset containing 246 question-answer pairs constructed from frequently asked questions (FAQs) platforms associated with the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH).  

For drug-related questions, the group built a MedicationQA component. This dataset contains 690 questions extracted from anonymous consumer queries submitted to MedlinePlus. The answers are sourced from medical references, such as MedlinePlus and DailyMed.   

In their tests, the researchers asked over 2,000 medical-related questions to ChatGPT-3.5 and MedAlpaca. MedAlpaca is a healthcare question-answer chatbot trained in medical literature. Yet, more than 67% of its responses to non-English questions were irrelevant or contradictory.  

“We see far worse performance in the case of MedAlpaca than ChatGPT,” Chandra said. 

“The majority of the data for MedAlpaca is in English, so it struggled to answer queries in non-English languages. GPT also struggled, but it performed much better than MedAlpaca because it had some sort of training data in other languages.” 

Ph.D. student Gaurav Verma and postdoctoral researcher Yibo Hu co-authored the paper. 

Jin and Verma study under Srijan Kumar, an assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering, and Hu is a postdoc in Kumar’s lab. Chandra is advised by Munmun De Choudhury, an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing. 
 
The team will present their paper at The Web Conference, occurring May 13-17 in Singapore. The annual conference focuses on the future direction of the internet. The group’s presentation is a complimentary match, considering the conference's location.  

English and Chinese are the most common languages in Singapore. The group tested Spanish, Chinese, and Hindi because they are the world’s most spoken languages after English. Personal curiosity and background played a part in inspiring the study. 

“ChatGPT was very popular when it launched in 2022, especially for us computer science students who are always exploring new technology,” said Jin. “Non-native English speakers, like Mohit and I, noticed early on that chatbots underperformed in our native languages.” 

School of Interactive Computing communications officer Nathan Deen and School of Computational Science and Engineering communications officer Bryant Wine contributed to this report.

“The actions are similar, but the choices and outcomes are very different because of the dynamic changes they’re making with the other person,” says Brian Magerko, Regents’ Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication. “It’s a thing that humans do all the time, and computers don’t do with us at all.”

Welcome to the next frontier of artificial intelligence (AI) — not just generating but collaborating in real-time.

Magerko and his colleagues, Georgia Tech research scientist Milka Trajkova and Kennesaw State University Associate Professor of Dance Andrea Knowlton, are putting a collaborative AI system they’ve developed to the ultimate test: the world’s first collaborative AI dance performance.

Dance Partner

LuminAI is an interactive system that allows participants to engage in collaborative movement improvisation with an AI virtual dance partner projected on a nearby screen or wall. LuminAI analyzes participant movements and improvises responses informed by memories of past interactions with people. In other words, LuminAI learns how to dance by dancing with us.

The National Science Foundation-supported project began about 12 years ago in a lab and became an art installation and public demo. LuminAI has since moved into a different phase as a creative collaborator and education tool in a dance studio.

“We’re looking at the role LuminAI can play in dance education. As far as we’re aware, this is the first implemented version of an AI dancer in a dance studio,” says Trajkova, who was a professional ballet dancer before becoming a research scientist on the project.

To prepare LuminAI to collaborate with dancers, the research team started by studying pairs of improvisational dancers.

“We’re trying to understand how non-verbal, collaborative creativity occurs,” Knowlton says. “We start by trying to understand influencing factors that are perceived as contributing to improvisational success between two artists. Through that understanding, we applied those criteria to an AI system so it can have a similar experience with co-creative success.”

“We’re working on a creative arc,” adds Trajkova. “So instead of the AI agent just generating movements in response to the last thing that happened, we’re working to track and understand the dynamics of creative ideas across time as a continuous flow, rather than isolated instances of reaction.”

Students from Knowlton’s improvisational dance class at Kennesaw State spent two months of their spring semester working routinely with the LuminAI dancer and recording their impressions and experiences. One of the purposes the team discovered is that LuminAI serves as a third view for dancers and allows them to try ideas out with the system before trying it out with a partner.

The classroom experiment will culminate in a public performance on May 3 at Kennesaw State’s Marietta Dance Theater featuring the students performing with the LuminAI dancer. As far as the research team is aware the event is the world’s first collaborative AI dance performance.

While not all the dancers embraced having an AI collaborator, some of those who were skeptical at first left the experience more open to the possibility of collaborating with AI, Knowlton says. Regardless of their feelings toward working with AI, Knowlton says she believes the dancers gained valuable skills in working with specialized technology, especially as dance performances evolve to include more interactive media.

Refined Movement

So, what’s next for LuminAI? The project represents at least two possible paths for its learnings. The first includes continued exploration about how AI systems can be taught to cooperate and collaborate more like humans.

“With the advent of generative AI these past few years, it’s been really clear how great a need there is for this sort of social cognition,” says Magerko. “One of the things we’re going to be getting off the ground is sense-making with large language models. How do you collaborate with an AI system – rather than just making text or images, they’ll be able to make with us.”

The second involves the body movements LuminAI has been cataloging and analyzing over the years. Dance exemplifies highly refined motor skills, often exhibiting a level of detail surpassing that found in various athletic disciplines or physical therapy. While the tools designed to capture these intricate movements—through cameras and AI—are still nascent, the potential for harnessing this granular data is significant, Trajkova says.

That exploration begins on May 30 with a two-day summit being held at Georgia Tech to discuss its application for transforming performance athletics, with interdisciplinary participants in dance, computer vision, biomechanics, psychology, and human-computer interaction from Georgia Tech, Emory, KSU, Harvard, Royal Ballet in London, and Australian Ballet.

“It’s about understanding AI's role in augmenting training, promoting wellness as well as diving deep in decoding the artistry of human movements. How can we extract insights about the quality of athlete’s movements so we can help develop and enhance their own unique nuances?” Trajkova says.

Peeler is a key team member supporting Georgia Tech’s Rural Computer Science Initiative launched in 2022. This initiative offers co-teaching lessons prepared by Georgia Tech faculty and offers virtual classes in computer science to expose Georgia high school students to a variety of technical topics and career pathways.

The program was conceived by Georgia Tech’s Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing (CEISMC) and the Georgia Tech Research Institute, specifically STEM@GTRI, to create and launch a pilot program for rural Georgia school districts with support from Georgia’s legislators to bring technical knowledge directly into high school classrooms.

“I’ve created and taught Java professional development courses for high school teachers to learn and use in their classes,” said Peeler. “Part of my job is to be on call for instructors who need me to troubleshoot problems. In addition, we typically have a week of in-class instruction where I virtually beam into the class to teach directly, then we introduce a project for them to try and tackle on their own based from the in-class material that we taught. I really like what I’m doing for Georgia high schools.”

