If you attended the recent run of the DramaTech performance, The Safety Show, you likely encountered the show’s custom app, which allowed audience members to view augmented reality versions of performers and scenery in the show.

The app, like the entire performance, was pure Georgia Tech, and pure Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts — a place where technology and the humanities often connect. Joshua A.Fisher, a Ph.D. student in the college’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication, developed the software in collaboration with the DramaTech team preparing the show.

“In addition to providing a visual cue for the show, the app also is a comment on technology and the perceived feeling of safety that surrounds it,” said DramaTech artistic director Melissa Foulger, who is also an academic professional in LMC.

“We intentionally started the show with a high amount of technology and had it taper off because we found that most people feel the most safe with other people, or when they feel a sense of community. We wanted to emulate that feeling as we moved through the performance,” she said.

Collaboration Began With Dissertation

Fisher began working with Foulger for his dissertation, which involves researching how community storytelling workshops can utilize emerging media for social action. That led to his involvement in the I Feel Safe When public arts project.

“That initiative involved collecting anonymous statements from students about moments when they felt safe. Given all of the events that have happened on campus and in the world over the last few years, exploring what it means to feel safe seemed necessary,” Fisher said.

Those anonymous statements form the backbone of the script for The Safety Show, which concluded its run February 23, 2019.

Fisher had about a month to develop the app in Unity, using Apple’s ARKit, Photon Unity Networking, and Placenote for the augmented reality components. Instead of a typical augmented reality app, in which each viewer receives a unique view of a space based on their perspective, Fisher’s app presented audience members a single shared AR scene.

‘The Symbiotic Relationship of Art and Technology’

“Our goal for the performance was to reconnect the audience with one another and to the Georgia Tech community,” Fisher said.

The project demonstrates the value of studying the humanities at a world-class technological university like Georgia Tech, Fisher said.

“This campus provides a wealth of opportunities to put theory into practice,” he said. “LMC understands the symbiotic relationship of art and technology. There’s an emphasis on how the two fields serve one another to construct beautiful, compelling, and human experiences. There are so many opportunities, from 360-degree filmmaking to game design, for students to explore.”

Alvarado was selected to join the first cohort of the UN Data Fellows, who work to promote awareness of the opportunities big data presents for sustainable development and humanitarian action. 

The Data Fellows initiative began with an exercise where Ph.D. candidates with specific expertise in AI, data science, computational social science or data and design are matched to work with one of 40 UN departments on a specific subject area.

Alvarado was chosen to work with the Accelerator Labs, a project of the United Nation’s Development Programme (UNDP) designed with the goal of becoming the world’s largest and fastest learning network around development challenges.

The fellows, UN Global Pulse, and the UN agencies they will be working with, met in New York at the UN Headquarters for the three-day workshop to facilitate in-person introductions and agree on the topic of their project. 

“The focus of the UN project is to provide a methodology that helps the staff at the Accelerator Labs of the UNDP to identify uncommon digital sources of information across social media, online communities and other digital platforms,” Alvarado says.

“The ultimate purpose of this project is to inform the development of tools that will enable the integration and use of crowdsourced data to inform collective action. By examining how data and community practices of citizens may contribute to the work of the Accelerator Labs, we are focusing on helping communities to transition from individual to systemic practices.”

By leveraging the UN’s varied geographic and intellectual projects, Data Fellows are provided an outlet to effect social change outside of the classroom.

“I think this is a unique opportunity for me to continue doing my research and have an impact beyond academia,” said Alvarado.

The National Science Foundation has awarded a team led by Brian Magerko of the School of Literature, Media, and Communication a four-year $2.1 million grant to explore adding an AI assistant to the award-winning EarSketch computer science, music, and technology learning platform.

The assistant would act as a creative collaborator with students using the music-based learning platform, helping them create in new ways and discover new techniques, said Magerko, an LMC professor who co-founded EarSketch in 2011 with Jason Freeman, a professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology's School of Music who also is co-principal investigator on the most recent grant.

“We’re thinking about a resource that you can tap on the shoulder, a buddy that knows a bit more than you do that you can call on,” Magerko said. “You can imagine writing a piece of code that creates a chorus. You tap on the AI, and it says, ‘That’s so sweet! I’m going to use that.”

The proposed EarSketch assistant would provide users with help in an environment where “aesthetics and technical questions go hand-in-hand in the curriculum and course projects,” Magerko said.

Georgia Tech and University of Florida to Collaborate on Research

Magerko is partnering with a team from the University of Florida, which received a related $862,472 NSF grant for its part of the research. The Florida team will be studying how high school students would use such an agent, while Magerko and his team will work on the technical underpinnings of the artificial intelligence agent.

Although some work has begun already, the bulk of the research study will begin in fall 2019, Magerko said.

EarSketch has been used by 265,000 youth and educators in 100 countries to help teach computer science, music, and technology skills to students, particularly minorities and girls who are often underserved by Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math (STEAM) programs.

Magerko, EarSketch, Also Named in Second Grant

The grant is one of two recently announced involving Magerko and EarSketch. The second grant, also from the National Science Foundation, is for a project spearheaded by Northwestern University that seeks to expand participation in computer science programs by way of music, dance and writing code.

That $999,865 grant goes mostly to Northwestern University, Magerko said. The Georgia Tech portion entails incorporating EarSketch into digital notebooks that combine programming code, music, video, lyrics, and other digital creations. Magerko is co-investigator on that project. Michael Horn of Northwestern University is the lead researcher.

The School of Literature, Media, and Communication is a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.­­­­­­

In announcing Magerko’s acceptance of the director position, LMC Chair Richard Utz said, “With his record, Professor Magerko can claim to lead by example in the areas of research, scholarship, and creative activity. His successful teaching and service activities are at a similarly high level, demonstrating how he gives of his time freely and collegially when advising, mentoring, and collaborating with our graduate and undergraduate students. We are pleased to have him assume leadership of this cutting edge program.”

Magerko joined Georgia Tech Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts in 2008. His research explores how to augment human creativity through technology for human expression, learning, and joy.

His achievements, for which he recently received promotion to full professor, include approximately 100 peer reviewed publications in peer-reviewed technical conferences and journals, numerous international keynote presentations, and top paper awards.

He has obtained more than $13 million in federal funding including more than $10 million from the National Science Foundation for EarSketch (with College of Design Chair Jason Freeman), a science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics or STEAM-based approach for underrepresented populations in high school computer science education. From its initial pilot program, the curriculum is now in use by more than 250 middle and high schools nationwide and was recognized by the White House in 2016 as a Computer Science Education Week (CSEdWeek) national initiative. New funding for the program includes a $3 million NSF DRK-12 grant this month in collaboration with the University of Florida to continue research with EarSketch. The focus of this grant will be on developing co-creative learning artificial intelligence (AI) that can help “bootstrap” learning in STEAM environments like EarSketch.

Magerko’s research has also yielded computational media artifacts in the form of software and interactive installations that have been featured in museums, schools, and other learning settings worldwide including the Smithsonian, the Museum of Science and Industry, the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh, and the Arts+Tech conference in San Francisco.

He directs the multidisciplinary Expressive Machinery Lab (formerly ADAM Lab) in which students from across campus work “to create near-future digital experiences that engage people in creative practices with computing — whether that means learning to program by making music, improvising dance and improv theatre with AI characters, or experiencing public installations that combine social creative behaviors with generative music.”

The exhibit, entitled “Food by Design: Sustaining the Future,” explores design challenges associated with emerging food production technologies. Faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students from the Public Design Workshop contributed to the exhibit, and they collaborated with Concrete Jungle, a volunteer-run organization that helps distribute neglected fruit to the hungry.

“Food by Design” runs until May 7, 2017. Learn more about the exhibit here: http://www.museumofdesign.org/nowonview/

Starner's inclusion in the prestigious group raises IC's current membership to seven. Other members from the school include John Stasko, Keith Edwards, Beki Grinter, Beth Mynatt, Gregory Abowd, and Jim Foley.

Starner will be honored at the CHI 2017 conference on May 7 in Denver, Colo.

Also of note from the upcoming conference are three "Best Paper Honorable Mention" designations for papers involving IC faculty and students: Locating the Internet in the Parks of Havana (Michaelanne Dye, David Nemer, Laura Pina, Nithya Sambasivan, Amy Bruckman, Neha Kumar), Sidestepping the Elephant in the Classroom: Using Culturally Localized Technology to Teach Around Taboos (Piya Sorcar, Benjamin Strauber, Prashant Loyalka, Neha Kumar, Shelley Goldman), and Intersectional HCI: Engaging Identity Through Gender, Race, and Class (Ari Schlesinger, Keith Edwards, Beki Grinter).

The "Best Paper Honorable Mention" designation indicates a paper that is in the top 5 percent of paper submissions for the conference.

CHI will be held from May 6-11 at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver.

The project is one of 10 “Big Data Spokes” announced by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF’s $10 million initiative was created to improve the ability to solve the nation’s most pressing challenges with the use of big data. The Georgia Tech, Smithsonian and IBM “Spoke” will receive $1 million from NSF. IBM will also provide in-kind gifts. Overall, the project engages 24 researchers from 14 institutions from academia, industry, government and non-profit organizations.

“Environmental sustainability is a growing concern for our country. Scientists and citizens needbetter tools and data to rapidly build and test conceptual models of ecological phenomena,” said Ashok Goel, a Georgia Tech professor who is the principal investigator of the collaboration. “We want to empower them.”

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), headquartered at the Smithsonian Institution, is an online, open-access database that gathers information about all biological species on Earth.

“Modelers tell us that predicting an ecosystem's response to global changes requires knowledge of things like the mass of an algal cell, the lifespan of a copepod and the ecological partners of a reef-building coral,” said Bob Corrigan, EOL’s director of operations. “EOL is surfacing, structuring and sharing hundreds of years of careful measurements by generations of biologists. Combining these assets with the capabilities of Georgia Tech and IBM will give scientists and students alike the ability to model and study our biosphere at scales that have not been possible before.”

As part of the Spoke project, Watson Developer Cloud’s Language and Vision services will be trained to deeply understand the specialized ecology domain represented in the EOL webpages and images. 

“Unlocking all of this unstructured information from the Smithsonian’s Encyclopedia of Life, bringing it into the context of other relevant structured knowledge, and making it available for further human and machine reasoning holds tremendous potential,” said Lisa Amini, director, Cognitive Computing: Knowledge and Reasoning at IBM Research. “The possibilities are endless.”

Users will then take that information and plug it into Georgia Tech’s Modeling & Inquiry Learning Application (MILA) system. The interactive tool allows scientists to rapidly generate conceptual models, evaluates them through simulation and provides results.

The NSF grant will allow the team to seamlessly link EOL, Watson and MILA. The goal is to build a working system that enables ecological modeling by early 2018.

“You can have all the information in the world, but if you can’t easily find the knowledge, you can’t build a model,” said Goel. “And if you can’t build a good model, the information is useless. Our project uses artificial intelligence to address these concerns.”

The Big Data Spokes program is supported and organized by the NSF’s Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs (BD Hubs). The four Hubs (South, Northeast, Midwest and West) foster multi-sector collaborations among academia, industry and government. Georgia Tech co-leads the South Hub with the University of North Carolina.

"The Big Data Spokes advance the goals and regional priorities of each BD Hub, fusing the strengths of a range of institutions and investigators and applying them to problems that affect the communities and populations within their regions," said Jim Kurose, assistant director of NSF for Computer and Information Science and Engineering. “We are pleased to be making this substantial investment today to accelerate the nation’s big data R&D innovation ecosystem.”

Two other Spoke awards have ties to Georgia Tech. Santiago Grijalva, Georgia Power Distinguished Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will study smart grids using big data with Texas A&M. Gari Clifford, an Emory University associate professor with a joint appointment in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, will investigate how to use data from fitness trackers and environmental monitors to improve patient care.

“Georgia Tech’s inclusion in these awards is reflective of the Institute’s unique breadth and depth of expertise that spans all areas of data science and data-driven discovery,” said Srinivas Aluru, co-executive director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for Data Engineering and Science and principal investigator of the South Big Data Hub.

100 Resilient Cities—Pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation—is dedicated to helping cities across the globe become more resilient to the physical, social, and economic challenges that are an unavoidable reality of life in the 21st century.

Researchers fed the robot nearly 5,000 complete songs — from Beethoven to the Beatles to Lady Gaga to Miles Davis — and more than 2 million motifs, riffs and licks of music. Aside from giving the machine a seed, or the first four measures to use as a starting point, no humans are involved in either the composition or the performance of the music.

The first two compositions are roughly 30 seconds in length. The robot, named Shimon, can be seen and heard playing them here and here.

Ph.D. student Mason Bretan is the man behind the machine. He’s worked with Shimon for seven years, enabling it to “listen” to music played by humans and improvise over pre-composed chord progressions. Now Shimon is a solo composer for the first time, generating the melody and harmonic structure on its own.

