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

A Precautionary Tale 

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

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

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

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

A Delicate Balance 

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

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

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

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

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

What Does AI-Generated Mean? 

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

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

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

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

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

AI and the Workforce 

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

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

Promoting Innovation and Competition 

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

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

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

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

What's Next 

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

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

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

A new $2,000,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will support the research. 

The research builds on previous collaboration between Rosa Arriaga, an associate professor in the College of Computing and Andrew Sherrill, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University, who worked together on a computational system for PTSD therapy. 

Arriaga and Christopher Wiese, an assistant professor in the School of Psychology will lead the Georgia Tech team, Saeed Abdullah, an assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology will lead the Penn State team, and Sherrill will serve as overall project lead and Emory team lead.

The grant, for “Understanding the Ethics, Development, Design, and Integration of Interactive Artificial Intelligence Teammates in Future Mental Health Work” will allocate $801,660 of support to the Georgia Tech team, supporting four years of research.

“The initial three years of our project are dedicated to understanding and defining what functionalities and characteristics make an AI system a 'teammate' rather than just a tool,” Wiese says. “This involves extensive research and interaction with mental health professionals to identify their specific needs and challenges. We aim to understand the nuances of their work, their decision-making processes, and the areas where AI can provide meaningful support.In the final year, we plan to implement a trial run of this AI teammate philosophy with mental health professionals.”

While the project focuses on mental health workers, the impacts of the project range far beyond. “AI is going to fundamentally change the nature of work and workers,” Arriaga says. “And, as such, there’s a significant need for research to develop best practices for integrating worker, work, and future technology.”

The team underscores that sectors like business, education, and customer service could easily apply this research. The ethics protocol the team will develop will also provide a critical framework for best practices. The team also hopes that their findings could inform policymakers and stakeholders making key decisions regarding AI. 

“The knowledge and strategies we develop have the potential to revolutionize how AI is integrated into the broader workforce,” Wiese adds. “We are not just exploring the intersection of human and synthetic intelligence in the mental health profession; we are laying the groundwork for a future where AI and humans collaborate effectively across all areas of work.”

Collaborative project

The project aims to develop an AI coworker called TEAMMAIT (short for “the Trustworthy, Explainable, and Adaptive Monitoring Machine for AI Team”). Rather than functioning as a tool, as many AI’s currently do, TEAMMAIT will act more as a human teammate would,  providing constructive feedback and helping mental healthcare workers develop and learn new skills.

“Unlike conventional AI tools that function as mere utilities, an AI teammate is designed to work collaboratively with humans, adapting to their needs and augmenting their capabilities,” Wiese explains. “Our approach is distinctively human-centric, prioritizing the needs and perspectives of mental health professionals… it’s important to recognize that this is a complex domain and interdisciplinary collaboration is necessary to create the most optimal outcomes when it comes to integrating AI into our lives.”

With both technical and human health aspects to the research, the project will leverage an interdisciplinary team of experts spanning clinical psychology, industrial-organizational psychology, human-computer interaction, and information science.

“We need to work closely together to make sure that the system, TEAMMAIT, is useful and usable,” adds Arriaga. “Chris (Wiese) and I are looking at two types of challenges: those associated with the organization, as Chris is an industrial organizational psychology expert — and those associated with the interface, as I am a computer scientist that specializes in human computer interaction.”

Long-term timeline

The project’s long-term timeline reflects the unique challenges that it faces.

“A key challenge is in the development and design of the AI tools themselves,” Wiese says. “They need to be user-friendly, adaptable, and efficient, enhancing the capabilities of mental health workers without adding undue complexity or stress. This involves continuous iteration and feedback from end-users to refine the AI tools, ensuring they meet the real-world needs of mental health professionals.”

The team plans to deploy TEAMMAIT in diverse settings in the fourth year of development, and incorporate data from these early users to create development guidelines for Worker-AI teammates in mental health work, and to create ethical guidelines for developing and using this type of system.

“This will be a crucial phase where we test the efficacy and integration of the AI in real-world scenarios,” Wiese says. “We will assess not just the functional aspects of the AI, such as how well it performs specific tasks, but also how it impacts the work environment, the well-being of the mental health workers, and ultimately, the quality of care provided to patients.”

Assessing the psychological impacts on workers, including how TEAMMAIT impacts their day-to-day work will be crucial in ensuring TEAMMAIT has a positive impact on healthcare worker’s skills and wellbeing.

“We’re interested in understanding how mental health clinicians interact with TEAMMAIT and the subsequent impact on their work,” Wiese adds. “How long does it take for clinicians to become comfortable and proficient with TEAMMAIT? How does their engagement with TEAMMAIT change over the year? Do they feel like they are more effective when using TEAMMAIT? We’re really excited to begin answering these questions.

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

A Precautionary Tale 

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

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

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

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

A Delicate Balance 

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

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

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

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

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

What Does AI-Generated Mean? 

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

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

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

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

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

AI and the Workforce 

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

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

Promoting Innovation and Competition 

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

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

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

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

What's Next 

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

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

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

In the U.S., one of the more challenging and complicated post-pandemic deliberations is around national security and how to respond to the next infectious disease run amok. Georgia Institute of Technology researcher Margaret Kosal addresses the issue in her study, “How Covid-19 is Reshaping U.S. National Security Policy,” published recently in the journal Politics and the Life Sciences.

The study was inspired, in part, by Kosal’s participation in National Academy of Sciences (NAS) committees focused on reducing bioterrorism and chemical terrorism.

“My work with NAS prompted me to think about how we are designing our strategies and what is driving these choices,” said Kosal, associate professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs within the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

In the wake of the pandemic, the U.S. is actively changing part of its national security enterprise. Kosal researched Department of Defense documents, among other sources, and noted that recent trends are moving policy in a different direction. Directing the national response to infectious disease is a task that has moved from public health into the domain of national security.

It’s a process called securitization. And based on Kosal’s findings, the current trend, “turns the securitization debate on its head.” That is, instead of treating an emerging infectious disease, like Covid-19, as a national security problem, there has been a noticeable shift to treat biological weapons and bioterrorism as a public health problem.

It’s not quite the “public healthization” of biodefense programs, according to Kosal, “but rather, it is an intermingling of the two, especially in the context of critical aspects of politics and warfare.”

And that presents a potentially confusing problem for national defense and security where clarity and specificity are most important. The use of biological weapons, or an act of bioterrorism, “are fundamentally political decisions, choices of warfare,” Kosal said. “But a disease is not something that depends on political will, and it isn’t influenced by power.”

An emerging infectious disease like Covid-19 is clearly a public health issue and should be treated as such, falling under the purview of the National Institutes of Health or Centers for Disease Control, she added, then emphasized, “but biological weapons and bioterrorism should not be treated like infectious diseases. They are different in very important ways.”

The Danger of Bad Information

Complicating any national security discussion, according to Kosal, are misinformation and disinformation, and the resultant erosion of confidence in institutions, “including but not limited to governments,” she wrote. “This is a missing aspect of the current discussions about

U.S. policies to reduce biological threats, whether from states or terrorists, in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

The pandemic revealed a significant weakness in governments’ ability to adequately address the problem of misinformation and disinformation, a failure that manifested in conspiracy theories and the flouting of public health recommendations.

Kosal cited numerous articles and studies that demonstrate how a global crisis opened the door to distortion of the facts, as extremist groups worked to leverage fears and anxieties, usually to broaden the appeal of their own narratives. Some of the more radical included: an al-Qaeda faction that claimed Covid, “is a hidden soldier sent by God to fight his enemies; a leader of Boko Haram faction who told followers the pandemic was, “divine punishment for the world.”

Kosal observed, too, that economic hardships and other impacts of the pandemic have made it easier for extremist groups to exploit the fragility of weak governments, while gaining followers and resources, and putting a halt to peace-building efforts in some regions. Technology, like the content-generating algorithms used in social media, has helped spread wrong information, too.

“The misinformation and disinformation problem is serious because it leads to this loss of confidence in government,” Kosal said. “That confidence is crucial in the context of disease and in responding to bioterrorism.”

Ultimately, she hopes her study will have an impact on defense policymakers who are helping to form and clarify our nation’s security plans.

“I’d really like to see more recognition of the political piece,” she said. “It’s critically important for our counter proliferation efforts and for our efforts to reduce the threat of these weapons more broadly.”

Placing extremist ideologies and manufactured weapons in a public health context, she argued, lessens the emphasis on the political will and the importance of the relevant strategic choices necessary to address a potential conflict.

And the nature of conflict, she said, “is all about people and power. Diseases don’t care really care about those things.”

Since the war began with the killing of an estimated 1,200 Israelis and the taking of more than 200 hostages by Hamas, the Gazan death toll is estimated to have surpassed 11,000, and over 1.6 million residents have been displaced. Israel has rejected cease-fire calls to this point, but a deal with Hamas resulted in a four-day pause in fighting in exchange for the release of 50 hostages. Israel has begun to release about 150 Palestinian prisoners — primarily women and children — and is allowing up to 300 aid trucks into Gaza. An additional two-day pause was also brokered, including the release of an additional 20 Israeli hostages. 

The deal offers hope that “there are lines of communication open, which, as we've just seen in the U.S.-China context, is important in and of itself between hostile or adversarial actors,” said Rachel Whitlark, political scientist and associate professor of international affairs in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

“It's not clear that the current developments signal anything about what might happen with the additional hostages being held by Hamas or those being held by Palestinian Islamic Jihad. And the deal will likely allow Israel to continue its military campaign to rid itself of a neighbor committed to its destruction, perhaps more aggressively given that these hostages have been released.” 

Identifying an End Goal  

The temporary peace will be welcomed in the region that has seen nonstop violence since Oct. 7, but when the fighting resumes, the pressure on Israel to identify an end goal will increase, explains Lawrence Rubin, associate professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs.  

"What happens the day after you topple Hamas? But also, what happens if Israel doesn’t eliminate Hamas?" said Rubin, who recently traveled to the Middle East for the IISS Manama Dialogue. “Another sticking point is that many Arab leaders are publicly unwilling to discuss any post-conflict scenario until the fighting stops. Leaders in Egypt and Jordan, for example, face populations who would view discussions about their countries’ participation in a post-conflict Gaza as allowing Israel to complete its destruction of Gaza. Arab leaders don’t want to be held responsible for cleaning up Israel’s military operation.”  

Hamas' relationship with the Jewish state complicates any large-scale political compromise with the organization. 

"Hamas is not an entity that even believes in a two-state solution. It is bent on Israel’s destruction and is unlikely to relinquish power. Israel has vowed to eliminate Hamas. A long-term political compromise at this stage seems highly unlikely,” Rubin said. 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently reiterated the intent to "destroy Hamas," and said Israel would maintain “overall military responsibility” in Gaza until it can ensure that there is no resurgence of terrorism in the region. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken affirmed the administration's position that Gaza cannot continue to be run by Hamas following the war. He also shared that conversations took place prior to the hostage deal, directing Israeli leaders to minimize harm to Palestinian civilians and increasing aid into Gaza.  

Whitlark explains that the U.S. has effectively used its modest tools of persuasion and diplomatic pressure to attempt to modify behavior in the war, yet faces additional challenges in its handling of multiple conflicts around the globe.  

"The Biden administration is juggling tensions both within the Democratic Party and with the Israeli government,” she said. “They are trying to manage the mounting civilian casualties in the conflict and the divisions in Congress, and among Democrats in particular, over U.S. support for Israel. This aid to Israel is also tied up with aid to Ukraine, another democracy that was attacked by a neighbor, that the U.S. is working hard to assist in its military campaign. Further, the administration had been putting significant pressure on Netanyahu to try to gain additional humanitarian aid, humanitarian pauses, and accept a deal to get some of the hostages released. Meanwhile, as we understand from the president's Washington Post op-ed last week, he is working for the longer-term future for a lasting peace, protecting democracies from encroaching aggression, and regional and global stability."  

In an interview with a Lebanese television outlet, Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas leader, stated the group's intention to repeatedly attack Israel "a second, a third, a fourth time" while expressing the organization's belief that their actions are justified as victims of occupation. Along with the targeted attack on perceived military infrastructure, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) claimed to have killed dozens of Hamas commanders, according to The Guardian. Israel's ground operation began in northern Gaza in late October, and in addition to the mounting pressure to reduce civilian casualties, there could be major economic ramifications of a drawn-out war.  

“Israel’s operational time has lasted longer than many would have expected, but it is still working on borrowed time. As international pressure on Israel mounts, U.S. leaders will continue to push harder for ways to reduce a rising civilian death toll,” Rubin said. 

A Second Battle: Misinformation  

As Israeli forces operate in Gaza City, the IDF recently gained control of Al-Shifa Hospital, which it asserts was being used to house a Hamas command center in underground tunnels. An initial raid of the compound revealed duffel bags filled with weapons, ammunition, and other military equipment, but Hamas continues to deny claims that the hospital is being used as a front and asserts that the IDF planted the evidence.  

With many claims unable to be independently verified, Rubin says a "misinformation problem" exists as the war goes on, and the world is watching it play out through social media and the internet. “It's almost to the extent that it doesn't even matter that we've seen the truth when it comes out because people won't believe it, and there's denial about it," he said.  

He also noted that Hamas understands the value of disinformation and its ability to pit the U.S. against itself. The unfolding hostage deal will not end this conflict, Rubin says, predicting the information battle will continue until the physical fighting resumes. 

Looking Ahead  

In terms of further escalation in the region, Rubin observed that Iran does not seem eager to jump into the fray. Hezbollah, a terrorist group based in Lebanon, has launched several attacks, but to this point, no second front has been opened in Northern Israel. That said, Whitlark notes that a recent meeting between an Iranian leader and Hezbollah's leadership reminds the international community that a broader conflict remains a possibility if the war between Israel and Hamas continues to escalate. 

*The below story was originally posted Oct. 17, 2023.

Attacks carried out by Hamas in Israel, along with subsequent strikes in Gaza and a declaration of war from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have resulted in global unrest. Georgia Tech experts offer their thoughts on the conflict, what comes next, and what role the United States will play.  

What Happened? 

On the Jewish Sabbath, which coincided with the holiday of Simchat Torah, 3,000 Hamas militants crossed into Israel and executed a coordinated attack on Israeli civilians and military personnel by land, sea, and air, killing an estimated 1,400.  

At the latest count, nearly 200 hostages were taken, including Americans and people from other countries. The attacks caught Israel Defense Forces (IDF) by surprise in what Lawrence Rubin, associate professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, described as one of the biggest intelligence failures since the 1973 Arab-Israeli War.  

"It is too early to make a definitive assessment as to why this intelligence failure occurred. However, it’s clear that there was a heavy reliance on technology and a certain amount of complacency in thinking that the threat from Hamas was contained and the greater Palestinian threat was in the West Bank. Israel had also been much more focused on the Iranian nuclear threat," said Rubin, author of Islam in the Balance: Ideational Threat in Arab Politics.  

Following Netanyahu's vow to "avenge this dark day" and win the ensuing war despite an inevitable "unbearable price," Israel quickly launched counterstrikes in Gaza, which have killed and wounded thousands. The conflict has escalated to a level not seen in the region in decades. 

What's Next? 

As Israel contemplates its next strategic move, Jenna Jordan, associate professor and associate chair of the Nunn School, said a ground invasion into Gaza could play into Hamas' goals of undermining diplomatic efforts in the Middle East and gaining support among the Palestinian people and the broader international community.  

"A ground invasion could result in major civilian casualties in Gaza, creating a humanitarian crisis. Hamas anticipated that a massive retaliatory response would change the tide of sentiment to their favor, mobilizing new recruits, support, and allies. Hamas seeks to appear as the most committed group fighting for and protecting the Palestinian people. These highly visible operations are a way for the group to demonstrate that they are more resolved and a stronger advocate for the Palestinian cause than Fatah and the Palestinian Authority," she said.  

Jordan, author of Leadership Decapitation: Strategic Targeting of Terrorist Organizations, explained that Hamas, which rose to power in Gaza and the West Bank in 2006 after winning 44.5% of the seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council, has already achieved an important strategic objective by seizing the attention of the international community and placing Israel in a strategic conundrum.  

"Israel is under pressure to respond with force given the scale of the attack, as is every nation in the wake of a major terrorist attack," she said. "The U.S. faced a similar decision in the aftermath of 9/11 and launched a very long and costly ground invasion into Iraq starting in 2003. This fueled the rise of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and eventually ISIS. It is imperative that Israel considers whether its counter operations will backlash and create more support for extremism in the region.” 

The possibility that Iran will intervene is the biggest wild card and could carry the greatest risk for regional conflict and escalation, according to Rubin. An Axios report states that Iran plans to intervene should a ground operation in Gaza occur and this could take the form of supporting Hezbollah operations against Israel if it opens a second front. Rubin warns this would bring the conflict to an entirely different level.  

U.S. Involvement 

The United States has offered its unwavering support for Israel, but President Joe Biden warned that invading Gaza would be a "big mistake." He announced plans to visit Israel before traveling to Jordan to meet with his Majesty King Abdullah, Egyptian President Sisi, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. 

Following the attacks on Oct. 7, the U.S. positioned an aircraft carrier, the USS Ford, in the eastern Mediterranean Sea as a deterrent, and a second carrier was deployed to the region on Oct. 15.  

As the U.S. continues to support the Ukrainian war effort against Russia, Rubin explained that the new conflict could shift the nation's focus further away from China. Should this conflict continue, it may erode previous efforts at bringing the Saudis and Israelis together to normalize relations, which already had plenty of challenges to begin with, Rubin said.  

National Trauma and Negotiations  

An IDF spokesperson called the Hamas attacks Israel's 9/11. Rubin speculated that it might be worse than that for Israel because the attacks have conjured images of pogroms and the Holocaust. He said Israel's small population exacerbates the sense of national trauma and could decrease the likelihood of a non-military response.  

“Almost everyone in Israel, particularly Jewish Israelis, knows someone who was killed, wounded, or kidnapped. Combined with the effect of having women and children held hostage, with reports of rape circulating on social media, this will reduce Israel’s willingness to compromise,” Rubin said. 

Whether Hamas can withstand Israel's efforts to restrict the flow of resources into Gaza and likely attacks on its leadership remains to be seen, explained Jordan. President Biden said on 60 Minutes that he supports the elimination of Hamas entirely, but Jordan noted that organizations such as Hamas — with popular support, a bureaucratized organizational structure, and a strong ideological foundation — are extraordinarily resilient.  

“It’s important to remember that ideology can become more entrenched in the face of violence and heavy-handed counterreactions on the part of the state fighting that particular group," she said. 

On Campus 

Jordan and Rubin, along with Associate Professor Rachel Whitlark and Lawrence Silverman, U.S. ambassador to Kuwait from 2016 to 2019, will host a virtual discussion titled Israel and Hamas at War on Wednesday, Oct. 18, at noon. 

The following resources and services are available to members of the Georgia Tech community:  

• Center for Mental Health Care and Resources.  

• Let’s Talk program.  

• Satellite Counseling program. 

• Through a partnership with Christie Campus Health, sponsored by the University System of Georgia, students can access 24/7 assistance by calling 404.894.2575 to get immediate assistance from a counselor. Students can also visit the GT Wellness Hub webpage for more self-care resources.  

• Dean of Students Office.  

• Advocacy and assistance: If you are concerned about a student who may be in distress or believe that a student may need personal support, the Dean of Students Office accepts third party referrals from faculty and staff.  

• Office of International Education.  

• info@oie.gatech.edu – Students needing support (or faculty/staff consultation) can contact the office via this address.  

• Campus chaplains. 

President Aanjan Sikal and Executive Vice President Harrison Baro take their respective offices at an "inflection point" in Georgia Tech's history as transformative projects are completed and a growing student body creates the need for additional resources.   

"It truly does feel like there is something brewing," Sikal said. "Especially with Scheller Tower and the George Tower coming up in Tech Square, with Art Square and Science Square now as well; it definitely feels like we are preparing ourselves, and with this enrollment growth we want to make access expandable to everyone." 

Sikal, a fourth-year industrial engineering student, previously served as the vice president of academic affairs under Rohan Sohani, who he credits with igniting conversations with Tech leadership regarding the stress that growth has placed on campus services such as housing, dining, registration, and infrastructure. Deciding to run for president, Sikal aimed to keep that conversation going and secure students' place at the table as critical decisions are made.  

"We want to make sure that for every decision that Georgia Tech makes, there are students on those decision boards and committees who are making those decisions along with the administration. We want student involvement in every level of Georgia Tech," he said.  

Sikal also notes that while some solutions take time to come to fruition, finding and executing short-term solutions will be a key part of their administration. Both Sikal and Baro see SGA as an organization that exists to embody the opinion of the collective student body, and Baro emphasized the importance of creating an open forum for students to participate in an ongoing dialogue where ideas can be shared with SGA leaders.  

"At the end of the day, this is an institution, and our goal as student government is always looking at how we can improve the student experience on campus and not only help everyone be a successful student, but also a successful member of the community. We want to make sure they understand that Georgia Tech is not just a place to get a degree, it's a place to call home, and it's a place that you should feel safe, welcome, and accepted," Baro, a third-year environmental engineering student, said.  

SGA plays a vital role in the support of student organizations on campus, and continuing that support became a pillar of Sikal and Baro's platform.  

"Whether it's funding organizations that can share pieces of their personality with other students or funding an organization to go and compete and represent Georgia Tech, I just want people to leave Georgia Tech having this love for their alma mater, and I think student government fits perfectly into that puzzle," Sikal said.  

The pair praised Institute leadership for their willingness to engage with SGA and value students’ voice. To ensure the strong relationship continues, they have prioritized setting up meetings with faculty members and administrators early in their tenure to continue building bridges.  

When he arrived on campus, Baro was intrigued by the inner workings of a college campus. His various roles within SGA have given him new insight into the "city within a city" that is Georgia Tech.  

"We get to see the student side as students ourselves and talking to our fellow classmates about things that we would like to see happen. From the administrative side, we get a more nuanced approach to the complexities of each situation and understand that cost-benefit analysis from both sides,” he said.  

The newly renovated John Lewis Student Center was the vision of past SGA leaders, and to Sikal and Baro, the space represents the impact that their administration will have during this period in Tech's history.  

"We're a moment in time, but what we do now can be carried from year to year and should be carried on because, if you move on and forget about what happened the year before, everything that we work toward and advocate for is lost,” Sikal said. “The continuation of ideas is extremely important to make Georgia Tech what it is."  

Sikal and Baro continue to gather feedback from the campus community, and while there are challenges that come with the position, they feel a renewed excitement on campus that has them eager to see what the future holds.  

Helping to examine the state’s place in the national landscape, the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts hosted the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Greg Bluestein at the Bill Moore Student Success Center on Sept. 14 as part of the Meg and Sam Flax Lecture Series on Public Policy. Bluestein has covered Georgia politics for more than 20 years and has documented the state's shift from Republican stronghold to its current battleground status.  

He believes Georgia could be the center of attention for years to come. Starting with the 2024 election cycle, he urged everyone, especially students, to take advantage of this unique learning opportunity.  

"Georgia is going to remain the center of the white-hot national spotlight for the next decade,” he said. “Students here at Georgia Tech who are studying public policy or whatever it may be can see how what they're doing is implemented on a national scale." 

Why Georgia? 

Bluestein explained how independent voters and those continuing a "split-ticket" trend across the state have decided recent elections, primarily the 2020 presidential election, a race that helped decide control of the U.S. Senate, and the most recent gubernatorial race. With this trend likely to continue, Bluestein, who wrote a book chronicling the events surrounding the 2020 election in Georgia, told the audience how that has affected candidates' view of the state heading into the future.  

"Every Republican and most Democrats say there is really no path to victory for any Republican candidate without winning Georgia. So, whether you like it or not, we're about to be the center of national attention, even more than we already are, which is hard to believe." 

Addressing the students in the audience, he went on, "That's the beauty of where you are. You'll have a chance in the coming months and years to work for candidates, campaigns, and causes. Be directly involved if you want. Cover them for the media. But also go to their rallies and events –– candidates you like and candidates you don't like. You'll be on the ground level to be able to see these candidates up close and personal." 

Politics on Campus 

Like any campus around the country, Georgia Tech's student body is made up of Republicans, Democrats, independent voters, and those who stay out of the political fray. While politics can involve disagreement, the Institute has received recent praise for its efforts to protect freedom of expression for all on campus.  

Associate Professor Richard Barke believes the Institute’s policies and efforts in this regard empower students to seek out differing viewpoints and to learn from one another. 

“Any institution of higher learning has an obligation, both legal and intellectual, to encourage diverse political views to be held, discussed, and respected. It also must do something that no other institution can do: challenge students to test ideas, whether their own or those of others. At Georgia Tech we take these duties seriously,” he said. “Our students learn how political processes work, not which political values are superior or which outcomes should be dictated by individual preferences. They can, and do, use this knowledge to analyze and promote policies across the political spectrum.”  

Second-year public policy student Luis Salazar attended Thursday's seminar and sees events such as this as a way to engage with his fellow Yellow Jackets about real-world issues.  

"This is a place to come together, and the Institute's reputation makes it the perfect place for professionals and experts to interact with students who want to be involved in the political process. I appreciate how Tech facilitates these debates and conversations," he said.  

Countless questions remain unanswered for both parties ahead of 2024, but Bluestein emphasized that, as candidates vie for the approval of young voters, students will have the power to make their voices heard. 

"You'll be in the middle of it here at Georgia Tech. Smart candidates will come to college campuses to try to attract young voters, not just to vote but to work on their campaigns. Students and faculty here will have a chance to ask questions that other folks might not be asking about, whether it be about higher education funding, student policies, student debt relief, or any other issues that are top of mind,” he said.  

The first true litmus test for the state in the upcoming election will take place on March 12 during Georgia's primary elections. 

There’s been so much media excitement over the premieres of these two movies in contrast to the opening of other highly anticipated blockbusters this summer, such as Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning, Spider-Man: Across the Spider Verse, or The Flash. Why?