Peeler has also created an instructional module introducing students to robotic programming. Students develop and deploy code using the MakeCode environment which is an online platform and toolset developed by Microsoft that enables users, especially beginners and students, to learn programming and computer science concepts through blocked-based coding.

Through this initiative and with the help of Peeler, Georgia Tech is empowering the next generation of tech-savvy leaders fostering interest in STEM fields and opening doors to exciting career opportunities.

“I'm extremely proud to be a part of this initiative and kickstarting the next generation of high school students in the computer science realm,” said Peeler.

These Georgia Tech faculty members will lead one of the following research areas for IPaT: global health equity and wellbeing; just, resilient, and informed communities; responsible and ethical technologies; and arts, expression, and creative technologies. They hold positions in colleges and centers across campus, and will be instrumental in promoting transdisciplinary collaborative research and engagements.

BACKGROUND: In the fall of 2023, the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) went through a strategic planning exercise and redefined its research concentrations to better align with its values. These new concentrations are also aspirational, encouraging IPaT researchers and academics to engage in new research domains that IPaT is uniquely equipped for generating new innovation. IPaT is one of Georgia Tech’s ten interdisciplinary research institutes (IRIs) that bring together researchers from different disciplines to address topics of strategic importance to Georgia Tech. 
 
IPaT RESEARCH INITIATIVE LEAD DETAILS:
 
1. “Global Health Equity and Wellbeing” research will be led by Rudy Gleason.
Research concentration: From pediatrics to aging, we are protecting health both locally and worldwide. IPaT's continuum of healthcare research is working to promote and enable vibrant and lifelong physical and mental health. Accomplished scholars and clinicians work together to transform healthcare delivery systems by creating novel and easily accessible health and wellness technologies. IPaT has led breakthroughs in health information technology, approaches for increasing patient engagement and treatment adherence, clinical process improvements, and new healthcare delivery knowledge.
Bio: Rudolph (Rudy) L. Gleason is a professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering and School of Biomedical Engineering in the College of Engineering. Gleason’s research program has two key and distinct research aims. The first research aim is to quantify the link between biomechanics, mechanobiology, and tissue growth and remodeling in diseases of the vasculature and other soft tissues. The second research aim is to translate engineering innovation to combat global health disparities and foster sustainable development in low-resource settings around the world.

2. “Just, Resilient, and Informed Communities” research will be led by Danielle Willkens.
Research concentration: Discovering strategies that benefit and inform communities from all walks of life. IPaT’s work in this area focuses on the daily lives of communities – how they live, work, and play. We are finding innovative approaches to shaping sustainable cities with research that thinks globally while acting locally. We're examining the transformative role of technology in transportation, civic engagement, and disaster recovery focusing on novel communication and information technologies to aid communities.
Bio: Danielle Willkens is an associate professor in the School of Architecture in the College of Design. Willkens, Assoc. AIA, FRSA, LEED AP BD+C, is a practicing designer, researcher, and FAA Certified Remote Pilot who is particularly interested in bringing architectural engagement to diverse audiences through interactive projects. Her experiences in practice and research include design/build projects, public installations, and on-site investigations as well as extensive archival work in several countries. She was an inaugural Mellon History Teaching Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, exploring the project “From Plantation to Protest: Visualizing Cultural Landscapes of Conflict in the American South.” She currently has several research, documentation, and visualization projects in Selma, AL and Atlanta, GA supported by National Park Service’s African American Civil Rights Grants. She is also leading efforts on heritage documentation and sustainable tourism, alongside a number of collaborators, at the Penn Center, SC, Valencia, Spain, and Petra, Jordan.

3. “Responsible and Ethical Technologies” research will be led by Allen Hyde.
Research concentration: Evaluating potential consequences to mitigate negative effects. IPaT is shaping the human-technology frontier by growing human capabilities at every level. We're exploring new ideas in user experiences that foster creativity, stimulate learning and enable productive collaboration. Through this initiative, we're researching a variety of wearable computing, assistive, augmented reality, and gaming technologies. In addition, to insuring the alignment of these and other future technologies with responsible and ethical practices.
Bio: Allen T. Hyde is an associate professor in the School of History and Sociology in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. Hyde is a quantitative scholar whose main research areas are stratification and inequality, urban sociology, work and occupations, climate and disaster resilience, and immigration. He is currently conducting research on the effects of race/ethnicity and immigration status on homeownership, social and demographic change in Clarkston, GA (known as the most diverse square mile in America), and Principal Investigator for the Youth Advocacy for Resilience to Disasters Program research project funded by the National Science Foundation's Civic Innovation Challenge. He has also been Principal Investigator for a National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps) grant. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at the University of Connecticut and has published research articles in journals like Social Science Research, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Social Currents, Environmental Sociology, Social Indicators Research, City & Community, and Sociological Perspectives.

4. “Arts, Expression, and Creative Technologies” research will be led by Lisa Marks.
Research concentration: Using advanced technology to enhance creative processes, artistic expression, and innovation. Through our research, IPaT is merging physical and digital worlds with innovative creative ideas. The creative uses of technology are endless. We seek to identify, nurture, and grow creative and artistic ideas which may unlock new processes, inspire practical solutions with outside the box thinking, or simply lead to new forms of art expression.
Bio: Lisa Marks is an assistant professor in the School of Industrial Design in the College of Design. Marks is a designer and educator teaching studio courses in the undergraduate and graduate programs at Georgia Tech. Her current research focuses on methods of combining endangered and traditional handcraft with algorithmic modeling in order to produce new modes of production. She has a Master of Industrial Design from Parsons School of Design and worked in New York for clients including Google, Nike, and Swarovski.

Clark is the lead principal investigator for the Coastal Equity and Resilience (CEAR) Hub. This is a project that joins community organizations, local governments, and educational institutions together to develop the knowledge, tools, and strategies that make our communities more resilient. CEAR Hub partners work alongside members of vulnerable communities to create fair and just solutions to climate challenges through community-led research, training, and outreach.

Assistant Professor Christopher MacLellan thinks teachable artificial intelligence (AI) agents are uniquely suited for this role and make ideal teammates for video gamers.

With the help of funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, MacLellan hopes to prove his theory with a conversational, task-performing agent he co-engineered called the Verbal Apprentice Learner (VAL).

“You need the ability to adapt to what your teammates are doing to be an effective teammate,” MacLellan said. “We’re exploring this capability for AI agents in the context of video games.” 

Unlike generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, VAL uses an interactive task-learning approach. 