“Once Shimon learns the four measures we provide, it creates its own sequence of concepts and composes its own piece,” said Bretan, who will receive his doctorate in music technology this summer at Georgia Tech. “Shimon’s compositions represent how music sounds and looks when a robot uses deep neural networks to learn everything it knows about music from millions of human-made segments.”

Bretan says this is the first time a robot has used deep learning to create music. And unlike its days of improvising, when it played monophonically, Shimon is able to play harmonies and chords. It’s also thinking much more like a human musician, focusing less on the next note, as it did before, and more on the overall structure of the composition.  

“When we play or listen to music, we don’t think about the next note and only that next note,” said Bretan. “An artist has a bigger idea of what he or she is trying to achieve within the next few measures or later in the piece. Shimon is now coming up with higher-level musical semantics. Rather than thinking note by note, it has a larger idea of what it wants to play as a whole.”

Shimon was created by Bretan’s advisor, Gil Weinberg, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology.

“This is a leap in Shimon’s musical quality because it’s using deep learning to create a more structured and coherent composition,” said Weinberg, a professor in the School of Music. “We want to explore whether robots could become musically creative and generate new music that we humans could find beautiful, inspiring and strange.”

Shimon will create more pieces in the future. As long as the researchers feed it a different seed, the robot will produce something different each time — music that the researchers can’t predict. In the first piece, Bretan fed Shimon a melody comprised of eighth notes. It received a sixteenth note melody the second time, which influenced it to generate faster note sequences.

Bretan acknowledges that he can’t pick out individual songs that Shimon is referencing. He is able to recognize classical chord progression and influences of artists, such as Mozart, for example.

“They sound like a fusion of jazz and classical,” said Bretan, who plays the keyboards and guitar in his free time. “I definitely hear more classical, especially in the harmony. But then I hear chromatic moving steps in the first piece — that’s definitely something you hear in jazz.”

Shimon’s debut as a solo composer was featured in a video clip in the Consumer Electronic Show (CES) keynote and will have its first live performance at the Aspen Ideas Festival at the end of June. It’s the latest project within Weinberg’s lab. He and his students have also created a robotic prosthesis for a drummer, a robotic third arm for all drummers, and an interactive robotic companion that plays music from a phone and dances to the beat.

Going beyond current crop monitoring techniques used in precision agriculture applications, the Georgia Tech team – led by School of Interactive Computing (IC) Professor Frank Dellaert and Ph.D. student Jing Dong – has created a four-dimensional (4D = 3D + time) reconstruction approach that can provide farmers with detailed crop information including plant heights and growth rates.

Traditionally, crop monitoring has been done manually, which is very labor and cost intensive. Satellites and unmanned aerial and ground vehicles have reduced costs somewhat in recent years, but the amount of useful information that can be gathered from 2D images and 3D reconstructions is limited.

According to the researchers, existing technologies were developed for static scenes. For example, current 3D tools assume that each geometric entity identified in an image will maintain a constant appearance over time.

“Of course, crops are constantly growing, moving in the wind, and changing color, etc., which makes it very difficult to automate the precise alignment of static images over time,” said Dong.

“What we have been able to do is to account for the dynamic nature of continuously growing crops and animate a whole growing season’s worth of 3D images into a 4D reconstruction that reveals a bounty of useful information to farmers and other precision agricultural systems.”

At the heart of the team’s approach is a highly robust data association algorithm that solves the problem of connecting related images over time that have highly duplicated structures, significant lighting and appearance differences.

To fuel the algorithm, the team equipped a standard farm tractor with color imaging, GPS, inertial measurement, and other sensors to collect data from a peanut field in Tifton, Georgia. Data was harvested over 23 sessions spanning 89 days during the 2016 summer growing season.

However, using a tractor presented another hurdle for the team to overcome. Existing methods of creating spatio-temporal maps – a primary tool for location recognition – were designed for autonomous driving applications. In these situations, camera angles remain mostly static as a vehicle moves down the road.

A tractor moving through a cultivated field is a different story.

“So, not only are the plants always changing, the camera angles are constantly shifting as the tractor goes over bumps and through ruts in the soil. Multiple rows and repetitive structures exacerbate the problem even further,” said Dong.

To account for the dynamic nature of the data, the new approach computes geometric details about camera angles and positions, as well as visual landmarks and points of reference for each individual row.

This information, in turn, builds visual correspondences and links each of the 23 data sessions for each specific row. From here, the team uses a search and optimization method to reject possible false positive matches between rows and sessions and to eliminate other outliers that might adversely impact the study results.

The output was a 4D point cloud (a time series of 3D point clouds which are aligned into a single coordinate frame) with 36 million data points.

"With this, we can visualize multiple types of output like height curves, growth rate heat maps, and detailed local mesh models that are accessible by farmers or other precision agriculture systems,” said Dong. "All of this information is very useful for making decisions about irrigation, pest control, harvesting, crop rotations, and much more.

“There is still much to be done as we continue to analyze the data and explore potential machine learning applications, but our ultimate goal is to do all that we can to bring more food to people around the world impacted by food shortages and famine.”

The full paper, 4D Crop Monitoring: Spatio-Temporal Reconstruction for Agriculture, was presented at the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), held in Singapore from May 29 to June 3.

Dellaert and IC Professor Byron Boots advise Dong. The research is supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture under award number 2014-67021-22556.

“There have been many studies about social media credibility in recent years, but very little is known about what types of words or phrases create credibility perceptions during rapidly unfolding events,” said Tanushree Mitra, the Georgia Tech Ph.D. candidate who led the research.

The team looked at tweets surrounding events in 2014 and 2015, including the emergence of Ebola in West Africa, the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris and the death of Eric Garner in New York City. They asked people to judge the posts on their credibility (from “certainly accurate” to “certainly inaccurate”). Then the team fed the words into a model that split them into 15 different linguistic categories. The classifications included positive and negative emotions, hedges and boosters, and anxiety.

The Georgia Tech computer then examined the words to judge if the tweets were credible or not. It matched the humans’ opinions about 68 percent of the time. That’s significantly higher than the random baseline of 25 percent.

“Tweets with booster words, such as ‘undeniable,’ and positive emotion terms, such as ‘eager’ and ‘terrific,’ were viewed as highly credible,” Mitra said. “Words indicating positive sentiment but mocking the impracticality of the event, such as ‘ha,’ ‘grins’ or ‘joking,’ were seen as less credible. So were hedge words, including ‘certain level’ and ‘suspects.’”

Higher numbers of retweets also correlated with lower credibility scores. Replies and retweets with longer message lengths were thought to be more credible.  

“It could be that longer message lengths provide more information or reasoning, so they’re viewed as more trustworthy,” she said. “On the other hand, a higher number of retweets, which was scored lower on credibility, might represent an attempt to elicit collective reasoning during times of crisis or uncertainty.”

The system isn’t deployable yet, but the Georgia Tech team says it could eventually become an app that displays the perceived trustworthiness of an event as it unfolds on social media.

“When combined with other signals, such as event topics or structural information, our linguistic result could be an important building block of an automated system,” said Eric Gilbert, Mitra’s advisor and an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing. “Twitter is part of the problem with spreading untruthful news online. But it can also be part of the solution.”

The paper, “A Parsimonious Language Model of Social Media Credibility Across Disparate Events,” will be presented in February at the 20th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing in Portland, Oregon.

You go to an appointment with your physician, you get some tests, and then you receive an email linking to an online patient portal. That online portal lets you access personal health records (PHRs) that include test results, prescription information, and visit summaries. It also provides features like messaging, medication refill requests, and appointment scheduling. If you see nothing concerning, you go about your day. If something gives you pause, you follow up with your doctor.

For many adults, checking test results is the extent of the use of these online patient portals. A team of researchers in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Interactive Computing has found, however, that adolescents and emerging adults in this digital age are interested in using the technology more and have come to expect it as an active component of their health care.

The team, which was led by Assistant Professor Lauren Wilcox, conducted a longitudinal study over the course of 19 months with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA) to examine the use and accompanying challenges of the online technology.

The results were published in a paper, Adolescent and Caregiver use of a Tethered Personal Health Record System, that was presented at the American Medical Informatics Association annual symposium in November.

The study focused specifically on patients between the ages of 13–17 at CHOA Scottish Rite and Egleston, who were suffering from cancer and blood disorders and engaging regularly with health care systems. They recorded usage over time by both adolescents and their parents through audit log analyses, and they conducted independent surveys and interviews with both parties.

The team examined how PHR usage differed between adolescent pediatric patients with cancer and blood disorders and their parental caregivers, which features of a PHR pediatric patients found valuable compared to their parents, and they probed the motivations of pediatric patients and their parents for using the technology.

Wilcox’s team will use insights from the study to outline considerations for the design of health IT systems to better engage adolescent patients.

In short, the study found that the teens are indeed using the technology. Parents more actively scheduled appointments, but Wilcox’s team found that teens liked to utilize the system before visits for reminders and updates, not just after the visit.

“They used it as a coordination tool with their families,” Wilcox said. “But these systems weren’t necessarily designed with that use in mind. They were designed to provide reports on appointments, reports on lab tests, or to ask a question and receive a quick answer. We found that they are being used to facilitate awareness between family members who are all using this, and to communicate and coordinate with each other.”

When compared to parents, teens reported a more positive attitude toward the impact of the system on their perceived ability to manage their care.

After using the system, they reported having known more about their health in general and the care their doctor provides them, than their parents. They also reported that the information in their personal health records led them to ask questions that they might not have known to ask before. Finally, they had slightly higher expectations that the portal system would lead them to take actions to improve their health.

“We found that for teens, it’s an essential mechanism for learning something about their health and engaging with their health care,” Wilcox said. “Their parents might appreciate an online tool, but not strictly need it.

“Parents already had many interactions with the healthcare system and they communicate in other ways with clinicians, so the portal is more of a supplement to those interactions. For teens, the online tools have the power to shape their experience with the healthcare system. Cultivating an informed relationship with their own health can actually start with the online portal.”

Ultimately, the study is meant to be one in a series of steps that can help in the design of better systems. The hope is to inform the implementation of better communicative systems, support ongoing relationships between patients and their care team members, provide interactive reports that will include age-appropriate explanations, and, on a broader scale, examine how to better shape policies concerning access to the systems by adolescents.

“It is interesting that adolescents and young adults often have a worse outcome compared to children and adults with the same tumors,” said Dr. Thomas Olson, a director of the Solid Tumor Program at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center who worked with Wilcox’s team on the project. “There is a real strong emphasis on improving oncology care for adolescents and young adults. Anything that engages adolescents to improve their compliance would be advantageous. In this generation, digital approaches seem to work best.”

Other Georgia Tech researchers performing the study included Human-Centered Computing Ph.D. student Matthew Hong and Computer Science Ph.D. student Clayton Feustel.

“About 1 in 7 U.S. children will be affected with a developmental disability including Autism and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), and research shows that getting intervention for these children at the earliest age promotes better long-term outcomes,” said Rosa Arriaga, a senior research scientist and developmental psychologist in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech who is leading the research.

Arriaga will be working with Laurel Warrell, a Master’s of Science Candidate in Human-Computer Interaction, in efforts to deploy the app, conduct usability studies, and propose design improvements.

The ActEarly app is designed to support kids – newborns to age five – by providing information on social, language, cognitive, and physical milestones children should achieve at each age. “Parents may be unaware that a child is failing to meet important developmental milestones and this might put the child at risk,” said Arriaga.

The app, which leverages expertise from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), is part of a broader campaign, “Learn the Signs, Act Early.” This initiative seeks to identify developmental disabilities in young children and provide families with needed services.

“Our goal in developing an interactive mobile-based app is to increase awareness of the appropriate milestones children should be reaching and empower caregivers to share their questions, doubts, and concerns with their pediatricians,” said Arriaga.

In creating the app, the Georgia Tech team has taken a largely paper-based set of material and designed a user-friendly way to easily understand and utilize CDC services and information regarding developmental delays in children.

For parents and caregivers interested in testing the app and participating in a usability study, there are two ways to help. Volunteers can signup for two 30-minute sessions to demo the app and provide feedback. Or, they can simply download the app and start using it. No individual data will be reported. Only aggregated results that are anonymous will be used for the research.

“We want parents to feel comfortable in choosing how much information, if any, they share,” Arriaga said. “This is a critical component to making this app useful as a health care tool.”

Those downloading the app can either create a personalized profile(s) to track one or more child’s developmental milestones, or they can choose to use the app to view quick lists of developmental milestones without providing personal data. Regardless, parents and caregivers are guided to tailored information based on the selected age range and answers to questions about developmental milestones. Users can reference a list of skills children should achieve at each age and keep track of milestones that have been attained. These include the number of words a child can speak, interactions with their environment, command of motor skills, and more.

Notes and email functions within the app allow parents to share gathered information with pediatricians and other medical professionals. These functions also provide parents a way to more closely monitor their child’s progress.