Yaszek: Because the Atomic Bomb and the Atomic Blonde are two cultural icons central to the modern American imagination! Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project ushered in the era of truly world-changing technosciences and catapulted the U.S. into a position of global leadership. Barbie was the first mass-produced doll that invited girls to imagine adult roles for themselves outside of motherhood, emerging in tandem with the beginning of the sexual revolution, the revival of feminism, and the start of modern conversations about sex and gender. These are two the key ways we define ourselves as Americans! It doesn’t matter if you know the details of Oppenheimer’s specific role in the creation of nuclear weapons, or if you ever actually played with Barbie and her pals. Everyone knows that “Oppenheimer” is shorthand for our complex feelings about the promises and perils of modern technologies that both sustain and threaten to end civilization as we know it, and everyone knows that “Barbie” is shorthand for our complex feelings about new social and sex roles that somehow both radically depart from — and yet also still echo — more conservative ones from earlier eras.

Yoshinaga: In the financial context of the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes as well as most of those other franchise films not meeting with summer box-office expectations, I think some industry watchers are hailing Barbenheimer’s killer opening weekend as a sign of hope for the entertainment industry. Barbie has enjoyed the largest open for a female-director-led movie in history, and Oppenheimer drew a respectable box office take as well. Both Barbie and Oppenheimer, drawing strongly on the last century’s sociopolitical context, promise some intellectual engagement, some critical thinking, some historical insight of who we are as a society.

Colatrella: That audiences connect the films — one representing the story of Barbie as documenting varying and shifting views on feminism and the other documenting varying and shifting views about the atomic bomb — resonates with contemporary concerns about women’s independence and with our wartime concerns about developing and using weapons and other technologies that have unforeseen consequences. It is interesting to me that Barbie incorporates the doll’s creator as a character and that Oppenheimer acknowledges the protagonist’s technological contributions and his subsequent restraint in using what he helped create. The films present revisionist histories demonstrating the force and fluctuations of political ideologies over time.

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Why should we see Barbie?

Colatrella: It’s great to see a film that celebrates feminism as a force enhancing gender equity, personal development for women and men (Kenough!), mother-daughter bonding, and community decision-making in BarbieWorld. In developing my book Toys and Tools in Pink, I met with Lego marketing and production executive in Billund, Denmark, and was impressed with their commitment to design construction and building toys that could appeal to girls as powerfully as Barbie does. They valued that children’s toys could contribute to collaborative play.

Yoshinaga: In the growing landscape of feminist directors, writer-director Greta Gerwig has carved out an intelligent, sensitive approach to portraying women on film—from the delightfully twee Frances Ha, which she co-scripted with director (and frequent filmmaking partner) Noah Baumbach, to the critically lauded Little Women and autobiographical, regionalist Lady Bird, all of which display her signature style of gentle observational humor, gender role insight, and quiet yet powerfully accumulating ethics. By making the screen story postmodern and feminist, she’s now viewed as having successfully “cracked” Barbie, a complex and potentially sexist/problematic IP that other skilled female comedy writers, including Diablo Cody and Amy Schumer, had not been able to pitch effectively.

Yaszek: First and foremost, we should all see the Barbie movie now because it promises a bit of hope and fun in a moment when our news cycle has become an endless loop of doom and gloom clickbait headlines. Having said that, I also think we can double or even triple our pleasure by having some serious fun with the Barbie film. The history of Barbie is one of changing ideas about sex and gender. The doll debuted in 1959, just as the feminist revival was taking off and women were beginning to challenge simple gender binaries that suggested men were naturally suited to paid labor in the rough and tumble world of the public sphere while women were naturally suited to unpaid nurturing and caretaking in the home. With her many different careers and a Dream Home that originally was all dressing room and no kitchen, Barbie seemed to capture the excitement and possibility of the early Women’s Liberation Movement. In a toy market flooded with baby dolls that demanded their owners act like little mothers, Barbie offered kids whole new imaginative play possibilities and, of course, whole new ways to think about sex and gender beyond the simple, pseudo-Darwinian binaries popular for much of American history. So I think it’s no surprise that while Barbie is always popular, she’s having a real moment right now, as we once again grapple with expanding sex and gender ideals.

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Why should the Georgia Tech community, especially, see Oppenheimer?

Yaszek: I think members of the Georgia Tech community can use Oppenheimer’s life story as a kind of test case for thinking through technoscientific and ethical dilemmas they might encounter in their own lives. Oppenheimer’s role in the Manhattan Project was to supervise the translation of abstract concepts from theoretical physics into practical applications — in this case, the creation of a working nuclear bomb. Along the way, he had to negotiate some serious moral and ethical issues, including his own excitement at seeing the work progress and misgivings about what would happen if these weapons were really used. While most of our graduates are unlikely to be in that exact position, our students often do go on to work at the intersection between pure science and applied technology and as such, may well grapple with ethical questions and unseen social impacts in relation to their work. It’s always instructive to see and hear stories that engage the issues we face in our own lives; they are virtual laboratories for testing certain courses of action before we act on them in the real world. And they give us ways to keep asking and exploring important questions about the impact of our actions on the world, long after the story itself is over.

Yoshinaga: One of my colleagues who teaches at a private aeronautical university — a Florida science-and-tech school with much less race and gender diversity in its student population than Georgia Tech — taught a section of her science-fiction studies course about the Manhattan Project. And some of her young undergraduates responded by claiming that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was “fake news.” This is the kind of dangerous misinformation trend that we faculty and researchers need to address, discuss, and teach/write about. Oppenheimer’s focus on scientific ethics in the context of both U.S. and global geopolitical history does just that.

Colatrella: I want to see it to better understand the man and the historical forces contributing to and judging his work. But I’d also like to read the 2005 biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin because I wonder if having more women on the Los Alamos team would have made a difference.

What’s your most lasting memory about Barbie and her friends, or about the nuclear age, of the postwar era? 

Colatrella: When I was young, I enjoyed playing with Barbies with cousins and friends; we would sew outfits for our dolls and imagine what decisions they would make about romance, education, and work. When my daughter was growing up, I bought her a Barbie Dreamhouse because I always wanted to have one, and I was reluctant to let it go until I could give it to the daughter of a Georgia Tech alumna who had been one of my students.

Yoshinaga: When I was a very young child, my parents couldn’t afford to buy me a Barbie doll, so I went without one for much of my early years. Besides, I’d always asked for mythology books! So it was my uncle who finally got me a classic Barbie, but by that time, I was in my late elementary-school era and didn’t know what to do with it. I was reading a lot of Marvel comics by then, so I would put Barbie into action-sequence fights with my little brother’s GI Joe. When it comes to the postwar era, I’m too young to remember the nuclear-attack drills and propaganda of the 1950s and ‘60s. Still, all the sci-fi dystopias I saw in the movie theaters involved a nuclear apocalypse as the start of the end of the world. So I always believed a mushroom cloud was just around the corner. There was also a sense that we were the “good” empire and the Soviets were “evil”; that we were helpless, caught between this global battle of geopolitical giants that might end up incinerating all of humanity.

Yaszek: I remember getting in a tussle with my mom over Barbie versus Stephie, the crafty country mom from the Sunshine family of dolls. My mom was a good second-wave feminist, very earnestly devoted to making sure her kids escaped the grip of the American beauty myth, and she thought Stephie, with her trim but realistic proportions and cute but modest clothes, was the role model for us girls. But all I wanted was the Barbie doll with the diamond jewelry and the pink satin jumpsuit! I felt that way in part because I was and still am a big fan of shine and sparkle, but also in part because Stephie’s clothes only seemed appropriate for one role, that of a crafty country mom, while I could imagine Barbie’s clothes taking her anywhere — from paid work as anything from a teacher to astronaut to working on her car in Barbie’s Dream Garage to dinner and dancing, depending on her hairstyle and accessories. To my mom’s credit, she did give in and get me the Barbie of my dreams. Plus, it turned out that my little sister, who was teething, loved chewing on the Sunshine family dolls, so everyone was happy in the end.

Interested in more?

Here are some suggestions for pop culture books, films, and TV series to extend your 'Barbenheimer' experience:

The atomic age and women’s roles in it:

Yaszek recommends:

• Caroline Herzenberg and Ruth Howes’s Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project
• Martha Ackman’s The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight
• The writings of postwar science fiction luminary Judith Merril. Her short story “That Only A Mother” is one of the most often-anthologized stories in science fiction history, and her novel Shadow on the Hearth was adapted for television as part of the prestigious Motorola story hour as “Atomic Attack!”

Yoshinaga recommends:

• WGN America network’s Manhattan, which focuses on the wives and families of the scientists behind the bomb

Feminism and the cultural importance of Barbie

Colatrella recommends:

• Her book, Toys and Tools in Pink: Cultural Narratives of Gender, Science, and Technology, as well as her forthcoming Feminism’s Progress: Gender Politics in British and American Literature and Television since 1830

Yoshianaga recommends:

• Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, a once-banned filmed in part with Barbie dolls by Todd Haynes, a filmmaker of stylish LGBTQIA+-themed movies

Yaszek recommends:

• Breanne Fahs’ Burn It Down! Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution to better understand the centuries long history of feminist thinking
• The National Women’s History Museum’s online exhibits on the four major waves of modern feminist activism.
• Her own The Future is Female! volumes

Georgia Tech space policy expert Mariel Borowitz thinks she has a way to help clear up some of that confusion. Under a new $1.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense, Borowitz plans to help lead a major series of public space wargaming exercises. They’re meant to tease out how current U.S. deterrence strategies might fall short when it comes to stopping a conflict in space and what can be done to improve them.

“When it comes to conflict in space, the stakes are enormously high and the challenges are extremely complex,” said Borowitz, an associate professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. “This project will better equip us to understand whether existing deterrence models can help hold the line in space or whether another model is necessary to prevent a potentially devastating outbreak in orbit.”

Jon Lindsay, an associate professor in the Nunn School with a joint appointment in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy, will work with Borowitz on the project, as will U.S. Space Force Lt. Col. Brian Stewart — a Nunn School Ph.D. graduate who now teaches at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Jacquelyn Schneider — a Hoover Fellow at The Hoover Center at Stanford University — rounds out the team.

A central theme of the project will be trying to understand how the concept of integrated deterrence applies to conflict in space. Integrated deterrence essentially boils down to a country using everything at its disposal to prevent conflict from escalating too far, from applying diplomatic and economic pressure to bringing the military into the mix.

Using such means to deter conflict in a global hotspot on the ground is tricky enough. Look no further than Ukraine for contemporary evidence of that.

But when that hotspot is space, conflict doesn’t just threaten stability in one part of the planet. It could quickly become a serious threat to civilian communications, commerce, and military operations across the globe. Despite the high stakes, trying to understand how to tamp down such conflict is something government officials and scholars are only beginning to tackle.

Much of the work in this space focuses on improving military technology to sense what adversaries are doing and improving the ability of militaries to destroy incoming attacks quickly. But this project highlights how no complex problem can be solved without considering both technological and human factors — a core competency of the Nunn School and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

“We understand entanglement from a technological standpoint, but we need to better understand how these entanglements affect perceptions and decisions, which ultimately shape deterrence,” Borowitz said. “And we need to have more clarity on how decisions to separate military and civilian systems or choices to integrate different sectors within the space domain more closely might affect deterrence, before billions of dollars are spent on these efforts.”

Borowitz and her colleagues have already staged versions of space conflict scenarios in the classroom at Georgia Tech. They are now broadening the scope and preparing for the first exercises, which could come as soon as September.

The team plans to hold wargaming sessions across the globe over the next few years, including at Georgia Tech and the Air Force Academy and in Washington, Brussels, Taiwan, and Tokyo. The sessions will include national security figures, scholars, students, and international partners.

The project is expected to generate a significant dataset of use to scholars, as well as a book, game design materials, and other assets to help other researchers continue the work, Borowitz said

An international coalition of researchers — led by Georgia Tech — have determined that advancements and innovations in urban research and design must incorporate serious analysis and collaborations with scientists, public policy experts, local leaders, and citizens. To address environmental issues and infrastructure challenges cities face, the coalition identified three core focus areas with research priorities for long-term urban sustainability and viability. Those focus areas should be components of any urban planning, design, and sustainability initiative.

The researchers found that the core focus areas included social justice and equity, circularity, and a concept called “digital twins.” The team — which consists of 13 co-authors and scholars based in the U.S., Asia, and Europe — also provided guidance and future research directions for how to address these focus areas. They detailed their findings in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, published in January 2023.

“Climate change has certainly increased the amount and intensity of extreme weather events and because of that, it makes our decision making today critical to the manner in which our economy and our day to day lives can operate,” said Joe F. Bozeman III, the lead author and an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. He is also the director of Tech’s Social Equity & Environmental Engineering Lab and has a courtesy appointment in the School of Public Policy. “Our quality of life can be negatively affected if we don't make good decisions today.”

Three core areas of focus to achieve urban sustainability

The researchers’ first core focus area, justice and equity, addresses innovations and trends that disproportionately benefit middle and high-income communities. Trends like IoT, “smart cities,” and the urban “green movement” are part of a broader push by cities to become more sustainable and resilient. But communities of color and low-income neighborhoods — the same areas often home to environmental contaminations, infrastructure challenges, and other hazards — have often been overlooked.

The researchers’ findings showed a consistent trend with marginalized communities across several countries, including Canada, the Netherlands, India, and South Africa. They call for mandatory equity analyses which incorporate the experiences and perspectives of these marginalized communities, and, more importantly, ensure members of those communities are actively engaged in decision-making processes.

“Planning, professional, and community stakeholders,” the researchers write in the paper, “should recognize that working together gets cities closer to harmonizing the technological and social dimensions of sustainability.”

The second focus area, circularity, addresses resource consumption of staple commodities including food, water, and energy; the waste and emissions they generate; and the opportunities to increase conservation of those resources by boosting efficiencies.

“What we mean by circularity is basic reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling efforts across the entire urban system — which not only includes cities and under resourced areas within those cities — but also rural communities that supply and take resources from those city hubs,” Bozeman said. The idea is aligned with the circular economy concept which addresses the need to move away from the resource-wasteful and unsustainable cycle of taking, making, and throwing away.

Instead, the researchers argue, cities should look for ways to improve efficiency and maximize local resource use. That has potential benefits not only for urban areas, but rural communities, too. One example, Bozeman said, is the Lifecycle Building Center in Atlanta. It takes old building supplies and sells them locally for reuse.

“By doing that, they’re at the beginning stages of creating an economic system, a regional engine where we share resources between cities and rural areas,” he said. “We can start creating an economic framework, not only where both sides can make money and get what they need, but something that can actually turn into a sustainable economic engine without having to rely on another state or another country's import or export economic pressures.”

To strengthen circularity and make it more robust, the researchers call for more expansive metrics beyond measuring recycling rates and zero waste efforts, to include other parts of the supply chain that may yield new ideas and solutions.

The third focus area, digital twins, addresses the development of automated technologies in smart buildings and infrastructure, such as traffic lights to respond to weather and other environmental factors.

“Let's say there's a heavy rain event and that the rainwater is being stored into retainment,” said Bozeman. “An automated system can open another valve where we can store that water into a secondary support system, so there's less flooding, and that can happen automatically, if we utilize the concept of digital twins.” 

Creating a new urban planning model

The research came about as part of the mission of the Sustainable Urban Systems Section of the International Society for Industrial Ecology, which aims to be a conduit for scientists, engineers, policymakers, and others who want to marry environmental concerns and economic activity. Bozeman is a board member of the Sustainable Urban Systems Section.

“In that role, part of we do is set a vision and foundation for how other researchers should operate within the city and urban system space,” he said. 

For urban sustainability, engineers and policy makers must come to the table and make collective decisions around social justice and equity, circularity, and the digital twins concepts. 

“I think we're at a really critical decision point when it comes to engineers and others being able to do work that is forward looking and human sensitive,” said Bozeman. “Good decision making involves addressing social justice and equity and understanding its root causes, which will enable cities to create solutions that integrate cultural dynamics.”

CITATION: Joe F. Bozeman III, Shauhrat S. Chopra, Philip James, Sajjad Muhammad, Hua Cai, Kangkang Tong, Maya Carrasquillo, Harold Rickenbacker, Destenie Nock, Weslynne Ashton, Oliver Heidrich, Sybil Derrible, Melissa Bilec. “Three research priorities for just and sustainable urban systems: Now is the time to refocus.” (Journal of Industrial Ecology, January 2023)

Now in its 20th year, the Noyce program provides funding to universities for scholarships, stipends, and programmatic support to recruit and prepare highly qualified K-12 science and math teachers in high-need school districts. 

The exploratory study was conceived by Meltem Alemdar, CEISMC’s associate director for educational research and evaluation, who had served as an external evaluator on four different Noyce projects over several years.

The researchers, which included co-principal investigators Jessica Gale, CEISMC senior research scientist, and Christopher Cappelli, former CEISMC senior research scientist now at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recruited about 160 Noyce Fellows in 50 programs across 30 states to participate in the national study.

A new survey was developed using an innovative methodology called social network analysis in which patterns of social ties among network individuals were quantitatively measured. Teachers completed the Teacher Personal Network Survey that asked about their school support structures, personal networks, and attitudes of self-efficacy as related to their Noyce program participation. Follow-up telephone interviews were conducted with a smaller sample of participants.

“Some of our results showed that teachers who have more connected networks are more likely to remain in high-need schools,” said Alemdar. “Additionally, our results showed the importance of expanding teachers’ networks and the significance of receiving unique types of support from the various people within teachers’ networks.”

Other compelling findings include: 

• Noyce Teachers’ Self-Efficacy and Retention: Although self-efficacy was not significantly correlated with retention, correlations were found between teaching self-efficacy and several Noyce program characteristics. This study found positive relationships between Noyce teachers’ teaching self-efficacy and several Noyce program characteristics: mentorship, high-need pre-service teaching experience, professional learning community participation, being observed by Noyce faculty, and job-finding assistance.
• Sources of Self-Efficacy: Although teaching self-efficacy is associated with many benefits for teachers and students, little is known about how it develops in the early years of a teacher’s career. Teachers with less experience reported lower self-efficacy for classroom management and instruction and identified more negative enactive experiences. In interviews, teachers described how sources combined or interacted to influence their self-efficacy. Science teachers reported significantly more negative mastery experiences than mathematics teachers in the sample. Findings contribute to better understandings of the sources of self-efficacy with implications for how best to support teachers in different disciplines and at different stages of their careers.
• Noyce Program Characteristics and Retention: This study identified a set of nine characteristics of Noyce programs that were positively correlated with retention. This indicates that when a teacher was exposed to these program characteristics, there was an overall increase in the likelihood that they would remain in a high-need school. Qualitative analysis revealed that teachers identified three major categories of support provided by Noyce programs as increasing their likelihood of retention in high-need schools: support from Noyce faculty, support from the Noyce teacher network, and training and support offered by Noyce programs.

A detailed summary of results is highlighted in the first chapter of the newly released Research in Practice: Preparing and Retaining K-12 STEM Teachers in High-Need School Districts published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Alemdar co-led a panel about the book as part of the 2022 Noyce Summit that was held in Washington, D.C. in July.

—Joëlle Walls and Angelica Jones, CEISMC Communications 

The board provides top Defense Department leaders with “independent advice and recommendations on innovative means to address future challenges through the prism of three focus areas: people and culture, technology and capabilities, and practices and operations,” according to its website. 

“I’m excited to return to the Pentagon and help our nation’s military leaders navigate innovation against today’s and tomorrow’s threats,” said Roper, who will continue in his Nunn School role. “The status quo can have tremendous inertia in the government. Good ideas must go hand-in-hand with good execution plans to disrupt it.”  

Roper (Physics 2001, M.S. Physics 2002) spent 16 years in various defense-related positions, most recently as former assistant secretary of the U.S. Air Force for acquisition, technology, and logistics. In addition to his work in the Nunn School, where he focuses on mentoring students and continuing to shape the discussion at the intersection of international security and technology, he now serves on the boards of several businesses, including technology firms, and as an Honorary Group Captain in the U.K. Royal Air Force. 

During his time at the Pentagon, Roper helped develop cutting-edge military technology for the United States — from hypersonic weapons to the first artificial intelligence co-pilot. While working as the Air Force’s and Space Force’s top weapons buyer, he forged closer ties with Silicon Valley, placing more than 2,300 venture-backed companies on defense contracts. He also championed digital transformation technology to speed up innovation, crediting such technology with helping produce and fly the first “6th-generation fighter” flight demonstrator years ahead of schedule. 

Other members joining the board along with Roper include Adm. Michael Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; former U.S. Rep. Mac Thornberry — a former chair of the Armed Services Committee; former CIA official Susan Gordon; and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman. Businessman and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg chairs the committee. 

The board recently met with Defense Department officials, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who tasked the panel to work on accelerating experimentation and technology adoption, strengthening private-sector ties, focusing on the “innovation workforce,” and advising on the National Defense Science and Technology Strategy. 

Roper is one of several current or former Nunn School faculty to hold defense-related positions. In May, President Joe Biden appointed Roper’s colleague, Adm. James “Sandy” Winnefeld, to the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board. Early in his administration, Biden also tapped then Distinguished Professor of the Practice Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall to serve as his homeland security advisor. 

Additionally, several faculty members, including former NATO commander Gen. Philip Breedlove, former Defense Department officials Michèle Flournoy and Robert Bell, and Lawrence R. Rubin and Margaret E. Kosal — associate professors in the Nunn School — previously served in defense-related posts. 

Alex hopes to leave a mark on the world, contributing his talents to a great cause. While reflecting on adversity and victories in his life, Alex remembers many people who positively impacted him along the journey.

Seeking Art and Finding the Navy

Growing up, Alex had no idea that his choices would lead him to GTRI. After his mother’s passing when he was 11, Alex was sent to Puerto Rico to live with various family members. The first few years were difficult. He could understand Spanish but didn’t speak it or really know how to read or write it. Through this tumultuous time in his life, Alex sought art as a form of escape. He started small with places and objects and gradually advanced to drawing video game characters and attempting to make his own concepts.

“When I was in high school, I surprised my art teacher with some of the knowledge that I had acquired through books and my observations of my surroundings,” Alex explained. “Art became a form of expression and way for me to communicate how I felt.”

After high school, he hoped to attend college and learn about automotive design. However, his extended family had no real means to help him. Due to personal family reasons, he had little to no opportunity for higher education.

Alex was at a point in his life where he was unsure of what tomorrow would bring, and it felt like no options were available. He reached out to an old friend of his mother who was a Navy Recruiter. She offered plenty of options to choose from, but due to time constraints given to him by his extended family, Alex had to pick a job that would grant him an opportunity to leave as soon as possible. He opted to become a steelworker, S.W. for short, thinking that metal fabrication would put him one step closer to becoming an automotive designer.

However, his eight years of contract service did not turn out exactly as he expected. Alex was deployed to Iraq in 2004. There, he supported a variety of construction tasks, including reinforcing vehicles, creating functioning shower facilities, rapidly building bridges, and completing repairs for tactical operations. Alex also engaged in a lot of humanitarian relief, eventually earning him a humanitarian ribbon. After Hurricane Katrina struck the United States in late August 2005, Alex aided in the relief efforts distributed through Mississippi and Louisiana. While deployed to Africa, he not only helped build homes and schools for the local residents, but also built relations with the community while upholding the Navy’s traditions and values. While this is not where he had anticipated life taking him, Alex looks back on this time in his life with gratitude.

“I met amazing people that helped me become the person that I am today,” said Alex

Seabees are known for their “Can Do” motto and comradery. During his time serving with the NMCB 74, he met one of his closes friend and brother at arms, Andrew (Andy) Rhead, while playing chess. Alex won three games in a row and never allowed his friend a rematch.

“Another one of my military friends, William Anderson, was the one who got me into the digital field (of art),” said Alex. “If it weren't for Will, I probably wouldn't have had the direction on what I wanted to pursue and wouldn’t be where I'm now.”

Returning to His Artistic Roots

Upon completing his service, Alex opted to utilize the G.I. Bill to pursue a college education. Initially, he enrolled in the now-closed ITT Technical Institute, but the game design program was shut down before Alex had a chance to complete it. This left him scrambling with half his G.I. Bill already used up.

Alex found a path forward at The Art Institute, where he met Phillip Hall, an animation instructor at the time. In 2014, Alex completed his bachelor’s degree in Media Arts and Animation and was ready to finally see his dream of working in art and animation come to fruition. But then, interview after interview ended with no job offer. Everyone loved his portfolio, but without any relevant work experience, nobody was willing to take a chance on the new artist. Alex reached out to his old professor and friend Philip for advice. He wanted to know what he was doing wrong.

Phillip explained he had been in a similar situation. He understood the frustration of wanting to put his skills to use, only to be stopped by the lack of work experience. Alex was at a crossroads in his life, and his upcoming choices would shape the course of his future.

Phillip’s solution had been more education. He took a risk by enrolling in a master’s program where he focused on refining his skills and pushing his limits. Afterward, Phillip landed a small job as an animator, and there he grew his network and met people who saw his potential. Eventually, he got to work on box office films like ‘Hotel Transylvania’ and award-winning games likes ‘Red Dead Redemption 2.’ This story resonated with Alex.

“I felt that pursuing a master’s was the most reasonable course of action for me as well,” shared Alex. “But at that time, I wasn't even able to be able to afford it. I had nearly used up all my G.I. Bill due to a combination of getting my bachelor’s at the Art Institute of Virginia Beach and situation with ITT Tech.”

A veterans' advocate recommended a vocational rehabilitation program that assists service members with disabilities in achieving a higher educational level. Alex signed up for the military program, and with his impressive portfolio and letters of recommendation from professors, he received the scholarship and soon enrolled at SCAD.

As he entered his master’s program, Alex was facing conflicting feelings. He had finally found a path forward and a way to express it, but there was also unrest in his personal life. He recently had ankle surgery, a serious relationship had abruptly ended, and he had just moved to a new city where he didn’t know anyone.

“I was ultimately alone, and I was definitely at my low point,” said Alex. “It was a very difficult journey for me to even make it to the start of my education.”

At first, people didn’t believe in him. But Alex pushed himself, and little by little, people started recognizing his talents and expertise. By the end of this time at SCAD, Alex was leading workshops and was well known around campus as the go-to guru with ZBrush and Maya.