“VAL learns how you do things in the way you want them done,” MacLellan said. “When you tell it to do something, it will do it the way you taught it instead of some generic random way from the internet.”

A key difference between VAL and a chatbot is that VAL can perceive and act within the gaming world. A chatbot, like ChatGPT, only perceives and acts within the chat dialog.

MacLellan immersed VAL into an open-sourced, simplified version of the popular Nintendo cooperative video game Overcooked to discover how well the agent can function as a teammate. In Overcooked, up to four players work together to prepare dishes in a kitchen while earning points for every completed order.

How Fast Can Val Learn?

In a study with 12 participants, MacLellan found that users could often correctly teach VAL new tasks with only a few examples.

First, the user must teach VAL how to play the game. Knowing that a single human error could compromise results, MacLellan designed three precautionary features:

• When VAL receives a command such as "cook an onion," it asks clarifying questions to understand and confirm its task. As VAL continues to learn, clarification prompts decrease.
• An “undo” button to ensure users can reverse an errant command.
• VAL contains GPT subcomponents to interpret user input, allowing it to adapt to ambiguous commands and typos. The GPT subcomponents drive changes in VAL’s task knowledge, which it uses to perform tasks without additional guidance.

The participants in MacLellan’s study used these features to ensure VAL learned the tasks correctly. 

The high volume of prompts creates a more tedious experience. Still, MacLellan said it provides detailed data on system performance and user experience. That insight should make designing a more seamless experience in future versions of VAL possible.

The prompts also require the AI to be explainable.

“When VAL learns something, it uses the language model to label each node in the task knowledge graph that the system constructs,” MacLellan said. “You can see what it learned and how it breaks tasks down into actions.”

Beyond Gaming

MacLellan’s Teachable AI Lab is devoted to developing AI that inexperienced users can train.

“We are trying to come up with a more usable system where anyone, including people with limited expertise, could come in and interact with the agent and be able to teach it within just five minutes of interacting with it for the first time,” he said.

His work caught the attention of the Department of Defense, which awarded MacLellan multiple grants to fund several of his projects, including VAL. The possibilities of how the DoD could use VAL, on and off the battlefield, are innumerable.

“(The DoD) envisions a future in which people and AI agents jointly work together to solve problems,” MacLellan said. “You need the ability to adapt to what your teammates are doing to be an effective teammate.

“We look at the dynamics of different teaming circumstances and consider what are the right ways to team AI agents with people. The key hypothesis for our project is agents that can learn on the fly and adapt to their users will make better teammates than those that are pre-trained like GPT.”

Design Your Own Agent

MacLellan is co-organizing a gaming agent design competition sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 2024 Conference on Games in Milan, Italy.

The Dice Adventure Competition invites participants to design their own AI agent to play a multi-player, turn-based dungeon crawling game or to play the game as a human teammate. The competition this month and in July offers $1,000 in prizes for players and agent developers in the top three teams.

Ph.D. students Yasmine Belghith and Atefeh Mahdavi co-led a study in a museum setting that observed how middle schoolers interact with the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT. 

“It’s important for museums, especially science museums, to start incorporating these kinds of exhibits about AI and about using AI so the general population can have that avenue to interact with it and transfer that knowledge to everyday tools,” Belghith said.

Belghith and Mahdavi conducted their study with nine focus groups of 24 students at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. The team used the findings to inform their design of AI exhibits that the museum could display as early as 2025. 

Belghith is a Ph.D. student in human-centered computing. Her advisor is Assistant Professor Jessica Roberts in the School of Interactive Computing. Magerko advises Mahdavi, a Ph.D. student in digital media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication.

Belghith and Mahdavi presented a paper about their study in May at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2024 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Their work is part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant dedicated to fostering AI literacy among middle schoolers in informal environments.

Expanding Accessibility

While there are existing efforts to reach students in the classroom, the researchers believe AI education is most accessible in informal learning environments like museums.

“There’s a need today for everybody to have some sort of AI literacy,” Belghith said. “Many middle schoolers will not be taking computer science courses or pursuing computer science careers, so there needs to be interventions to teach them what they should know about AI.”

The researchers found that most of the middle schoolers interacted with ChatGPT to either test its knowledge by prompting it to answer questions or socialize with it by having human-like conversations. 

Others fit the mold of “content explorers.” They did not engage with the AI aspect of ChatGPT and focused more on the content it produced.

Mahdavi said regardless of their approach, students would get “tunnel vision” in their interactions instead of exploring more of the AI’s capabilities.

“If they go in a certain direction, they will continue to explore that,” Mahdavi said. “One thing we can learn from this is to nudge kids and show them there are other things you can do with AI tools or get them to think about it another way.”

The researchers also paid attention to what was missing in the students’ responses, which Mahdavi said was just as important as what they did talk about.

“None of them mentioned anything about ethics or what could be problematic about AI,” she said. “That told us there’s something they aren’t thinking about but should be. We take that into account as we think about future exhibits.”

Making an Impact

The researchers visited the Museum of Science and Industry June 1-2 to conduct the first trial run of three AI-based exhibits they’ve created. One of them is LuminAI, which was developed in Magerko’s Expressive Machinery Lab.

LuminAI is an interactive art installation that allows people to engage in collaborative movement with an AI dance partner. Georgia Tech and Kennesaw State recently held the first performance of AI avatars dancing with human partners in front of a live audience.

Duri Long, a former Georgia Tech Ph.D. student who is now an assistant professor at Northwestern University, designed the second exhibit. KnowledgeNet is an interactive tabletop exhibit in which visitors build semantic networks by adding different characteristics to characters that interact together.

The third exhibit, Data Bites, prompts users to build datasets of pizzas and sandwiches. Their selections train a machine-learning classifier in real time.

Belghith said the exhibits fostered conversations about AI between parents and children.

“The exhibit prototypes successfully engaged children in creative activities,” she said. “Many parents had to pull their kids away to continue their museum tour because the kids wanted more time to try different creations or dance moves.”

Nivedita Arora received the 2024 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Doctoral Dissertation Award during an awards ceremony on Saturday in San Francisco. Arora, an assistant professor at Northwestern University, is the first Georgia Tech alumna to win the award, which includes a prize of $20,000.

Arora was a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing during the 2022-2023 academic year. She also earned her Ph.D. in computer science and her master’s in human-computer interaction from Georgia Tech.

At Northwestern, she directs the VAK Sustainable Computing Lab, which re-envisions computing from a sustainability-first approach.

“The ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award is the most prestigious recognition for doctoral research in our field,” said Josiah Hester, an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing who mentored Arora during her postdoc. “The award is a testament to the recipient's exceptional contributions to the field of computing, marking them as a world-class leader and innovator.”