“We want to give parents a technology resource that can meet all their needs in saving important observations about their child’s behavior or questions for their pediatrician while being able to easily access the information at any time,” Arriaga said.

The ActEarly app will provide researchers an opportunity to understand how parents use a developmental milestone tracker and, in the long-term, have user data on development milestones that can help other families make better decisions and improve quality of care for young children.

For more information or to contact the team on using the ActEarly app, visit http://ipat.gatech.edu/study-recruitment.

EarSketch teaches students core computational concepts and the Python and JavaScript languages. Using a digital audio workstation, students write code to create and remix music in popular styles such as hip hop and dubstep.

The software has been used by more than 75,000 students in all 50 states and more than 100 countries since launching in 2013. It is freely accessible to all teachers and students. Georgia Tech researchers created the program to address the national need to make major strides in computer programming literacy for K-12 students, especially among underserved populations.

“Students who study with EarSketch have been shown to make progress in both content knowledge and attitudes toward computer science,” said co-creator Jason Freeman, a professor of music in the College of Design. “EarSketch is especially effective at engaging female students in computing, whose gains in computing engagement in our research can be two or three times higher than their male peers.”

EarSketch will train 50 K-12 teachers in computer science principles this summer through in-person workshops and online training.

Freeman co-directs EarSketch with Brian Magerko, an associate professor in the Ivan Allen College School of Literature, Media, and Communication, in collaboration with Georgia Tech’s Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC) and the Institute for Computing Education. EarSketch is supported by the National Science Foundation, Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, Scott Hudgens Family Foundation and Google.

This morning’s White House fact sheet kicks off CSEdWeek and highlights new actions of support for computer science education. President Barack Obama challenged the nation to create opportunities for every child to learn computer science during February’s State of the Union Address.

Fitzgerald, a robotics student pursuing her Ph.D. in Computer Science, faced physical hindrances brought on by heart defects, asthma, and low blood pressure. Chancellor, a Ph.D. student in Human-Centered Computing, had the less permanent but no less challenging struggle of recovering from a serious ankle injury.

Both born problem-solvers, they set out to do the only thing they knew how: Find a solution. And while their respective struggles were different in many ways, the conclusion for both was the same:

Powerlifting.

No, these were not halfhearted New Years’ resolutions to join the Campus Recreation Center and put in a set of squats or curls every now and again. We’re talking shaking legs, clinched teeth, and flushed red faces with muscles pushed to the limit.

“It’s an exciting sport,” Chancellor said. “It’s something everyone can celebrate. Every person, even if they aren’t going to win. They’re excited about someone setting a personal record. The room lights up, and you can hear it.”

Powerlifting is a strength sport that consists of lifting max weight on three lift types: squat, bench press, and deadlift. In a powerlifting event, it involves lifting the weight in three attempts.

Chancellor began her involvement in the sport just two years ago, but has already taken part in a handful of competitions. Competing wasn’t her original intention, though. She got involved simply to solve a problem.

She suffered a significant ankle injury at the end of her time as an undergraduate. Admitting she wasn’t in the best physical health before that time, she said she approached the issue like she approaches her studies: She did research.

She looked into the best ways to rehabilitate her ankle after going through reconstructive surgery. The overwhelming tip was lifting weights.

“It was a solution to help stabilize, add physical fitness, and decrease the risks of further injury,” she said.

She began doing simple workouts at the gym, noting that she had very little grasp of what she was doing by herself. Once she came to Georgia Tech to begin her Ph.D. three years ago, however, she discovered the Barbell Club.

“That’s when I actually got serious about the weight lifting and started powerlifting,” she said. “I was barely squatting 135 when I joined. But there is a mentorship at the Barbell Club. I was paired with the mentor, who helped grow my lifting abilities. It was a ton of fun to have a group of people I could talk to. No one is judgmental. They’re all super supportive of you. When I post videos, everyone helps me with my form. I got hooked.”

Fitzgerald is having a similar experience. While she hasn’t joined the Barbell Club yet, Chancellor has tried to recruit her to join.

“I only found out she was lifting about a month ago,” Chancellor said. “I saw her on Instagram, and I was like ‘What?!’”

Fitzgerald, who has yet to compete, said she plans to join the club and hopes to do her first competition sometime in early 2017.

She’s been lifting for about a year after her physician advised her to take part in more physical activities because of some of her medical difficulties.

“I have to stay in good cardiovascular shape, otherwise I start to have issues with low blood pressure and poor circulation,” Fitzgerald explained. “I was advised by my doctor to use exercise as the most effective treatment.”

She also sees powerlifting as a mental break and a constant challenge that puts her other work in perspective. While her research is an intellectual challenge, in lifting or cycling, another sport she enjoys, she said that you are pushing yourself to do something you weren’t sure you could physically do.

“That’s something I appreciate both in the research lab and out,” she said. “It’s competitive on an individual level. It’s more important to compare yourself to what you used to be. Just the progress and how you’ve improved. It’s comforting to know everyone started somewhere. The same person who is lifting 500 pounds, they started somewhere very similar to me.”

The involvement in powerlifting takes an interesting juxtaposition to Fitzgerald’s research, which is in cognitive systems and human-robot interaction. Her research centers around analogical reasoning as it pertains to robots, answering the central question: How can we make artificial intelligence handle new situations that arise, which they are unprepared for, using past similar experiences? By Fitzgerald’s own description, it’s a means to help robots be more flexible in how they solve problems.

As Fitzgerald explains, it’s an approach very similar to how humans work. We see a problem, we consider past experiences, and we find a solution.

Similarly, Chancellor’s research has an interesting tie to her involvement in powerlifting. One of her research areas pertains to deviant behavior in online mental wellness communities. For example, there are certain communities that not only accept destructive behaviors like eating disorders, but promote them. Her aim is to help these communities find and understand the spread of this content on social networking sites, as well as to help moderators who are challenged by this content.

While Chancellor said that she aims to keep her own personal health and wellbeing separate from her research, it’s impossible not to be informed by both.

“Still, the gym is my space,” she said. “It’s a chance to get away from something that can be an emotionally heavy subject.”

The sport has become more popular, especially among women, in recent years, and Chancellor said that it’s a great movement that she’d like to see continue.

“It’s cool for women to be strong and to be active,” she said. “We’re so much further along than we used to be.”

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a system that teaches people Morse code within four hours using a series of vibrations felt near the ear. Participants wearing Google Glass learned it without paying attention to the signals —they played games while feeling the taps and hearing the corresponding letters. After those few hours, they were 94 percent accurate keying a sentence that included every letter of the alphabet and 98 percent accurate writing codes for every letter.

This is the latest chapter of passive haptic learning (PHL) studies at Georgia Tech. The same method — using vibrations while participants aren’t paying attention — has taught people braille, how to play the piano and improved hand sensation for those with partial spinal cord injury.

The PHL projects are all led by Georgia Tech Professor Thad Starner and his Ph.D. student Caitlyn Seim. The team decided to use Glass for this study because it has both a built-in speaker and tapper (Glass’s bone-conduction transducer).

In the study, participants played a game while feeling vibration taps between their temple and ear. The taps represented the dots and dashes of Morse code and passively “taught” users through their tactile senses — even while they were distracted by the game. 

The taps were created when researchers sent a very low-frequency signal to Glass’s speaker system. At less than 15 Hz, the signal was below hearing range but, because it was played very slowly, the sound was felt as a vibration. 

Half of the participants in the study felt the vibration taps and heads a voice prompt for each corresponding letter. The other half — the control group — felt no taps to help them learn.

Participants were tested throughout the study on their knowledge of Morse code and their ability to type it.  After less than four hours of feeling every letter, everyone was challenged to type the alphabet in Morse code in a final test.

The control group was accurate only half the time.  Those who felt the passive cues were nearly perfect.

The research was recently presented in Germany at the 20^th International Symposium on Wearable Computers.

“Does this new study mean that people will rush out to learn Morse code? Probably not,” said Starner. “It shows that PHL lowers the barrier to learn text-entry methods — something we need for smartwatches and any text-entry that doesn’t require you to look at your device or keyboard.”

Previous research on PHL used custom hardware to provide the tactile stimuli, but here researchers use an existing wearable device. 

“This research also shows that other common devices with an actuator could be used for passive haptic learning,” he says. “Your smartwatch, Bluetooth headset, fitness tracker or phone.”

“In our Braille and piano PHL studies, people felt vibrations on their fingers, then used their fingers for the task,” said Seim. “This study was different and surprising. People were tapped on their heads, but the skill they learned was using their finger.”

Seim’s next study will go a step further, investigating whether PHL can teach people how to type on the trusted QWERTY keyboard. That would mean several letters assigned to the same finger, rather than using only one finger like Morse code.

The work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation (Grant Number 1217473). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.

One Google search leads you down a labyrinth of conflicting information, countless websites providing their own specific set of recommendations, and by the time you’re finished you are more flummoxed than when you began.

And that’s just for a headache and a nagging cough. Imagine what those who are going through more serious afflictions – like breast cancer – encounter.

The American Cancer Society estimated that about 246,660 new cases of invasive breast cancer would be diagnosed in women in 2016 alone. And while oncologists, navigators and other healthcare professionals do fantastic work in guiding their patients through the challenging journey, the sheer number of patients makes a more personalized approach difficult.

That’s a problem that Georgia Tech students Maia Jacobs and Aditi Dhar are trying to overcome with their work on MyPath.

MyPath is a mobile application designed to help individuals on their cancer journey, a concept Jacobs became familiar with as she volunteered with Susan G. Komen as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin.

“We see a lot of health applications now being focused on a singular need or a singular moment in time,” Jacobs said. “But I’m trying to push away from that and develop these more holistic and adaptive systems that can support people’s needs as they do change over time.”

Now in her fifth year pursuing her Ph.D. in Human-Centered Computing in the College of Computing, Jacobs is working to provide easier access to more personalized information that changes and updates over the course of an individual’s battle with breast cancer – from the day of diagnosis to survivorship.

It begins with a home screen that offers tabs to various needs. One provides information on treatments, another on day-to-day matters. There are others for health and wellbeing, social support, emotional support, and weekly surveys users can fill out to help tailor the application to their needs.

On the survey, individuals can check specific areas that may have been a problem for them over the past week, including child care or housing, insurance or treatment decisions. Beyond that, they can select a level of distress, from 1-10, that they have felt over the past week. From there, they receive specific resource recommendations that have been sifted from the vast collection found online.

Dhar worked on the design of the tool. Jacobs and she spent time going through and iterating her design, refining it and improving it each time. Now, as the UX designer (or user experience designer), Dhar focuses on enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability and accessibility provided in the interaction between the user and the product.

“It’s not that there’s no information out there,” Dhar said. “It’s just too much information. The biggest need was to tailor what information is needed in that moment for that patient.”

This project is five years in the making for Jacobs and nearly a full year for Dhar, who began pursuing her Master’s in Human-Computer Interaction at Georgia Tech after doing her undergraduate work in her native India. Dhar joined Jacobs and MyPath in January of this year.

Jacobs, whose grandmother is a three-time cancer survivor, initially worked on a project surrounding breast cancer, called MyJourney Compass, early during her time at Georgia Tech. That project, also a mobile application, in many ways inspired the development of MyPath. Where MyJourney Compass did not have any personalization or adaptive features, that is the primary contribution of MyPath.

“With MyJourney Compass, we were really just exploring if and how people would use mobile tablets throughout their cancer journey,” Jacobs explained. “The tablet had static health information, a set of PDFs recommended by the Harbin Cancer Clinic. In addition, patients had their email, calendar, doctor information, games, and could add their own content, as well. All of that will continue to be on the new tablets.”

MyJourney Compass was funded by the Georgia Department of Community Health. Using research from that application, the team was able to secure a larger grant from the National Cancer Institute, which has funded their work on MyPath.

Early on, she spent her time working with Cancer Navigators, a nonprofit organization based in Rome, Ga., that serves as a complement to the medical expertise of cancer care providers by guiding those affected toward a better understanding of their diagnosis and care.

“My first year was just trying to get to know (Cancer Navigators) and what they do,” Jacobs said. “What we found is that they offered this amazing personalized support, but they work with 900 patients a year, so it’s just a huge responsibility. They’re limited with time and resources, so it came down to how we can help support their navigation practices.”

That organization partners with the Harbin Cancer Clinic, where MyPath is set to launch next week, the last of October’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

The plan is to offer those diagnosed with breast cancer at the clinic the opportunity to participate in the application and a study that seeks to understand how a personalized adaptive system influences patient experiences using standard survey metrics that assess things like physical and emotional wellbeing as well as patient engagement.

Half the group in the study will be given a tablet that is personalized and adaptive to each patient, while the other half will receive one that provides all the health information but lacks the personalized component. They will take four surveys over the course of a year, and the responses will be compared.

For now, the application will be in a beta mode available only to those participants at the Harbin Cancer Clinic, but Jacobs envisions a possibility where this application could be used on a much broader scale.