During Alex’s final year at SCAD, he attended an event called BeeConnect. There, he met Megan Denham, a senior research associate at GTRI’s Information and Communication Laboratory (ICL). Megan saw Alex’s passion and talent. She thought those skills, combined with his prior military experience, would make Alex a great fit at GTRI. And she was right! Alex joined GTRI in February of 2020 as a temporary employee, with a way to join full-time once he completed his master’s degree in May of that same year.

Finding a New Community at GTRI

Almost as soon as Alex started at GTRI, the organization responded to the Covid-19 pandemic with work-from-home policies. Even though Alex didn’t get an opportunity to work side by side with fellow coworkers, he wanted to finish his degree and join the team full-time. It was April when tragedy struck once more, as Alex found out his little sister had passed away.

“It was tough,” Alex said. “I had spoken to her about getting together for the holiday a few weeks prior, and she expressed how proud she was because I never gave up on my dreams, and it gave her courage to keep moving forward.”

What kept Alex going through this difficult time were the words his sister gave him, the drive his friends and family instilled in him, and the GTRI community (that he knew so little about) showing him a level of understanding and compassion.

Alex did graduate with his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Visual Effects in May 2020, and he started his permeant role at GTRI in the fall. While his current title is Research Associate I, a better descriptor may be 3D Environment/Character Modeler. In ICL, he works on texture design, rigging, and animation in both the 2D and 3D space. He also has experience in motion tracking and motion capture, and he’s moving into learning coding languages such as Python and C++ to aid in his designs.

“My main goal is to do something in my life where I can leave my name chiseled,” said Alex. “Whether in a game or a film, I want proof that I was alive. I overcame these insane hurdles. I want to show that I managed to get here and make my family in heaven proud as they watch from above.”

At GTRI, Alex offers his expertise to research teams, and his background in the military offers him a clear perspective on the importance of GTRI’s national security-focused work. Alex has faced intense adversity at every step of his life. Thankfully, at many stages, friends and mentors have come along to guide and support Alex. In 2021, Alex’s GTRI coworkers had the opportunity to play that role in his life. Only a few months after his sister passed away, Alex too found himself in an isolated hospital bed with an early strand of the virus.

“I’ve been through some tough times in my life, but being in a room where you don’t have the strength to physically move, nurses and doctors are coming in and out of the room in what looked like hazmat suits, and hearing them say they may have to put you on a ventilator… it tore me up inside” shared Alex.

Through what was explained to him as an experimental treatment, Alex was able to recover. But he returned home weak and barely able to walk. Some of his GTRI colleagues, including Megan Denham, Victoria Razin, and Leigh McCook, delivered a get-well basket and ensured Alex felt supported through his recovery.

“It was that kind of dedication, kindness, humility, and overall humanity from these individuals that instilled the drive to work that much more at GTRI. It made me want to give back,” said Alex. “It reminded me that I started working because Megan sold me on the idea that I'll be able to give back with my skills.”

Alex’s current goal is to continue growing in his field and learning new skills. To help his coworkers on future projects, he would love to collaborate on opportunism that could open up doors for GTRI in the VFX experimental film and VR/AR field.

“I would even like to dive into a project that would incorporate aspects of what a service dog is or even create a game to drive a story about people with a service dog,” said Alex. “When it comes to GTRI, I’ve seen and worked on projects that have the potential to be even greater. It makes you feel like anything is possible with the right minds and passion.”

Writer: Katrina Heitz
Photographer: Sean McNeil
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia USA

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,800 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $700 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

Read about the study here. 

To overcome these challenges, Georgia Tech researchers form the core of an interdisciplinary, interorganizational team which seeks to prevent disease outbreaks by integrating the study of human behavior with computational data-driven models. 

Calling themselves BEHIVE (BEHavioral Interaction and Viral Evolution), the group recently received a $1 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant toward multidisciplinary team formation and novel outbreak prevention research.

“Our goal is to bring together all these terrific researchers from different disciplines to help bring a paradigm shift in the science of pandemic prediction and prevention,” said B. Aditya Prakash, associate professor with Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE). 

“While epidemic forecasting is compared to weather forecasting, there is an important difference. Unlike weather, our actions and behavior can change the course of an epidemic.”

Prakash is the principal investigator of the $1 million NSF grant. Fellow BEHIVE members include:

• Pinar Keskinocak, William W. George Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech
• Thomas Kingsley, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Informatics at Mayo Clinic
• Shinobu Kitayama, Robert B. Zajonc Collegiate Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan
• Ramesh Raskar, Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab
• Liliana Salvador, Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia’s Department of Infectious Diseases
• Joshua Weitz, Professor and Tom and Marie Patton Chair in the School of Biological Sciences and Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Quantitative Biosciences (QBioS) at Georgia Tech

Prakash emphasized BEHIVE’s primary goal to use its interdisciplinary organization to bridge research methodologies between hard and soft sciences. 

He explained that human behavior was underutilized in epidemic science before Covid-19, largely due to data scarcity and underdeveloped computational technologies. Behavioral dynamics encountered during the pandemic, such as social distancing, mask wearing, and vaccine hesitancy, has provided new research and data that now can be considered in models and simulations.

Here, BEHIVE will develop high fidelity computational models by designing new artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques that bridge human behavior knowledge and traditional epidemiological theory and models.

“It is still an open question of how we can best incorporate human behavior knowledge into the study of pandemics. That is the challenge,” Prakash said. “Our main idea is to better integrate knowledge from psychology and the humanities into pandemic science using novel computational methods.”

BEHIVE originated when team members met through various workshops held in 2020 and 2021. Prakash was an invited organizer of the National Symposium on Predicting Emergence of Virulent Entities by Novel Technologies (PREVENT). 

PREVENT reported that interdisciplinary collaboration was an obstacle in predicting and preventing pandemics. For example, some vocabularies often don’t mean the same thing across disciplines, so a consistent methodology to establish a common language must be developed.

BEHIVE is custom built to solve these challenges PREVENT revealed. Along with a wealth of knowledge learned through past epidemics, each BEHIVE researcher brings to the group experience working across interdisciplinary lines. 

Among the Georgia Tech researchers alone, Keskinocak interfaced with policymakers and the public on measures to slow Covid-19 spread. 

Prakash’s lab led several high-profile Covid-19 forecasting initiatives, including collaboration with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Weitz teamed with fellow Georgia Tech researchers with the College of Science, College of Computing, and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering to create a predoctoral training program that integrates computational modeling and data analytics into bioscience.

Keskinocak, Prakash, and Weitz together are also faculty in the Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS), one of Georgia Tech’s ten interdisciplinary research institutes. IDEaS connects research centers and efforts in foundational areas such as machine learning, high-performance computing, and algorithms.

BEHIVE’s $1 million grant is funded through NSF’s Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Prevention (PIPP) initiative. This program supports high-risk, high-payoff convergent research that aims to identify, model, predict, track, and mitigate the effects of future pandemics.

According to Prakash, the PREVENT symposium’s summary report helped lay the foundation for the PIPP program.

PIPP is a two-phased initiative in which NSF selects to fund 25 to 30 project teams, including BEHIVE, for eighteen months through phase one. However, this does not necessarily limit PIPP’s influence to chosen project teams within academia.

BEHIVE intends to partner with industry, governmental, and non-profit organizations to expand its interdisciplinary, interorganizational network. 

BEHIVE’s nucleus of Georgia Tech researchers connects the group with the CDC, Georgia Department of Public Health, and numerous hospitals across the state. BEHIVE’s other researchers also serve in leading roles at non-profits, such as the Pathcheck Foundation, and top hospitals like the Mayo Clinic.

Along with developing interdisciplinary methodologies, new disease prevention models, and partnering with external organizations, BEHIVE hopes to develop educational training programs. This would ensure their effort last generations to bring about the necessary paradigm change to prevent future pandemics.

“Our initial projects and research the next eighteen months will help us get a sense of research gaps and enlarge our perspective” Prakash said. “We’re approaching PIPP as a science, and we want to lay the foundation of the science by bringing in many people from different fields for the future.”

Ongoing research to study sea level rise led by Georgia Tech researchers, a coalition of universities, Savannah and Chatham County government leaders, and local community groups is creating what could be a national model for coastal regions across the country facing similar challenges.

Launched in 2018 with a Georgia Smart Communities Challenge Grant, the data collected from the sea level sensors is used to inform city and county planners and emergency responders on resource deployment following major weather events.

Now in its fourth year, the sea sensor project is now slated to receive $5 million from Congress to launch the Coastal Equity and Resilience Hub. It is secured by U.S. Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, and U.S. Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter to expand the network of sensors — currently 50 are deployed off Chatham County’s coast — to blanket Georgia’s 11-county coastal region.

“With this new funding, we are recognizing a new phase of our project which has evolved,” said Kim Cobb, former director of Georgia Tech’s Global Change Program and a professor who studies climate, oceanography, and weather in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.

Cobb and Russell J. Clark, senior research scientist in the School of Computer Science at Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, co-lead the project. Allen Hyde, assistant professor in the School of History and Sociology in Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, leads a National Science Foundation project focused on youth disaster resilience as part of the effort.

The funding will support expansion of building out more hyperlocal flood forecasting models, resilience planning tools for underserved communities, and further development of a K-12 education curriculum, paid internships, and other workforce development programs.

Georgia Tech and its partners in the Coastal Equity and Resilience Hub — which includes Savannah State University, the University of Georgia, and the University of South Carolina — is using these low-cost sensors to gain real-time data that over time will help inform the policies on infrastructure design and retrofitting, Cobb said. It will also further expand first responders and emergency planners’ ability to forecast extreme rainfall and storm surge events on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood specific basis.

“It's going to translate into a saved lives and saved infrastructure,” Cobb said.

A National Model
Hub researchers say the data being collected from the sensors and additional information gleaned from the sensor expansion has immediate applications in terms of flood disasters and hurricanes. Those findings over the long-term could also help frame the national dialogue and help inform policy as leaders in Washington shape it to tackle rising sea levels and climate change.

The award is part of a broader federal push, including a $12 billion funding package, to help Georgia and other states along the Eastern Seaboard, as well as the West and Gulf coasts, develop resiliency and flooding plans and protocols to mitigate damage from future floods.

Cobb said this new funding allows the Hub to further efforts in its research that further expands education and workforce development — particularly in underserved minority communities — as components of the broader strategy.

“Our project started out anchored on the sensors and trying to provide real-time data to emergency planners and emergency response responders, but it’s no longer just a small team of people who are interested in sensors or physical scientists, engineers and researchers on the science and technology side,” she said, explaining the research team of some 30 people also includes policy and planning experts, along with community advocates.

“We're trying to think about solutions in the context of history, geography, — the history of people, cultures, and economies down on the coast,” Cobb said. “There’s no waving a magic wand and making this all right, especially for the most vulnerable communities.”

Community Voice
In broad terms, the project touches flooding, infrastructure, property, and pollution. But this newer phase brings in aspects that go beyond scientific modeling of risk, said Dean Hardy, an assistant professor in the University of South Carolina’s Department of Geography.

It’s what he calls the “human dimension” phase.

“There are disaster plans, there's resiliency plans, and there's community level thinking. But what we need is systemic change,” said Hardy, whose research expertise is in geography and integrative conservation, which marries preservation and social and community goals with public policy.

“So, what I hope partially comes out of this is not just a bunch of scientific publications or better scientific understanding of these issues, but capacity-building with community organizations that leads to the capacity for self-determination.”

That acknowledgement is important to marginalized communities, said Dawud Shabaka, interim director of Harambee House, in Savannah. The organization, which is involved in the sensor project, promotes and advocates for civic engagement and environmental justice from the coastal city’s Black residents and youth.

Shabaka noted that the engagement component, particularly local high school and middle school students working on the sensors and coding, has allowed the participants to see themselves not only as budding scientists, but as future community leaders.

“When you’re dealing with or managing or mitigating an issue that’s affecting society, it’s got to involve research and dialogue with the community. This project is allowing us to recognize that the community themselves are the subject matter experts,” said Shabaka. “Having the students involved at an early age, benefits society as a whole and lets them know that the work they’re doing is having a much wider impact. This is the type of community engagement that needs to happen to make people feel like they’re worthwhile.”

Dhongde's paper, written with co-author Robert Haveman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is her latest in a series of work on the topic and the first to break down multidimensional poverty on a state-by-state level over more than a decade. 

"This is important because there was much variation across states in how the Great Recession and the following recovery affected the multidimensional poor," Dhongde said. "Now we can apply those lessons to Covid recovery efforts to help ensure the policies are as effective as possible and reaching the people who need it the most." 

Geographic and demographic breakdown 

Analyzing data from 2008 to 2019, the researchers found that multidimensional poverty increased across the United States during the Great Recession from 2008 to 2010 and gradually declined through 2019.  

The analysis showed that poverty among adults aged 18 to 65 was most widespread in the South and West. At the peak of the Great Recession in 2010, 20% of adults in Florida — more than two million people, according to census reports — were experiencing at least two measures of deprivation. In Texas, 22% of adults, totaling nearly 3.5 million people, were multidimensionally poor. However, the highest rate of multidimensional poverty was in California, where more than 5.5 million adults — nearly one in every four — were multidimensionally poor in 2010. 

In the North, New York stood out as an exception with a high rate of multidimensional poverty. At the same time, states such as Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Vermont had some of the lowest multidimensional poverty rates, at  5% to 6% of the population. 

According to the researchers, the high multidimensional poverty rate in California, Texas, and Florida is partially explained by their large Hispanic populations. Hispanics living in the United States are significantly more likely to experience two or more measures of poverty than other demographic groups, Dhongde and Haveman found. On average, they wrote, white people in the United States had the lowest multidimensional poverty rate at 10.4 percent, Black people and Asians had moderate rates at 14.8 and 16.5 percent, respectively, and Hispanics experienced the highest multidimensional poverty rates at 34.7 percent. 

Little overlap with income deprivation 

Surprisingly, the researchers found that having an income below the poverty line and experiencing multidimensional poverty (living with at least two of the six alternative deprivations) did not significantly overlap. According to the research, 13% of adults were multidimensional poor, and about 12.5% were income poor. However, there was a small overlap between the two groups; only 5.5% were both income poor and multidimensional poor. 

Of the six deprivations studied, most multidimensional poor lacked health insurance and a high school education. They also faced a severe housing cost burden. “This underscores our argument that income poverty often fails to capture deprivation in other dimensions affecting the quality of life,” Dhongde and Haveman wrote.  

Less surprisingly, “among individuals who were not income poor, deprivation was highest when individuals had incomes just above the poverty threshold,” the researchers found. They recommend expanding policies to help individuals living just above the poverty line as well as those below it to help reduce multidimensional poverty in the U.S. 

Translating these lessons to Covid-19 

The researchers also noted that immigrants were four times more likely to be multidimensionally poor than those born in the United States, and that multidimensional poverty rates were highest among children and young adults, single-parent families, and immigrants. Dhongde and Haveman speculate that these population groups are also the most likely to be socially and economically affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. 

“In coming years, as the country recovers from the pandemic, it will be even more important to monitor multidimensional poverty in conjunction with income poverty in order to get a better idea of the impact on the quality of life experienced by a country’s population,” they wrote.   

Spatial and Temporal Trends in Multidimensional Poverty in the United States over the Last Decade was published in Social Indicators Research: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-022-02902-z.  

The article is the latest in Dhongde's body of literature on the topic, which includes studies on multidimensional poverty during the Covid pandemic, during the Great Recession, among senior citizens, and across racial and ethnic groups. Her work has been featured on NPR, in US News and World Report, Public Health Post, How Stuff Works, and many other outlets. 

That includes making more of these chips here at home.  

• Kim M. Cobb, Georgia Power Chair, director of the Global Change Program, and ADVANCE Professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, College of Sciences

• Hanjoong Jo, Wallace H. Coulter Distinguished Faculty Chair in Biomedical Engineering and the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering’s associate chair for Emory University

• Carlos A. R. Sa de Melo, professor in the School of Physics, College of Sciences

The 2021 class of AAAS Fellows includes 564 scientists, engineers, and innovators spanning 24 scientific disciplines who are being recognized for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements. AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals.

Tech’s trio of honorees lead a spectrum of global research spanning climate variability and trends to theoretical physics to atherosclerosis.

Kim M. Cobb

Geology & Geography | For distinguished service to the field of paleoclimatology and in outreach and education to foster a new generation of earth scientists who are engaged with the real world.

“As a climate scientist,” Cobb shares, “it’s thrilling to uncover some of Earth’s longest held secrets. In that way, our research has always been its own reward to me. But this honor is special, and a true testament to the outsized contributions of our team’s research faculty, students, and staff.”

The mission of Cobb’s research is to uncover the mechanisms of global climate change — both natural and anthropogenic — to inform regional projections of future climate change.

More recently, her research has included the study of climate extremes in Georgia, with the aim of bolstering community resilience to climate change impacts.

As historically marginalized communities are most vulnerable to such impacts, Cobb explains, she works with a large team of colleagues and students that includes social scientists, as well as local officials and community organizations. Her AAAS Fellow citation recognizes her sustained efforts in communicating climate science to policymakers and the general public.

Hanjoong Jo

Biological Science | For distinguished contributions to atherosclerosis research, especially in discovering the role of blood flow on endothelial dysfunction and atherosclerosis using novel animal models and cultured cells.

Jo’s research focuses on better understanding atherosclerosis, a buildup of artery-clogging fats and cholesterol that can lead to heart attacks and strokes.

“I am deeply honored and humbled to be elected as an AAAS Fellow,” shares Jo. “This election recognizes my lifetime contribution to vascular mechanobiology and atherosclerosis by a distinguished group of AAAS Fellows, who are themselves accomplished leaders in broad [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] fields.”

Carlos A. R. Sa de Melo

Physics | For seminal contributions to superconductivity and superfluidity, particularly the crossover from BCS (Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer) superconductivity to Bose-Einstein condensation in ultra-cold atoms, and for communicating these advances to students and the public.

Sa de Melo’s work focuses on theoretical condensed matter and ultra-cold atomic and molecular physics: superconductors, quantum magnets, superfluids, and Bose-Einstein condensates. 

“I strongly encourage my students to be broad, deep and creative,” he shares. “Breadth of knowledge is very important in today's physics job market, as is expert (deep) knowledge in a particular area.” But most of all, he adds, it’s “the development of new directions, never explored before” comprising the dominant component of his research.

“I am very thankful to the colleagues that have nominated me for such a recognition — to my students and postdocs for their collaboration,” Sa de Melo says, “and to the AAAS Council for electing me to the rank of Fellow for contributions to theoretical physics in the fields of superconductivity and superfluidity.”

A tradition since 1874

“AAAS is proud to bestow the honor of AAAS Fellow to some of today’s brightest minds who are integral to forging our path into the future,” says Dr. Sudip Parikh, AAAS chief executive officer and Science executive publisher. “We celebrate these distinguished individuals for their invaluable contributions to the scientific enterprise.”

This tradition stretches back to 1874. AAAS Fellows are a “distinguished cadre of scientists, engineers, and innovators who have been recognized for their achievements across disciplines ranging from research, teaching, and technology, to administration in academia, industry, and government, to excellence in communicating and interpreting science to the public.”

AAAS members achieve the rank of Fellow through a rigorous annual nomination and selection process. Cobb, Jo, and Sa de Melo join more than 90 faculty from Georgia Tech faculty elected as Fellows since 1954, including Kaye Husbands Fealing, dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, who also serves on the AAAS Executive Board — along with several fellow Georgia Tech faculty inducted as AAAS members, including Susan Lozier, dean of the College of Sciences and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair.

The new class of Fellows will receive an official certificate and a gold and blue rosette pin to commemorate their election (representing science and engineering, respectively) and will be celebrated at an AAAS commemoration later this year. The cohort is also featured in the AAAS News & Notes section of Science for January 2022.

***

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 44,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science, as well as Science Translational Medicine; Science Signaling; a digital, open-access journal, Science Advances; Science Immunology; and Science Robotics. AAAS was founded in 1848 and includes more than 250 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. The nonprofit AAAS is open to all and fulfills its mission to “advance science and serve society” through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education, public engagement, and more. For additional information about AAAS, visit www.aaas.org.

In her paper, Fong asks why low-income mothers hesitate to contact state services for children in their community — even when they suspect there might be child abuse or neglect. Her findings help reframe the conversation in a new way. 

 
Challenging conceptions 

Fong interviewed 74 low-income mothers in Providence, Rhode Island, over several years to conduct her research. Analyzing her interviews, Fong found that “respondents disavowed or expressed ambivalence about reporting other families to child protection authorities, often justifying their non-reporting by empathizing with mothers they might report,” she wrote in her abstract.  

“Drawing on their own experiences of scrutinized and precarious motherhood, respondents imagined how they would feel if reported and balked at calling on child protective services, understanding reporting as an act of judging and jeopardizing another’s motherhood,” the abstract continued. “The findings challenge conceptions of non-reporting as necessarily indicating social disorganization. Rather, hesitation to mobilize authorities can constitute an expression of care, kinship, and solidarity.” 

This reframes the issue in an important way. “A lot of academic research focuses on the deficits of marginalized communities — their weak networks, their social disorganization. But I heard a lot of expressions of kinship from moms, extended not just to their best friend, sister, or neighbor, but to hypothetical moms, people in their community that might be subjected to the same thing that they could imagine themselves being subjected to,” said Fong. “And that's really powerful. I think that's something that policymakers and others in power don't pay enough attention to: the real care that mothers in marginalized communities have for other mothers in similar positions.” 

Leveraging care into policy 

Leveraging this care could translate into actionable policy changes, Fong said. Rather than urging mothers to call CPS when they suspect a child is in danger, Fong’s research suggests there may be other, more effective interventions. 

“I think that these findings require us to step back and ask: If moms don't see this option [CPS] as one that's appropriate, given their experiences and perspectives, what would be an appropriate intervention? And how can we strengthen and support those alternatives?” asked Fong. For example, peer support networks, disconnected from child removal, could provide an alternate resource for the women to reach out to with concerns with less trepidation that they may cause a family to be separated. 

 
Further work in social inequality 

Fong’s article in Social Problems is part of her larger body of research on social inequality, family life, and how families engage with state services in the United States. She often conducts interdisciplinary work with Assistant Professor Lindsey Bullinger in the School of Public Policy.  

One of their recent papers reframed another question, looking at the bigger picture of not just how parents care for their children but the conditions under which they do so. Their research connected eviction filings to reports of child abuse and neglect, and suggested that reducing the former could also be an effective way to minimize the latter. Currently, Fong and Bullinger are working on a “Research to Action” grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, investigating how social services can best continue to provide virtual services to families and children in the post-pandemic world.  

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But a new study from Keaton Fletcher and Kimberly French, a duo of assistant professors in the School of Psychology at Georgia Institute of Technology, may force some new thinking about how early career advancement can temporarily throw off well-being and shake up feelings of self-esteem in the short-term and long run. 

Using data accumulated on 184 workers over a 12-year period, the new research suggests that taking on a first formal leadership role at work is, in the first year, a stressful experience for all workers — one that can negatively impact men’s self-esteem more than women’s in that period. However, for years after taking on that first leadership role, both men and women report experiencing increased positivity and self-esteem. 

Fletcher and French’s new paper, “Longitudinal Effects of Transitioning Into a First-Time Leadership Position on Wellbeing and Self-Concept,” is published online in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. 

The tough first year of leadership

The researchers reviewed data that was part of an archival Youth Development Study dataset collected by Jeylan Mortimer of the University of Minnesota. The data, which studied formative experiences among adolescents and young adults, was for a wide range of jobs in small and large organizations, but most were considered traditional office positions. 

“We were capturing people toward the beginning of their development as young adults,” French says. “That is a prime time, when work has a major impact on how we feel about ourselves.”

To better understand an employee’s first-time transition to leadership, the study drew upon a concept known as role theory. People take on different social roles throughout their lives, “and they affect everything from how we perceive ourselves, to how others perceive us, how we behave, our mental health,” Fletcher says. The identity-driven roles can be permanent and lasting, such as the concept of being an adult or a parent, “or they can be more transient roles, like the role of a manager or that of a partner in a relationship.”

The data that Fletcher and French analyzed included information on tension (think: feeling stressed), depression, emotional well-being, self-esteem, feelings of control, and job satisfaction before and after people took on their very first supervisory role. 

The researchers unexpectedly found that “men experienced a significant drop in self-esteem at the point of transition compared to women, but otherwise, there were no significant gender differences at the time of, or following, a leadership transition.”

Internalizing societal expectations for leaders

“We were surprised,” Fletcher says. “Because of role theory, we thought women would suffer more in transition to leadership and get fewer benefits out of it” because of certain social expectations that are often internalized.

“Society tells me as a man, I’m a natural leader and should be good at it,” Fletcher explains. “Then when I run into inevitable challenges as a first-time supervisor, I’m going to take those challenges personally, and they’ll challenge my self-esteem. With men, leadership is part of that role. It’s sort of expected that you’re more dominant and effective at being a leader, and what we see during the first year of transition is that’s it’s stressful — and men may feel like they’re failing, and men see that as a challenge to their self-esteem.”

In contrast, Fletcher says that women have a divergent set of societal norms and expectations that could help explain the durability of their self-esteem in a leadership role. “They haven’t internalized that perspective.”

And French explains there’s much more scientific literature on gender and work relationships than there are studies looking at gender and the experience of being a leader. Her research focuses on how managing work and family affects the health and well-being of individuals and their family members, “and there’s a lot of gendered research there because work and family are gendered domains.”

“The question we posed is pretty unique,” she adds. “Most of what we have is looking at perceived effectiveness of leadership, women or men, and how gendered expectations align with expectations for leaders. It was less on how men and women differentially react to events like becoming a leader.” 

Leadership stresses and the 'Great Resignation'

Although the archival data studied was collected from 2000-2011, both Fletcher and French speculate that difficult first-year leadership transitions may have a part to play in the so-called “Great Resignation,” which is a current trend among office workers who are leaving their jobs or beginning to seek out new roles after the pandemic may have forced reappraisals of their employment situations. The employment expert who coined the term “Great Resignation” also came up with “pandemic epiphanies” to describe workers reevaluating work lives, and Fletcher believes first-year leadership stress contributes.