Arora creates sustainable computational materials that harvest energy from their surrounding environments and can be responsibly disposed of at the end of their life cycles. Under the advisement of Professor Thad Starner and former Georgia Tech Professor Gregory Abowd, she won the dissertation award for her work involving interactive sticky notes.

The interactive sticky notes perform computing tasks and allow wireless communication without battery dependency. 

Through her dissertation, Sustainable Interactive Wireless Stickers: From Materials to Devices on Applications, Arora demonstrated that interactive sticky notes can capture audio, store it as memory, and relay it to another location. For example, an Amazon Alexa user can communicate commands to Alexa without being nearby.

“With rising climate change and e-waste, it is imperative to build computing technologies with a sustainability-first approach,” Arora said. “My dissertation represents this core thinking. I am honored that ACM has recognized my research on sustainable computational materials. I am extremely grateful to my advisers, collaborators, friends, and family for their support.”

Her dissertation also earned Outstanding Dissertation recognition from Georgia Tech’s College of Computing in 2023. She also won the college’s 2022 Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant Award.

Arora was a finalist in the 2022 Fast Company Design Innovation Competition. In 2021, She won the ACM Gaetano Borriello Outstanding Ubiquitous Computing Student Award and was named an EECS Rising Star and a Foley Scholar.

The truth is, that future is already here. Most of us just didn’t notice.

Every time you unlock your smartphone or computer with a face scan or fingerprint. Every time your car alerts you that you’re straying from your lane or automatically adjusts your cruise control speed. Every time you ask Siri for directions or Alexa to turn on some music. Every time you start typing in the Google search box and suggestions or the outright answer to your question appear. Every time Netflix recommends what you should watch next.

All driven by AI. And all a regular part of most people’s days.

But what is “artificial intelligence”? What about “machine learning” and “algorithms”? How are they different and how do they work?

We asked two of the many Georgia Tech engineers working in these areas to help us understand the basic concepts so we’re all better prepared for the AI future — er, present.

Read the full crash course on the College of Engineering website.

This story was featured in the spring 2024 issue of Helluva Engineer magazine, produced biannually by the College of Engineering.

From safer roads to new fuel cell technology, semiconductor designs to restoring bodily functions, Georgia Tech engineers are capitalizing on the power of AI to quickly make predictions or see danger ahead.

Explore some of the ways we are using AI to create a better future on the College's website.

This story was featured in the spring 2024 issue of Helluva Engineer magazine, produced biannually by the College of Engineering.

Georgia Tech’s Office of the Executive Vice President for Research (EVPR) has announced a new Faculty Service and Development Fund (SD Fund) designed to cover up to 5% of salaries for research faculty who are funded 95% or more on sponsored support. The new SD Fund will take effect in August and is designed to cover individuals' time as they participate in service to the Institute and their research communities, develop new research programs, or engage in professional growth activities. 

Artec Leo is a wireless, handheld professional 3D scanner designed to make scanning easy and effortless. It allows students, engineers, product designers, CAD technicians, VFX artists, archeologists, game designers, and virtual reality app developers to create precise and workable 3D models out of a diverse range of physical objects and surfaces. The Artec Leo scanner captures an object as the user simply moves around the object as if filming a video. A 3D replica is built in real time on a display as the capture is occurring. 

“The Artec Leo is a great addition to our capabilities. It is one of those tools that ups your game on what kind of work you can do,” said Noah Posner, a research scientist in IPaT and manager of the Interactive Product Design Lab in the College of Design. “It is just so easy compared to other 3D scanners I have used in the past. It is fast, portable, and does a great job at capturing geometry. It is also fast and versatile enough to capture a scan of a person in instances where we are designing wearable devices.”

Additional equipment and upgrades are also being installed in the Craft Lab and its companion space, the Prototyping Lab:

• Bambu Lab X1E printer – This 3D printer excels in handling high-temperature materials for versatile and precise 3D printing. Its AI algorithm enhances print quality by rectifying initial layer flaws, ensuring consistent results. This printer supports various high-performance materials, making it ideal for both intricate prototypes and everyday items.
• Epilog Fusion Galvo Laser – This laser machine combines fast engraving and produces a variety of marks on metal including deep engraving, polished white marks, and deep black annealed etching. It makes an excellent companion and expansion to the existing capabilities of the Prototyping Lab’s 48” x 36” CO2 laser cutter from Epilog while sharing the same software workflow.
• Kniterate – This compact digital knitting machine turns digital designs into knitted garments automatically. It is a first-of-its-kind, fully automated knitting machine meant for desktop/small-scale use and makes these operations more accessible than traditional industrial machines.

Equipment Upgrade:

• Added a digital motor and encoder to the industrial leather stitcher – While the industrial equipment normally comes with a clutched motor that is difficult for new users to control, the lab has replaced it with a digital servo motor that can be run much slower without compromising the power benefits of industrial equipment. They also added a digital encoder, which ensures the needle always ends down in the material being stitched, allowing for precise control, and can be raised with the foot pedal instead of manually moving the handwheel. Those upgrades make the machine more user-friendly and easier to use.

“We are committed to the continuous improvement of IPaT’s Craft and Prototyping Labs, as spaces leveraged by the entirety of campus,” said Tim Trent, director of these spaces and IPaT faculty member. “From the Prototyping Lab’s inception in 2006 through the Craft Lab’s opening in 2022 and on to today, we are always looking to find ways to collaborate with and meet the needs of our users, whether they are individual researchers, student groups, or whole departments at Tech.”

The IPaT Craft Lab is located in the Technology Square Research Building, Room 225B. The IPaT Prototyping Lab is located on the basement level in Room S21. Equipment in the lab may be used for academic and research purposes across the entire Georgia Tech community. Contact the Craft Lab staff at craftlab@cc.gatech.edu or the Prototyping Lab staff at protolab@cc.gatech.edu.

Upol Ehsan is the first Georgia Tech graduate selected by BKC. As a fellow, he will contribute to its mission of exploring and understanding cyberspace, focusing on AI, social media, and university discourse.

Entering its 25th year, the BKC Harvard fellowship program addresses pressing issues and produces impactful research that influences academia and public policy. It offers a global perspective, a vibrant intellectual community, and significant funding and resources that attract top scholars and leaders.

The program is highly competitive and sought after by early career candidates and veteran academic and industry professionals. Cohorts hail from numerous backgrounds, including law, computer science, sociology, political science, neuroscience, philosophy, and media studies. 

“Having the opportunity to join such a talented group of people and working with them is a treat,” Ehsan said. “I’m looking forward to adding to the prismatic network of BKC Harvard and learning from the cohesively diverse community.”