“If we’re able to show that this has some impact on patients’ experiences, satisfaction with care, physical and mental wellbeing, all of that could motivate the need for it more broadly,” she said. “I think Georgia Tech has really great resources for turning research projects into products. It’s not what we’re looking into now, but it might become that as we see what the research finds.”

In addition, Jacobs and Dhar will be talking directly to participants to understand just how the technology fits into their daily routines and supports their personal and health goals.

Dhar’s Master’s project will focus on creating a better “ecosystem” between patients, doctors, and navigators.

“We have information from patients and doctors, but we don’t necessarily have a way for the navigators to get that information in a format that reduces their time spent on getting up to speed with the patient,” Dhar said. “We have so many pieces, we just need to connect it together into one ecosystem.”

As for the future of MyPath, both Jacobs and Dhar see plenty of potential to build and expand upon the project as they receive feedback from doctors, patients, and navigators.

“It’s never fully finished,” Dhar said. “You always get feedback, and then you make it better and so on. I don’t think, as designers, we can ever say that something is truly finished.”

“There’s a real opportunity here to work on a project where you are seeing a direct impact on people’s lives,” Jacobs added. “That makes it pretty special, I think.”

Jacobs was named a 2016 James D. Foley Scholar and Dhar a finalist for the GVU Distinguished Master’s Student Award. They are advised on the project by College of Computing Professor Beth Mynatt, who is executive director for the Institute for People and Technology and the director of the Everyday Computing Lab.

• Scrolling through apps running your fingers along the watch band
• Launching eight smartwatch apps by tapping key points on the watch case (or bezel)
• Rejecting phone calls by blowing on the screen or tapping the side of the watch
• Editing dictated text message errors by breathing on the screen
• Transferring on-screen information from the watch to a phone with breaths
• Selecting numbers by tapping the back of your hand

The research was presented at several conferences in the fall, most recently in Niagara Falls at the 2016 ACM International Conference on Interactive Surfaces and Spaces in November.

Ph.D. student Cheng Zhang oversaw WatchOut, an interaction technique that uses taps and scrolling gestures on the case and watchband, “outside” the watch screen. They’re possible because of the watch’s gyroscope and accelerometer sensors.

“Other techniques that improve control of smartwatches have included 3D gestures above the screen, bigger screens or adding an extra armband,” Zhang said. “We wanted to show it could be done with existing technology already common on today’s devices.”

One demo app allows wearers to scroll up, down, left and right by swiping on the watchband. According to Zhang it makes it easier to interact with GPS maps or menus. His study showed that scrolling on rubber watchbands was more accurate than leather bands due to the different friction of the materials.

They also created an app that creates eight touchpoints on the device’s bezel. Rather than scrolling through a long list of apps, the user simply hits one of eight spots on the case to launch Facebook, for example. Hitting the sides of the watch can also control incoming calls.  

“Smartwatches aren’t very convenient when you’re carrying something,” Zhang said. “That’s why we wanted to create a technique that allows the user to tap the watch to accept or deny phone calls. Hitting the right side answers the call; the left side ignores it.”

Hands-free control is exactly what the other Georgia Tech team, led by Ph.D. student Gabriel Reyes, had in mind. One day he watched his wife blow a piece of fuzz off her phone while holding their newborn son. He and a team of students later created Whoosh, a technique that allows a person to control the watch by blowing, exhaling, shushing, sipping or puffing on the screen. The watch uses its microphone and machine learning to identify the breath patterns of each acoustic event, then assigns an action to each.

For example, a wearer can shush the watch to ignore a call or blow on it twice to accept. In another scenario, the watch can be locked or unlocked using a correct combination of short or long breaths. Voice recognition sometimes produces incorrect words when dictating a text message. Blowing quickly on the watch can erase words, while blowing on it longer will send the text message when ready. Finally, the technique also works with smartphones. A user can transfer content from the watch to a smartphone simply by sipping it off the watch and puffing it on the phone.

Reyes and his team are excited that they’ve proven the technology works. He says it could have potential for people with disabilities. “The sip and puff technique has been used to control wheelchairs,” he said. “Perhaps Whoosh could be the foundation for developers looking for ways that allow more control for those who can’t easily interact with their mobile and wearable devices.” 

Dingtian Zhang, a Ph.D. student and labmate of Reyes, also designed a 3D-printed case that snaps onto the watch. The attachment has eight holes around the bezel, each with varying lengths. When a wearer blows into each of the holes, unique frequencies are generated much like a flute. The watch’s microphone and the Whoosh system detects the subtle differences in the frequencies produced and identifies the intended target. Each target is linked to a specific action within applications.

The final project, TapSkin, allows users to tap on the back of their hand to input numbers 0-9 or commands into the watch. The technique uses the watch’s microphone and inertial sensors to detect a total of 11 different tapping locations on a person’s skin around the watch.

Ten years ago, Evans suffered a stroke that left him with limited mobility. Over the past two years, he’s been working with Kemp, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, to develop and test robots that help him shave, adjust a blanket when he’s cold, and even scratch an annoying itch.

“We did things with the robots that I never could have imagined,” said Evans, who contacted Kemp after seeing him on a CNN broadcast about health care robots.

Robots working directly with people – even helping them shave – is both challenging and unusual. Most robots today work in manufacturing facilities where, for safety reasons, they stay far away from humans. But Georgia Tech robotics researchers believe people and robots can accomplish much more by working together – as long as the robots have common sense to know, for instance, how much force humans apply when shaving.

“A major challenge for health care robots is that they lack so much of the knowledge and experience that people take for granted,” said Kemp. “To us, it’s just common sense that everybody has; for robots, it’s a serious impediment.”

Giving robots common sense is just one milestone on the path to the kinds of collaboration that will be required to meet the needs of a growing population of older persons. Beyond personal care, the benefits of co-robotics are many. To produce better products more efficiently, manufacturing robots will need to team up with humans, each contributing unique abilities. And in defense and homeland security, robots will increasingly have to take on the dangerous jobs, leveraging people’s skills while protecting them from harm.

Read more of this article from Georgia Tech's Research Horizons magazine.

Class began Jan. 5 for Watson when it became a part of Ashok Goel’s Computational Creativity courses. Through a special licensing arrangement, Goel, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing, and his students are enjoying extraordinary access to the computing power of Watson. Goel is hopeful that the Watson-based partnership between IBM and Georgia Tech has only just begun.

“It is my hope that once we have acquired the expertise, that IBM will give Watson to Georgia Tech for more extensive use,” Goel said.

Why are Goel and Georgia Tech interested in Watson? Watson is an artificially intelligent computer system that processes information like a human. Named for IBM’s founder Thomas J. Watson, the system is a “natural extension of what humans can do at their best.” As such, Watson is rapidly becoming a valuable resource for research and analysis.

Select, elite educational institutions across the U.S. have been granted licenses to use Watson in classroom settings. Goel is the Institute’s first licensee. He plans to use Watson as a resource capable of aiding human creativity in his courses. Goel is particularly interested in how humans make scientific discoveries and inventions. That interest has guided Goel’s approach to his courses.

Goel plans to load biological knowledge like public domain articles and relevant information from open access journals onto Watson. Loading such information will enable Goel’s students to find information in a targeted manner. Students will need that information to be readily accessible as they design problems in teams with a focus on environmental sustainability. Subsequently, Goel hopes students having that level of access to top expertise will allow for the development of practical, new solutions.

“Using artificial intelligence to provide access to biological knowledge to non-biologists can hopefully inspire new creativity,” Goel said. Creativity that Goel hopes stretches beyond the classroom. His courses feature an extensive primer on entrepreneurship. He’s hopeful such information plants a seed in the minds of his students.

“A team could start a company,” Goel said. “That’d happen in a perfect world.”

If Watson and Goel’s students have their way, that perfect world might not be far off.

The 2014 ACM fellows were cited for contributions to key computing fields including data base mining and design; artificial intelligence and machine learning; cryptography and verification; Internet security and privacy; computer vision and medical imaging; electronic design automation and human-computer interaction.

ACM will formally recognize the fellows at its annual awards banquet in June 2015 in San Francisco. Additional information about the ACM 2014 fellows, the awards event, as well as previous ACM Fellows and award winners is available at http://awards.acm.org/.

Guzdial, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing, was cited for “contributions to computing education and broadening participation.” Guzdial serves as director of Contextualized Support for Learning and led “Georgia Computes!,” an effort to increase the number and diversity of computing students in the state. He is currently a lead in the NSF’s Expanding Computing Education Pathways Alliance, which helps states improve their computing education policy and offerings.

"I feel honored and privileged to be included in the fellows of 2014,” Guzdial said. “This recognition shows that computing education research is valued and promoted in the ACM, which I deeply appreciate. I am particularly grateful to Professor Jim Foley for nominating me.”

A professor at Georgia Tech since 1990, Navathe was cited for his “contribution to data modeling, database design and database education.”  With his multidisciplinary background, Navathe has focused his research on database modeling, design, and integration problems in the context of emerging applications - engineering design, electronic commerce, biological (particularly human genome) databases, document and text databases, and collaborative applications. He is also interested in knowledge representation, data mining and knowledge discovery, tools and methodologies for information system design and visualization and user interfaces for better information retrieval.

“It is a great honor to be recognized by the computing research community for my long-standing work on modeling design, distribution and integration of databases which I started when databases were just starting to be used in industry and government for large-scale applications,” Navathe said. “Through my textbook and its translations in 11 languages, I have been able to influence the teaching of this discipline worldwide. I owe it to a number of colleagues, faculty, and industry collaborators and students who have worked with me over the last 35 plus years.”

The students talked with farmers and volunteers about the crops, planting schedules, harvest requests, visitor demographics and other data crucial to the daily operation.

Urban agriculture, the students realized, is a complex undertaking. Their challenge is to create a streamlined data management system for the farm and move them away from pencil and paper. Ideally, this system will allow the farm to increase productivity and move toward financial sustainability.

The student team is one of five working with non-profits and government agencies as part of the Data Science for Social Good internship program, sponsored by Georgia Tech and Oracle.

Sixteen students from around the country are participating in a 10-week paid internship program showing non-profits and government agencies how they can use data to tackle social and societal problems.

The program allows students to solve real-world problems instead of relying on sample data sets, said Ellen Zegura, the program director.

It also educates local non-profits on the need for better data systems, said Zegura, a professor in the School of Computer Science in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech.

“We are connecting those who collect data with the people who know how to turn the data into something meaningful that can have a positive impact,” she said.

The projects deal with safety, criminal justice, transportation and sustainability. The student teams are collaborating with the Atlanta Police Department, the city’s Community Courts, Cycle Atlanta, Georgia Tech Office of Information Technology and Truly Living Well.

Georgia Tech is piloting the program this year and hopes to grow it next year. The Atlanta internship is modeled after a similar program the University of Chicago started last year.

Raj Bandyopadhyay, principal data scientist with Pindrop Security, heard about the Chicago program at a conference and led the charge to bring it to Atlanta.

“So often when people hear of big data, they don’t understand how it can be used to improve their lives,” he said. “We are showing future data scientists how they can use their skills to address social issues.”

More than 80 students applied for the internship. The selected students come from eight colleges including: Carnegie Mellon University, Southern Methodist University, Emory University and Georgia Tech.

Umashanthi Pavalanathan, a Ph.D. student in computer science at Georgia Tech, is working with 911 data collected by the city. They are looking at the response time between calls and how to best use the dispatchers.

“I’m so used to dealing with abstract concepts and situations that it’s exciting to work with real clients on real issues,” she said. “You get a good feeling knowing that what we’re doing can help save somebody.”

Students from all five projects will present their findings and recommendations during a public demonstration and reception scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. on July 17 at Atlanta Tech Village. More information about the event and internship program can be found here: http://dssg-atl.io

The internship ends July 18, although the data will continue to reap benefits.

Bretan created the composition after listening to Davis’ 1971 Live Evil album.

“The brilliance of the musicians on that album is an inspiration to me and my own musical and instrumental aspirations,” said Bretan. “They also set the standard for the level of musicianship that I hope machines will one day achieve. And through the power of artificial intelligence, signal processing and engineering, I firmly believe it is possible for machines to be artistic, creative and inspirational.”

The project was created during a span of several months at Georgia Tech. The Shimi robots analyze the music offline and generate a sequence of movements and musical phrases that can then be performed live. Shimon, is given the chord progression prior to the performance, then figures out how to improvise with Bretan. The student will spend the next few months fine-tuning the process to allow real-time analysis and composing. 

These inventions are among the 20 semi-finalists competing in an annual competition to find the next generation of music instruments.

The Margaret Guthman Musical Instrument Competition, held at the Georgia Institute of Technology, seeks to find the world’s best new ideas in musical instrument design, engineering and musicianship. Entries represent a dozen countries and expand our assumed notion of what constitutes an instrument and the sounds it can produce.