“We are seeing people taking on leadership roles right now when companies are in crisis, and still in remote work because of Covid,” Fletcher says. “If you were making that leadership transition now, you might not see that long-term benefit because in the short term, it’s very stressful, and you won’t see those benefits right away. People may be doing mental calculus of ‘is this worth it?’ and in the short term the answer may be no.”

But, because the years following a transition to leadership can bring increases in emotional well-being and self-esteem, “just taking on this role sets people on a positive trajectory for how they view themselves and the world,” Fletcher says. 

Advice for employers: start small, share support

That’s why Fletcher and French recommend that organizations offer more support to those chosen for leadership, including a gradual assignment of more responsibilities. 

“Based on our study, more opportunities for informal leadership — before you take on a formal role — should help,” he adds. “Then you run into those challenges on a lower level where the stakes are not so high. And during that year of transition, making sure that the company acts as a mentor. Your supervisor is helping you, giving you guidance, and making sure you’re not taking challenges personally, so you can reframe the experience as beneficial.”

Fletcher adds that, because toxic feelings experienced by new supervisors can be passed down to other workers, companies should provide more help when they present opportunities to employees to lead. 

“Helping people be better people should be a goal of an organization — to better society, not just make money,” French says. “The benefits to self-concept are there. The outcome in and of itself, making workers better people, is a valued outcome."

Researchers from Georgia Tech have been awarded a $2.5 million National Science Foundation Smart and Connected Communities Grant to develop systems that will improve travel mobility, safety, equity, and sustainability using the city of Peachtree Corners, Ga., as an immersive living lab.

During the course of the four-year project, the research team will develop tools and evaluate policies that will allow communities to leverage advances in information, communication, and sensor technologies in a quantifiable manner to achieve sustainable travel goals.

The project’s principal investigator, Frederick R. Dickerson Chair and Professor Srinivas Peeta, explained that the crux of the work lies in analyzing and fusing qualitative and quantitative data from a variety of sources including emerging technologies—like sensors that collect large volumes of data—and communications strategies like community feedback surveys.

“In any city, there are all these resources,” said Peeta, who is jointly appointed in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. “For transportation engineers, how do we use all of these technologies and all of the data? How do we use all of this to come up with solutions that are holistic?”

Reaching the Community

Through the grant, Peeta and the research team will work to create strategies to meet the needs of a diverse set of constituents, with a particular focus on reaching underrepresented communities. These include “information deserts” in lower-income neighborhoods, in which residents do not have as much access to smartphones and internet, as well as senior residents for whom technology is an obstacle.

To foster sustainability values in children, the project will involve initiatives in K-12 schools, including engagement roles for a local high school. The researchers will also develop a new community app to provide Peachtree Corners users with information about travel options and collect feedback.

The Georgia Tech researchers are partnering with the City of Peachtree Corners; Gwinnett County Department of Transportation; Tortoise, an artificial intelligence company focused on last-mile delivery logistics and shared micromobility; Paul Duke STEM High School in Gwinnett County; and Curiosity Lab at Peachtree Corners, a publicly funded test environment designed to advance intelligent mobility and smart city technology.

“Curiosity Lab is a unique public-private partnership that facilitates innovation by others. We are excited to work with Georgia Tech researchers to advance mobility concepts that benefit future generations,” said Betsy Plattenburg, executive director of Curiosity Lab at Peachtree Corners.

Generating Solutions

Through this grant, the research team will address the challenges of how to integrate disparate, multi-source data from various stakeholders and use it to systematically generate solutions — in the form of partnerships, behavioral interventions, and policy interventions — to meet sustainability objectives at the community level in a systematic, quantifiable manner over time.

The researchers will utilize methods from multi-objective and multi-agent optimization, machine learning, behavioral economics, and data and policy analytics to generate multidimensional solutions.

“We are making steps toward real-time policy analysis and program evaluation with information-based strategies,” said the project’s Co-PI Omar Asensio, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy and director of the Data Science and Policy Lab. “The connections to real-time experiments and observational data feeds will be important. To do this effectively, we will introduce methods of causal inference to isolate the underlying causes of behavior change in travel patterns, which will then feed into more effective machine learning models. Real-time analysis represents a change in our ability to understand travel choices related to congestion and sustainability.”

Asensio explained that the move toward real-time analytics can be faster, cheaper and potentially more accurate than traditional government transit surveys, which are slow, costly, and update relatively infrequently.

Creating a Framework

The Peachtree Corners project will focus on collaboration among three main constituencies: transportation users, providers, and influencers.

“For the users, how can they have a better travel experience? For influencers, what can they do to share information and reach larger groups? And for providers, how can they collaborate?” Peeta said.

Gwinnett County Transit is the main public transportation provider in Peachtree Corners. But there are also private sector companies that provide micromobility options like electric scooters that supplement traditional public transportation.

Influencers are community pillars such as school districts and major employers that have the opportunity to share information about transportation with their constituents and influence travel behavior.

The transportation users in this project are the residents of Peachtree Corners, a diverse population of different ages, abilities, genders, races and income levels who all have different needs and travel behaviors.

The goal is that after four years, the model will be sustainable in Peachtree Corners and can be replicated in other communities.

“By the end of this project, we hope to have a framework that can be transferred to any city with a smart and connected framework,” Peeta said. “If they’re able to do it there, then it’s transferable elsewhere.”

Jason Borenstein of the School of Public Policy, Ellen Zegura of the School of Computer Science, and Charles Isbell, dean of the College of Computing, will lead a three-year, National Science Foundation-funded study seeking to “better understand and amplify the diverse range of voices that may have been absent during the development of a traditional computing ethics curriculum.”

Borenstein is the project’s principal investigator. “The main goal of this grant is to enable groups historically underrepresented in computing to have more of a direct say in what’s offered in the computing ethics curriculum,” said Borenstein, who teaches ethics in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts and is the director of graduate research ethics programs for Georgia Tech.

Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous individuals represent just over 15% of bachelor’s degrees awarded in computer science in the United States and fewer than 4% of doctoral degrees, according to the most recent CRA Taulbee study.

“As computing expands to touch everyone’s lives, it becomes more and more important to have people from a diverse set of backgrounds doing that work,” said Isbell, a co-principal investigator on the study. “What we do in the classroom and in our careers must be responsible to all of the different groups affected by our work. I am looking forward to this project and eager to see what impact we can make.”

By learning more about how changes to the curriculum might change students’ perceptions of ethics in computing, the hope is the team will be able to develop recommendations for changes instructors could implement to make the curriculum more diverse, inclusive, and attentive to thorny ethical issues that many students may never personally experience, Zegura said. Such efforts are foundational to Georgia Tech’s mission to educate leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

“We’re educating many future software developers. We have a chance through these students to do more to make computing responsible to all parts of society. An important piece is educating future developers to think broadly and carefully about the software they are building,”  said Zegura, also co-PI on the study.

Borenstein, Zegura, and Isbell hope to survey minority faculty at a number of U.S. universities about what they are teaching and what they think should be taught as part of the computing ethics curriculum. They are working with senior advisors from the faculties of Georgia State University, Morehouse College, and Florida International University and an advisory board.

A key step will be to create sample course syllabuses incorporating the views of surveyed faculty and measure to see if the proposed additions would change students’ perceptions of the computing fields and the classes they might take.

“Our hope is that it might help with retention rates,” Borenstein said. “If, for instance, you talk about issues more directly related to social justice in your computing courses, is that going to resonate with different student populations and potentially make them more interested in staying in computing?”

The project is funded by a $398,288 NSF grant through its Ethical and Responsible Research (ER2) program.

Meeting a 2035 deadline for decarbonizing U.S. electricity production, as proposed by the incoming U.S. presidential administration, would eliminate just 15% of the capacity-years left in plants powered by fossil fuels, says the article by Emily Grubert, a Georgia Institute of Technology researcher. Plant retirements are already underway, with 126 gigawatts of fossil generator capacity taken out of production between 2009 and 2018, including 33 gigawatts in 2017 and 2018 alone.

“Creating an electricity system that does not contribute to climate change is actually two processes — building carbon-free infrastructure like solar plants, and closing carbon-based infrastructure like coal plants,” said Grubert, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “My work shows that because a lot of U.S. fossil fuel plants are already pretty old, the target of decarbonization by 2035 would not require us to shut most of these plants down earlier than their typical lifespans.”

Of U.S. fossil fuel-fired generation capacity, 73% (630 out of 840 gigawatts) will reach the end of its typical lifespan by 2035; that percentage would reach 96% by 2050, she says in the Policy Forum article published in Science. About 13% of U.S. fossil fuel-fired generation capacity (110 gigawatts) operating in 2018 had already exceeded its typical lifespan. 

Because typical lifespans are averages, some generators operate for longer than expected. Allowing facilities to run until they retire is thus likely insufficient for a 2035 decarbonization deadline, the article notes. Closure deadlines that strand assets relative to reasonable lifespan expectations, however, could create financial liability for debts and other costs. The research found that a 2035 deadline for completely retiring fossil fuel-based electricity generators would only strand about 15% (1,700 gigawatt-years) of capacity life, along with about 20% (380,000 job-years) of direct power plant and fuel extraction jobs that existed in 2018. 

In 2018, fossil fuel facilities operated in 1,248 of 3,141 counties, directly employing about 157,000 people at generators and fuel extraction facilities. Plant closure deadlines can improve outcomes for workers and host communities — providing additional certainty, for example, by enabling specific advance planning for things like remediation, retraining for displaced workers, and revenue replacements.

“Closing large industrial facilities like power plants can be really disruptive for the people who work there and live in the surrounding communities,” Grubert said. “We don't want to repeat the damage we saw with the collapse of the steel industry in the 1970s and ’80s, where people lost jobs, pensions, and stability without warning. We already know where the plants are, and who might be affected. Using the 2035 decarbonization deadline to guide explicit, community grounded planning for what to do next can help, even without a lot of financial support.”

Planning ahead will also help avoid creating new capital investment that may not be needed long-term. “We shouldn't build new fossil fuel power plants that would still be young in 2035, and we need to have explicit plans for closures both to ensure the system keeps working and to limit disruption for host communities,” she said. 

Underlying policies governing the retirement of fossil fuel-powered facilities is the concept of a “just transition” that ensures material well-being and distributional justice for individuals and communities affected by a transition from fossil to non-fossil electricity systems. Determining which assets are “stranded,” or required to close earlier than expected, is vital for managing compensation for remaining debt or lost revenue, Grubert said in the article.

CITATION: Emily Grubert, “Fossil electricity retirement deadlines for a just transition” (Science, 2020). https://science.sciencemag.org/content/370/6521/1171

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Hundreds of millions of doses will have to distributed nationwide and kept cold until healthcare professionals can administer not one, but two doses to each person. And enough skeptical members of the population will have to be persuaded to receive the vaccine to slow virus transmission.

Beyond those challenges, the distribution effort will have to adapt to unexpected and uneven demand; accommodate recipients who may not return on time for a second dose; train hundreds of thousands of staff from clinics, pharmacies, doctor’s offices, and hospitals; prioritize serving high-risk groups first while encouraging others to wait — all while under tremendous pressure to get the much-anticipated vaccines into use as case counts and the death toll continue rising.

“Time is of the essence because the virus is already so widespread,” said Pinar Keskinocak, the William W. George Chair and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “With the pressure on our timeline, knowledge of how quickly the disease is spreading, and the broad U.S. and global need, I can’t think of a comparable public health initiative that has ever been undertaken.”

Shipping and Keeping Hundreds of Millions of Doses Cold

Three vaccines, produced by Moderna, Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech, and Oxford-AstraZeneca, are expected to be available first. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine will need to be kept ultra-cold — minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit — on its journey to individual Americans. The Moderna drug won’t have such demanding conditions, but both it and the Pfizer vaccine will tax the existing “cold chain” that keeps vaccines and other temperature-sensitive products in a narrow range of conditions during transport and storage. 

The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will have much less stringent requirements and faster ramp-up in capacity, though early testing suggests its efficacy may be lower than the others. That will create tradeoffs between efficacy versus access and speed in distribution.

Plans already exist to get the vaccines from manufacturers to the states, each of which has developed its own distribution plan. Keskinocak worries mostly about “last mile” plans — getting the vaccines to where they will be injected — and getting individuals to those locations.

“Access is going to be a challenge,” she said. “You may be able to get it to locations where it can be distributed, but you have to make sure the people who really need the vaccine can easily access those locations.”

Cold chain transportation, tracking, tracing, and storage already exist in most areas, but refrigeration could be challenging for rural areas that may be at the end of the chain, especially for the vaccine requiring very cold temperatures beyond the capability of freezers found in most doctor’s offices and clinics. And cold can sometimes be too cold, Keskinocak said.

“We often think about keeping it cold, but sometimes it may be too cold, which is not good. It’s not just whether the temperature exceeded the required level, but also whether it went below that. It is important to keep the vaccine exactly at the required temperature level.”

Pfizer has developed a shipping container that includes a temperature tracking device — and 50 pounds of dry ice to maintain the right temperature during transit. Because it is contained in small vials and the liquid vaccine is diluted for use, the overall volume being shipped will be relatively small, limiting the number of packages that will be moved and stored, Keskinocak noted.

Ultimately, the cold chain may play a significant role in vaccine effectiveness. Currently, the vaccines being produced by Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna are reported to have a higher efficacy than the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine — but only if they can be maintained at the proper temperatures. The timing, magnitude, and duration of temperature fluctuations during transport and before administration could affect that in ways that may be difficult to assess.

“Our current modeling shows that a vaccine that is less effective but that can be distributed more quickly and more widely might work better in some settings than a more effective vaccine, thereby reducing the total number of infections in the population,” Keskinocak said.

If You Build It, Will They Come?

Expectations are that the nation is hungry for a vaccine to escape the horrors of Covid-19. But a recent Gallup survey shows that only 58% of respondents said they planned to receive the vaccine when it becomes available. Boosting that percentage will require a massive communications effort to overcome vaccine reluctance and concerns fueled by the uneven nature of the U.S. pandemic response.

“If we can get the vaccine to locations where people can access it, and we have the necessary syringes, supplies, and PPE, as well as the healthcare staff to administer the injections, it’s not clear that people will come to receive it in large enough numbers,” Keskinocak said. “That’s one major component missing from a lot of the plans that I see at the state level.”

The communications program will have to run in parallel to the vaccine distribution, and they have to be coordinated so that supply meets demand.

“Public health communication and dissemination of information at the right time and in the right language is going to be at least as important and challenging as the logistics of distributing the vaccine,” Keskinocak said. “Communication is going to shape demand to a large extent. If one is more effective than the other, we will have a mismatch between demand and supply.”

Different demographic populations have different levels of trust for medicine in general and vaccines in particular, she said, so communications campaigns will have to focus on issues of concern to those groups. Unexpected variations in vaccine demand caused by these concerns could also create logistical uncertainties.

“We can try to forecast demand, and ship supplies to those locations,” she said. “But historically, we have seen that demand can exceed supply in one location while inventory builds up in another location. We need to avoid this situation of unmet demand and unused vaccine.”

Another issue will be the two doses necessary for the vaccine. The second dose must be received within a narrow range of time for the two-dose vaccine to be effective. Should a second dose be reserved for every person receiving a first dose, or should the goal be to get as many doses out as possible?

“Some people may never show up to be vaccinated, while others will receive the first dose, but may not come back for the second dose,” she said. 

Getting the Program Started

The first available doses will likely go to healthcare workers and first responders who are on the front lines of battling Covid-19. That is expected to be the easier part of vaccination logistics, and the lessons learned there should help with the much more massive vaccination campaign for high-risk individuals and the general public.

As vaccine production and distribution capacity ramp up, other groups will be next in line. While distributing small batches as manufacturers produce it can create some supply challenges, that also allows the system to more easily adjust to unexpected demand.

Even though distributing and administering vaccines is something the U.S. healthcare system does routinely, the size and timeline of this project are unprecedented, Keskinocak noted.

Beyond the logistical and communications needs, the vaccination program will also have a strong information technology component. Administration will likely be by appointment, and each injection will have to be reported to a vaccine registry to provide a record of which vaccines people have received and when.

Vaccinating People Who May Already Be Immune

It’s estimated that the number of reported Covid-19 cases may be just 10% of the actual number of infections in the U.S. Assuming recovery from the virus confers immunity for some period of time means there may be quite a few people who don’t actually need the vaccine right away to be protected. But there are currently no plans to determine whether recipients are already immune before they receive the vaccine.

“There are a lot of people out there who have some level of immunity to the coronavirus,” Keskinocak said. “The plans I’ve seen don’t include the serological testing that would be needed to identify people with some level of immunity, which could be around 30% of the population by the time the vaccine gets out to the general public.”

Testing for immune antibodies could be done ahead of the vaccination program, but that would create an extra step in a process that is already quite complicated. Healthcare systems such as the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs or certain private insurance plans could include that step, especially if vaccine supplies lag behind demand.

“The big complexity is timing,” she said. “Once vaccines become available, you’ll want to deliver them as quickly as possible to as many people as possible in a very short time frame.”

Annual vaccination campaigns for the seasonal flu set ambitious goals for the population levels they want to reach, but the time challenges will be much greater for the coronavirus vaccine.

“The seasonal flu vaccine becomes available months before the virus spreads broadly, so we have quite a bit of time to administer it before we get into the peak of the flu season,” she said. “We have been in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic for several months now. We are really late in the game, so we don’t have the luxury of time.”

Keskinocak is cautiously optimistic that the challenges will ultimately be addressed.

“There are certainly still lots of unknowns,” she said. “But the state plans I have seen look reasonable from a supply chain standpoint. Some of the decisions will be made once the states receive the vaccine, and exactly how they do it will be somewhat up to the local jurisdictions. There are still many things that need to be decided to make this unprecedented initiative live up to its goals.”

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“High compliance with voluntary quarantine – where the entire household stays home if there is a person with symptoms or risk of exposure in the household – has a significant impact on reducing the spread,” said Pinar Keskinocak, the William W. George Chair and professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) and director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Shelter-in-place (SIP) puts the brakes on the spread for some time, but if people go back to ‘business as usual’ after SIP, the significant impact is lost, so it needs to be followed up by voluntary quarantine and other physical distancing measures.”

Utilizing data from the state of Georgia, the study determined that a combination of non-pharmaceutical interventions, with various levels of compliance that change over time, could in some instances cut cumulative infections in half and reduce the peak number of infections to about a third of what could have been seen, “flattening the peak” to avoid overwhelming a state’s healthcare system. 

The study compared actual statistics to revised models of what could have happened in the state during the past seven and a half months without the physical distancing. As Covid-19 cases increase toward what may be a new peak this fall, the study could help public health officials evaluate the benefits of potential intervention strategies, for example, in the debate around K-12 school closure.

The study modeled the number of Covid-19 infections and resulting severe outcomes, and the need for hospital capacity under social distancing, particularly, school closures, shelter-in-place, and voluntary quarantine. 

“As one would expect, there is variation across the state in the observed data, which depends in large part on people’s behaviors,” said Nicoleta Serban, who is the Joseph C. Mello chair and professor in ISyE. “For example, mobility increased faster in some counties compared to others, which is likely to be correlated with increased physical and social interactions, and therefore faster spread of the coronavirus.”

The team, including Georgia Tech ISyE Ph.D. students Buse Eylul Oruc and Arden Baxter, developed and used an agent-based simulation model to project the infection spread. “This is a sophisticated mathematical model which mimics what might happen in practice – under different scenarios – by capturing the progression of the disease in an individual, as well as the interactions between people in the household, in peer groups such as schools or workplaces, or in community groups such as grocery stores,” Oruc said.

The model utilizes parameters specific to Covid-19 and data from Georgia on population interactions and demographics. The study covered a period starting February 18, evaluating different social distancing scenarios, including baselines in which no intervention would have taken place or the only intervention would have been K-12 school closure, comparing them to combinations of shelter-in-place and voluntary quarantine with different timelines and compliance levels. 

Outcomes were compared at the state and community level for the number and percentage of cumulative and daily new symptomatic and asymptomatic infections, hospitalizations, and deaths; Covid-19-related demand for hospital beds, ICU beds, and ventilators. 

The number of hospitalizations in Georgia turned out to be fewer than models last spring had forecast, but “models accurately predicted which hospital regions of the state that would have the largest gaps between number of people with severe outcomes and available care capacity – and therefore face potential shortages of ICU beds, hospital beds, and ventilators,” Baxter said. 

The results suggest that shelter-in place followed by voluntary quarantine reduced peak infections to less than a third of what we would have seen if no intervention had taken place and to less than a half if only schools had been closed. The models predicted correctly that the interventions would delay the peak from April to sometime between late July to mid-September, reducing the daily strain on health care systems.

According to the study, increasing shelter-in-place duration from four to five weeks yielded between 2% to 9% and 3% to 11% decrease in cumulative infection and deaths, respectively. Regardless of the shelter-in-place duration, increasing voluntary quarantine compliance decreased daily new infections and cumulative infections by about 50%. The cumulative number of deaths ranged from 6,660 to 19,430 under different scenarios. 

As infection rates rise in the United States during late October, the study could help public health officials select the best techniques for addressing the viral threat. Georgia’s total population is approximately 10.5 million, and Covid-19 related deaths have exceeded 7,600.

“The study further highlighted and quantified the impact of how compliance with public health measures impact infectious disease spread,” Keskinocak said. “The takeaway message is that each of us have the power to control our health by making the right choices.”

“As individuals and as a nation, we often expect technological or medical fixes or cures to health problems, whereas many of these problems, whether they are at the individual level or the public health level, are caused by or exacerbated by our choices and behaviors,” Keskinocak said. “For many of them, we don’t need a new fancy device, drug, or technology to make things better. As individuals, or households, or communities, we have the power and the responsibility to impact and improve our own health, and the public health, by making healthy choices.”

This research was supported in part by the William W. George endowment, the Virginia C. and Joseph C. Mello endowments, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (DGE-1650044), an NSF grant to support the high performance computing facilities at Georgia Tech (MRI-1828187), and research cyberinfrastructure resources and services provided by the Partnership for an Advanced Computing Environment (PACE) at Georgia Tech, and the following Georgia Tech benefactors: Andrea Laliberte, Joseph C. Mello, Richard “Rick” E. & Charlene Zalesky, and Claudia & Paul Raines. The funders played no role in the study design, data collection, analysis, interpretation, or in writing the manuscript.

CITATION: Pinar Keskinocak, Buse Eylul Oruc, Arden Baxter, John Asplund, and Nicoleta Serban, “The impact of social distancing on COVID19 spread: State of Georgia case study.” (PLOS ONE, 2020) https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0239798

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The studies were originally intended to test for gender bias, that is, if people thought a robot believed to be female may be less competent at some jobs than a robot believed to be male and vice versa. The studies' titles even included the words "gender," "stereotypes," and "preference," but researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology discovered no significant sexism against the machines.

“This did surprise us. There was only a very slight difference in a couple of jobs but not significant. There was, for example, a small preference for a male robot over a female robot as a package deliverer,” said Ayanna Howard, the principal investigator in both studies. Howard is a professor in and the chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing.

Although robots are not sentient, as people increasingly interface with them, we begin to humanize the machines. Howard studies what goes right as we integrate robots into society and what goes wrong, and much of both has to do with how the humans feel around robots.

I hate robots

“Surveillance robots are not socially engaging, but when we see them, we still may act like we would when we see a police officer, maybe not jaywalking and being very conscientious of our behavior,” said Howard, who is also Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Chair and Professor in Bioengineering in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“Then there are emotionally engaging robots designed to tap into our feelings and work with our behavior. If you look at these examples, they lead us to treat these robots as if they were fellow intelligent beings.”

It’s a good thing robots don’t have feelings because what study participants lacked in gender bias they more than made up for in judgments against the humanoid robots' competence. That predisposition was so strong that Howard wondered if it may have overridden any potential gender biases against robots – after all, social science studies have shown that gender biases are still prevalent with respect to human jobs, even if implicit.

In questionnaires, humanoid robots introduced themselves via video to randomly recruited online survey respondents, who ranged in age from their twenties to their seventies and were mostly college-educated. The humans ranked robots’ career competencies compared to human abilities, only trusting the machines to competently perform a handful of simple jobs. 

Pass the scalpel

“The results baffled us because the things that people thought robots were less able to do were things that they do well. One was the profession of surgeon. There are Da Vinci robots that are pervasive in surgical suites, but respondents didn’t think robots were competent enough,” Howard said. “Security guard – people didn’t think robots were competent at that, and there are companies that specialize in great robot security.”

Cumulatively, the 200 participants across the two studies thought robots would also fail as nannies, therapists, nurses, firefighters, and totally bomb as comedians. But they felt confident bots would make fantastic package deliverers and receptionists, pretty good servers, and solid tour guides.

The researchers could not say where the competence biases originate. Howard could only speculate that some of the bad rap may have come from media stories of robots doing things like falling into swimming pools or injuring people.

It’s a boy 

Despite the lack of gender bias, participants readily assigned genders to the humanoid robots. For example, people accepted gender prompts by robots introducing themselves in videos.

If a robot said, “Hi, my name is James,” in a male-sounding voice, people mostly identified the robot as male. If it said, “Hi, my name is Mary,” in a female voice, people mostly said it was female.

Some robots greeted people by saying “Hi” in a neutral sounding voice, and still, most participants assigned the robot a gender. The most common choice was male followed by neutral then by female. For Howard, this was an important takeaway from the study for robot developers.

“Developers should not force gender on robots. People are going to gender according to their own experiences. Give the user that right. Don’t reinforce gender stereotypes,” Howard said.

Social is good

Some in the field advocate for not building robots in humanoid form at all in order to discourage any kind of humanization, but the Georgia Tech team takes a less stringent approach.

"There is no single one-size-fits-all answer on whether it is appropriate to design robots to look like human beings.  It depends on a variety of ethical considerations and other factors, including whether people might trust a robot too much if it has a human-like appearance," said Jason Borenstein, a co-principal investigator on one of the papers and an ethics researcher in Georgia Tech's School of Public Policy.