While at Georgia Tech, Ehsan expanded the field of explainable AI (XAI) and pioneered a subcategory he labeled human-centered explainable AI (HCXAI). Several of his papers introduced novel and foundational concepts into that subcategory of XAI.

Ehsan works with Professor Mark Riedl in the School of Interactive Computing and the Human-centered AI and Entertainment Intelligence Lab.

Ehsan says he will continue to work on research he introduced in his 2022 paper The Algorithmic Imprint, which shows how the potential harm from algorithms can linger even after an algorithm is no longer used. His research has informed the United Nations’ algorithmic reparations policies and has been incorporated into the National Institute of Standards and Technology AI Risk Management Framework.

“It’s a massive honor to receive this recognition of my work,” Ehsan said. “The Algorithmic Imprint remains a globally applicable Responsible AI concept developed entirely from the Global South. This recognition is dedicated to the participants who made this work possible. I want to take their stories even further."

While at BKC Harvard, Ehsan will develop a taxonomy of potentially harmful AI effects after a model is no longer used. He will also design a process to anticipate these effects and create interventions. He said his work addresses an “accountability blindspot” in responsible AI, which tends to focus on potential harmful effects created during AI deployment.

Hoffman, an assistant professor in computer vision and IPaT faculty member, received a test of time award Thursday at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in Vienna, Austria, for a paper she co-authored in 2014.

Hays, an associate professor in computer vision and robotics and IPaT faculty member, will receive a test of time award next week at the 2024 SIGGRAPH conference in Denver for a paper he co-authored in 2012. SIGGRAPH is the official conference hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.

ICML, SIGGRAPH, and other computer science conferences recognize researchers whose work is at least 10 years old and has had a lasting impact since publication.

Read the full story from the College of Computing >>

The students’ 2024 summer research projects included:

• Grace Littler, a junior majoring in architecture, worked with Jennifer DuBose, executive director of the SimTigrate Design Lab. She helped gathered data for a NIH proposal from New Horizons, a group in Atlanta, studying sleep and environment issues. She also participated in research activities related to neurorehabilitation centers.
   
• Seongjin Kim, a sophomore majoring in electrical engineering, worked with Celeste Mason, research scientist at IPaT, and Thad Starner, professor in the School of Interactive Computing, on a passive haptic learning and rehabilitation project related to piano playing. 
  
  According to Kim, “playing musical instruments is beneficial for people's mental health and cognitive abilities, but it is also a time-consuming process. The Passive Haptic Learning (PHL) project aims to help people learn piano faster through wearable gloves that use actuator-caused haptic vibrations to stimulate the cutaneous sensory mechanoreceptors in the user's hands. This makes technical practice sessions more efficient as PHL gloves build up procedural memory, and it is a more efficient use of time as the learning process becomes passive, meaning that users may perform other tasks while wearing the gloves.”
  
  Over the summer, the PHL gloves transitioned from using wired connections to flexible PCBs to enhance the glove's electromechanical integrity, and the flexible PCB design and assembly procedure has been simplified. Moreover, an ergonomic form factor was developed to complement the new circuitry.
   
• Shreya Sasmal, a junior majoring in computational media, worked with Kala Jordan, research scientist in IPaT, and Maribeth Coleman, director of research for IPaT. Her project’s goal was to digitize instruction manuals focused on mechanical repair and maintenance to create a more efficient repair process and speed up knowledge transfer between workers.
   
• Nathan Lin, a senior majoring in computational media, worked with IPaT scientists Peter Presti, senior research scientist, and Brian Jones, senior research engineer, on the Aware Home smart bathroom project. Lin programmed and built a full-stack application that can report data of deployable smart toilet seats for occupational therapists to review data.
   
• Sameer Arora, a sophomore majoring in computer science, worked with Peter Presti, senior research scientist, and associate professor, Rosa Arriaga in the School of Interactive Computing, on a prolonged exposure therapy iOS mobile app. He programmed and built the Prolonged Exposure Collective Sensing System for PTSD on iOS which was already available on Android devices. This programming project was funded by the National Science Foundation.
   
• Siddharth Jain, a undergraduate student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, who worked with Matt Sanders, director of research computing and data at Georgia Tech. Jain architected “Control Point,” a smart interface between legacy operating system built devices and smart environments. Control Point is a component for secure data transfer between legacy devices and modern systems, acting as a bridge that ensures efficient data flow and compliance with industry standards.
   

• Matthew Perry, a junior majoring in computer engineering, worked with Brian Jones, senior research engineer, at the Aware Home. Perry previously worked for the Aware Home for five semesters as a student assistant. His summer research internship accomplishments were numerous

  He developed the third hardware revision of the Gait Speed Clinic Device from TechSage D3.3. The overall goal of this new printed circuit board was to reduce production time, reduce required experience, and reduce the cost of the system to allow for more clinics to access the device. 

  He also revised and setup the Aware Home's network infrastructure to allow the two main floors of the home to be isolated yet managed as one. This was implemented by using new network hardware that allowed for VLANs and more detailed firewall rules. All devices on the old network, as well as new devices, were moved to this new network. Smart home devices on this network are controlled and collect data through “Home Assistant” granting future researchers in the home greater access to device history.

  Additionally, he developed the Smart Bathroom's (TechSage D1.1) grab bar system to allow automated and manual movement via actuators. He implemented a button box for physical therapists to move the grab bars to the desired position. In the future, these positions can be saved for a voice command system to utilize.

“Congratulations to this year’s four winning research teams,” said Michael Best, executive director of IPaT. “These projects explore sustainability, AI, education, artistic learning, and critical computing. They all advance IPaT’s goal to develop technologies that empower people from all walks of life.”

Congratulations to these winning project teams:

Proposal Title: Making Sustainability Data Public on the Georgia Tech Library Media Bridge
Team Members: Yanni Loukissas, associate professor, School of Literature, Media and Communication; Emily Weigel, senior academic professional, School of Biological Sciences; Alison Valk, Jason Wright, and Charlie Bennett with the Georgia Tech Library; Steve Place, Jermaine Clonts, and Svetlana Sorok with the Georgia Tech Office of Sustainability.
Research Overview: Our research idea is to study the social effects of fostering creative, public experiences with real-time, sustainability-related data on campus with the long-term goal of learning what a resource-conscious campus community might look like. Our approach will be to develop an interactive data visualization prototype for the Georgia Tech Library Media Bridge that will visualize real-time water use data in 47 student housing buildings. This visualization will serve as an adaptable research instrument through which to explore the potential for public experiences with data. It will challenge student residents to reflect on and take practical steps to change the environmental footprint of the places where they live. This research project is co-funded with Georgia Tech's Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems.