“This year we have seen a tremendous variety of high-quality submissions – from beautifully designed acoustic instruments to sophisticated electronic instruments utilizing wearable, mobile and robotic technologies,” said Gil Weinberg, director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology.

The center, the School of Music, and the College of Architecture sponsor the competition. Contestants compete for $10,000 in prizes.

“In its seventh year, the competition has established itself as the place to go for those who want to get a glimpse of the future of musical performance and expression,” Weinberg said.

During this year's competition organizers will honor Richard Guthman, who recently passed away. Guthman, who graduated from Georgia Tech in 1956 with a degree in industrial engineering, founded the Margaret Guthman Keyboard Competition in 1988 as a tribute to his wife. The event evolved into the current musical instrument competition.

Judging the 20 semi-finalists are: DJ Hurricane, a producer and rapper who is best known for his work with the Beastie Boys; Graham Marsh, a Grammy award-winning producer, mixer and engineer who has worked with Ludacris, Bruno Mars and CeeLo Green; and Joe Paradiso, a physicist who designs electronic music synthesizers and directs the MIT Media Lab’s Responsive Environments Group.

And for the first time, the competition will also include a student challenge. Over 70 Georgia Tech students registered to participate in the Guthman Musical Instrument Design Challenge, sponsored by synthesizer maker Moog and the Georgia Tech Office of the Arts. Student winners will receive cash and in-kind prizes valued at more than $6,000. Participants will also get the chance to present their invention during the main Guthman Competition event.

Judges for the Student Design Challenge are: Michael Adams, CEO of Moog Music; Aaron Lanterman, a Georgia Tech professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering who specializes in digital signal processing; and Lee Lerner, a research scientist with the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

The main Guthman Competition will be held February 19 and 20 at the Klaus Advanced Computing Building on campus. The finals will be held February 20 from 7:00 – 9:00 pm on campus and are free and open to the public. The finals will also be live streamed. More information about the contest and live streaming can be found at http://guthman.gatech.edu.

Pham is among the 22 people the White House invited to hear President Obama’s speech from the first lady’s box.

Pham graduated from Tech with a computer science degree in 2007 and completed her master’s degree in 2009, focusing on human-computer interaction. 

She currently works for the administration’s new U.S. Digital Service, which aims to make the federal government more tech-savvy. Her duties include improving digital healthcare for veterans.

The job is a personal one. Pham’s brother, David, is also a Georgia Tech graduate who earned a Purple Heart for his service with the United States Marine Corps in Afghanistan.

Kathy Pham is known for using her tech skills to solve problems. She helped her mother battle leukemia and blogged about their experiences at Team Mama Pham.  

In fact, the White House singled out Pham for her ability to merge tech know-how with a passion for public service.

“Kathy, a computer scientist, has used technology throughout her career to tackle pressing challenges,” according to the White House. “From Google to IBM to Harris Healthcare Solutions, she's designed health care interoperability software, studied disease trends with data analytics, and built data warehouses for hospitals.”

While studying at Tech, Pham won Microsoft’s Imagine Cup, a premier global student technology competition.  

She also received the Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship from Google and in 2006 was named the College of Computing’s most outstanding junior student.

The study followed 923 people who used “#engaged” to announce in 2011. The research team then looked at each person’s tweets in the nine-month period before the engagement and 12 months afterward (2 million total tweets). They were also compared to a random sampling of tweeters during the same time frame (12 million tweets).

After people got engaged, tweets with the word “I” or “me” dropped by 69 percent. They were replaced with “we” and “us.” There was barely any change within the control group.

“People began to paint themselves as a couple, rather than as individuals,” said Munmun de Choudhury, a Georgia Tech assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing who led the study. “They’re going through a major change in life, and it shows on social media as they adapt to society’s expectations of their marital identity.”

Similarly, tweets using familial words such as “future-in-laws” and “children” jumped by 219 percent after the proposal (although men tended to wait until after marriage to tweet family-based words).

The study also noticed that men and women gush about each other differently.

The most frequent terms used by females when tweeting about their significant other were tied to emotion (for example, they “love” their  “wonderful” fiancé). Men are more likely to use physical descriptors such as sexy, beautiful or gorgeous when talking about their fiancée.   

De Choudhury and co-author Michael Massimi also noticed that engaged people are much more likely to think and tweet about the future. Instead of using past-tense verbs, future-tense verbs surged by 62 percent after engagement.

“People are more likely to post that they ‘are going on a date night tonight’ rather than tweeting that they already did so,” said Massimi, a former postdoctoral fellow at Microsoft Research Cambridge. “They’re looking forward to the future in their real lives and boasting about it on social media too.”

This is the first empirical study of engagement in social media. It centered on the anthropological concept of liminality – a phase people undergo when they transition from one role in society to another.

“Twitter can be a powerful tool that can mirror our thoughts and how we’re actually feeling,” said de Choudhury, who has done similar social media studies on mothers and postpartum depression. “This isn’t based on what they told us they did. It’s a reliable record ­– it’s what they actually did.”

The paper, “She Said Yes!” Liminality and Engagement Announcements on Twitter,” was accepted and will be presented at iConference 2015 in Newport Beach, California, March 24-27.

“The second drumstick has a mind of its own,” said Weinberg, founding director of the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology. “The drummer essentially becomes a cyborg. It’s interesting to see him playing and improvising with part of his arm that he doesn’t totally control.”

The prosthesis was created for Jason Barnes, a drummer who was electrocuted two years ago and lost his right arm below the elbow. The Atlanta Institute of Music and Media student built his own prosthetic device shortly after the accident. It wasn’t very flexible. He could bang the drums by moving his elbow up and down, but couldn’t control the speed or bounce of the stick without a wrist or fingers. That’s when Weinberg stepped in to create a single-stick device with sensors that responds to Barnes’ bicep muscles.

“Now I can flex and send signals to a computer that tightens or loosens the stick and controls the rebound,” said Barnes.

Weinberg, who has already built a robotic percussionist and marimba player that use computer algorithms to improvise with human musicians, took the prosthesis a step further. He added the second stick and gave it a “musical brain.”

“Jason can pull the robotic stick away from the drum when he wants to be fully in control,” says Weinberg. “Or he can allow it to play on its own and be surprised and inspired by his own arm responding to his drumming.”  

Regardless of how he uses the extra stick, the new prosthetic has already given Barnes capabilities he hasn’t had since before the amputation. It’s only the beginning for Weinberg. He’s using a National Science Foundation grant (IIS- 1345006) to expand the technology.

“Music is very time sensitive. You can hear the difference between two strokes, even if they are a few milliseconds apart,” said Weinberg. “If we are able to use machine learning from Jason’s muscles (and in future steps, from his brain activity) to determine when he intends to drum and have the stick hit at that moment, both arms can be synchronized.”

Weinberg says such robotic synchronization technology could potentially be used in the future by fully abled humans to control an embedded, mechanical third arm during time-sensitive operations. For example, Weinberg’s anticipation algorithms could be used to help astronauts or surgeons perform complex, physical tasks in synchronization with robotic devices.

For Barnes, it’s all about the music. Because an embedded chip can control the speed of the drumsticks, the prosthesis can be programmed to play two sticks at a different rhythm. It can also move the sticks faster than humanly possible.

“I’ll bet a lot of metal drummers might be jealous of what I can do now,” he said. “Speed is good. Faster is always better.”

Barnes will play with the device for the first time publicly on March 22 at the Robotic Musicianship Demonstration and Concert at Kennesaw State University’s Bailey Performance Center. The free event, which will also feature Weinberg’s Shimi robot, is part of the Atlanta Science Festival.

 “People are seeking ways to integrate health care practices into their lives and improve their quality of life, so we must design health interventions that fit seamlessly with current consumer technologies developed for daily use,” says Elizabeth Mynatt, Georgia Tech’s director of the Institute for People and Technology and professor in the School of Interactive Computing.

Highlighting Georgia Tech’s health research strategy are three projects focused on personal technologies and networked computing tools designed to radically change how users interact with health care information and systems. This research will be presented at the Association of Computing Machinery’s conference on human-computer interaction, CHI 2014, in Toronto, Canada, next week.

The research includes:

• Seeking and Sharing Health Information Online, the first large-scale study comparing what medical conditions users looked for on search engines vs. social media. For example, the study revealed that cancer was the No. 1 web search topic while headaches was No. 1 on Twitter.
• StepStream, a computing tool to help middle school-aged students who need more physical activity through a non-competitive program and social conversations around fitness. 
• My Journey Compass, a health management tool designed for tablets and customized for cancer patients.

For the online health information study, Microsoft Research and Georgia Tech researchers compared and contrasted health activities on search engines and social media. Researchers identified 165 prevalent medical conditions, categorized them based on symptoms and severity and developed stigma levels for each. Analyzing Twitter and web search data from a 15-month period for the medical conditions, they gathered more than 125 million tweets from half that number of Twitter users and more than 174 million web searches from almost 40 million users. They also conducted a survey of 210 Internet users to identify motives for online health activity.

“Our findings indicate that there are considerable differences in health activity between the platforms,” says Munmun De Choudhury, the lead investigator and an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. “But the complementary nature of the two media – public vs. private, seeking vs. sharing – helped develop a more complete picture of the range of online health activities.”

The research results showed that people prefer search engines when seeking information on serious medical conditions, disabilities and conditions known to bear social stigma, while Twitter is used more often to share information around symptoms of different health issues, and on conditions with benign explanations.

The StepStream program resulted from a Georgia Tech social computing project on adolescent obesity. This personal health tool integrates into youths’ daily lives through an after-school program and social network site to encourage fitness. The system eschews the direct competition and direct social comparisons of other systems and instead explores how to develop social support for physical fitness within a school context.

Deployed for four weeks in a middle school, StepStream tracked the step count of individual participants who wore pedometers. When a student reached his or her baseline step count (visible only to that student), they received activity points and the social website would post a congratulatory message public to other participants. Students could also send comments to each other on the site. The points were used to play StepStream’s online game, PuddleJump, where friends worked together to unlock levels by collecting stepping stones.

“Since health behavior change theories all focus on attitude change as a prerequisite to sustained behavior change, we were particularly interested to see how StepStream may have influenced students’ perceptions of their own abilities, comparison to other students and fitness in general,” says Andrew Miller, StepStream’s creator and a Ph.D. candidate in human-centered computing at Georgia Tech.

Students averaged 6,137 steps per day in the baseline period and 6,465 steps per day while using StepStream. While the overall effect on physical activity for all students was modest, StepStream appeared to help those most in need of elevated fitness levels. Those students, with baselines below the group average (the lower 50 percent), improved their daily step counts by an average of 1,088 steps per day while using StepStream.

My Journey Compass was designed by a Georgia Tech team to increase patient engagement for improving health outcomes and create a potential gateway to impact chronic disease management. Researchers tested the tool with a small group of breast cancer patients and included a suite of preinstalled applications and health management resources on Nexus 7 Android tablets.

Designed and deployed with health care providers, My Journey Compass enabled patients to be more confident and prepared in discussing their treatment, according to the study. Patients recorded conversations with physicians (to reference later or share with family), took notes, scheduled appointments, referenced health data and did other tasks to centralize their cancer management. The high adoption rate of the tablet tool directly correlated to its customization (for health and non-health purposes), mobile use, balance of information that was relevant and not overwhelming, and privacy advantages.

My Journey Compass gave patients total control of the device, resulting in unexpected uses, notably as a relaxation and escape tool. Patients added their own entertainment apps for various activities, including making visits to chemotherapy easier and routine daily use.

“By providing a tool that shifts between a health and personal device, participants over the long term may be more likely to return to using the tool for health purposes should the need arise,” said Maia Jacobs, a researcher on the study and Ph.D. student in human-centered computing at Georgia Tech.

In South Korea, 99.6 percent of young people are active, the highest percentage in the world. The least? The Asian island of Timor Leste with less than 1 percent.  

Those are among the many findings in a study from The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs Assistant Professor Michael Best and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). The study is the first attempt to measure, by country, the world’s “digital natives.” The term is typically used to categorize young people born around the same time as when the personal computer was introduced and who have spent their lives connected with technology. 

Nearly 96 percent of American millennials are digital natives. That figure is behind Japan (99.5 percent) and several European countries, including Finland, Denmark, and the Netherlands.

But the percentage Best thinks is most important is the number of digital natives compared to a country’s total population.

“That’s because a country’s future will be defined by today’s young people and by technology,” said Best, who co-led the study and, jointly with ITU, developed the model that calculated the worldwide figures. “Countries with a high proportion of young people who are already online are positioned to define and lead the digital age of tomorrow.” 

The countries with the highest proportion of digital natives among their population are mostly rich nations, which have high levels of overall Internet penetration. Iceland is at the top of the list with 13.9 percent. The United States is sixth (13.1 percent). A big surprise is Malaysia, a middle-income country with one of the highest proportions of digital natives (ranked fourth at 13.4 percent). Malaysia has a strong history of investing in educational technology.  