“Robots can be good for social interaction. They could be very helpful in elder care facilities to keep people company. They might also make better nannies than letting the TV babysit the kids,” said Howard, who also defended robots’ comedic talent, provided they are programmed for that.

“If you ever go to an amusement park, there are animatronics that tell really good jokes.”

Read the studies

The two studies were submitted to conferences that were canceled due to COVID-19.

Why Should We Gender? The Effect of Robot Gendering and Occupational Stereotypes on Human Trust and Perceived Competency was published in Proceedings of 2020 ACM Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI’20), which appeared in March 2020. Robot Gendering: Influences on Trust, Occupational Competency, and Preference of Robot Over Human appeared in CHI 2020 Extended Abstracts (computer-human interaction, DOI: 10.1145/3334480.3382930).

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The papers’ coauthors were De’Aira Bryant, Kantwon Rogers, and Jason Borenstein from Georgia Tech. The National Science foundation funded via grant 1849101. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded via grant G-2019-11435. Any findings, conclusions, or recommendations are those of the authors and not necessarily of the sponsors.

Also read: Surfaces that grip like gecko feet may come to an assembly line near you

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Georgia Institute of Technology

“Your mother told you to cover your mouth when you cough, and this is the best way to do it without fail,” said de Heer, a Regents Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics.

De Heer advocates that widespread use of masks can save hundreds of lives in just days, and he is not alone. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Surgeon General, and the White House have officially recommended cloth face coverings.

Since people can carry the coronavirus with no COVID-19 symptoms and still spread the virus, everyone is a potential carrier, which means that everyone should wear a DIY mask in public, de Heer said. He compared it to coughing into your sleeve but even better because a DIY mask is always in front of your face, and it can be made out of more effective fabrics than a sleeve.

Notes of caution

All of these parties, including de Heer, want people to not buy up masks needed by clinicians. N95 masks are not only not necessary for the general public but are also ineffective for many people, which could be dangerous.

“N95 masks are difficult to wear correctly, and they are hard to breathe through. They are not as effective for everyday use as a more comfortable cloth mask,” de Heer said.

U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams has cautioned that wearing masks must not discourage other behaviors to fight contagion like handwashing, avoiding touching your face, and social distancing.

DIY mask physics

Here is more logic on DIY mask effectiveness followed by links to instructions on how to make them.

As a researcher, de Heer is a leading expert on small clusters, particles the size of the misty droplets that shoot out of mouths when people sneeze or cough. The bigger the droplets, the higher the viral loads they likely contain, and face covers catch nearly all larger drops and most smaller ones as well.

Breathing mist from a cough or sneeze or getting it in the eyes, nose, or mouth is likely the primary source of contagion for the coronavirus, according to the CDC. There have also been reports that the mist may hang in the air like exhaled cigarette smoke that people can inhale and become infected.

A hand-sewn mask out of cloth that has a tighter weave can cut down sharply on the mist, de Heer said, but even a bandana is much better than nothing.

“For math’s sake, say a bandana stops 80 percent of dangerous mist. That protection increases when everyone wears them. So, if two people are wearing bandanas – the sender of the spittle and a potential receiver – the math tells us that two bandanas would catch 96 percent of the dangerous mist. This shows that we all need to be wearing something.”

Hordes of Americans wore masks during the last great pandemic to hit the country, the Spanish flu of 1918-1919. Nurses handed out white gauze masks, and people also made them at home.

Georgia Tech researchers have published instructions and guidance for making and using homemade masks. Also, the New York Times has published mask sewing instructions here and the CDC here.

The Czech example

One country, in particular, impressed upon de Heer that the effectiveness of masks – the Czech Republic. A recent movement there led to the very widespread use of homemade cloth masks, and that country also has a very mild curve of new COVID-19 infections.

Countries turn a variety of weapons against contagion with varying success or failure, so it can be hard to determine if a single one stands out. But some countries have clearly reduced the rise in contagion as well as death rates more effectively.

Some are known for world-class healthcare systems with large capacities to serve their populations, but at the same time, they have displayed signature measures in the struggle. In the Czech Republic, this has been widespread cloth mask use.

“If you look at Western countries – and I’m going to include the state of New York in that list – New York has had really high increases in new cases. So have Spain, Italy, and France,” de Heer said. “Then you have outliers. Germany and Austria got out ahead of the game by getting widespread testing going very early on."

The Czech Republic has been another distinct outlier. So have many other places where masks are ubiquitous such as Hong Kong, Japan, or South Korea, de Heer noted, even though they are densely populated, making social distancing more challenging.

Austria also recently mandated the use of face covers when grocery shopping, following the lead of the Czech Republic. De Heer points to the Czech experience and that of successful Asian countries as very conspicuous evidence that masks help and that it is wise to adopt widespread use in the United States as well.

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Also read: Advice on DIY masks

Writer & Media Representative: Ben Brumfield (404-272-2780), email: ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu

Georgia Institute of Technology

Empty classrooms and supermarket shelves marked the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. But Keskinocak expects more signs of the times to come – such as pop-up pandemic clinics and the shortage and rationing of medical supplies beyond masks and ventilators.

Keskinocak is the director of the Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems at the Georgia Institute of Technology, which studies how government and private sectors can cooperate to handle health and humanitarian crises. And she is William W. George Chair and Professor in Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

In previous research, Keskinocak’s team created a model that accurately ran the course of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, and when COVID-19 struck, her team was already in the middle of modeling how special clinics could significantly slow a pandemic. In the meantime, temporary clinics in Wuhan, China, appear to have validated her model.

Healthcare expansion now

The surge of COVID-19 patients pushed Italy’s health care system into a very ugly crisis, and the U.S. needs to take measures now to handle similar patient surges. Pandemics often strike in two waves or more, and the second is usually the worst, so measures need to be lasting, Keskinocak said.

Even without COVID-19, the U.S. healthcare system has been under strain. Emergency rooms are often overcrowded; it takes a long time to schedule an appointment, and there is a chronic shortage of nursing staff.

[Read Keskinocak's guest op-ed in the New York Daily News: COVID clinics now]

“We need to expand capacity and unleash creative flexibility in our healthcare systems. We should use more telemedicine and create self-service stations for testing. I would particularly like to see specialized COVID-19 clinics established now,” Keskinocak said.

“Special clinics could be separate spaces in existing facilities or standalone facilities. As COVID-19 spreads, we expect a lot more people with cold- and flu-like symptoms to seek testing and care. The healthcare capacities are just not there for a business as usual approach, and taking it could harm patients by delaying care and increasing risk of infection.”

Gathering COVID-19 patients in tight spaces like waiting rooms with other patients would increase the coronavirus’ spread, and patients with preexisting conditions could face mortal threat. Contagion could also spread into hospitals.

“Dedicated pandemic clinics could implement targeted hygiene, air filtration, and specialized protective equipment beyond masks and gloves for healthcare workers. They can tailor workflows to test and care for patients quickly and effectively and keep them away from other patients and staff,” Keskinocak said.

Payment needs to be easy, too, including financing the uninsured. In the middle of a public health emergency, it is vital to not get bogged down by restrictions meant for normal times.

Potentially dangerous shortages

Toilet paper will make a comeback in supermarkets, but in its place, life-saving medications could become perilously scarce. Countries need to act now to prevent this from compounding the COVID-19 crisis.

“Dwindling availability of hospital beds, ventilators, and personal protective equipment like masks and gloves during a patient surge – those are the obvious things. But we could also see shortages of items like asthma medication or antidepressants. Worst case, even food supplies could run low,” Keskinocak said.

[Read Keskinocak's guest op-ed in The Hill: medical supply chain dangers]

Here’s how shortages work and can lead to price gouging and also rationing. The latter can have good effects.

“Shortages are the result of supply-demand imbalance caused by either an unexpected increase in demand or unexpected decrease in supply or both. Shortages are common in crises such as natural disasters or health emergencies. But given the worldwide slowdown of economic activity in pandemics, disruptions could get much worse this time,” Keskinocak said.

“Supply chains are actually intricate webs of multiple parts that span the globe. Pandemics damage many of those parts, and it can take time to recover. This creates a more serious and worrisome imbalance between supply and demand.”

Toilet paper will return because people fear-hoard it in a panic but consume it at normal rates. When the panic runs its course, demand slows back down to the actual rate of consumption and its normal supply chain, which is relatively simple, catches up.

“With medicine and healthcare services and supplies, the increase in demand is typically already in line with consumption, so a shortage in supply or increase in demand can create a supply-demand gap that continues for a long time,” Keskinocak said. “Medical supply chains are also very complex and fragile.”

Future vaccine distribution

In normal times, most supply chains work at a plodding pace, and when crisis strikes, it is tough to ramp them up due to expensive equipment, complex logistics, and strict regulations, particularly in health care. Even temporary shortages of medicines and medical devices can have consequences for patients who need them.

“If shortages become serious, rationing – with a priority allocation to those most in need – can help balance demand and supply for critical items like medications.”

Once created and approved, the production of vaccines or antivirals for COVID-19 will ramp up slowly and could be in short supply at first. Decision-makers need plan investments now in the supply chains necessary for their effective distribution.

This will include painful, necessary decisions like prioritizing first doses for healthcare workers, people with pre-existing conditions, and the elderly. The current system of restocking vaccines in the U.S. after initial distribution also has serious gaps that need fixing to save many more lives.

In the meantime, social distancing is one of the best ways to protect everyone and reduce the patient surge into clinics. Do it if you or anyone in your household has any cold-like symptoms.

[Read Keskinocak's commentary on social distancing on AJC.com]

Also read: Vaccine Supply Gaps Can Make Pandemics Deadlier

Media contacts: Ben Brumfield (ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu) and John Toon (john.toon@comm.gatech.edu)

In the immediate aftermath, relief agencies rush in survival supplies like water, food, medicine, and blankets. But instead of prioritizing and maintaining the relief supply chains, a transition to restoring a place’s normal supply infrastructure could help more people more quickly. That’s the first recommendation from over 125 pages of case studies and analyses, issued by an eight-member National Academies committee that included Pinar Keskinocak, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and the director of its Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems.

Hurricanes can kill many victims by drowning, and in their wake, mangled homes and roads, contaminated water, and shortages of everything compound suffering. Restoring supply lines, primarily of the private sector, would accelerate recovery, according to the report, but relief efforts can unintentionally conflict with that.

“Relief supply chains inevitably compete with regular supply chains, given limited resources, such as transportation. If the focus is primarily on pushing relief supply rather than restoring infrastructure and supply chains to normalcy, we may unwittingly delay recovery and prolong the aftermath,” said Keskinocak, who is William W. George Chair and Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

Researchers on the ground

In 2017, in the wakes of hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, the last of which killed over 3,000 people, FEMA assigned the National Academies to make recommendations on improving relief response. Keskinocak and her colleagues traveled to the storm-damaged sites to collect information for their report.

“We spoke to stakeholders in affected areas – local governments, businesses, health systems, and more. We learned about the impact of storms on their community, what their participation was in the response process, and what went well and not so well,” Keskinocak said.

Challenges in the coordination of resource allocation, especially in logistics, have caused hindrances to recovery. This led to the report’s other major recommendations.

“Areas where hurricanes may strike need to get a good understanding of how supply chains work under normal conditions along with their vulnerabilities, or weak links, so they can be proactive in strengthening supply,” Keskinocak said.

Public-private collaboration

Disaster preparedness requires collaboration between government, relief agencies, and the private sector, all compiling and sharing this understanding together. All sectors would benefit from educational programs on supply chain dynamics and from sharing public-private partnership best practices.

“After a big storm strikes, it is typically not possible for any one entity to handle it all alone,” Keskinocak said. “Organizations such as FEMA could play the role of a convener to ensure various organizations collaborate, coordinate, and share information well ahead of time and in the aftermath.”

The report recommends increasing focus on preparedness over post-disaster response toward preparedness, as this could help alleviate situations in which FEMA marshals ample supplies but then finds that the supplies are not needed or cannot be effectively distributed to those in need.

“I have the utmost respect for what FEMA does because they have to work under the most difficult circumstances, and these conditions may put them into binds that are out of their control,” Keskinocak said. “More preparedness on the ground could help get FEMA, local governments, private sector, and non-governmental relief agencies to achieve synergies for saving lives and alleviate suffering."

Read the news release by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine here.

Also read: Tweaking vaccine distribution could save many more lives in flu season and pandemics

Writer & Media Representative: Ben Brumfield (404-272-2780), email: ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu

Georgia Institute of Technology

That is at the center of new research conducted at Georgia Institute of Technology, where researchers looked into how personal disclosures in a workplace environment could impact the relationships between coworkers and task effectiveness.

In the study published in January in the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, the researchers found that for higher status individuals, disclosing a weakness negatively affected their relationship and task effectiveness with their lowers status partners.

“We may think that sharing personal information is always a good thing, but what we found is that when higher status individuals, which could in real situations include star employees, share personal information that highlights a potential shortcoming, it can affect the way they are perceived by coworkers,” said Dana Harari, a doctoral student at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business. “This is important because it could undermine their ability to be an effective manager.”

The team, which included Kerry Gibson, now an assistant professor at Babson College and Jennifer Carson Marr, now an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, focused on task-oriented relationships such as those found in a workplace.

The researchers devised three laboratory experiments during which a total of 762 participants completed virtual tasks with either a higher status or peer status partner. During the task, the “coworker,” who was actually a confederate in the study, disclosed personal information that could be perceived either as a weakness, a positive or neutral.

The researchers found that although the type of disclosure did not affect peer status disclosers, higher status individuals who disclosed a weakness experienced a “status penalty.” As a result, higher status disclosers were liked less, and participants resisted their influence more during the task.

“A lot of the current conversations that we hear about leadership is that we want leaders to be authentic and to bring their true selves to work, but our findings suggest that if doing so reveals vulnerability initially such as sharing their flaws, it could have a negative impact on how well they’ll be able to influence the people that they work with,” Harari said.

The findings are particularly notable because in organizations, higher status individuals may be motivated to disclose information about their weaknesses to coworkers in the hopes of developing a closer relationship and working better together as a result, the researchers wrote. Or, in some cases, the disclosing individual may hope to relieve the stress of trying to conceal weaknesses.

But that “status loss” could lead to unintended outcomes, such as the discloser having less influence and experiencing more conflict within their team, the researchers wrote.

“It is especially interesting that although self-disclosing weakness signaled vulnerability for everyone, only higher status disclosers suffered from this ‘status penalty,’” Harari said. “Thus, although higher status disclosers may feel closer to their coworkers after disclosing information themselves, they may not realize that the receiver may not feel closer to them.”

CITATION: Kerry Roberts Gibson, Dana Harari, Jennifer Carson Marr, “When sharing hurts: How and why self-disclosing weakness undermines the task-oriented relationships of higher status disclosers,” (Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, January 2018). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2017.09.001

U.S. flu vaccine distribution logistics could use an update, according to Pinar Keskinocak. The researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology co-led a recent study that compared the current approach with a proposed allocation method calculated to save many more lives in a pandemic or similarly intense influenza outbreak that taxes vaccine supplies.

The study's recommendations, which apply to resupplying vaccine stocks during a running outbreak, boil down to this: To put a bigger dent in the spread of flu, replenish vaccine stocks in regions where they are being used up and don't replenish them in areas where vaccines are just sitting on shelves, because few people are getting flu shots there.

A simple tweak

The tweak in the supply chain could also save thousands of lives annually in regular flu seasons in the U.S., which can be plenty deadly. A flu season can take more lives than murders in the same time period.

“Even seasonal flu kills tens of thousands of people each year, so we would benefit immediately,” said Keskinocak, who is William W. George Chair and Professor in Georgia Tech’s H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Director for the Center of Health and Humanitarian Systems.

“In a pandemic, nearly no one would have natural immunity, so the death toll could be significantly high if we don’t improve vaccine coverage.”

What makes a pandemic a pandemic? The flu virus represents a mutation that human immune systems have not had a chance to build prior resistance to, thus the lack of natural immunity. When the next one strikes, in addition to the many lives saved, the researchers’ recommendations could massively prevent flu infections, secondary infections like bronchitis, hospitalizations, and unnecessarily high medical costs.

Keskinocak, co-principal investigator Julie Swann from North Carolina State University, and first author Zihao Li of Georgia Tech published their results in the journal Plos One in October 2018, around the start of the 2018-19 flu season. The research was supported by the Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Junior Faculty Endowment Fund.

A logic breakdown

When a pandemic hits, or a flu season that taxes the vaccine stocks, vaccine supply may become limited but then catch up over time. When that happens, the vaccine distributors commonly take what’s called the population-based approach.

“Areas with larger populations get more vaccine, proportional to the population. It’s a straightforward approach that seems fair,” Swann said.

As more vaccine becomes available over time, restocking follows the same principle, and that is where distribution logic breaks down. In some regions, few people get vaccinated, but under population-based allocation, resupply stocks go there anyway and may go to waste. Meanwhile, restocking may fall short of demand elsewhere, where people are lining up for inoculations.

A mathematical fix

As a result, in a pandemic, people eager for a vaccination might not get one despite adequate vaccine production, and the resulting additional unvaccinated people are more likely to get the flu and also spread it to others. That intensifies the outbreak for the entire population.

The wasted vaccine stocks also drain medical finances, and the new model would releave some of that strain even in regular flu seasons.

“Production, storage, and delivery of vaccine are costly, and unused inventory can’t just be thrown away. It costs money to dispose of,” Keskinocak said.

Restocking doses where they are actually being used would benefit the entire population by boosting the total number of vaccinated individuals, who would then be less likely to get sick and to infect other people. That would tamp down the flu wave for everybody.

A data dearth

Leftover inventory could be slashed to about 20 percent of current levels, saving considerable costs, and the data about which areas were not resupplied could be used to identify areas where more people need encouragement to get vaccinated.

“The data would tell you where you need continued education about the importance of vaccination, and some of the money saved from unnecessary resupplying could be invested in public health campaigns,” said Swann, who collaborated with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the 2009-10 H1N1 Swine flu pandemic.

But the needed data is missing at present in the U.S. vaccine distribution system.

“Surprisingly few states have systems in place that tell them how much vaccine has been administered where and how much is still left in inventory at provider locations,” Swann said.

The next “big one” 

The next “big one” flu pandemic will sneak up on humanity someday.

Ultimately, the best way to cut its death toll by more than half and save possibly hundreds of thousands of lives will be for virtually everyone to get vaccinated against influenza annually. Currently, fewer than 50 percent of Americans do.

The 1918-19 outbreak, which may have consisted of multiple concurrent influenzas, killed 678,000 people in the U.S. Other “big ones:” The 1957 “Asian flu” killed 116,000 in the U.S.; the 1968 “Hong Kong flu” killed 100,000. The 2009 bird flu pandemic, which was a less contagious virus, killed 12,500 people in the U.S. and hospitalized some 275,000.

Also Read:
Want to beat antibiotic-resistant superbugs? Rethink that strep throat remedy.

FDA Taps Georgia Tech to Help Reduce Cost of Making Antibiotics

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Here's how to apply to Georgia Tech.

The study was supported by the Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Junior Faculty Endowment Fund, and by the following Georgia Tech benefactors: William W. George, Andrea Laliberte, Joseph C. Mello, Richard “Rick” E. and Charlene Zalesky. Any findings, conclusions, or recommendations are those of the author(s) and not necessarily of the funders.

Media relations assistance: Ben Brumfield

(404) 660-1408

ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu

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Writer: Ben Brumfield

Currently, 30% of the U.S. population lives with ozone levels that exceed government health standards. Though past environmental regulations have vastly helped clean the air and put the U.S. on a positive trajectory to reduce pollutants — including ozone — policy rollbacks back could slow the progress and even reverse it, researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology said.

Continuing progress against ozone would pay off in better health and finances: The more ozone in the air, the more cases of respiratory illness and the higher the cost of meeting ozone level targets.

“Additional ozone is tough to control technologically. The costs would be very high — tens of billions of dollars,” said Ted Russell, a principal investigator on the study. “In the meantime, more people would die than otherwise would have.”

The researchers published their results in One Earth, a Cell Press journal on Friday, October 25, 2019. The research was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and by the National Science Foundation.

The study focuses on ground-level ozone people breathe to the detriment of their health, which should not be confused with the stratospheric ozone that protects us from the sun’s harmful radiation.

Goodbye environmental policies

In the last three years, various energy policies have been loosened, which should result in raised CO₂ emissions and continued emissions of ozone precursors in years to come, the study’s authors said.

“Incentives are being retired like production and investment tax credits, which have been very influential in solar and wind,” said Marilyn Brown, a Regents Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy and a principal investigator on the study. “The Investment Tax Credit gives a 30% tax reduction for investments in solar or wind farms or the purchase of solar rooftop panels by homeowners. The Production Tax Credit for utilities reduces tax liabilities by 23 cents for each kilowatt-hour of electricity generated by solar, wind or other renewable energy sources.”

But one policy move in particular stands to keep more ingredients in the ozone-making cauldron: courts preventing the Clean Power Plan (CPP) from going into effect and its replacement with the Trump administration’s Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) plan.

ACE, which also has not been implemented, would make it easier to continue burning fossil fuels, particularly coal, according to Brown, who was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which received a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. CPP would have phased out those generators, reducing nitrogen oxide gases, or NO_X, key reactants in the production of ozone.

^{[Ready for graduate school? Here's how to apply to Georgia Tech.]} 

From NO_X to noxious

“The major target of the CPP was CO₂, but it had side effects on the reduction of NO_X because it shifted coal use to natural gas as well as to renewable sources,” said Huizhong Shen, a postdoctoral researcher in Russell’s group and one of the study’s first authors.

The study modeled atmospheric chemistry that produces O₃ around commonly predicted trajectories for greenhouse gas emissions and climate change paired with anticipated pollutant emissions, particularly of NO_X. The model’s output depicted “non-attainment” scores, which refer to the number of U.S. counties exceeding ozone targets and by how much.

The study modeled against official targets for ozone levels and in addition, against cleaner standards widely held to be attainable and much healthier for people. Models built around rolled-back environmental regulations and increased warming initially showed the current trajectory of progress against ozone levels continuing — but later reversing. Ozone levels then rose again, putting many more counties in non-attainment by or before 2050.

Nature’s surprise ingredient

Alongside human-produced NO_X, nature contributes ozone-making ingredients that aren’t harmful per se and often smell great, like the aroma of cut grass or of a pine tree. They are examples of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), of which nature produces hundreds.

VOCs get into the air easily and react readily with other chemicals. The warmer the air and the sun, the more vegetation produces VOCs that meet with raised levels of NO_X emissions to make ozone. It forms downstream from emissions sources, making it hard to regulate. 

“There are no ozone emissions, just precursor emissions,” Shen said. “So, emission controls for ozone have to mainly target NO_X emissions.”

Feedbacks and pile-ons

Keeping ozone around as the world warms will be more than just the sum of power plants still emitting NO_X plus boosted VOC emissions.

“If you heat up the air, it also speeds up photochemical reactions involved in ozone production,” Shen said.

“Ozone is a greenhouse gas, so it adds some climate change feedback, too,” said Russell, who is Howard T. Tellepsen Chair and Regents Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “You can also have increased vegetation emissions of ammonia. Some of this goes on to form particulate matter, which is also harmful to the lungs.” 

Passing the buck

When coal-fired power plants emit NO_X, the ozone strikes miles away.

“Ozone can occur hundreds of miles away, so if controls are loosened in one state to save industry money there, a state downstream may have to spend even more to try to meet ozone targets. You transfer the problem and the costs,” Russell said. “Most U.S. cities are already not in attainment, and this will likely make it harder for them to get there.”

Also READ the companion piece on policy: U.S. Carbon and Pollution Emissions Policies are ‘Up in the Air’

The co-authors of the research are: Yilin Chen, Yufei Li, Yongtao Hu, Mehmet Odman, Momei Qin, Abiola Lawal, Gertrude Pavur, and Marilyn Brown of Georgia Tech; Zhihong Chen of Georgia Tech and the Chinese University of Hong Kong; Jhih-Shyang Shih and Dallas Burtraw of Resources for the Future; Lucas Henneman of Harvard University; Shuai Shao and Charles Driscoll of Syracuse University; and Haofei Yu of the University of Central Florida. The research was funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (grant R835880) and the National Science Foundation (grant 1444745). Any findings, conclusions, or recommendations are those of the authors and not necessarily of the funding agencies. Ted Russell served on the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee during the administration of President Barack Obama.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2019.09.006 

Writer & Media Representative: Ben Brumfield (404-272-2780)

Email: ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu

Georgia Institute of Technology
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Energy policy expert Marilyn Brown explained to Research Horizons online the current peril facing many emissions-related policies face. This is a companion article to one written about the study.

Brown is a Regents Professor and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Public Policy. She co-authored the new ozone study with researchers in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering that modeled what stripping away the policies could do to future ozone levels.

Research Horizons: Before we get to emissions and energy regulations, there is a perhaps larger, very serious issue: What is happening to the generous tax incentives for people and companies who contribute to cleaner air and lower carbon emissions?

Marilyn Brown: Some incentives are being retired early like production and investment tax credits, which have been very influential in the spread of solar and wind power. A major one, the Investment Tax Credit gives a 30% tax reduction for investments in solar or wind farms or the purchase of solar rooftop panels by homeowners. The Production Tax Credit for utilities reduces tax liabilities by 23 cents for each kilowatt-hour of electricity generated by solar, wind or other renewable energy sources. These measures have been absolutely transformational in the U.S. power industry.

RH: Where did these incentives come from, and how long have they been in place?

Brown: They started spreading at the state level probably about 30 years ago. Iowa was the first state with its significant wind resources. With the Energy Policy Act of 1992, the incentives became national policy. Tax credits have been an on-and-off policy but mostly on, and they have really helped remake the energy landscape. But the incentives have to be renewed periodically, and then they go up for debate in Congress.

RH: Has this been a partisan issue? One party came up with the incentives, and the other has tried to knock them down?