Proposal title: Computational Design AI System to Empower Maker Educators
Team members: HyunJoo Oh, assistant professor, School of Industrial Design and School of Interactive Computing; Sehoon Ha, assistant professor, School of Interactive Computing; Sabrina Grossman, program director, Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing at Georgia Tech. 
Research overview: The rise of design and fabrication tools like 3D printers and microcontrollers has expanded maker education from K-12 to higher education. However, access remains a challenge, especially for underprivileged youth. Teachers often struggle to lead maker-centered activities due to a lack of design and engineering expertise, which particularly affects students in low-resource districts where school activities may be their only exposure to creative learning. To address this, we propose developing a web-based AI system that empowers teachers to lead kinetic design and engineering projects. Through participatory design with experienced teachers, the system will assist with project design and offer customized instructional guidance by identifying challenging steps and potential recovery solutions and adapting content to meet teachers’ needs.

Proposal title: Democratizing Creative Agency Through Interactive Technologies and Music Education
Team members: Moeiini Reilly, research technologist, GTRI, and human-centered computing Ph.D. student with the School of Interactive Computing; Paul Brancato, research engineer, GTRI; Nicole Brancato, composer and music educator.
Research overview: Artistic computing learning environments play a crucial role in promoting equity and inclusion in computing by offering diverse opportunities to learn computational thinking through culturally relevant programming. Despite advances in science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) education, there remains a significant gap in understanding how learners interact with and design creatively in these constructionist settings, as well as how the materiality of computational artifacts influences learning processes, meaning-making, and creative agency. This research seeks to build a framework for centering social and cultural dimensions of artistic learning within computational environments augmented by low-cost, technology-enhanced music education.

Proposal Title: Fostering the Landscape of “Critical Computing” at Georgia Tech
Team Members: Richmond Wong, assistant professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication; Heidi Biggs, assistant professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication; Carl DiSalvo, professor, School of Interactive Computing; Betsy DiSalvo, professor, School of Interactive Computing.
Research Overview: Critical computing interrogates the social values, normative orientations, and unintended consequences of computing applications, and it is quickly coming to occupy a central place in research and practice among Georgia Tech researchers and their larger research communities. We seek to build a transdisciplinary critical computing research community at Georgia Tech spanning computing, the social sciences, humanities, and related disciplines. Through a working group and symposium series, we will explore the methods, concepts, theories, history, funding, and evaluation of critical computing research. We will investigate approaches to critical computing research that foreground issues of social values and ethics, engage in just and equitable research approaches, explore new forms of communication and expression, and seek to pursue meaningful alternatives to the status quo.

The keynote speaker this year was Thomas Reardon, vice president and head of neural interfaces at Meta Reality Labs. Reardon is a highly regarded neuroscientist and entrepreneur who founded CTRL-labs which was acquired by Meta (Facebook) in 2019. He currently leads a team of computational neuroscientists and biotech engineers working to connect neurons to machines via a novel non-invasive neural interface technology. Reardon’s talk topic for this year’s annual Industry Innovation Day was “Consumer Neural Interfaces: View from Meta Reality Labs.” In addition to providing an informative lecture about neural technology, he briefly displayed some of the capabilities of his Meta team’s wrist-mounted, non-invasive device that was able to translate neuro hand activity into its corresponding robotic hand movements.

“Our undergraduate degree in neuroscience is one of the Institute’s most popular degrees,” said Julia Kubanek, vice president for interdisciplinary research at Georgia Tech, who gave several introductory remarks. “The neuroscience area integrates many disciplines across campus such as the arts, humanities, social science, computer science, engineering, business, design, and the basic sciences and is a great example of the true integration of interdisciplinary research in many forms across Georgia Tech. We are particularly grateful for the participation today of companies and other organizations that collaborate with the Georgia Tech community of researchers.”

Leigh McCook, interim executive director of IPaT, emphasized the need to have dialogue and conversations between industry partners and community partners with Georgia Tech researchers to develop supportive research projects and create greater impact in the area of the human technology frontier.

“The neuro space and the IPaT space are natural partners for each other,” said Chris Rozell, professor and Julian T. Hightower Chair in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “This is a perfect day to come together and talk about what the human frontier looks like. Georgia Tech hired its first neuro engineer more than 30 years ago long before it was cool to be an engineer studying neuro. Today, we have more than a 100 faculty spanning six colleges studying neuro-related topics with the additional involvement of Emory University and Georgia State University. We’ve had an incredible trajectory over the last decade and we’ve fostered a growing and active community.”

Following Reardon’s keynote were two interactive panel sessions. The first panel was focused on “brain computer input and output” was led by moderator Michelle LaPlaca, professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. Her research interests are in neurotrauma, injury biomechanics, and neuroengineering as they relate to traumatic brain injury.

The panelists were:

Melody Moore Jackson, professor in the School of Interactive Computing
Omer Inan, professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Carlos Bremer, president North America Division - Global VP of Knowledge at brain4care
Isaac Clements, CTO and co-founder of BioCircuit Technologies
The second panel was focused on the “future of cognitive and psychological aids” and was moderated by Maribeth Gandy Coleman, director of research at the Institute for People and Technology where her work has been focused on the intersection of technology for mobile/wearable computing, augmented reality, AI, human computer interaction, healthcare, assistive technology, and gaming.

The panelists were:

Jennifer R. DuBose, director of the SimTigrate Design Lab
Tansu Celikel, chair of the School of Psychology
Deborah Backus, vice president of research and innovation, Shepherd Center
Barbara Olasov Rothbaum, director of the Emory Healthcare veterans program and chair in neuropsychopharmacology, Emory University School of Medicine
“I am really pleased with the connections we were able to foster today,” said Clint Zeagler, co-director of strategic partnerships for IPaT and principal research scientist. “Key to translational and impactful research outcomes are transdisciplinary collaboration across campus and with industry and corporate partners. Events like this with both academic and industry experts allow for deep conversations and spark interesting and innovative projects.”

Ryan Elchahal from Westminster High School
Nekele Hayes from Campbell High
Morgan Hildebrand from Harrison High School
Harrison Lueder from Maynard Jackson High School
Lilith (Ace) Magerko from Dekalb School of the Arts
Nekele Hayes is a high school junior and while the other students are seniors in high school.
Nathan Williams, a Dekalb County school teacher, was onsite helping to support the program.

The goal of IPaT’s high school summer internship program is to expose high school students interested in careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) to ongoing research at the Institute for People and Technology. Project areas will include Esports, augmented reality/cognitive aid design, and technologies for aging in place (Aware Home).