The countries with the smallest estimated proportion of digital natives are Timor-Leste, Myanmar, and Sierra Leone. The bottom 10 consists entirely of African or Asian nations, many of which are suffering from conflict and/or have very low Internet availability.

However, the report notes that Internet usage has increased significantly in the developing world during the past five years. The ITU believes the digital native population in these regions will more than double by 2017.

Overall, there are approximately 363 million digital natives out of a world population of nearly 7 billion (5.2 percent).

“Youth are transforming our world through the power of information and communication technologies,” said Hamadoun Touré, ITU secretary-general. “The Youth Declaration developed at ITU’s BYND2015 Youth Summit in Costa Rica and presented to the United Nations General Assembly last week by Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla calls for more measurable targets to monitor the digital empowerment of young people at national, regional, and international levels. This first attempt to measure the number of digital natives around the world is a valuable first contribution to this effort.”

The model was developed using data collected by the ITU through surveys conducted around the globe. The study is part of the ITUs Measuring the Information Society 2013 report, which was released on October 7.

Best is a faculty member in The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs with a joint appointment in the College of Computing. His research focuses on information and communication technologies for social, economic, and political development, primarily in low-income countries in Africa and Asia.

Research into fan fiction and other types of remix communities reveals many legal misconceptions persistent among different groups when applying copyrighted work to their own creations. The research also highlights online social norms – independent of actual law – that guide the use of copyrighted works in fan communities.

For the study, Georgia Tech researchers interviewed content creators who participate in remix and fan creation activities – think “Gangnam-style” parody videos or Twilight fan fiction – and found that legal ambiguity, rather than technical limitations can be a higher barrier to creating media online. The study focused on participants’ understanding of the U.S. copyright law’s “fair use” provision, which allows for the use of copyrighted material without permission from the owners in certain instances. 

“We wanted to take a group of people who make subtle judgments about what they think they can or can’t do in a legally gray area and see how that affects their daily decisions in what they are creating online,” says Casey Fiesler, Ph.D. candidate in human-centered computing at Georgia Tech and the primary investigator in the research.

The study revealed several common legal myths about fair use that were strikingly similar among participants who represented different media types (fiction, art, video, graphics and music). These included:

- Perception of noncommerciality as the sole deciding factor of fair use. (REALITY: Courts use a four-pronged test to determine fair use; also, monetary gain doesn’t necessarily forbid fair use of copyrighted content.)

- Blanket exception for educational use. (REALITY: There are no such blanket exceptions, although parodies have been tested in case law and more often than not were protected as fair use.)

- Addition of attribution as an explicit fair use factor. (REALITY: Giving credit to the original copyright holder is not required as part of the law, nor does it automatically protect the new creator.)

Fiesler, who also holds a law degree from Vanderbilt University, says the problem with fair use is that it’s decided on a case-by-case basis. She said: “The only way you ever know for absolute sure that something is fair use is if you are sued, and a judge says ‘Yes, it’s fair use’ or ‘No, it’s not.’”

Researchers also discovered patterns of ethical judgments by participants that are related to fair use. These included:

- Distinction between “profiting” from someone else’s work and commerciality.  In fan communities, even if money doesn’t change hands, tangible benefits to the remixer/fan creator are frowned upon.

- More consideration for the “little guy” with respect to market harm.  The perception exists that individuals are less likely to obtain content illegally and more likely to attribute a source when the copyright source is a smaller artist.

- Potential for “market good.” This is a notion that remixes and fan works expose copyrighted work to broader audiences.

- Implicit attribution. This is an idea that attribution isn’t necessary when the content source is obvious.

The research indicates that many of the participants’ ethical judgments likely stem from the social norms of larger fan communities that predate the Internet. The fandom community has a “gift” economy, rather than a commercial one, says Fiesler, and that helps dictate norms about how both the underlying works and the new works are treated.

Where the law is vague in what constitutes commercialization, the Georgia Tech researchers found that fan communities often extend the definition to any type of “profiting.” One participant, for example, said that banner ads on a website with remixed work is profiting from the art and should be disallowed. Fan debates on what qualifies as profiting also help to keep the artists in line with legal doctrine.

“What the community typically believes and does can actually affect what is judged legal,” says Amy Bruckman, professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech and researcher on the study. “So it’s in their interests to have cohesion to craft codes of best practice.”

Researchers also found that content creators receive uneven guidance on fair use from market leaders who publish their content. YouTube’s Copyright School (a four-minute video for copyright offenders) features a cute woodland creature that attempts to push the fair use legal information off the screen when it appears. Fiesler says YouTube’s approach might imply that fair use is too hard and that anyone considering it should get a lawyer or beware, a message that could have a chilling effect on how technology is used.

The research study, “Remixers’ Understandings of Fair Use Online,” will be presented at the 17th annual Association of Computing Machinery Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, or CSCW 2014, taking place Feb. 15-19 in Baltimore, Maryland.

O’Brien, who earned a Ph.D. in computer science from Tech in 2000, was recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Feb. 7 with an Academy Award for Technical Achievement. The honor represents his influential research, which served as the foundation for tools to achieve realistic destruction effects in motion films.

A growing list of major Hollywood motion pictures (60 and counting) have used the techniques since 2011, including “X-Men: First Class,” sequels to “Sherlock Holmes” and “Harry Potter,” “Godzilla,” “Man of Steel” and more.

O’Brien’s Georgia Tech thesis work in 1999 involved finite element methods, an established numerical technique for approximating complex solutions in engineering. It is widely used in the real world in the analysis of determining what will happen to a structure when it is hit by another object or blown up. He continued the work at the University of California, Berkeley, when he joined the faculty in 2000 and developed it further in 2004 with Pixelux, a company focused on advanced simulation technology.

O’Brien developed destruction effects using the finite element methods to help create the Digital Molecular Matter (DMM) library, which was first used in video games, notably the “Star Wars: The Force Unleashed” series. The Motion Picture Company, a leader in visual special effects, started working with Pixelux to develop the Kali Destruction System on top of DMM for use in Hollywood films.

The core algorithms for the finite element method destruction technique came from O’Brien’s original work. O’Brien says his fellow Academy Award honoree Eric Parker, who contributed to the DMM toolkit, worked very hard to make things fast on the software. Ben Cole was the third honoree for the design of the Kali Destruction System.

“As a grad student, it was amazing to get the first crack at a test object to use the algorithms,” says O’Brien, who was advised by Jessica Hodgins, now a professor of computer science and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University. 

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognized 21 scientific and technical achievements, represented by 58 individual award recipients, at the annual Scientific and Technical Awards Presentation on Feb. 7. The 87th Academy Awards will take place Feb. 22 to honor the best performing artists, writers, directors and other craftsmen in motion pictures released last year.

“I expect that human robot coordination will be a prominent theme this year,” says Heni Ben Amor, research scientist in the School of Interactive Computing. “There have been new developments in the past year that now allow close interaction between humans and robots when previously it was not safe to stand in their way. Also, hardware has caught up with theoretical development and new advancements in grasping are a sub-area within this topic.”

Georgia Tech’s Henrik Christensen, KUKA Chair and Distinguished Professor in theSchool of Interactive Computing and Executive Director of the Institute for Robotics & Intelligent Machines, will co-chair a session about robotic grasping. New research from Georgia Tech is helping robots grab parts of an object that cannot be not seen (“Exploiting Symmetries and Extrusions for Grasping Household Objects” by Ana Huamán Quispe, Benoît Milville, Marco Gutiérrez, Can Erdogan, Henrik Christensen, Heni Ben Amor, and Mike Stilman). This improves upon previous methods that limited what a robot could do based upon what it was already programmed to recognize.

In all, 14 papers from the College of Computing have been accepted and represent work by Ben Amor, Tapomayukh Bhattacharjee, Aaron Bobick, Byron Boots, Luca Carlone, Siddarth Choudhary, Christensen, Frank Dellaert, Jing Dong, Erdogan, Sehoon Ha, Huamán Quispe, Vadim Indelman, Charles Isbell, Martin Levihn, James Rehg, Jonathan Scholz, Stilman (dec.),and Nam Vo.

Related to grasping, Georgia Tech students will compete in the first ever “Amazon Picking Challenge” at ICRA 2015 to test how well Crichton the robot can pick objects off warehouse shelves. Led by PhD student Eric Huang, the team has been working long hours to ensure that Crichton performs well. Amazon is interested in new forms of commercially viable automated picking so it can continue to quickly package and ship items from a network of fulfillment centers all over the globe.

The conference takes place May 26-30 at The Washington State Convention and Trade Center. 

Georgia Tech’s Institute for Robotics & Intelligent Machines will host an evening reception for personnel and special guests on May 28. Faculty members from the College of Engineering also take leadership roles in chairing sessions, presenting and serving on the conference Steering Committee.

In a rare interview in 2013, Henry said Georgia Tech has always been “Nerd University,” and a major player in Atlanta’s science and science fiction heritage – a unique environment that allows Dragon Con to succeed.

What makes Dragon Con so interesting to those of us from Georgia Tech? Discover Georgia Tech’s stories of nerdy inspiration at the nation’s premier science fiction, fantasy, and pop culture fan convention.

The Spectacular Collision of Georgia Tech and Dragon Con

“People come to this site with hope to fight thoughts of self-destruction,” said Munmun De Choudhury, a Georgia Tech assistant professor who co-led the study. “They’re looking for help. But the pleas of support changed to hopelessness and despair.”

De Choudhury’s group, which included co-leader Mark Dredze of Johns Hopkins University and Glen Coppersmith from the mental health startup Qntfy, looked at nearly 66,000 posts from 19,000 unique users from October 2013 to December 2014. The researchers noticed how language changed in the weeks before and after 10 celebrity suicides, including the 2014 death of comedian Robin Williams.

For example, posts prior to suicides included “maybe I should just do it” and “I need some help…I feel I’m right on the edge.” Afterward, phrases were often along the lines of “It will be one more week and I’ll be done” and “I’ll be ending it this weekend.”

“Redditors tended to be more inwardly focused after celebrity suicide,” said Dredze. “They wrote less about other people. Posts about family and friends shifted to ‘I’ and ‘me.’ We saw more self-disclosure and sadness.”

The researchers add that Redditors didn’t go online to talk about the celebrity. They posted about their own life and the potential of ending it.

The study mirrors the “Werther effect” – that there is an increased number of completed or attempted suicides after the media covers a celebrity’s suicide. Studies that focus on the Werther effect focus on people’s concrete actions. The new study uses social media to gain fresh insights about the morale of a community contemplating suicide.

“We could explore what they thought and how they felt, that is, markers of suicide ideation,” said De Choudhury, a faculty member in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing.  

She and the research group say the findings can be used to offer better online support for psychologically vulnerable populations. For example, the leaders of the sub-Reddit group could prompt more moderators to check the site more frequently after celebrity suicides. Algorithms could be designed to develop risk scores based on language variations before and after a celebrity’s death, then have specialists keep an eye on Redditors most at risk.

The current paper, “Detecting Changes in Suicide Content Manifested in Social Media Following Celebrity Suicides,” was presented in early September at the Proceedings of 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media in Cyprus. It builds on De Choudury and her team’s prior social media studies about mothers with postpartum depression. Another of her papers, which monitored Reddit posts to help determine the likelihood that people trying to quit will actually abstain from tobacco and alcohol, will also be presented at the conference in Cyprus.

This research was supported by National Institutes of Health grant 1R01GM11269701. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

The technique gathered more than 40,000 pictures taken every 30 to 60 seconds, over a 6 month period, by a wearable camera and predicted with 83 percent accuracy what activity that person was doing. Researchers taught the computer to categorize images across 19 activity classes. The test subject wearing the camera could review and annotate the photos at the end of each day (deleting any necessary for privacy) to ensure that they were correctly categorized.

“It was surprising how the method’s ability to correctly classify images could be generalized to another person after just two more days of annotation,” said Steven Hickson, a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science and a lead researcher on the project.

“This work is about developing a better way to understand people's activities, and build systems that can recognize people's activities at a finely-grained level of detail,” said Edison Thomaz, co-author and graduate research assistant in the School of Interactive Computing. “Activity tracking devices like the Fitbit can tell how many steps you take per day, but imagine being able to track all of your activities – not just physical activities like walking and running. This work is moving toward full activity intelligence. At a technical level, we are showing that it's becoming possible for computer vision techniques alone to be used for this.”

The group believes they have gathered the largest annotated dataset of first-person images to demonstrate that deep-learning can understand human behavior and the habits of a specific person.

Student Daniel Casto, a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science and a lead researcher on the project, helped present the method earlier this month at UBICOMP 2015 in Osaka, Japan. He says reaction from conference-goers was positive.

“People liked that we had a method that combines time and images,” Castro says. “Time (of activity) can be especially important for some activity classes. This system learned how relevant images were because of people’s schedules. What does it think the image is showing? It sees both time and image probabilities and makes a better prediction.”