Brown: That’s not what we’ve seen. These were not partisan agendas in particular in their implementation. For example, the last extension of the Production Tax Credits two years ago benefitted the economics of Plant Vogtle’s two new units, because nuclear power now qualifies as an eligible resource. These incentives have been on a planned gradual retirement trajectory.

In our new study, we just removed them entirely, along with other key policies under threat to see the effect on ozone levels with them completely gone. Such removal actions are occasionally debated in Congress, so it’s not unrealistic to see them suddenly disappear. The paper quantifies the resulting ozone penalty, and that is a first. Our results show that we would have less success fighting ozone, and eventually it would resurge, which would be bad for the health of many people. Costs would rise sharply for places in ozone non-attainment to try to meet healthy targets, and many of them would fail, as many do today.

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RH: But there was recently a more political back-and-forth over a plan by the previous administration, correct?

Brown: The last administration created the Clean Power Plan (CPP), and it was stayed – not approved – by federal courts in 2016, so it was not implemented. The current administration basically replaced it with the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) plan. CPP would have phased out coal-fired electricity generation in favor of natural gas and sustainable energy solutions. ACE, on the other hand, emphasizes improvement in the efficiency of coal plants, but there is a strong a consensus that coal plants can’t be made much more efficient.

RH: Foundational clean air regulations, the iconic Corporate Average Fuel Economy, or CAFE, standards – first enacted in 1975 – are also under threat.

Brown: The CAFE standards are very much up in the air right now. They could be frozen or done away with, but the automobile industry appears to be divided on this. Seventeen auto makers – Ford and Honda among them – came out in support of CAFE’s progressive tightening of fuel standards because they said doing away with them could destabilize their industry. CAFE lays down a trajectory of improvement that car makers are already anticipating in their product engineering. But CAFE is also being litigated. Also, California has the right to have its own emissions standards, which have a strong influence on fuel economy for all cars sold in the U.S., and that’s being challenged, too.

RH: Why the concentration on ozone in the study as opposed to, say, particulates?

Brown: The Clean Air Act regulates many pollutants, but it seems that ozone is the one we are having the most trouble with. Thirty percent of Americans live with levels exceeding public health targets. Progress has been quite slow because ozone’s precursors come from coal plants, and those precursors are what have to be regulated. There are no new coal plants under construction or plans to build any, but many coal plants are still active, and they can boost capacity a lot. For example, you could get about 250% more coal being used in the Great Lakes region by 2050. That would come from existing coal plants being dispatched much more.

RH: It sounds like many things could converge at once.

Brown: If they did, it could make for a perfect ozone storm. But keep in mind that there are other forces at work like the market and technology as well as consumer choices and other innovations that could help keep the fight against ozone going — actually against many pollutants and greenhouse gases.

Also READ the main article: This study shows what could happen to harmful ozone levels if endangered federal energy-air quality regulations are not rescued.

Writer & Media Representative: Ben Brumfield (404-272-2780)

Email: ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu

Georgia Institute of Technology
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Flashback to July 2019, the dawn of autonomous vehicles and other connected cars, and physicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Multiscale Systems, Inc. have applied physics in a new study to simulate what it would take for future hackers to wreak exactly this widespread havoc by randomly stranding these cars. The researchers want to expand the current discussion on automotive cybersecurity, which mainly focuses on hacks that could crash one car or run over one pedestrian, to include potential mass mayhem.

They warn that even with increasingly tighter cyber defenses, the amount of data breached has soared in the past four years, but objects becoming hackable can convert the rising cyber threat into a potential physical menace.

“Unlike most of the data breaches we hear about, hacked cars have physical consequences,” said Peter Yunker, who co-led the study and is an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics.

It may not be that hard for state, terroristic, or mischievous actors to commandeer parts of the internet of things, including cars.

“With cars, one of the worrying things is that currently there is effectively one central computing system, and a lot runs through it. You don’t necessarily have separate systems to run your car and run your satellite radio. If you can get into one, you may be able to get into the other,” said Jesse Silverberg of Multiscale Systems, Inc., who co-led the study with Yunker 

Freezing traffic solid

In simulations of hacking internet-connected cars, the researchers froze traffic in Manhattan nearly solid, and it would not even take that to wreak havoc. Here are their results, and the numbers are conservative for reasons mentioned below.

“Randomly stalling 20 percent of cars during rush hour would mean total traffic freeze. At 20 percent, the city has been broken up into small islands, where you may be able to inch around a few blocks, but no one would be able to move across town,” said David Yanni, a graduate research assistant in Yunker’s lab.

Not all cars on the road would have to be connected, just enough for hackers to stall 20 percent of all cars on the road. For example, if 40 percent of all cars on the road were connected, hacking half would suffice.

Hacking 10 percent of all cars at rush hour would debilitate traffic enough to prevent emergency vehicles from expediently cutting through traffic that is inching along citywide. The same thing would happen with a 20 percent hack during intermediate daytime traffic.

The researchers’ results appear in the journal Physical Review E on July 20, 2019. The study is not embargoed.

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It could take less

For the city to be safe, hacking damage would have to be below that. In other cities, things could be worse.

“Manhattan has a nice grid, and that makes traffic more efficient. Looking at cities without large grids like Atlanta, Boston, or Los Angeles, and we think hackers could do worse harm because a grid makes you more robust with redundancies to get to the same places down many different routes,” Yunker said.

The researchers left out factors that would likely worsen hacking damage, thus a real-world hack may require stalling even fewer cars to shut down Manhattan.

“I want to emphasize that we only considered static situations – if roads are blocked or not blocked. In many cases, blocked roads spill over traffic into other roads, which we also did not include. If we were to factor in these other things, the number of cars you’d have to stall would likely drop down significantly,” Yunker said.

The researchers also did not factor in ensuing public panic nor car occupants becoming pedestrians that would further block streets or cause accidents. Nor did they consider hacks that would target cars at locations that maximize trouble.

They also stress that they are not cybersecurity experts, nor are they saying anything about the likelihood of someone carrying out such a hack. They simply want to give security experts a calculable idea of the scale of a hack that would shut a city down.

The researchers do have some general ideas of how to reduce the potential damage.

“Split up the digital network influencing the cars to make it impossible to access too many cars through one network,” said lead author Skanka Vivek, a postdoctoral researcher in Yunker’s lab. “If you could also make sure that cars next to each other can’t be hacked at the same time that would decrease the risk of them blocking off traffic together.”

Traffic jams as physics

Yunker researches in soft matter physics, which looks at how constituent parts – in this case, connected cars – act as one whole physical phenomenon. The research team analyzed the movements of cars on streets with varying numbers of lanes, including how they get around stalled vehicles and found they could apply a physics approach to what they observed.

“Whether traffic is halted or not can be explained by classic percolation theory used in many different fields of physics and mathematics,” Yunker said.

Percolation theory is often used in materials science to determine if a desirable quality like a specific rigidity will spread throughout a material to make the final product uniformly stable. In this case, stalled cars spread to make formerly flowing streets rigid and stuck.

The shut streets would be only those in which hacked cars have cut off all lanes or in which they have become hindrances that other cars can’t maneuver around and do not include streets where hacked cars still allow traffic flow.

The researchers chose Manhattan for their simulations because a lot of data was available on that city’s traffic patterns.

Also READ: Georgia Tech's cybersecurity researchers tackle the internet of things 

The study was coauthored by Skanda Vivek and David Yanni of Georgia Tech and Jesse Silverberg of Multiscale Systems, Inc. Any findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the authors.

Writer & Media Representative: Ben Brumfield (404-660-1408), email: ben.brumfield@comm.gatech.edu

Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
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Instead of relying on behavioral survey data, as key prior studies have, Associate Professor Willie Belton and his coauthors looked at 15 years of county-level U.S. Census data with details on black, Latino, white, and Asian population, along with another data set tracking membership in social, religious, and political groups — measures researchers have argued are good proxies for social trust.

The study found that social capital increased in counties where one ethnicity dominates, but declined in communities with higher rates of diversity.

Looking for Evidence of a Cause

Belton and his coauthors scoured the data for evidence pointing to one of the three theories proposed to explain the link between social capital and diversity: the contact, hunker-down, and conflict theories.

The contact thesis suggests that rising diversity boosts social capital as people of different ethnicities become more tolerant of one another. The “hunker down” theory suggests that  social capital declines because people retreat into their shells when faced with rising diversity—rejecting newcomers but also pulling back on engagement with people of their own ethnic group in an effort to shelter themselves. The conflict model explains falling social capital as backlash against newcomers in a perceived fight over limited resources.

Belton’s study found sufficient evidence in the data to reject the contact hypothesis, but the results were less clear when it came to the remaining two propositions.

Their study found no evidence that increased immigration in the most ethnically similar counties caused reductions in social capital—a finding the researchers said was inconsistent with what the hunker-down theory would predict. But they said they could not conclusively determine whether the hunker-down theory or the conflict theory was correct.

“We reject the contact hypothesis, but find evidence consistent with the outcomes predicted in both the conflict hypothesis and (the) hunker-down hypothesis, in inter-ethnic relations,” they wrote in the paper. “Due to data limitations, we are unable to test directly which of these two thesis are more relevant for the U.S experience. However, we provide suggestive evidence in support of the conflict hypothesis over the hunker-down hypothesis.”

Other Influences Likely Outweigh Impact on Social Capital

Despite reinforcing the negative link between diversity and social capital, Belton and his coauthors cautioned that their study does not capture the potential benefits of immigration and should not be seen as discrediting the widely held viewpoint that diversity provides an array of benefits that favor economic innovation and society. They say these benefits could outweigh the negative influences on social capital accumulation.

“Though diversity may lead to a decrease in social capital as captured by our measures, our results do not provide evidence of the impact of diversity on other welfare outcomes or alternative measures of social capital,” wrote Belton and his coauthors, former School of Economics student Yameen Huq, and Ruth Uwaifo Oyelere of Agnes Scott College.

The paper, “Diversity and Social Capital in the U.S.:  A Tale of Conflict, Contact, or Total Mistrust," appears in the June 2019 edition of the Review of Economics and Institutions.

Belton is an associate professor. Huq, who finished his undergraduate education at Georgia Tech in 2014 with Bachelor of Science degrees in Economics and Chemical and Bimolecular Engineering, is pursuing a Master of Science in Cybersecurity in the School of Public Policy.

The schools of Economics and Public Policy are units of Georgia Tech’s Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

The funding will continue support for the South Big Data Innovation Hub, an organization that helps 16 Southern States and the District of Columbia identify and utilize data science and engineering to address critical societal needs. One of four NSF-supported regional data hubs in the U.S., the South Big Data Hub is managed by the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

"The Big Data Hubs provide a connective tissue for the data science ecosystem across sectors and domains,” said Renata Rawlings-Goss, the Hub’s executive director. “I am deeply pleased by NSF's recommitment to the growth of the South Hub and our community. Over the last three years, we have made great strides within our priority areas and are looking to broaden that reach in the next four years.”

The NSF-supported data hubs play four key roles: (1) Accelerating public-private partnerships that break down barriers between industry, academia and government, (2) Growing R&D communities that connect data scientists with domain scientists and practitioners, (3) Facilitating data sharing and shared cyber infrastructure and services, and (4) Building data science capacity for education and workforce development.

“There is a global shortage of data science and analytics talent that is threatening the future of innovation,” added Rawlings-Goss “By working across sectors, the South Hub joins in creating solutions to increase the capacity of universities and industry to work on pressing problems for our region and for the world.”

Priorities for the hubs are determined regionally to bring together collaborators that include academics, community leaders, local and state government executives, regional businesses, national laboratories and others, explained Srinivas Aluru, principal investigator for the Hub, which was launched in 2015 and won the 2019 Georgia Tech Outstanding Achievement in Research Development Award.

“We want to collaborate to help solve regional problems using the resources of the Hub,” explained Aluru, who is also co-executive director of the Institute for Data Engineering and Science at Georgia Tech. “We are addressing truly regional issues that affect more than one state and more than one set of collaborators. These are challenges that can only be addressed by bringing these groups together.”

The south region is pursuing five major big data priorities:

• Health and Disparities: High impact applications of data science in precision medicine, health analytics, and health disparities. “If you look at the health outcomes, they differ by ethnic groups. Trying to understand and address these health disparities is one of our big data challenges,” Aluru said.
• Smart Cities and Communities: Collection and integration of data on infrastructure, sensors, and behavior to design efficient use of resources and services, and to achieve a higher quality, affordable lifestyle, as well as concrete applications of analytics and machine learning to improve the nation’s energy production and smart grid.
• Advanced Materials and Manufacturing: Access to data infrastructure for creating new materials for advanced manufacturing in every state. “Manufacturing is very important to the Southeast, and we plan to workwith the state manufacturing extension partnerships in different states, trying to inject big data techniques into materials science and manufacturing to shorten the deployment cycle,” Aluru added.
• Environment and Coastal Hazards: Prevention and enhanced response to natural and human-induced environmental hazards. Southern states are disproportionately affected by hurricanes on the both the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. Understanding these threats and how best to protect people and property is critical.
• Social Cybersecurity: Best practices across sectors to forecast cyber-mediated changes in human behavior to ensure private, secure and ethical data sharing, reporting and use. “In modern times the virtual world is a force in and of itself; we want to support transparency in how it can change interactions and social outcomes,” said Rawlings-Goss.

The new NSF award includes seed funding designed to evaluate the feasibility of new big data projects. Part of a hub-and-spoke system, the seed money should help create new spokes to address specific data issues identified by collaborators.

“Developing innovative, effective solutions to grand challenges requires linking scientists and engineers with local communities,” said Jim Kurose, Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the NSF. “The Big Data Hubs provide the glue to achieve those links, bringing together teams of data science researchers with cities, municipalities and anchor institutions.”

Ultimately, the goal is to harness the synergy of the collaborators to address issues that require the use of data science and engineering techniques.

“By catalyzing partnerships that integrate academic researchers into the fabric of communities across the U.S., we can accelerate and deepen the impact of basic research on a range of societal issues, from water management to efficient transportation systems,” said Beth Plale, one of the NSF program directors managing the Big Data Hubs awards.

The South Big Data Hub was funded through the National Science Foundation’s Big Data Science & Engineering Program, Awards 1550305 and 1550291. 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 Science Foundation.

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

Writer: John Toon

Learning the nuances of workplace culture is a bit like exploring another country, says Jenny Strakovsky, assistant director of career education and graduate programs in the School of Modern Languages. 

Each field has a vernacular and tempo of its own. Values, goals, and cultures differ from field to field.

This is why Strakovsky and the School of Modern Languages at the Georgia Institute of Technology are pioneering the use of “culture-driven career design.” Using the study-abroad model as a metaphor for career exploration, Strakovsky and Anna Westerstahl Stenport, chair and professor in the school, teach a class called Career Design for Global Citizenship.

The class seeks to inspire both undergraduate and graduate students to consider how humanities-based skills can be central to their careers and give them tools to design “meaningful, fulfilling, and impactful careers.”

‘Real-World Scenarios for How to Collaborate’

“This innovative course brings together undergraduate and graduate students from fields as diverse as computer science and international affairs, math and city and regional planning, and public policy and applied languages and intercultural studies,” Stenport said.  “It provides real-world scenarios for how to collaborate in multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural professional environments, while applying project management and communication strategies.”

The class is attracting attention nationally. Strakovsky has presented the work to the Modern Language Association (MLA), among others. The Association of Departments of Foreign Languages and English also has invited Strakovsky and Stenport to present the work at the annual ADFL/ADE Summer Seminar for department chairs this summer.

The career education programs at the School of Modern Languages are part of an effort to change the direction of liberal arts education in the United States.

“It’s an approach to teaching humanities at the intersection of cultural studies and career education, which are two different fields,” Strakovsky said of the class.

“It’s unique and at the cutting edge of what is happening in both fields," said Stenport.

The Value of Humanities in the Workplace

Ryan Gemilere, a second-year physics major from Saint Louis Park, Minnesota, took the class in 2018. He is now a research assistant in the career design studio at the School of Modern Languages, working with Strakovsky and Stenport on the intersection of humanities and STEM.

“A strong understanding of many subjects that fall under the umbrella of the humanities, especially philosophy and management, is fundamental for a successful career based in physics,” he said.

The course includes lecture and project components. Students learn about the changing world of work and the role of liberal arts skills in professional life. They also learn how to hone in on their own career goals and create long-term plans for their lives.

The students are then sent out to create case studies examining how humanities skills, such as well-developed communications abilities and a focus on human-centered problem solving, are crucial in helping solve intractable social and policy challenges.

Students have examined issues such as energy consumption and conservation, the impact of space policy on humanity, how to keep equity issues in the forefront of the sustainability debate, and water security.

Different Perspectives Are Crucial

This exploration also helps students learn the value of applying humanities-based skills, especially intercultural studies, to the field of work they want to pursue.

“In the process of doing science, or designing a product, you need to have the ability to design questions and think about other people’s perspectives,” Strakovsky said. “Having the ability to think from the perspective of a different culture allows you to tap into new markets and discover new questions that you might not even realize are questions if you’re only looking at it from your own cultural perspective.”

Career exploration as a form of cultural studies also helps students overcome a pervasive unease with the process that will get them their first job.

“In career education, we talk about networking and the importance of tailoring resumes and writing cover letters a certain way,” Strakovsky said. “There’s a place for that, but students will often talk about how they hate it because it feels artificial and manipulative."

“But when you bring the cultural studies framework to it, and you explain that this is a community and you are learning about it, that you’re on a study abroad in this community, it changes their perspective. If you were living in another country and trying to learn the language and the culture, of course you would connect with as many people as possible to ask questions and do justice to understanding that community,” Strakovsky said.

For Gemilere, who wants to work in the space sector after he graduates in 2021, the class proved invaluable.

“To do something other than university research with a physics degree, I believe an understanding of many humanities topics is essential,” he said, “I would even say that the humanities enriches the research process in which many physicists take part."

A Leader in Empowering Liberal Arts Graduates

The School of Modern Languages, a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, is quickly enlarging its reputation as a national leader in empowering liberal arts graduates to pursue successful careers in many sectors.

The School’s new Master of Science in Applied Languages and Intercultural Studies and the Master of Science in Global Media and Cultures, which is offered in conjunction with the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, were recently mentioned in the New York Times as an example of innovative curriculum for the future of language study.

Strakovsky and Stenport are next teaching the class in Spring 2019. That semester, Strakovsky also will expand offerings of the class with a master’s level version, part of the new Global Media and Cultures program.

“The humanities, particularly cultural studies, teach us how to create meaning out of facts, mobilize stories to shape our future, and connect with people who are very different from us,” Strakovsky said. “These skills are crucial for the kinds of leadership and innovation-oriented roles that Georgia Tech alumni pursue.”

“Senator Nunn’s impact on the Navy and Marine Corps team cannot be overstated,” Spencer said. “His leadership in the Senate, specifically as the long-serving chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, helped streamline the military chain of command and strengthen our Navy and Marine Corps team. I am pleased that Senator Nunn’s legacy of service to our nation will continue in the future USS Sam Nunn.”

Arleigh Burke-class destroyers conduct a variety of operations, from peacetime presence and crisis response to sea control and power projection. USS Sam Nunn (DDG 133) will be capable of fighting air, surface and subsurface battles simultaneously, with offensive and defensive weapons systems designed to support maritime warfare, including integrated air and missile defense and vertical launch capabilities.

USS Sam Nunn (DDG 133) will be constructed by Huntington Ingalls Industries in Pascagoula, Mississippi. The ship will be 509 feet long, have a beam of 59 feet and be capable of traveling in excess of 30 knots.

From Perry, Georgia, Nunn served in the U.S. Coast Guard and the Coast Guard Reserve, and represented the state of Georgia in the U.S. Senate from 1972 to 1997. During his tenure as a senator, Nunn served as chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services and the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He helped draft the Department of Defense Reorganization Act and the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which provided assistance to Russia and the former Soviet republics for securing and destroying their excess nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.

In 1996, Georgia Tech’s School of International Affairs was named for Senator Nunn who joined the College as a distinguished faculty member in Public Policy and International Affairs.

The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs is a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

Humanities scholars found both inspiration and shared challenges at the School of Literature, Media, and Communication’s (LMC) humanTech symposium, held April 19–20, 2019.

The symposium was meant to focus the discussion about what it means to be a humanist at a technologically oriented university such as the Georgia Institute of Technology, said Richard Utz, chair and professor in LMC.

“While our participants had work experience at large research institutions, small engineering oriented colleges, and traditional universities with strong science and technology sectors, it became clear very quickly that we didn’t need to switch codes to understand our most important opportunities. They were the same,“ he said. “Terms like innovation, interdisciplinarity, partnership, integration, and collaboration, were front and center among all presentations and responses.”

Presentations and discussions also identified similar challenges, including funding disparities between the humanities and the STEM fields and a traditional view from both humanities and STEM-based scholars that each group is part of a separate academic world.

Despite such challenges, Paula M. Krebs, executive director of the Modern Language Association, noted during her opening address to the symposium how many tech firms and even the Columbia University Medical School, which offers a program in “narrative medicine,” are embracing the skills provided by a humanities education and applying them to technical and scientific disciplines.

“If those graduates are better doctors for studying the humanities, what would a better engineer who is fully engaged in the humanities look like?” Krebs asked.

As it happens, they might look something like many Georgia Tech students, who study or intern abroad at much higher levels than the national average and half of whom voluntarily choose to study a foreign language, compared to 8 percent nationally.

The Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, LMC, and the School of Modern Languages also are leading in the fields of language and cultural studies, as Krebs noted.

“Georgia Tech itself is a leader in connecting language and education with career possibilities at the undergraduate and graduate levels,” she said. “The graduate program in Global Media and Cultures, for example, is the kind of program that makes clear the career value of language study.”

That degree, a joint offering of LMC and Modern Languages, and also the Master of Science in Applied Language and Intercultural Studies in the School of Modern Languages, are both meant to give students rigorous training in communication and global leadership, preparing them for careers in international business, non-profits, media, social justice, and education.

Other initiatives are under way at Georgia Tech to help prepare humanities students for interdisciplinary careers in a changing workforce.

LMC and Modern Languages also each have post-doctoral programs for recent humanities graduates. LMC’s Brittain Fellows program seeks Ph.D. graduates with an interest in “digital pedagogy and the cultural studies of science and technology,” while LMC’s Global Languages, Cultures, and Technologies program seeks to foster collaboration across languages, technologies, and global cultures.

Both schools, and faculty from across Ivan Allen College, also are actively engaged in a number of Vertically Integrated Research (VIP) research projects, meant to give undergraduate students the opportunity to participate in meaningful, often interdisciplinary, research projects.

Such program are the product of a spirit of “radical interdisciplinarity” among humanities scholars at Georgia Tech that has allowed such programs to flourish, said Anna Stenport, professor and chair in the School of Modern Languages

“I am very happy and proud to be able to say that there is no crisis of the humanities at the Georgia Institute of Technology,” she told the symposium.

For Utz, the symposium was just the beginning.

“This symposium can only be a first step toward future additional conversations, and the School of Literature, Media, and Communication, together with our partners, will take a lead role in continuing what we started this year,” he said.

Another humanities-related symposium occurred April 25-27. The Atlanta Global Studies Symposium focused on global, regional, and international studies and the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Discussion centered on collaboration among institutions of higher education, the public and the community, and the K-12 sector in the Atlanta region and beyond through education, research, and outreach.

Georgia Tech leads the pilot Georgia Smart Communities Challenge, which supports one-year projects to develop and implement smart design solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing the state. 

The four selected localities were chosen from a pool of applicants statewide.The cities of Albany and Chamblee and the counties of Chatham and Gwinnett are focusing on pilot projects to improve local housing investments, address traffic and transportation challenges, and develop more targeted flooding forecasts of storms and sea level rise along Georgia’s coast. 

A local government coordinates each project. But community and neighborhood groups, industry, and others are crucial collaborators. A Georgia Tech researcher conducts studies and provides guidance in pursuit of each project’s goals, supported by graduate and undergraduate students.

Each community has received $50,000 in grants and $25,000 from Georgia Tech in research support. Communities also raised matched funds. Georgia Power is the lead sponsor, with additional financial support from the Atlanta Regional Commission. The work began in September 2018 and will continue through September 2019. 

Students are engaged through the research projects but also through two additional summer programs. The Georgia Smart Community Corps is a full-time, paid summer fellowship for Georgia Tech students to become part of the project team. It is a joint collaboration with the Strategic Energy Institute, Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain, Center for Career Discovery and Development, and the Student Government Association. 

The Georgia Tech Civic Data Science Program, led by Ellen Zegura and Christopher Le Dantec, competitively recruits students nationally to come to the Atlanta campus for the summer and work in smaller teams with the Georgia Smart community on data analytics. 

And the competition will soon begin for the next group of communities, to be announced in June.

“We define ‘smart development’ as the integration and application of technologies to improve the quality of life,” said Debra Lam, managing director of Smart Cities and Inclusive Innovation at Georgia Tech. These advanced tools can be intelligent infrastructures, information, and communication technologies, Internet of Things devices, and other computational or digital systems, such as data centers and portals, web and smartphone applications, and automated digital services.

“There is a misconception that smart community innovations always must start in a major city and trickle down to smaller places,” said Lam. “But innovations can trickle up as well. They can be developed more quickly in smaller communities because you have all stakeholders in the room — the mayor and city manager, public agencies, community and neighborhood groups, industry and business. A next step will be to spread what’s learned from these smart development projects to other Georgia communities and beyond.”  

Smart Sea Level Tools for Emergency Planning and Response

Climate change is driving sea levels higher, increasing flooding events during coastal storms and extreme high tides in Chatham County. But the county has only one official water level gauge, located at Fort Pulaski. The Georgia coast, however, is a complex environment where rising water impacts can vary dramatically from place to place. 

“Some neighborhoods are flooding more frequently now, while in other neighborhoods not far away the flooding is more modest or erratic, depending on which way the wind is blowing, how much rain falls, and many other factors,” said Russell Clark, Georgia Tech senior research scientist in the College of Computing. 

That’s why residents want more targeted flood warnings and forecasts. 

Chatham County is using its Smart Communities support to partner with Georgia Tech researchers to develop a sensor network partnered with data analytics for more accurate, localized flooding forecasts for improved emergency planning and response. 