The team of IPaT faculty and staff members supporting the program includes:

Maribeth Coleman – Director of Research (IPaT)/Principal Research Scientist
Scott Robertson – Senior Research Scientist
Brian Jones – Principal Research Engineer/Director of the Aware Home
Laura Levy – Senior Research Scientist
Clint Zeagler, Senior Research Scientist
Tim Trent, Research Technologist II
Noah Posner, Research Scientist II
Kala Jordan, Research Technician II
Cynthia Moore, Assistant Director-Business Operations
Marcia Chandler, Administrative Operations Coordinator
Christine Robinson, Senior Administrative Professional
Leigh McCook, interim Executive Director, IPaT

At the end of the internships, students presented their projects in the large Georgia Tech Research Institute auditorium on July 21. Morgan Hildebrand, Harrison Lueder, and Ace Magerko presented their Fidget Focus project. The aim of their project was to boost productivity in virtual meetings using a browser-specific Chrome extension for distraction free collaboration. Nekele Hayes and Ryan Elchahal presented their Vidsight project. An iOS app for life skills training and appliance education using machine learning and computer vision.

The seven selected Georgia Tech students for IPaT’s 2023 summer research internship program are:

Ritu Atreyas, junior majoring in computer science
Corinne Cutts, sophomore majoring in psychology
William Dyches, junior majoring in electrical engineering
Alexa Hanna, senior majoring in computer science
Geehoon Jung, junior majoring in computer engineering
Amrita Manickandan, junior majoring in computer science
Suchir Sur, junior majoring in mechanical engineering
Summer research projects available included:

* Aware Home: seeking students interested in evaluating, deploying, and integrating home sensing and automation tools and services to support research and demonstrations.

* Aware Home SmartBathroom Fixture Automation: seeking students interested deploying and configuring a home robotic research platform in the home to support research, academic, and demonstration capabilities. Read more about this project here.

* Coastal Equity and Resilience (CEAR) Hub: seeking students who are interested in working with diverse project teams addressing flooding on the Georgia coast. We are looking for application software developers, IoT sensor experience (e.g.Arduino), data analytics, community outreach and engagement, K-12 summer camp leads, etc.

* Esports User Research: seeking students for work in one of four projects relating to 1) novel fan experiences in mixed reality, 2) teamwork interventions to improve esport athlete performance, 3) health and safety support for esports athletes, and 4) scholastic gaming to support STEAM engagement in at-risk K-12 students."

* Augmented/Virtual Reality and Wearable Computing: seeking students interested in performing research and development in the areas of augmented/virtual reality and wearable computing. We are creating innovative systems to help diverse populations in the areas of work, healthcare, education, and entertainment.

* CellWatch is a mobile app that allows you to record, view, and analyze cellular connectivity. This app is part of a research project focused on measuring and characterizing the availability and quality of mobile broadband in rural areas. Through this project we hope to collaborate with rural and tribal communities in the US in order to inform policy and technological changes in the pursuit of digital inclusion. Building a mobile app (Android) that can record, view and analyze cellular connectivity. We are initially building a mobile app (Android) that can record, view and analyze cellular connectivity. It's a cellular speed test app. Students would help with Android, Kotlin software development for building this app. Students will also help to develop a web dashboard app; Javascript, React experience is needed and familiarity with integrating Google Maps in apps would help as well.

* Other projects may be available
 

He holds a Ph.D. and master’s degree from MIT and has served as director of Media Lab Asia in India and head of the eDevelopment group at the MIT Media Lab. He received his computer science and engineering bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Both Chaouki Abdallah, executive vice president for research, and I see a bright future for IPaT with professor Michael Best coming onboard as executive director of IPaT,” said Julia Kubanek, vice president for interdisciplinary research at Georgia Tech. “Mike is our first Interdisciplinary Research Institute executive director with a primary faculty appointment in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. He brings his deep experience integrating technology and social sciences to this new role. With the rapid deployment of AI in daily life, IPaT – now combined with the GVU Center – plays a critical role in addressing not only how people interface with new technologies, but also how people should control and direct technology to meet the needs of diverse communities.”

“I’m especially appreciative of the search committee members and of professor Pinar Keskinocak for chairing the search. Together they brought forward an excellent slate of candidates. The IPaT community came out in force to meet with our four finalists and provided valuable feedback. In serving as interim executive director since January 2022, Leigh McCook has provided strong leadership and supported the merged IPaT and GVU community. Leigh will serve in this role until August 1, after which she will return to her earlier roles in IPaT and GTRI.”

Best serves as associate editor for global computing with Communications of the ACM and co-founder and editor-in-chief emeritus of the journal Information Technologies and International Development. Best has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers in books, journals, and conferences since joining Georgia Tech in 2003. He has delivered more than 100 invited and keynote lectures across the USA and internationally.

While research faculty at MIT, he served as a research fellow in the Center for International Development at Harvard University, conducting policy, strategy, and technical research in information and communication technologies for social and economic development.

In 2015, Best took a leave of absence from Georgia Tech to become founding director of the UNU Institute on Computing and Society. UNU-CS was the “people and technology” research arm of the United Nations, and Best was responsible for strategic development, government relations, research visioning, budget, and administrative supervision. As director, he recruited, hired, and supervised over 40 staff and researchers and managed an annual budget of $4 million.

“I am thrilled to take on this leadership role with IPaT,” said Best. “The intersection of people and technology – where science and engineering connect with societies and communities – defines today’s greatest challenges and opportunities. AI technologies or mRNA vaccines are as much about people, society, and policy as they are about neural networks or vaccine systems. IPaT’s ongoing purpose is to strengthen Georgia Tech’s leading research at this intersection.”

The Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) brings together researchers across Georgia Tech to support world-class research, engage students, and collaborate with industry, government, and nonprofit partners. IPaT’s goal is to maximize Georgia Tech’s societal impact through people-centered innovation. IPaT was created in 2011 to embrace opportunities and needs to create a networked research ecosystem of Georgia Tech faculty and industry partners, and to amplify their combined thought leadership and on-the-ground results to create a positive economic and societal impact in critical areas that define much of everyday life.

Michael Best will be the second executive director of IPaT, succeeding the founding director Elizabeth Mynatt.

Some of this year’s demonstration topics included battery fuel cells, nanotechnology, DNA, immunoengineering, chemistry, engineering, superconductivity levitation, wastewater treatment, aerospace, space outreach, virtual reality, biology, robotics, computing, 3D printing, paper making, and much more.