The ability to literally see and recognize human activities has implications in a number of areas – from developing improved personal assistant applications like Siri to helping researchers explain links between health and behavior, Thomaz says.

Castro and Hickson believe that someday within the next decade we will have ubiquitous devices that can improve our personal choices throughout the day.

“Imagine if a device could learn what I would be doing next – ideally predict it – and recommend an alternative?” Castro says. “Once it builds your own schedule by knowing what you are doing, it might tell you there is a traffic delay and you should leave sooner or take a different route.”

The research, “Predicting Daily Activities From Egocentric Images Using Deep Learning,” can be found at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/cpl/projects/dailyactivities/. Authors are Castro, Hickson, Vinay Bettadapura, Thomaz, with School of Interactive Computing Professors Gregory Abowd, Henrik Christensen and Irfan Essa.

“I always wanted to teach,” said Goel. “Growing up in (Kurukshetra) India, my grandfather was a primary school teacher, and my father was a professor of physics. Teaching runs in my blood, I suppose. In my family, teaching and research were considered the things to do.”

He came to the U.S. to attend The Ohio State University and pursue a Ph.D. in physics, but he instead earned a degree in computer science after working for a few years. 

“Some people are like arrows. They know exactly what they want to do in life and they shoot like this,” Goel said, demonstrating a straight shot. “I’m afraid I was more like a spiral,” he joked, referring to the fact that he went from physics to computing. 

Now a professor of computer science and cognitive science in the College of Computing’s School of Interactive Computing, Goel also is the director of the School’s Ph.D. program in Human-Centered Computing. In addition, he serves as director of Interactive Computing’s Design & Intelligence Laboratory, co-director of Tech’s Center for Biologically Inspired Design, and is a fellow of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems. 

He has been at Georgia Tech for 26 years.

“Sometimes people ask me, ‘Why haven’t you moved?’ My answer is Georgia Tech changes into a new place every five years,” he said. “The changes here are so rapid.”

Go 'In the Classroom' with Ashok Goel.

And robots can too.

Researchers at Georgia Tech have identified a way to teach robots how to fall with grace and without serious damage. The work is important as costly robots become more common in manufacturing alongside humans. The skill becomes especially important, too, as robots are sought for health care or domestic tasks – working near the elderly, injured, children or pets.

Ph.D. graduate Sehoon Ha and Professor Karen Liu developed a new algorithm that tells a robot how to react to a wide variety of falls – from a single step to recover from a gentle nudge, to a rolling motion that breaks a high-speed fall. As a result, robots can minimize the damage or injury they might cause to themselves or others while falling by learning the best sequence of movements to slow their momentum. The planning algorithm was validated in physics simulation and experimentally tested on a BioloidGP humanoid.

“A fall can potentially cause detrimental damage to the robot and enormous cost to repair,” said Ha, who graduated in summer 2015 and is now a postdoctoral associate at Disney Research Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. “We believe robots can learn how to fall safely. Our work unified existing research about how to teach robots to fall by giving them a tool to automatically determine the total number of contacts (how many hands shoved it, for example), the order of contacts, and the position and timing of those contacts. All of that impacts the potential of a fall and changes the robot’s response.”

With the latest finding, Ha builds upon Liu’s previous research that studied how cats modify their bodies in the midst of a fall. Liu knew from that work that one of the most important factors in a fall is the angle of the landing. She also knew that a well-designed robot has the “brain” to compute a softer landing, but hadn’t yet optimized the sequence of motions that take place during a fall, like she and Ha were able to do in their latest research.

“From previous work, we knew a robot had the computational know-how to achieve a softer landing, but it didn’t have the hardware to move quickly enough like a cat,” Liu said. “Our new planning algorithm takes into account the hardware constraints and the capabilities of the robot, and suggests a sequence of contacts so the robot gradually can slow itself down.”

Now the robots may fall more gracefully than people and possibly cats, too. Imagine that.

The research, entitled “Multiple Contact Planning for Minimizing Damage of Humanoid Falls,” was presented this month at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in Hamburg, Germany.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Weinberg sees other applications for the technology.

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

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

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

The “Robotarium” is expected to house up to 100 ground and aerial swarm robots. No other university has a similar facility.

“Building and maintaining a world-class, multi-robot lab is too expensive for a large number of roboticists and budding roboticists. This creates a steep barrier to entry into our field,” said Magnus Egerstedt, Schlumberger Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). “We need to provide more access to more people in order to continue creating robot-assisted technologies. The Robotarium will allow that.”

Egerstedt will lead the project, which includes several Georgia Tech faculty members who will also have access to the facility for their own multidisciplinary experiments and curriculum. The team has already created a mini-version of the Robotarium. Georgia Tech graduate students used it to complete their robotics projects. Researchers from the University of California, San Diego, successfully uploaded code during a recent test session.

Access is only one goal of the project.  

“A research instrument like the Robotarium has the potential to build stronger networks of collaborative research, making the whole significantly larger than the sum of its parts,” he said. “The end result has the potential to show how remote access instruments can be structured in other areas beyond robotics.”

The National Science Foundation is helping to fund the project with two grants totaling $2.5 million. Georgia Tech will transform an existing classroom into the new lab. Georgia Tech will use the other award to help create safe and secure open-access systems for the remote lab.

“The first thing that’s going to happen when you open it to the public is someone is going to try to break it,” said Aaron Ames, an associate professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and ECE who’s involved in the project. Ames has already developed an algorithm to prevent robots from colliding with each other.

The Robotarium is expected to be fully operational in 2017.

“It’s going to be a room where robots are always roaming around,” said Egerstedt. “Georgia Tech students will be able to hang out and watch research that is happening across the country and beyond.”

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through grant numbers ECCS-1531195 and CNS 1544332. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NSF.

“Georgia Tech has long defined a vanguard for liberal arts curricula rooted in interdisciplinarity and technology. The center established through the Mellon Foundation funds will allow us to grow the scope and impact of our digital humanities programs and sustain an innovation-based learning experience for our students,” said G.P. “Bud” Peterson, president of Georgia Tech.

“This grant offers us a remarkable opportunity to bring even greater coherence and definition to one of our most distinctive strengths — the innovative ways that we use digital technologies in support of research, teaching, learning, and community engagement,” said Jacqueline J. Royster, dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and Ivan Allen Jr. Chair in Liberal Arts and Technology. “Mellon has our deepest gratitude for believing in our capacities to achieve, to produce, and to make a meaningful difference both in facing global challenges and in enriching the lives, talents, and careers of Georgia Tech students within the College and across the Institute.”

Royster and project co-leaders Lauren Klein and Carl DiSalvo, both professors in Ivan Allen College’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication, will develop a Digital Humanities Studio, where students will use digital technologies to conduct practice-based humanities research; a Civic Engagement Laboratory, which will foster team-based projects and internships to help undergraduates apply their humanities knowledge and technological expertise to real communities in Atlanta and beyond; and a Crossroads Series, which will address a range of complex public issues and connect meaningfully with various audiences through interactive arts and cultural events.

But it took 120 years and a collaboration between Georgia Tech data scientists and University of Georgia historians to see what the spread of that idea had actually looked like. Starting in Chicago, site of the convention, “Cross of Gold” moved to the populous East Coast, then jumped to the West Coast before filling in the less populated areas.

“Going viral” may have taken longer in the 19th century, but the principle was much the same.

Researchers tracked Cross of Gold’s spread using U.S. News Map, a database of more than 10 million newspaper pages that is helping researchers see history with spatial information that hadn’t been available before. Using digitized newspaper articles and cutting-edge search technology, the project is helping researchers see the nation’s history in new ways.

“Every historical development has a spatial component to it, and often one that is central to explaining the ‘how’ and the ‘why,’” noted Claudio Saunt, chair of the Department of History at the University of Georgia. “With this new search engine, we now have the ability to see where newspapers were writing about a subject, and how interest in that subject changed over time. It’s a powerful tool for historians, and one that can shed new light on the past.”

A free service, the database is available at USNewsMap.com. It is based on data from approximately 10 million pages published in nearly 2,000 U.S. newspapers between 1836 and 1924. The newspapers represent what was happening in nearly 800 U.S. cities. More pages are being added all the time, though some states still have not contributed digital newspaper data and are therefore not represented on the project’s map.

To create the database behind the search engine, text from the newspaper pages was scanned by universities around the country, and each word indexed, explained Trevor Goodyear, a research scientist in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). The application uses Apache Solr database software, a document database that allowed GTRI researchers to efficiently store and index the large volumes of text and associated metadata.

The processed text exists across eight different servers, some in a data center at Georgia Tech and some in a cloud server provided by Amazon Web Services. When a user types an inquiry into the website, the servers all participate in the search together. The text database is linked to images of the newspaper pages housed at the Library of Congress, so when users find an item of interest, they can see its context on the original newspaper page.

The innovations, said Goodyear, were to show when each instance of a term appeared in the newspapers and to animate those appearances. Dots on the map show all mentions of the term in all newspapers across each U.S. city, lighter dots indicating multiple mentions. Users of the site can move a slider to see how terms pop up in different cities over time.

“We’ve placed the data onto a map of the United States that allows users to view how the term moved across the country over time,” he said. “You can navigate through time to see how each term was used in different locations. You really get a sense for how ideas went viral during that time in history.”

The Library of Congress awards grants to universities across the United States for digitizing historic newspapers. This digitization process involves applying optical character recognition (OCR) techniques to convert the printed words into computerized text. Through imperfections in the newspapers’ preservation and errors in the scanning and translation process, the results can look very different from what was originally published in the newspapers. Information lost in translation includes the distinctions between headlines, article content, author bylines, and newspaper titles. Due to these limitations, the system links users to the full newspaper page on which the search term appears instead of to individual scanned articles.

Other newspaper databases exist and the Library of Congress newspaper collection is searchable, but no other source shows the spatial component of history in this way, said Saunt, who is the Richard B. Russell Professor in American History. He expects U.S. News Map will be useful to more than historians.

“With U.S. News Map, it is easy to trace the evolution of a term – to see where it originated and how it spread – something that linguists are deeply interested in,” he said. “Historians will be able to see how news stories moved across the continent, and rose and fell over time.”

At the University of Georgia, the project began with Saunt and collaborators Stephen Mihm and Steve Berry in the institution’s eHistory.org program, which is affiliated with the Willson Center Digital Humanities Lab. “We brainstormed the idea of building a website to allow the public to visualize searches in the massive Library of Congress digital newspaper database, ‘Chronicling America,’ by showing the results on a map,” Saunt explained.

The UGA researchers contacted a colleague at Georgia Tech, where data science and data analytics are part of research in GTRI’s Innovative Computing Division. The project demonstrates how data science can extract new knowledge from massive data sets, Goodyear said.

“We had never worked with large text-based data sets like this before, and it offered an interesting challenge to conventional techniques,” he added. “We had to adjust techniques developed for short text to longer newspaper text.”

Other search examples:

• The term “miscegenation” appeared in 1864, coined during the presidential election that year. “You can type it into the search box and watch it spread across the continent like a plague,” said Saunt.
• The term “Ghost Dance,” describing the ceremonial dance that Native Americans began performing in the 1870s, appeared sporadically in western newspapers. But after the massacre at Wounded Knee, it was picked up by the press nationally, noted Saunt, who is associate director of the Institute of Native American Studies. 
• Georgia Tech appeared in newspapers in 1888 when fire destroyed the Institute’s Old Shop Building. Newspapers reported the fire and the amount of insurance coverage available, Goodyear noted. Georgia Tech began appearing regularly in newspapers once the publication of sports scores became common.
• The database covers much of the Industrial Revolution in the United States. A search turned up more than 207,000 mentions of inventor Thomas Edison, and 64,000 mentions of influential technology company General Electric.

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Writer: John Toon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download the complete research paper.

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

People in pro-ED communities share content, and provide advice and support for those who choose eating disorders, such as anorexia or bulimia, as acceptable and reasonable ways of living. They use specific hashtags to form very connected groups, often using anonymous names to keep their lifestyle choice a secret from the families and friends.

Instagram banned some of the most common pro-ED tags four years ago. People can still post these censored terms, but the words no longer show up in search results. Banned examples include “thighgap,” “thinspiration” and “secretsociety.” Other pro-ED words received advisories. They can be searched, but notifications about graphic content were added, along with public service links for people looking for help.

The Georgia Tech researchers looked at 2.5 million pro-ED posts from 2011 to 2014 to study how the community reacted to Instagram’s content moderation.

“People pretty much stopped using the banned terms, but they gamed the system to stay in touch,” said Stevie Chancellor, a doctoral student who led the study. “’Thinspiration’ was replaced by ‘thynspiration’ and ‘thynspo.’ ‘Thighgap’ became ‘thightgap’ and ‘thygap.’”

The 17 moderated terms morphed into hundreds of similar, new words. Each had an average of 40 variables. Some had more: the researchers found 107 variables of “thighgap.”