“Coastal communities are desperate for solutions,” said Kim Cobb, the project’s faculty leader, Georgia Power Chair, and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “Through many partnerships, Georgia Tech can design strategies to help communities adapt to climate change and sea level rise. We see this pilot as only the first step of a multi-year effort to advance real solutions with different combinations of partners, expertise, and funding.”  

Local high school students are helping to build and install a new batch of 30 sensors that will soon augment the 12 units already deployed. The sensor network will transmit data to computer models for analysis and prediction of storm strength and flooding.

The Smart Sea Level Sensor Project is a partnership among Chatham Emergency Management Agency officials, City of Savannah officials, and Georgia Tech scientists and engineers. The pilot project’s data could be used to plan more resilient bridge, road, and water treatment infrastructure. The sensors could be adapted later to collect other environmental monitoring data, including rainfall and water quality parameters. 

“Residents are excited to see that localized sensor data will be visible for them,” said Clark. “We hear a lot of ‘thank you for doing this in my neighborhood.’”

Emanuele Di Lorenzo, professor of ocean and climate dynamics, will integrate sensor data into models for predictive flood-risk assessments specifically for the Chatham County coast. David Frost, Elizabeth and Bill Higginbotham Professor of civil engineering, will provide resilience planning tools for community leaders.

Residents can offer their input during a May 16 showcase for the project sponsored by the Georgia Smart Communities Program. On smartphones and iPads, Georgia Tech undergraduates will guide residents through web-based visualizations of flood-risk scenarios for different coastal locations with augmented reality tools. 

“We continue to look for community feedback, which is so important,” said Cobb. “There will be many more opportunities for local community members, students, and educators to get involved.”

Albany Housing Data Initiative

Why do public investments in housing and infrastructure fail to revitalize some blighted neighborhoods? Albany, a city in the southwest corner of the state, is drawing on Georgia Smart support and guidance to develop and evaluate an automated housing registry that could help answer this question. 

“As is the case in many communities, housing has fallen into disrepair in some Albany neighborhoods,” said Omar Isaac Asensio, assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy and principal investigator for the Albany project. “Abandoned or uninhabitable properties have been purchased and cleaned up. But the community says, ‘We're spending a lot of money on revitalization, but because data are siloed in different city departments and are not easily accessible, it’s hard for us to really quantify the benefits of these investments.’ In an effort to promote transparency, the city wants to integrate and analyze Albany’s housing data, which would help the community answer questions about the effectiveness of various policies or programs designed to help neighborhoods.”

For example, the Community Home Investment Program (CHIP) assists low- and moderate- income households with up to $25,000 in home repairs that affect the health or safety of those residing in the home. Eligible repairs include costly items such as roof replacement, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, and other energy efficiency measures. Today there is no way to link housing investment information with energy performance data in the city. As a result, the data needed to evaluate the effectiveness of housing programs are inaccessible, not just to the public.

Asensio’s team is collaborating with the city to bring together multiple databases to map housing address information as well as 10 years’ worth of utility records held by the city. Additional information from other city departments, including transit, code enforcement data, crime data, and other open data is part of the overall initiative, and will be added later. 

“Under the leadership of Steven Carter, Albany’s chief information officer, we’ve already made strides on data collection, aggregation, and curation,” he said. “Now an open-data portal needs to be built, and data from more departments will be integrated into one place.” Using record linkage and statistical algorithms, the Georgia Tech team will create maps to visualize locations of blight and housing investments and tell the hidden stories behind the data, backed by rigorous analysis.

Albany is hosting participatory design workshops for the public and others to develop priorities about the initiatives that can be run through the portal and ArcGIS Hub in collaboration with Georgia Tech’s Christopher Le Dantec and Debra Lam. Project partners include Dougherty County, the city’s Department of Community and Economic Development, and the nonprofit Fight Albany Blight.

“We need input from both the public and private sectors about what’s important to them because ultimately this process is meant to benefit communities,” Asensio said. The open-data portal will evolve with new data that the city adds over time, helping officials to do their jobs, improving fiscal efficiency and enhancing transparency throughout city government. 

Urban policy scientists are often stymied by lack of access to data. “The Albany initiative allows researchers access to granular data about public investment and performance needed for rigorous policy and program evaluation,” he said. “This project could provide a blueprint to other cities to open up and visualize city data in collaboration with the academic research community, the public, government, and industry. Albany’s experience will be indispensable for other communities in our state, putting the city on the map for developing the latest analytical tools on open data.”

Connected Vehicle Technology Master Plan

Suburban Gwinnett County, northeast of Atlanta, has experienced sprawling growth and increasingly heavy traffic in recent decades. County leaders, looking for solutions, took note of Atlanta’s North Avenue Smart Corridor and similar high-tech projects around the country. Smart technologies can improve traffic flow and driver safety when vehicles share real-time locations with each other and with traffic signals. High-tech sensors on vehicles and roadways tell connected vehicles when to maneuver to avoid collisions, reducing crashes and traffic snarls on suburban arteries.

Now Gwinnett County is partnering with Georgia Smart in a project to engage multiple stakeholders across the state to set the standard for application of connected vehicle technology that can improve mobility and traffic safety.

The county aims to develop and implement a master plan for autonomous real-time data sharing among connected vehicle applications, signals, and other roadway sensors. The Peachtree Industrial Boulevard Corridor has been chosen as the pilot smart corridor for technology deployment, which is scheduled to begin later in 2019. 

First, though, the county needs accurate baseline data about current traffic patterns. 

“We’ve had access to high-fidelity traffic signal data, but data from vehicles on the road are very sparse,” said Angshuman Guin, the project’s faculty leader and senior research engineer in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. 

“We were only getting a location point for emergency response vehicles every five minutes, but we need GPS points every second to understand the bottlenecks in traffic, as well as where and why the vehicles are losing time on the roadway during an emergency response.” He is collaborating with the county fire chief to outfit 15 fire department vehicles with Georgia Tech-designed sensor packages. 

“We are using the fire department data to know exactly where and how long the delays are for emergency response vehicles — and compare those data to signal data. Was a delay associated with the signal being red? Or was it associated with traffic alone? This study is only possible because of our collaboration with the county, the fire department, and the other partners involved. We would not be able to gather the data we need without them.”  

Guin will help the county assess the benefits of Connected Vehicle applications such as Emergency Vehicle Preemption, which help responders reach emergency scenes more quickly and safely. He will also simulate traffic operations and apply safety analyses across all systems.

“We are helping the county develop strategies, leveraging connected vehicle technology, for extending the benefits of preemption by implementing anticipatory queue flush operations at intersections to reduce the delays experienced by emergency vehicles, and to also improve safety at intersections,” he said.

Gwinnett County and Georgia Tech are collaborating on the project with the Georgia Department of Transportation and the cities of Berkeley Lake, Duluth, Norcross, and Suwanee. 

Most connected-vehicle pilot efforts focus on interstates or high-density business districts. But many commuters and other drivers in the Atlanta metro spend more miles on suburban roadways than in the city. 

Suburban arterials are typically more challenging for smart communications technologies. Heavily traveled suburban roads with higher operating speeds and irregularly spaced intersections make driving more complex and dangerous. That’s why the suburban Gwinnett County corridor could form the backbone of the Connected Vehicle Technology Master Plan to improve driving experience with connected vehicle technology across city and county lines throughout the state. 

Chamblee Shared Autonomous Vehicle Study 

The city of Chamblee is attracting young people and others who seek a walkable, lively urban experience without the steep rents of Atlanta’s popular, higher-density neighborhoods. The Chamblee MARTA rail station in suburban DeKalb County has been a crucial drawing card for commuters relocating to apartments in the city’s redeveloping core. 

Chamblee has succeeded in redeveloping properties near MARTA with urban apartments and new restaurants. “Now the city wants to expand local transit opportunities to link the MARTA station to other nearby neighborhoods, some with redevelopment projects already underway,” said Ellen Dunham-Jones, director of the Georgia Tech urban design program.

Chamblee is using Georgia Smart funding to partner with a Georgia Tech team, led by Dunham-Jones, to study how improving urban design and passenger experiences can help build ridership for an experimental mode of transportation — the shared autonomous vehicle. 

Chamblee anticipates operating an autonomous shuttle along a mile of Peachtree Road with five stops for 10 hours a day, seven days a week. A second phase could extend the shuttle east to Assembly Yards, a mixed-use development under construction in Doraville. At first, the shuttle would operate semi-autonomously with an onboard attendant in case of emergencies.

The Georgia Tech team is developing a set of recommendations for the city and a best practices manual to improve the user experience of getting to, waiting for, and riding on autonomous shuttle buses. How might they expand walkability throughout Chamblee and build social capital? Can bus stops serve as community infrastructure? The guide could be applied in other communities in Georgia and around the country. 

Dunham-Jones and Ph.D. student Zachary Lancaster studied 18 autonomous shuttle projects in pilot stages worldwide, the great majority of which operate on private streets or in office parks. They interviewed industry experts, visited pilot projects, and surveyed potential passengers of Chamblee’s shuttle. 

The autonomous shuttle experience must be appealing to compete with other transit options including private cars, electric scooters, and ride-share services. 

“Once the shuttle is operating, it’s important to have a data management plan that allows for feedback from users,” she said. “That will help the city improve the shuttle system by learning more about how people respond to it.”

The pilot project will also develop an operations plan for the shuttle and conduct preliminary engineering while engaging the community through public meetings, city strolls, and other events. Other city partners include the City of Doraville, Stantec, MARTA, and the Assembly Community Improvement District.

Introducing small autonomous transit vehicles to city streets could eventually transform how people get around.  

“With autonomous shared vehicles, you could replace the typical big bus that comes once an hour with four or five small shuttles along the same route arriving every 10 minutes, and that would be a game changer for encouraging more people to use transit,” she said.

Concluding the Projects and Next Steps

As the inaugural Georgia Smart projects draw to a close in September, the team with support from the Strategic Energy Institute will produce a Georgia Smart Community Playbook. Distilling best practices and findings for all communities, the playbook is being developed by Christopher Le Dantec, associate professor in the Digital Media program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication. 

The playbook will include a data guide. 

“The guide prompts communities to answer a number of questions about data they found useful in their projects,” says Le Dantec. “Where did these data come from? What are the data standards? What are the data’s limitations? What might another community do with similar data and where can it go for help?” 

Each project concludes in September with a local public event to explain how the community pursued its goals, gained results, and made plans for the future. Each cohort, then, provides a road map for the next one. 

But projects supported by Georgia Smart won’t necessarily come to an end after one year. They may evolve with new sources of funding.  

“Georgia Tech scientists and engineers have become part of the local team,” said Lam. “Many of the researchers want to continue engaging in this work, expanding the pilot projects with new grants and other opportunities.”

Georgia Smart is supported by the Georgia Power Company and the Atlanta Regional Commission, the lead sponsors, as well as the Association County Commissioners of Georgia, Georgia Chamber, Georgia Department of Community Affairs, Georgia Department of Economic Development, Georgia Municipal Association, Georgia Planning Association, Global City Teams Challenge, Metro Atlanta Chamber, and Technology Association of Georgia. 

For more information about Georgia Smart, visit www.smartcities.gatech.edu/georgia-smart.

The links below have additional information (in PDF format) on each project:

• Chatham County
• Albany
• Chamblee
• Gwinnett County

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As part of the study, researchers at the Wireless RERC compared 2017 model year phones capable of receiving Wireless Emergency Alert notifications — a category that includes most top-tier phones —  to 2015 versions and found improved accessibility across 10 of 13 features.

However, researchers found that phones offered by operators under the federally subsidized Lifeline program for low-income people fell short in nearly every category when compared to phones offered through traditional wireless plans.

The results are of concern because research shows that people with disabilities are more likely to have lower incomes and may make up a significant percentage of Lifeline users, according to lead author Salimah LaForce, senior policy analyst at the Center for Advanced Communications Policy (CACP) and project director for policy and outreach at the Wireless RERC. CACP houses the Wireless RERC.

“A person without a disability can take it for granted that they can go into a wireless store and leave with a phone that has the features they want,” LaForce said. “These data show that may not be the case for people with disabilities.”

For instance, 84 percent of phones offered under traditional, or Tier One, plans offered by wireless carriers included built-in text-to-speech readers, an important feature for many people with vision disabilities. Among Lifeline phones, 26 percent of phones included that feature, according to the Wireless RERC analysis.

Also, the study found that 17 percent of Lifeline phones examined included access to potentially lifesaving WEA alerts, compared to 84 percent of models offered through Tier One plans.

“This statistic is particularly troubling because some of the nation’s populations which are most vulnerable to the effects of disasters are not receiving critical access to WEA messages,” the researchers wrote.

Among other findings in the report:

• Smartphones are more likely than non-smartphones to include a broad range of accessibility features. According to the report, smartphones were more likely to include accessibility features in 20 of 24 features examined. This is of note because non-smartphones are less expensive than their display-screen oriented counterparts and sometimes preferred by people with lower incomes, older people, or people with specific disabilities for whom durability is a key concern.
• Nearly six in ten phones (58 percent) lacked video calling features needed by people who primarily communicate via American Sign Language.
• An “overwhelming percentage” of mobile phones lack good or excellent hearing aid compatibility ratings.

The study included phones from the four major U.S. carriers, one prepaid carrier and five randomly selected Lifeline carriers. The report did not include assessments of individual phone models or operating systems.

The Wireless RERC, whose primary mission is to harness wireless technology to empower people with disabilities to live independently, prepared the study for submission to the Federal Communications Commission as part of the agency’s biennial review of the Twenty First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (CVAA). 

The law, which is sometimes called the “ADA for communications,” governs access to advanced communications technologies such as voice over internet, chat, and video calling.

The report calls on FCC regulators to give extra attention to CVAA compliance among Lifeline providers to increase access to the WEA system and other accessibility features.

The full report is available on the Wireless RERC website at https://b.gatech.edu/2RMcM42.

The Wireless RERC and CACP are part of Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy, a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

Writer: Michael Pearson, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts

As the volume of data continues to expand, however, many agencies are considering the use of commercial cloud services to help store and make it available to users. While agencies may have different strategies, these new partnerships could result in user fees levied on downloads and analyses performed on the data while it remains in the cloud.

Writing in a policy forum article published February 8 in the journal Science, a Georgia Institute of Technology space policy researcher who studies such data use urges caution about the design of these commercial cloud partnerships and possible imposition of user fees.

“Under the current system, free and open government data is used by scientists to conduct research, by entrepreneurs to create new businesses, and by citizens and other organizations to promote government transparency,” said Mariel Borowitz, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs. “If users must pay fees to download or analyze the data, this will decrease the ability of these users to access and work with data. Past experience suggest that the impacts of this decrease in data use could be large – both for individual users and for society as a whole.”

Moving data to commercial cloud systems would likely provide broader access and more efficient analysis options, but she cautions those advantages could be offset by the cost, particularly for organizations with small budgets.

“Agencies risk losing some of the benefits of this transition by not budgeting for the costs associated with data downloads and analysis, up to a reasonable level,” Borowitz said. “Many who would be interested in using the data may not be able to pay the associated fees. Researchers, nonprofit organizations and others who do not directly profit from the use of this data are most likely to be affected.”

Borowitz recently spent two years at NASA and witnessed both the development of systems that will dramatically increase data collection and debates about future data storage. She recently authored a book, Open Space: The Global Effort for Open Access to Environmental Satellite Data, published by MIT Press. 

She would like to see the agencies that provide data continue to shoulder the costs, up to some “reasonable level,” to ensure that the data continues to be readily available to all users. As an alternative to commercial services, some agencies are considering development of their own, custom-built cloud solutions, and will have to weigh the cost of benefits of the different options. There will also be technical, organizational and policy issues to consider.

“Agencies are taking seriously issues of security and long-term preservation of data,” Borowitz added. “When working with commercial providers, some are concerned about the possibility of getting ‘locked in’ to one provider, due to the large costs of migrating data from one system to another. It is possible that costs and capabilities could change over time. On the other hand, commercial cloud providers have large workforces and extensive infrastructure that allow them to provide services and capabilities well beyond what any one agency would be able to maintain.”

Borowitz notes that most agencies have not made final decisions about their cloud-based programs, so there should be adequate time to work through these issues.

“Most agencies that make data publicly available, particularly science agencies, are already discussing and/or beginning to make the transition to cloud systems,” she said. “However, these programs – at agencies like NSF, NIH, NASA and NOAA – are still in their early phases, and there is still opportunity for feedback to be provided and adjustments to the programs to be made.”

The existence of fees for access to government data is not without precedent, but Borowitz argues that past experience suggests that user fees result in significantly less use. Before Landsat data – satellite imagery of Earth – was made freely available in 2008, no more than 25,000 images a year were purchased from the collection. “Within a few years of implementing the free and open data policy, the government was distributing 250,000 images a month,” she said.

That number provides a suggestion of what the often cash-strapped agencies are dealing with. According to the paper, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) houses more than 100 petabytes (PB) of data and generates more than 30 PB per year from satellites, radars, computer models and other sources. NASA projects that its archive will grow to 250 PB by 2025. And the amount of genomic data at the National Institutes of Health is growing exponentially.

A petabyte is 1,024 terabytes, or a million gigabytes. A gigabyte is 1,024 megabtyes. For scale, an average photograph taken by a high-end cell phone camera can be in the neighborhood of 10 megabytes. Laptop computers may be able to store as much as a few terabytes of data.

Borowitz sees the transition to cloud computing as both an opportunity and a challenge for the future availability of government data. “The decisions being made right now about the structure of these programs have the potential to significantly impact researchers and society as a whole, so it is important to raise awareness and increase engagement on these issues.”

CITATION: Mariel Borowitz, “Government data, commercial cloud: Will public access suffer?” (Science, 2019) http://science.sciencemag.org/content/363/6427/588

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A paper published December 10 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences takes a closer look at these specialists, who perform essential roles in research and resulting academic publishing – but who may never lead production of a journal paper themselves. These supporting scientists often do their work outside the traditional tenure track and may never obtain permanent positions as professors.

“More and more critical scientific work is taking place in teams, and there are people who are building their careers supporting these teams,” said John Walsh, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy and a co-author of the study. “These supporting scientists are here to stay as a part of our scientific workforce, but we don’t really have a career system that accounts for and recognizes the contributions they make.”

Since the 1960s, the ranks of these “middle authors” has grown from 25 to 60 percent of the research authors publishing in the three fields the study examined. With titles such as “research scientist,” “laboratory technician” or “postdoctoral fellow,” these authors often move from one temporary assignment to another, and may drop out of research publishing in as few as five years after receiving a Ph.D.

“There seems to be more volatility in scientific careers,” Walsh noted. “Careers are getting shorter, and the point at which authors drop out, the half-life of a scientist, is getting shorter.” The study found that the time at which half of a cohort has left academic publishing has declined from 35 years in the 1960s to only five years a half century later.

Walsh and colleagues Staša Milojevic and Filippo Radicchi from the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University used data from the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science to study the changing demographics of scientific careers by looking at researchers in the fields of astronomy, ecology and robotics. They examined the careers of 71,164 scientists in astronomy, 20,704 in ecology and 17,646 in robotics to determine when publishing careers began and the publishing roles played by individual scientists. The National Science Foundation-supported research analyzed millions of bibliographic items produced during the study period.

The researchers looked for factors that might predict the career length for newly minted Ph.D. scientists. They found that the long-term survival of lead authors correlated with the number of publications during their first five years, while the success of supporting scientists didn’t seem to have a predictor.

The study wasn’t able to determine where the dropout scientists went after they stopped publishing, but Walsh notes there are number of career choices that would utilize Ph.D. skills – teaching, research administration or industrial research – without the expectation of traditional academic publishing.

With academic research based on the conventional roles of principal investigators and graduate students, the supportive scientists necessary for today’s research might not find a place in traditional college and university career paths.

“If you build the hiring, promotion and compensation systems on a model of a principal investigator and graduate students, these important contributors may be left out,” he said. “We may need to rethink the career and reward system because these specialists are becoming a larger and larger share of the scientific workforce.”

What’s causing the shift toward more transient members of research teams? Walsh says factors include the need for large teams to take on big science challenges, and competition for research support that drives the division of labor in team-based approaches – similar to what happened in factories – to get work done faster and more efficiently.

“There is very strong pressure to be good and to be fast,” he said. “One of the effects of what has been called the bureaucratization of research is that as groups get larger, you see more specialization and people who become permanent staff members who help support the team.”

Walsh said the growth of this “temporary workforce” represents a change in the university research enterprise.

“A significant and growing share of authors in each of these fields we studied spent their entire career as part of a research group, but never as a leader,” he said. “We saw this as strong evidence of a transition in the organization of scientific work.”

This work used Web of Science data by Clarivate Analytics provided by the Indiana University Network Science Institute and the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University. This work was supported by National Science Foundation Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences (SBE) Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (SMA) Early-Concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) grant SMA-1645585.

CITATION: Staša Milojevic, Filippo Radicchi, and John P. Walsh, “Changing demographics of scientific careers: The rise of the temporary workforce,” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1800478115

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The interdisciplinary center will focus on research and instruction geared to student populations that are underrepresented in international and advanced language studies.

“The Atlanta Global Studies Center will provide opportunities for economic and civic partnerships across the greater Atlanta region by leveraging the city’s status as a leading international corporate center and thriving multinational investment hub,” said G.P. “Bud” Peterson, president of Georgia Institute of Technology. “The state of Georgia’s efforts in bilingual and dual-immersion education demonstrates the ever-growing need for a global workforce. We are honored to work with Georgia State on yet another collaboration.” 

The AGSC will engage college students throughout Atlanta — including science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students; community college students; and minority, first-generation and low-income students — with a goal to serve areas of national needs in educating these college students for careers in business, education, security and defense, and public and governmental sectors. 

“All students must engage in international education to succeed during the 21st century, both in the job market and as well-informed citizens,” said Risa Palm, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Georgia State. “The new center will help to provide more opportunities for students from underrepresented backgrounds in the region to gain this vital knowledge that is critical for their future success, and for our region and nation.”

AGSC will foster specialized instruction in international education and less commonly taught languages, such as Arabic, Korean, Portuguese and Hindi. In addition, the AGSC will manage FLAS fellowships for undergraduate and graduate students. Prospective Fellows must enroll in language programs and will receive a full-tuition waiver and stipend. 

“The AGSC is an important step in further innovation of global curriculum, and I am thrilled about the enrichment it will provide to students and community,” said Anthony Lemieux, director of the Georgia State Global Studies Institute and co-director of AGSC.

According to Anna Westerstahl Stenport, chair of the Georgia Tech School of Modern Languages who spearheaded the grant proposal, AGSC priorities will encompass curriculum enhancement, faculty professional development, public events, conferences, language instruction, and kindergarten through 12th grade and community outreach. 

“Our mission is to enhance access to advanced language learning and deepen knowledge of global and intercultural issues for the benefit of Atlanta region students, faculty and the public,” said Stenport, co-director of the AGSC. “This will be facilitated through robust collaborations in research and instruction with Atlanta universities and with international organizations, consulates, refugee organizations and institutions of public service and higher education in the Southeast and nationally.”  

The AGSC proposal team from Georgia Tech included professors Stenport, Vicki Galloway, Lizanne DeStefano and Yves Berthelot, who also is the vice provost for international initiatives. The Georgia State team included professors Lemieux, William Nichols, and Wolfgang Schlör, associate provost for international initiatives.

The AGSC will be housed in the Global Studies Institute in Georgia State’s College of Arts & Sciences and the School of Modern Languages in the Georgia Tech Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. For more information, contact Anna Stenport at aws@gatech.edu.

Creating a sixth branch of the United States military to oversee space defense — a Space Force — could spur technological innovation, but could just as likely cause disruption among organizations tasked with defending U.S. military and commercial interests in orbit, according to Margaret E. Kosal, an associate professor in the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

“Do we need to recognize the value of space as a domain crucial to U.S. national security and our economy? Absolutely,” said Kosal, a former advisor for science and technology in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. “Do we need to better fund basic and applied research? Absolutely. Do we need to have more robust thinking about space as a military and commercial domain? Absolutely. Is a Space Force the best, or second- or third-best way to do that? No.”

Vice President Mike Pence announced August 9, 2018 that the United States would seek to establish a U.S. Space Force as a separate branch of the military by 2020. President Donald Trump publicly proposed such a branch in June.

Kosal, an expert in military technology, said it is unclear what a Space Force would do beyond the existing roles handled by other military organizations. She said it also could be a destabilizing influence internationally, inducing other nations, such as China and Russia, to stand up their own versions of a military space force.

“That may drive a militarization of space,” she said.

One possible benefit of such a service branch, she said, might be greater emphasis on basic and applied research that could help drive new discoveries.

But, she said, a better way to do that would be to direct more money to research into space-related technologies, as well as the civilian space program.

“If a Space Force brings more attention to the importance of space and space exploration, that could be very good broadly,” she said. “If it brings more prominence and serious work regarding the role of space-based operations in a security context that could be good. If it takes away from the already good work being done in under-funded programs in the U.S. Air Force and NASA that would not be good.”

The Sam Nunn School of International Affairs is a unit of the Georgia Tech Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

“The HEAL will provide needed research to inform the national medical imaging policy debate and develop new approaches for improving population health,” said Danny R. Hughes, a Georgia Tech professor of economics and executive director of the Neiman Institute, who will lead the lab. “Drawing on Georgia Tech’s unparalleled strength in interdisciplinary research, the HEAL is uniquely positioned to exploit the vast stores of medical data now available to ensure we move toward a sustainable health care system.”

The center aligns well with Georgia Tech’s core research areas, said President G.P. “Bud” Peterson.

“At Georgia Tech, one of our fundamental missions is help solve society’s most challenging questions,” Peterson said. “Issues of population health, cost, and access to health care are certainly among the most complicated we face. I am certain Georgia Tech’s strong emphasis on data engineering and public policy will provide a firm foundation for Dr. Hughes and the HEAL team.”

The lab will support full-time post-doctorate researchers, graduate research assistants, and affiliated Georgia Tech faculty to produce both methodological and policy-oriented research. A secondary aim of HEAL is to provide training and mentorship to radiologists interested in performing research into health economics and health policy.