A parent attending from Peachtree City said, “we’ve discovered our son has an affinity for math and science. He’s handling tenth grade science level coursework, yet he’s only in the seventh grade and can understand math formulas ahead of his age group. We brought him here to expose him to a variety of technologies and advanced equipment that he won’t see or be exposed to in his middle school. The staff and professors here have been very kind to show him how to use some of the equipment we’ve seen. And his eyes have gotten bigger all day because of these interactions.”

Virginia Howell, director of the Roberts C. Williams Museum of Paper Making in the Renewable Bioproducts Institute at Georgia Tech said, “the paper museum is delighted to be part of the Georgia Tech Science and Engineering Day. It's a great opportunity for people to learn more about the paper museum and get hands-on experience in making a sheet of paper to take home. We offer workshops, classes, and tours to students across the state of Georgia. Kids have been lined up all day to participate at our tables today.”

Demonstrations included how to extract DNA, seeing LIDAR in action, experiencing heat sensing sensors, how x-rays are used, viewing scanning electron microscopes, playing a virtual reality game, experiencing chemical reactions, watching 3D printing, making slime, showing atom-level nano materials in synthesized materials, neuroscience demos, liquid nitrogen experiments, and many more.

Presentation areas were hosted by the Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, and the Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences who provided valuable space in their buildings to house demonstrations. The Ford Environmental Science & Technology Building and Molecular Science & Engineering Building also donated space for demonstrations.

Another tour offering during Science and Engineering Day was the Flowers Invention Studio at Georgia Tech which offers more than 5,000 square feet of industrial makerspace equipment.

“We are the largest student-run maker space in the nation,” said Lillian Tso, president of the Invention Studio and a fourth-year mechanical engineering student. “We house industrial grade equipment for prototyping and manufacturing—we support anything that students want to build. We're open for all students of all majors of all years. They can use our equipment for free which includes CNC machines, more than 50 3D printers, waterjets, laser cutters, and many other professional-level tools. This is our first year participating in the Georgia Tech Science and Engineering Day. We wanted to do a lot more outreach to the Georgia Tech campus and the greater Atlanta community."

Lucas Garza, president-elect of the Invention Studio, added, “we’ve had a busy day offering tours of our studio throughout the festival.”

Located in the mezzanine of the Marcus Nanotechnology Building, Ethan Sirak, a fourth-year aerospace student with the Georgia Space Grant Consortium, was providing kids with exposure to space facts and allowing them to perform crafts related to planets and space. The consortium is an organization under NASA which aims to promote STEM exposure to kids of all ages. He also assists with the Aerospace Engineering Outreach Program. He was partnered at his hands-on learning table with Bill McNutt Jr., a senior aerospace engineering student.

A young participant from Suwanee, Georgia, said, “I want to go to school at Georgia Tech because of aerospace engineering. I want to go on good adventures in future space flight and design things.”

His mom, a sixth-grade science teacher added, “I love coming to science fairs to get new ideas for my students and I love to bring my family because we just have a great time. This is our very first science fair here at Georgia Tech. We've been to ones in north Georgia because that's pretty close to where we live. But when we saw this was available, we're like, yeah, we're coming down to Tech for this today—and having a great time.”

While attendees were able to get a peek into one of the nation’s most research-intensive universities, the event also allowed the many researchers and students participating the opportunity to share their science and engineering work with the public.

One of the more unique tables was manned by Alison Reynolds, an instruction archivist with research services in the Georgia Tech library. She was displaying a selection of unique items from Georgia Tech’s science fiction archives and special collections. She said, “we’ve been teaching with science fiction since 1971 and our collection is now one of the largest science fiction collections in the United States. We wanted to display part of our special collection.”

“I had several Georgia school systems reach out to me that were interested in attending this event,“ said Leslie O 'Neill, education outreach manager with the Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor (SENIC) at Georgia Tech. “Georgia Tech plays a vital part in its community. We wanted to showcase the campus; the student, faculty and staff research; and the amazing science and engineering being done. We’ve had a fantastic turnout this year for this event.”
 

Launched with funding from the state legislature in 2022, the program was developed collaboratively by Georgia Tech’s Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC) and STEM@GTRI, Georgia Tech Research Institute’s K-12 outreach program.

It focuses on developing coding, music, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity skills in high school students in rural parts of the state. During its pilot year, the program served 11 schools in eight school districts in Bartow, Chattooga, Effingham, Fayette, Gordon, Haralson, Liberty, and Walker counties. 

Today, it serves 39 schools and 24 school districts: Candler, Catoosa, Chattahoochee, Clinch, Decatur, Dooly, Fannin, Grady, Hancock, Houston, Jeff Davis, Jones, Laurens, Lumpkin, Macon, Oglethorpe, Peach, Screven, Stephens, Tattnall, Thomas, Treutlen, and Twiggs counties.

Modules taught to students include introduction to coding, advanced coding, principles of cybersecurity, foundations of AI, introduction to robotics, intermediate coding, intermediate robotics, sensors and data science, website design, sensors, and data science.

“This rural computer science initiative has been transformative for Twiggs County schools,” said Mack Bullard, school superintendent. “We find it very difficult to find computer science teachers who are willing to come to rural Georgia to teach.”

He called partnering with Georgia Tech professors “transformative for our school system. Experiences like robotics and coding in class have excited our kids now that they've been able to see what's possible. From our collaborations with other teachers in this program, I can see future student projects in Twiggs County related to agriculture, such as the building and programming of probes. This computer science program has been phenomenal.”

CIC was founded in 2007 by the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT). This year, the Asian CIC competition is co-supported by the Shenzhen Georgia Tech Education Foundation, an independent fund in support of Georgia Tech. The competition recognizes student innovation and entrepreneurship with a focus on global challenges and opportunities. Many projects are linked to United Nations sustainable development goals.

Sumpter is coordinating with eight new Asia faculty fellows recruited from IPaT’s strategic partners and anchor universities across Asia. These faculty fellows are experts in their field who have agreed to give advice and mentorship to interested student teams participating in CIC. 

In addition to supporting CIC, she manages IPaT’s lending library allowing a wide range of technology to be used by faculty and students. Devices that can be checked out include: phones, tablets, and other mobile and wearable devices; Arduinos, Raspberry Pi’s and other IoT development kits; a variety of sensors; cameras and media capture devices; virtual machines and databases, home automation hubs and sensors; and a wide range of networking equipment. 

She previously worked for the University of North Carolina in Ashville, Agnes Scott College, and Chattahoochee Technical College. Sumpter is currently a second-year doctoral student at the University of North Georgia in the higher education, leadership and practice program. Travelling the globe is one of her biggest hobbies and she’s planning to visit Panama and Mexico soon.