Instagram’s censorship polarized the pro-ED community.

“Likes and comments on these new tags were 15 to 30 percent higher compared to the originals,” said Munmun De Choudhury, assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing. “Before the ban, a person searching for hashtags would only find their intended word. Now a search produces dozens of similar, non-censored pro-ED terms. That means more content to view and engage with.”

The team also found that the content on these so-called lexical variants discussed self-harm, isolation and thoughts of suicide more often than the larger community of sufferers of eating disorders.

Instagram has also blacklisted words related to sex, racism and self-harm. What is more effective than banning tags? The Georgia Tech team suggests a few alternatives.

“Allow them to be searchable. But once they’re selected, the landing page could include links for help organizations,” said Chancellor. “Maybe the search algorithms could be tweaked. Instead of similar terms being displayed, Instagram could introduce recovery-related terms in the search box.”

The study, “#thyghgapp: Instagram Content Moderation and Lexical Variation in Pro-Eating Disorder Communities,” was presented at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing on March 1 in San Francisco.

According to the executive order, the Commission “will make detailed recommendations to strengthen cybersecurity in both the public and private sectors while protecting privacy, ensuring public safety and economic and national security, fostering discovery and development of new technical solutions, and bolstering partnerships between federal, state and local government and the private sector in the development, promotion and use of cybersecurity technologies, policies and best practices. The Commission's recommendations should address actions that can be taken over the next decade to accomplish these goals.”

The Commission will be led by Chair Tom Donilon, former National Security Advisor to President Obama, and Vice Chair Sam Palmisano, former CEO of IBM. The commission will submit its final report to President Obama on Dec. 1, 2016.

“It is an honor to be asked to serve on the Commission,” said Antón, now in her fourth year at Georgia Tech. “I look forward to working with the other members to address ways in which our nation can leverage technological advances to enhance cybersecurity while preserving privacy.”

Antón, who is an expert on software compliance with federal privacy and security regulations, is a professor and chair of the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech. She holds additional appointments in both the School of Computer Science and the Scheller College of Business. Before joining Georgia Tech, she was a professor of computer science at North Carolina State University, where she is now an adjunct professor. Antón has been a leader in privacy and cybersecurity since the late 1990s. She is an ACM Distinguished Scientist and Senior Member of IEEE.

Antón has written more than 80 peer-reviewed technical papers, and testified before Congress as well as the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board. She has served on a number of privacy and security advisory boards, including for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the National Institutes of Standards and Technologies.

“Professor Antón has a wealth of experience in cybersecurity and privacy, and will bring strategic expertise to the important work of the new Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity,” said G. P. “Bud” Peterson, president of Georgia Tech.

“We are thrilled that Professor Anton has been named to this panel,” said Zvi Galil, dean and John P. Imlay Chair of the Georgia Tech College of Computing. “She is one of the country’s foremost experts on privacy issues, and she will bring that critical perspective to one of the most important security conversations facing the country right now.”

“I have charged the Commission on Enhancing National Cybersecurity with the critically-important task of identifying the steps that our nation must take to ensure our cybersecurity in an increasingly digital world,” President Obama said. “These dedicated individuals bring a wealth of experience and talent to this important role, and I look forward to receiving the Commission's recommendations.”

In addition to Anton, here are the other members of the Commission:

General Keith Alexander, USA (Ret) –  Chairman and CEO of IronNet, and former director of the National Security Agency.

Ajay Banga – president and CEO of MasterCard.

Steven Chabinsky – general counsel and chief risk officer for the cybersecurity technology firm CrowdStrike.

Patrick Gallagher – Chancellor and CEO of the University of Pittsburgh.

Peter Lee – corporate vice president of Microsoft Research.

Herbert Lin – Senior Research Scholar for Cyber Policy and Security at the Center for International Security and Cooperation and a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford University.

Heather Murren – private investor and member of the Board of Trustees of the Johns Hopkins University and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Joe Sullivan – chief security officer at Uber.

Maggie Wilderotter – Chief Executive Officer of Frontier Communications from 2004 to 2015, and then Executive Chairman of the company until April 1, 2016.

That’s why Goel added a ninth TA this semester. Her name is Jill Watson, and she’s unlike any other TA in the world. In fact, she’s not even a “she.” Jill is a computer — a virtual TA — implemented, in part, using technologies from IBM’s Watson platform.

“The world is full of online classes, and they’re plagued with low retention rates,” Goel said. “One of the main reasons many students drop out is because they don’t receive enough teaching support. We created Jill as a way to provide faster answers and feedback.”

Goel and his team of Georgia Tech graduate students started to build her last year. They contacted Piazza, the course’s online discussion forum, to track down all the questions that had ever been asked in KBAI since the class was launched in fall 2014 (about 40,000 postings in all). Then they started to feed Jill the questions and answers.

“One of the secrets of online classes is that the number of questions increases if you have more students, but the number of different questions doesn’t really go up,” Goel said. “Students tend to ask the same questions over and over again.”

That’s an ideal situation to apply computing technologies like Watson. Goel tapped into IBM's open developer platform to identify Watson APIs for answering questions, adding Georgia Tech’s own processing modules to improve performance. The team then wrote code that allows Jill to field routine questions that are asked every semester. For example, students consistently ask where they can find particular assignments and readings.

Jill wasn’t very good for the first few weeks after she started in January, often giving odd and irrelevant answers. Her responses were posted in a forum that wasn’t visible to students.

“Initially her answers weren't good enough because she would get stuck on keywords,” said Lalith Polepeddi, one of the graduate students who co-developed the virtual TA. “For example, a student asked about organizing a meet-up to go over video lessons with others, and Jill gave an answer referencing a textbook that could supplement the video lessons — same keywords — but different context. So we learned from mistakes like this one, and gradually made Jill smarter.”

After some tinkering by the research team, Jill found her groove and soon was answering questions with 97 percent certainty. When she did, the human TAs would upload her responses to the students. By the end of March, Jill didn’t need any assistance: She wrote the class directly if she was 97 percent positive her answer was correct.

The students, who were studying artificial intelligence, were unknowingly interacting with it. Goel didn’t inform them about Jill's true identity until April 26. The student response was uniformly positive. One admitted her mind was blown. Another asked if Jill could “come out and play.” Since then some students have organized a KBAI alumni forum to learn about new developments with Jill after the class ends, and another group of students has launched an open source project to replicate her.

Back in February, student Tyson Bailey began to wonder if Jill was a computer and posted his suspicions on Piazza.

“We were taking an AI course, so I had to imagine that it was possible there might be an AI lurking around,” said Bailey, who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “Then again, I asked Dr. Goel if he was a computer in one of my first email interactions with him. I think it’s a great idea and hope that they continue to improve it.”

Jill ended the semester able to answer many routine questions asked. She’ll return —with a different name — next semester. The goal is to have the virtual teaching assistant answer 40 percent of all questions by the end of year.

The new approach is an algorithm – developed by students Daniel Castro and Vinay Bettadapura under the guidance of Professor Irfan Essa – that analyzes video for images with ideal artistic properties. It first considers geolocation, then composition, symmetry and color vibrancy to determine what is important or picturesque. Video frames with the highest scores are processed into a highlight reel. See the finished product here.

Castro and Bettadapura conceived the approach after the latter returned from a two-week vacation, driving coast-to-coast across the southern United States. He ended the trip with 26.5 hours of footage from a wearable, head-mounted camera. He had no idea what do with it.

“The data was essentially useless because there was just too much of it,” said Bettadapura, who completed his Ph.D. in the fall and now is a Google software engineer. “We liked the idea of being able to automatically generate photo albums from your vacation, algorithmically.”

The algorithm turned 26 hours of video into a 38-second highlight reel in three hours.  Because Bettadapura had worn a head-mounted Contour Action Camera that captured GPS data, the algorithm could filter by geographical location. That reduced the footage to 16 hours. Shot boundary detection further reduced it into 1,724 video shots or about 10.2 hours of video. It then processed for artistic quality and provided an output of the most picturesque content. Processing time is variable and depends on the number of computers used.

The algorithm can be adapted to user preferences.

“We can tweak the weights in our algorithm based on the user's aesthetic preferences,” Bettadapura said. “By incorporating facial recognition, we can further adapt the system to generate highlights that include people the user cares about.”

Castro and Bettadapura presented their findings at WACV 2016: IEEE’s Winter Conference on the Applications of Computer Vision, March 7 in Lake Placid, N.Y. The pair will continue to work together testing the algorithm with multiple participants to help generalize the approach, incorporate facial recognition, and develop data visualization techniques that make it easy to browse and search specific moments. The implications of future, successful tests could echo far beyond their initial work at Georgia Tech.

“This research brings together multiple modalities to more efficiently understand large amounts of data,” said Castro, who is completing his Ph.D. in computer science and also working as an intern at Google. “We are trying to optimize how easy it is to understand all of the data we have in an efficient manner because otherwise it would be impossible to do so.”

Instead, the gap seems to be getting larger because of these tools, according to a new study from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Researchers found that low-income parents are less likely to use these extra resources or, when they do, they do so less effectively because of differences in motivation and parenting practices.

“A key goal for low-income parents is making sure their children stay in school, so often they are more focused on monitoring whether their kids are doing homework and going to class,” said Betsy DiSalvo, an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing, who led the study. “Their attention is directed towards school and not what could happen outside the classroom.”

Higher-income parents are more likely to act as learning brokers or resource providers by searching for opportunities outside of school, whether it be a book, online game or extracurricular activity.

DiSalvo and a team of researchers interviewed 63 parents across socio-economic groups and conducted an online survey of 997 parents in partnership with ACT, a national education testing services organization.

The results found that even when low-income parents turn to online resources they face greater challenges.

“They had lower perceived technical skills when it came to using computers and portable devices and conducting searches online. Even when they could do it, they downplayed their abilities,” DiSalvo said. 

“If we can capture these parents and give them access to these educational resources, we can help them help their children,” DiSalvo said. “These tools are supposed to improve learning for all children, but if they are not being used by lower-income students, they are coming to school at an even greater disadvantage.”

Lower-income parents also seem to experience greater face-saving concerns.

“Most parents are worried about saving face when asking for help with parenting. But this study shows it might be worst for low income parents,” DiSalvo said.

There were also differences between how high-income and lower-income parents use social networks for education. Lower-income parents talk very little online about finding educational tools and instead physically go to the school resources center.

“Higher-income parents form Google groups, or search parenting blogs and message boards to learn about new tools. They will seek out that one mother who seems connected to everything and always knows what’s going on,” DiSalvo said. 

DiSalvo presented the study this week at the Associate for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2016. The results of this study and prior research are being used to develop an online parent portal that will specifically address the needs of lower-income parents.

“Across the board parents we talked to are passionate about their kids’ education, but even those who are heavily invested are still struggling to help their children,” DiSalvo said. “If we think these online resources are the answer to helping children, we need to design them so that low-income parents will find them and use them.”

The Georgia Tech study is among the first to examine the online language of the BLM movement. It collected tweets surrounding four major events: the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (August 2014); the decision not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson (November 2014); protests and the shooting deaths of two New York City police officers (December 2014); and the death of Freddie Gray while in custody of Baltimore police officers (April 2015).

The team also plugged in data of more than 10,000 deaths due to police shootings since 2000. From that, it outlined which states, based on their African-American population, had the highest rates of deaths. Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico were among the highest in the mainland United States.

“These were the same states where we found very negative language on Twitter during Black Lives Matter events,” said Munmun De Choudhury, the Georgia Tech assistant professor who led the study. “Other areas, especially in the South and Midwest, used words about death to express their feelings. Potentially, Twitter users in states with historically higher rates of fatal police shootings of blacks tend to interact with others to seek and provide psychosocial support around issues of racial inequality.”

However, much of that negativity disappeared on the immediate eve of protests. Language changed. The researchers noticed that tweets about death, anger and first person singular nouns transformed into more posts about family, friends and first person plural pronouns.

“We saw more sadness but lower anger and anxiety the day before protests,” said Benjamin Sugar, a Georgia Tech master’s student who co-authored the study. “It doesn’t mean they weren’t angry or anxious. But in 140 characters, people showed thoughts of moving forward and making a difference.”

BLM was born on Facebook in 2013 following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Florida’s Trayvon Martin. During each subsequent event, the movement has contradicted typical Twitter stereotypes. The study found that on average 36 percent of first-time BLM users participated again.

“Other hashtag movements have helped spread awareness about important issues, but many of them quickly lose their momentum,” said Shagun Jhaver, a Georgia Tech Ph.D. student and co-author. “The Black Lives Matter movement realizes it’s part of a long-term social transformation and shows continual engagement. And it continues despite having no formal hierarchal structure.”  

The research, “Social Media Participation in an Activist Movement for Racial Equality,”  won best paper when it was presented last month at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media in Germany. It was funded, in part, by the National Institutes of Health (#1R01GM11269701). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Institutes of Health.