Jacqueline Royster, dean of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, said the center will bring new possibilities for research and collaboration to Georgia Tech and the Neiman Institute.

“We are excited by the opportunities HEAL will bring to both organizations,” she said. “This new lab will benefit from the enormous breadth of top-notch interdisciplinary expertise across Georgia Tech and in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, from economics, public, policy, and data analysis to artificial intelligence, engineering, and computer science.”

In addition to financial support, the Neiman Institute will provide HEAL researchers access to their extensive data resources, to include large-scale medical claims databases covering millions of U.S. residents.

“This partnership provides a tremendous opportunity to leverage the Neiman Institute’s policy expertise with the analytical capabilities of a world-class engineering institution to address the pressing problems of improving population health, increasing access to medical care, and reducing medical costs.” said Geraldine McGinty, chair of the American College of Radiology’s Board of Chancellors.

To arrange an interview with a Neiman Institute spokesperson, contact Nichole Gay at (703) 648-1665 or ngay@neimanhpi.org. 

Swire’s project focuses on the new era of “data nationalism,” the escalating actions by nations to control the flow of data, especially personal data, from one country to another. This ties into Swire’s core research areas of privacy and cybersecurity, including his ongoing research about the rules for government access to communications and other data.  

“This award brings recognition to the crucial issues of how to govern cross-border flows of personal information,” said Swire, the Elizabeth and Tommy Holder Chair of Law and Ethics in the Scheller College of Business. “I am humbled by the opportunity to try to help solve these global challenges before they turn into severe global problems.”

Swire said the conflicts arising from data nationalism pose large risks to privacy and human rights. It also endangers the effectiveness of legitimate law enforcement and intelligence activities, he said.

Thirty-one scholars and writers were selected for the fellowship, often called the “brainy award,” from nearly 300 nominations. Swire is the only recipient from Georgia.  

The winning proposals focus on a variety of political, economic, technological, humanistic and sociological matters. 

“The jurors were greatly impressed by the wide range of institutions represented, the remarkable quality and depth of the proposals, and the overall display of intellectual diversity and creativity shown by the nominees,” said Susan Hockfield, chair of the Andrew Carnegie Fellows Program jury. “Narrowing the field to 31 fellows was both challenging and rewarding for the jurors. We are pleased to know that this investment provides a tremendous opportunity for the fellows to contribute important research and writing to their fields of study, which is a benefit to us all.”

Swire holds courtesy appointments in the College of Computing and in the School of Public Policy in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. He is associate director for policy in the Institute for Information Security and Privacy. 

In addition to academic appointments, Swire has also held several presidential appointments. Under President Clinton, he was the chief counselor for privacy in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, the only person to date to have U.S. government-wide responsibility for privacy policy. Under President Obama, he was one of five members of the President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies. 

Black Panther is an international phenomenon. After nearly a month in the theaters, it has passed the $1 billion mark in global ticket sales and is now ranked as the fifth-biggest superhero film to date globally, according to Forbes. It has sparked discussion online, around dinner tables, and in classrooms around the country on issues ranging from black pop culture, to the legacies of colonialism and racism, to colorism, and the future of cinema. We talk with Susana Morris, an associate professor and expert on Afrofuturism in Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication, about why the film resonates with black audiences, and why it is important for everyone.

Why is this movie important?

The phenomenon around Black Panther gives the lie to the notion that black films don’t do well. It has just crossed into $1 billion worldwide. It’s been the No. 1 movie in the country since it came out. It had the 10^th-biggest opening weekend. It’s up there with your Avatars and so on, films that almost everyone has seen. The interesting thing is it’s also gotten a lot of critical acclaim. This is actually a solid film. The director, Ryan Coogler, is interesting. His two previous films were Fruitvale Station and Creed. One was an art house film, the other a boxing movie, and he elevated the genre in both. So, I wasn’t surprised when I watched the movie and thought it was good. It also didn’t hurt that the film explores Afrofuturism, which is a big part of the cultural zeitgeist right now.

Explain Afrofuturism.

Afrofuturism is a movement that understands blackness as integral to not only understanding the future, but our present and our past. It is concerned with the role of technology as it’s related to race. Think Sun Ra, Parliament Funkadelic, Janelle Monae, Outkast. These are all Afrofuturist musicians who think about what it means to be black in the future. Black Panther is a good example of Afrofuturism because it is thinking about what are the tensions between tradition and innovation. Black Panther is set in a mythical African nation named Wakanda, where they have all this technology, yet they masquerade as a third world country. Once you pass their façade, they are walking around wearing all this technology on their bodies. Rather than think about African art or African technology as primitive, Black Panther invites us to consider the ways in which technology is integral to the understanding of the African or African-American experience.

How does the current political and social climate play into the reception of this movie?

We are living in weird, divisive, hard, difficult political times. I’m not a comic book scholar, but I do know they often reflect our politics, our society. If you think about the Batman movies of the early 90s, which were very campy and quirky, they say something about the early 90s and late 80s. Heath Ledger’s Joker is very different from Jack Nicholson’s. This imagining of Wakanda, a place that has never been colonized, with all this advanced technology, it’s like a Utopia. But they have these questions about isolationism versus globalism. The film reflects the questions we have in this country today, such as how do we interact with our neighbors? Do we share? What’s our obligation to our fellow human beings? There’s a refugee conversation happening in the movie, there’s a border conversation happening in the movie. These are questions we are asking right now. So, it’s absolutely connected. And it’s interesting that black people are at the center of that conversation.

The movie touches on many controversial themes: slavery, colonialism, colorism. How were the filmmakers able to broach such difficult subjects while keeping the film approachable to a mass audience?

I think Black Panther does this in a few important ways. One, it is able to discuss controversial issues by showing contrast. Because Wakanda has not experienced slavery, colonialism, or colorism, the audience can see the possibilities of what Africa might have been (and could become) without the legacy of these social ills. The film’s antagonist also explicitly voices the consequences of Wakanda’s isolation, and the audience has to weigh the role of Wakanda’s success (and its decision to not help other nations) and its isolation. The film also tackles controversial themes through humor, which both teaches and disarms. Characters such as Shuri, a tech whiz kid and princess, and M’Baku, leader of an opposing tribe in Wakanda, cut the seriousness in key moments to invite the audience in to laugh at the absurdities of stereotypes.

In addition to the strong male characters played by Chadwick Boseman (T’Challa/Black Panther) and Michael B. Jordan (Erik Killmonger), Black Panther also features a number of strong black female characters.

Yes, you have the elite fighting team, the Dora Milae. Their general is a woman. The queen mother is an important figure. You have Shuri, who is 16 years old and who does all the tech for the country. These women are bad asses, and they are intellectuals, and they are regular people, and they are important. It’s a society where women are fully integrated, and they don’t have to be a princess to be important.

Social media has been flooded with images of kids wearing costumes from the film, mimicking fighting poses and so on. The film really made a mark with a lot of young kids and their parents, hasn’t it?

It’s very important, especially to combat some of the stereotypes that often go with black characters in movies: the black character being killed first, being villains, not having speaking roles. Black women often don’t show up at all, or are expected to be hyper-sexualized. To have characters that are nuanced —even the antagonist, who part of the time you may be rooting for — it’s important for black people to see themselves that way. It’s not that you can’t see yourself as a character played by a white actor, but after a while, all those representations, along with the negative representations, become disheartening.

A character like Shuri also has to be a great model to young women, especially African-American women, thinking about getting into tech fields. What would you say to a young woman thinking about coming to Georgia Tech to study a technology field, maybe even in your own department? What sets Tech apart from other schools?

Susana Morris, a professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, specializes in Afrofuturism, Black Feminism, and Black Digital Media. She also is the co-founder of the popular feminist blog, The Crunk Feminist Collective.

The two-year pilot program, known as Increasing Minority Presence within Academia through Continuous Training (IMPACT), seeks to create a synergistic pairing of these two sets of stakeholders through mutual professional interests and technical expertise. Led by the Georgia Institute of Technology, the project is funded under the NSF’s Inclusion Across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (INCLUDES) program.

“This project has the potential to impact the engineering faculty ecosystem by demonstrating a new method to support and engage diverse engineering faculty through retired and emeriti faculty who may have preceded them in their chosen field of study,” said Comas Haynes, a principal research engineer at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and principal investigator for the project. “The initiative will provide opportunities for underrepresented minorities to gain access to the insights, greater discretionary time and, as appropriate, the extensive contacts developed by the more senior engineering faculty over the course of their careers.”

Beyond facilitating the mentoring opportunities, the project will assess the results of the interactions and the ways in which the URM faculty and emeriti faculty experience the opportunities afforded by the project. Further, the investigators plan to collect data to examine how project participants perceive and experience conventional and direct communications – telephone calls, email, and in-person meetings – versus the use of technology-focused embodied conversational agents, interface agents that engage a user in real-time dialogue by using verbal-nonverbal channels to emulate the in-person experience. 

“This project has the potential to broaden participation in the engineering professoriate and opens up new possibilities for supporting URM engineering faculty,” Haynes added.

In addition to Haynes, the IMPACT project will include Georgia Tech co-PI Rosario Gerhardt (Professor, School of Materials Science and Engineering); University of Colorado, Colorado Springs co-PIs Valerie Martin Conley (Dean, College of Education) and Sylvia Mendez (Associate Professor, College of Education); and Morehouse College’s co-PI Kinnis Gosha (Assistant Professor, Computer Science). The project is among 27 new awards made by the NSF INCLUDES program aimed at enhancing U.S. leadership in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) discoveries and innovations through a commitment to diversity and inclusion.

“Broadening participation in STEM is necessary for the United States to retain its position as the world’s preeminent source of scientific innovation,” said NSF Director France Córdova. “The National Science Foundation has a long history of working to address difficult challenges by creating the space for inventive solutions. NSF INCLUDES breaks new ground by providing a sustained commitment to collaborative change with the goal of bringing STEM opportunities to more people and communities across the country.”

Underrepresented minorities are less than 10 percent of engineering faculty, despite comprising nearly a third of the nation's population. A common explanation for their disproportionate representation, at the engineering faculty level, is related to a lack of access to effective mentorship from other faculty. 

A previously-funded rendition of IMPACT involved seven Georgia Tech emeriti engineering faculty mentoring eleven URM engineering faculty from different engineering institutions; it found that mentor-mentee pairing was viewed favorably by both parties and was beneficial, particularly for the URM engineering faculty. Because of these results, the investigators proposed to scale, test and evaluate the approach on a broader scale by creating national infrastructural network partners to help increase capacity to serve a greater number of URM engineering faculty and to introduce tele-mentoring and training models to serve URM faculty who work in remote geographical locations with very little access to mentors. 

NSF INCLUDES is designed to create paths to STEM for underrepresented populations, expanding the nation’s leadership and talent pools. Like other programs in NSF’s Broadening Participation portfolio, NSF INCLUDES seeks to improve the U.S. STEM enterprise by leveraging the benefits of diversity. The program is among NSF’s “10 Big Ideas for Future NSF Investments,” research agendas that identify areas for future investment at the frontiers of science and engineering.

The 27 new Design and Development Launch Pilots, funded through two-year, $300,000 grants, will develop blueprints for collaborative change among institutions and organizations to address broadening participation challenges. A key feature of NSF INCLUDES is its focus on uniting a wide variety of collaborators to generate pioneering solutions to persistent problems. These pilot programs will create an infrastructure that enables collaboration, fueling future innovations in broadening STEM participation.

The NSF INCLUDES approach builds on a growing body of scientific research suggesting that complex problems are best addressed through collective impact or networked communities focused on finding solutions through common goals and shared resources. This strategy marks a shift from successful but locally focused efforts toward impact at a national scale as institutions, professional societies and the scientific community cooperate and share information and effective strategies.

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Writer: John Toon

Each week in April, we will publish more stories about our autism-related work.

WEEK ONE: Autism and Social Policy

Jennifer S. Singh

Multiple Ways of Viewing Autism

I think in the end, at the end of the day . . . genetic factors will probably account for most of autism. So the working model that we have now is that there are multiple genetic variants involved in autism. . . . Some cases there might be an environmental component to it, too. . . . I’m sticking with genetics right now. But it’s going to be in the majority cases complex combinations of genes that are contributing to it, and there seems to be a lot of genes involved.

■ Molecular geneticist

My biggest motivation for participating in a genetic research study was just the idea of being part of something that could ultimately help us better understand this disorder, for us and for everybody else. You know, this is a great mystery. . . . I mean we’re getting little signs but we still don’t know.

■ Parent of a child diagnosed with autism

People are improperly addressing autism by thinking of whether it is a question of genetics or not. I don’t see why it would really make a practical difference. In terms of what actually happens if it is genetic or something else, you know, some people have it, some people don’t. Some people are in between. You deal with them based on who they are, not how they got to be that way.

■ Adult with autism

This book investigates the social, cultural, and political factors contributing to the production, meanings, and use of genetic and genomic knowledges of autism since the late twentieth century.

The introduction’s epigraphs reflect central themes I examine throughout this book.

First, it offers a critical analysis of the persistent focus on investigating autism through genetic and increasingly genomic lenses, as well as the social and political consequences for this narrow focus of autism research.

Second, this book investigates the emergence of biosocial communities and forms of citizenships situated within and around advocacy for, participation in, or contestation to autism genetics and genomics research.

Finally, this book offers alternative perspectives based on the experiences of living with autism and the utility of genetic information for everyday life.

These various ways of seeing, practicing, living, advocating, and knowing autism and the relationships and tensions situated around the politics of autism genetic and genomic science are central issues I investigate in this book.

Multiple Autisms is framed within theoretical perspectives of sociology of science, technology, and medicine and is based on nine years of ethnographic observations at autism conferences, symposiums, lectures, and public events.

This book is grounded in the analysis of over seventy interviews I conducted with scientists, parents who have a child with autism, and adults diagnosed or self-diagnosed with autism, as well as the review of selected scientific literature and media produced by key actors in the production of autism genetic and/or genomic knowledge.¹

Based on these different sites of analysis, I investigate the politics of knowledge production surrounding the scientific quest of and contestation to finding the elusive genes for autism. I demonstrate how the production of autism genetic and genomic knowledge dwells within larger infrastructures² built through complex interactions among parent advocacy groups, scientists, funding agencies, and individuals with autism and their families, as well as biological materials, genomic technologies, and many other elements.³

Where the biosocial worlds of these various actors interact, this book reveals both agreement and contestation as to how autism genetic and genomic science is implicated vis-à-vis diagnoses, causes, treatments, and, above all, meanings associated with autism.

So Much Money, No Autism Gene

When I started investigating the politics of autism genetic science, the prevalence of autism was reported as 1 in 150 children,⁴ and autism was clinically defined as “autistic disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition (DSM–IV).⁵

The defining features of autism according to DSM–IV are impairments in social interaction; impairments in communication; and restricted, repetitive, and stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests, and activities.⁶

The signs of autism are typically apparent by age three, and although autism is diagnosed and culturally constructed as a childhood disorder,⁷ autism is a lifelong condition.

In 2014, ten years after I started my investigation, the prevalence of autism was reported to affect approximately 1 percent of the population and to be almost five times more common in boys (1 in 42) than among girls (1 in 189).⁸ In 2013 the DSM changed the diagnosis of autism to “autism spectrum disorder” to account for the range of symptoms and severity associated with this diagnosis.⁹

Thus, in the course of researching and writing this book, the prevalence and diagnosis of autism have changed and remain unsettled. This unsettledness is especially true with regard to the causes and treatments of autism.

To date, there are no known definitive causes of autism, and the treatments are equally tentative.¹⁰ This book investigates the social and political processes of investigating the genetic and increasingly genomic causes of autism, an area of research that has generated much attention, money, time, and resources.¹¹

Multiple Autisms is situated within the flows and wakes of sequencing the human genome in the early years of the twenty-first century. The Human Genome Project (HGP) offered hope and hype of gene-based designer drugs or cures for many diseases.¹²

Within the autism scientific community, there was also a growing consensus by 1998 that autism had a genetic component, claiming that it was “one of the psychiatric disorders most influenced by genetic factors.”¹³ Since this time, the funding for autism genetics research has risen substantially.¹⁴

For example, the Combating Autism Act (CAA) of 2006 allocated hundreds of millions of dollars toward genetics research. Spending on the investigation of genetic risk factors alone accounted for over $100 million.¹⁵ Autism was also the only disease earmarked for funds in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, granting approximately $30 million to establish the Autism Sequencing Collaboration.

By 2014 a private philanthropy, the Simons Foundation, granted over $200 million dollars to autism research that focuses mainly on genetics, including the development of the Simons Simplex Collection (SSC), an autism-specific genomic database designed to investigate new kinds of genomic mutations made visible through emergent biotechnologies.

In short, by 2014 the investigation of autism genetics became a billion-dollar scientific industry, and it continues to be a major funding priority in the United States.

Despite these and other efforts, however, major genes for autism have not been found.

It is estimated that approximately 20–25 percent of autism cases are a result of known genetic mechanisms,¹⁶ leaving the cause of 75–80 percent of autism cases unknown.

Yet public and private resource commitments toward the goal of identifying genetic risk factors continue at the expense of research on other alternative causal mechanisms such as environmental exposures or issues relevant to families and people living with autism.

The persistent focus on autism genetics research over time raises important sociological questions I investigate in this book: Why has autism genetics research received so much financial and political support? Who has been involved in setting the priorities to pursue the genetic mechanisms underlying autism? And what are the social processes and consequences of viewing autism as a genetic and genomic condition for scientists, for clinical researchers, for families, and for people living with autism?

Multiple Autisms answers these questions by investigating and charting the various shifts in the social and scientific history of autism genetic and genomics research.

I trace the social history of parent advocacy in autism genetics, the scientific optimism and subsequent failures of finding a gene for autism, and the various meanings attached to autism in the context of knowledge produced with emerging genomic technologies.

This book reveals how parent advocates not only pushed for more autism awareness and research funding but also organized and governed autism genetic research initiatives. This in turn influenced shifts in scientific practices and created new fields of exchange among scientists and families who participate in genetics research. Their collective efforts also helped to build an epistemic infrastructure to support the shift to autism genomics science.

Situated during these shifts from autism genetics to genomics research were the developments of technologies that enabled scientists to see and interpret the genome in new ways.

Thus, this book traces the transformations in scientific practices of autism genetics research from its initial optimism about identifying a “gene for” autism to the current paradigm of uncovering multiple gene-gene and gene-environment interactions, as well as small chromosomal deletions or duplications that are spontaneously acquired.

Finally, this book pays close attention to the social impacts of translating autism through a genomic lens by taking into account the various meanings and subjectivities developed or interrupted based on autism genetic and/or genomic knowledge.

I show how despite the billion-dollar pursuit of unraveling the genetic cause of autism, the understanding of autism remains elusive and the utility of this information has limited value in the immediate lives of people living with autism.

Excerpt from the introduction to Multiple Autisms: Spectrums of Advocacy and Genomic Science by Jennifer S. Singh
(University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota.

PURCHASE THIS BOOK

“It is appropriate that this, our first Ivan Allen Jr. Prize for Social Courage to be presented to a couple, will be awarded to Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter,” Peterson said. “Together, they exemplify the far-reaching global changes that are possible through a lifetime partnership in social courage.”                                                

The former president and first lady were jointly recognized for their partnership in a courageous collaboration to improve human rights and alleviate suffering around the world. Over the span of more than four decades their work has focused on improving health, preventing and resolving conflicts and enhancing freedom and democracy.

They are the first couple to receive the award, which recognizes those who demonstrate leadership to improve the human condition despite personal risks and challenges.

After the ceremony, the Carters participated in a town hall discussion with Georgia Tech students.

“It’s a pleasure always to be associated with the Ivan Allen family in any way. We’ve been close to the family for a long time,” said Jimmy Carter, who attended Georgia Tech and received an honorary degree from the Institute in 1979. “In every respect my heart is with Georgia Tech and I'm particularly grateful to Ivan Allen himself and his family, and this award has special meaning for me.”

“This is a great honor for me, especially to receive an award in the name of Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. for whom I had such great admiration,” Rosalynn Carter said. “Mayor Allen was a beacon of light for Jimmy and for me and so many others actually in our whole country, standing up for what was good and what was right.”

The Carters, who have been married for more than 70 years, have accomplished much together, whether it be their time in the White House, his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 or her groundbreaking work in mental health advocacy.

The Ivan Allen Jr. Prize in Social Courage honors the people behind the efforts to improve the human condition. The award is named for former Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. Funded in perpetuity by a grant from the Wilbur and Hilda Glenn Family Foundation, the Allen Prize includes a $100,000 stipend.

But what if your diagnosis and treatment could be further informed by the experience of millions of other patients, including those who not only had similar symptoms, but perhaps also were your age, gender, ethnicity — and with similar medical history? That’s among the benefits coming soon from health analytics and informatics.

Using massive data sets, machine learning, and high-performance computing, health analytics and informatics is drawing us closer to the holy grail of health care: precision medicine, which promises diagnosis and treatment tailored to individual patients. The information, including findings from the latest peer-reviewed studies, will arrive on the desktops and mobile devices of clinicians in health care facilities large and small through a new generation of decision-support systems.

“There are massive implications over the coming decade for how informatics will change the way care is delivered, and probably more so for how care is experienced by patients,” said Jon Duke, M.D., director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Health Analytics and Informatics. “By providing data both behind the scenes and as part of efforts to change behavior, informatics is facilitating our ability to understand patients at smaller population levels. This will allow us to focus our diagnostic paths and treatments much better than we could before.”

At Georgia Tech, health informatics researchers are partnering with both public- and private-sector organizations to develop and apply transformative technology that will connect incompatible systems and analyze vast data sets. This technology also will help clinicians track the latest research, potentially shortening the time required to move health care advances into practice.

“Our goal is to be directly involved with that health care transformation and to be one of the contributors focusing on what technology can do well,” said Steve Rushing, senior strategic advisor for health extension services at Georgia Tech. “Technology has to be leveraged in a way that will meet the goals of improving the quality of care, bettering the patient experience, and addressing the rising cost of health care.”

Georgia Tech’s health informatics effort combines academic researchers in computing and the biosciences, practitioners familiar with the challenges of the medical community, extension personnel who understand the issues private companies face, and engineers and data scientists with expertise in building and operating secure networks tapping massive databases.

“It takes all of these components to really make a difference in an area as complex as health informatics,” said Margaret Wagner Dahl, Georgia Tech’s associate vice president for information technology and analytics. “This integrated approach allows us to add value to collaborators as diverse as pharmaceutical companies, health care providers, large private employers, and federal agencies.”

See the complete article from Research Horizons magazine.

Election as a Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers. Fealing was nominated by the Section on Societal Impacts of Science and Engineering for “distinguished contributions to the field of science, technology, and public policy, particularly for leadership in the area of the science of science policy.”

During the course of her career, Fealing has developed models to measure science innovation and to measure the impacts of market forces and policy on the access of women and minorities to employment and careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) areas. She has held named professorships at two institutions and served as president of the National Economic Association.

In addition, Fealing developed the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Science of Science and Innovation Policy program and co-chaired the Science of Science Policy Interagency Task Group. At NSF, she also served as an economics program director.

This year, 391 members have been awarded this honor by AAAS because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. New Fellows will be recognized on February 18, 2017 at the AAAS Fellows Forum during the 2017 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts.

For more information on the AAAS Fellows nomination process, visit http://www.aaas.org/aboutaaas/fellows.

New research from Georgia Tech economist Shatakshee Dhongde shows there are multiple components of poverty that more accurately describes a household’s economic condition. Dhongde looks at “deprivation” more than simply low income, and her work finds that almost 15 percent of Americans are deprived in multiple dimensions.

“This study approaches poverty in a new way,” said Dhongde, who recently published “Multi-Dimensional Deprivation in the U.S.” in the journal “Social Indicators Research.”

“We tried to identify what is missing in the literature on poverty, and measure deprivation in six dimensions: health, education, standard of living, security, social connections, and housing quality. When you look at deprivation in these dimensions, you have a better picture of what is really going on with households, especially in developed countries like the United States.”

Co-authored with Robert Haveman of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the study looks at deprivation in the U.S. since the onset of the Great Recession, roughly 2008 to 2013. The source data for the study came from the American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Dhongde’s and Haveman’s analysis showed that while the official income-based poverty rate averaged 13.2 percent from 2008 to 2013, the multi-dimensional deprivation index averaged 14.9 percent.

“Lack of education, severe housing burden and lack of health insurance were some of the dimensions in which Americans were most deprived in,” Dhongde said. “Even though deprivation did increase during the recession, it began to improve between 2010 and 2013.”

When placed side-by-side, the multi-dimensional deprivation index was a better reflection of the people’s economic state than income alone, and the index was able to detect a more nuanced view of what might be driving people’s dissatisfaction.

Interestingly, the study showed that there was not much overlap between individuals who were income poor and those who were multi-dimensionally deprived. Only 6.6 percent of the income poor were also deprived in multiple dimensions.

“Almost 30 percent of individuals with incomes s lightly above the poverty threshold experienced multiple deprivations,” Dhongde said. “Our analysis underscores the need to look beyond income based poverty statistics in order to fully realize the impact of the recession on individual’s well-being.”

In order for a respondent to qualify as having multi-dimensional deprivation, he or she had to have more than one indicator of deprivation, such as lack of education and severe housing burden.

While research on deprivation has been growing in recent years in developing countries, this is the first time such an approach has been taken with poverty in the United States. In this country, the study found the greatest deprivation in education, housing and health insurance, and the greatest prevalence of deprivation was in the southern and western U.S. The study specifically cited Asian and Hispanic populations as experienced the the greatest prevalence of deprivation among ethnic groups.

“From our analysis there are several policy recommendations that can be made,” Dhongde said. “First, significant reduction of deprivation can be attained by implementing new policies related to health insurance coverage, such as through the Affordable Care Act; improving high school completion rates, especially among Hispanics; and constraining housing costs. By looking at a broader set of criteria than just income, policy decisions are clearer and solutions can be more easily identified."