Researchers across the Georgia Institute of Technology campus are focusing their attention on biofuels. And while most experts agree that biofuels are not the silver bullet to solve the world’s long-term fuel needs, they see biofuels as a necessary complement to conventional oil and gas.
Biofuel research at Georgia Tech intensified in 2004 with the launch of the Strategic Energy Institute(SEI), created to enable, facilitate and coordinate programs related to energy research and education.
“Many energy issues are truly multi-disciplinary and can’t be addressed by one faculty member,” says Roger Webb, interim director of the SEI. “The Strategic Energy Institute has been broadly engaging companies to define projects that many faculty members at Georgia Tech can pursue in a collaborative effort.”
This interdisciplinary approach was a major reason why Chevron Corporation chose Georgia Tech as its first strategic research alliance partner, according to Rick Zalesky, vice president of the biofuels and hydrogen unit of Chevron Technology Ventures.
“Georgia Tech has the infrastructure so that researchers from various departments work together in the same building to solve complex problems, and we think that’s terrific,” says Zalesky.
With funding from Chevron, Atlanta startup C2 Biofuels, the Georgia Research Alliance and one of the U.S. Department of Energy’s new BioEnergy Science Centers, Georgia Tech researchers are exploring advanced technologies aimed at making transportation fuels from forestry products.
Georgia Tech researchers are examining and optimizing the five major steps required to produce bioethanol, or ethanol obtained from the carbohydrates in many agricultural crops. These steps include selecting the best plant material, preparing the plants for conversion, breaking down the carbohydrates into simple sugars, fermenting the sugars into alcohol and separating the ethanol from water.
Bioethanol produced from corn is being manufactured at a rate of more than 5 billion gallons per year in the United States, but concerns exist about the future price and availability of corn as a food crop if it’s being used to help meet energy needs.
Because forest products are a more efficient source of ethanol and more than 5 million tons of trees are available for harvest each year in Georgia beyond what is needed for pulp mill and sawmill production, Georgia Tech researchers are turning to Southern pine trees.
Switchgrass, a fast-growing tallgrass, is another attractive source of plant material because of its ability to grow in poor soil and adverse climate conditions, its rapid growth and its low fertilization and herbicide requirements.
Art Ragauskas, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, studies the chemistry and structure of the starting plant material, known as biomass, to determine which varieties and characteristics of switchgrass and pine trees improve conversion to ethanol.
He also examines how different acids react with the wood chips to make accessible the complex interior mixture of carbohydrate polymers, including cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin.
“Pre-treatment is performed under severe chemical conditions and very high temperatures. Understanding the chemistry should allow us to make pre-treatments more efficient, less costly and more effective,” says Ragauskas.
After the acid pre-treatment, the wood is placed in a reactor and exposed to high-pressure steam.
John Muzzy, a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Kristina Knutson, a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, are working with Ragauskas to develop a continuous reactor that will employ mechanical energy and/or boiling water instead of acid and high temperatures to break up the wood. That would greatly reduce processing and chemical costs while increasing the life expectancy of the reactors, Ragauskas notes.
After the pre-treatment, the cellulose and hemicellulose are further broken down to free the sugar for fermentation to alcohol. Commercially available enzymes can do this, but they are too expensive to use in biofuel production, according to Andreas (Andy) Bommarius, a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. As an alternative, he is identifying novel enzymes and engineering them to be longer-lasting and more effective at breaking down cellulose polymers to sugars than those commercially available.
“We want to produce enzymes more efficiently and make them more active and stable, at the same time improving bioethanol production at a lower cost,” explains Bommarius.
In conventional ethanol production, the sugars obtained are then fermented with yeast to produce alcohol. Rachel Ruizhen Chen, an associate professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is working to increase the ethanol production rate by using the bacteria Zymomonas mobilis instead of yeast in the fermentation process because it has a three- to five-fold higher productivity than yeast when making bioethanol. Chen plans to manipulate the enzymatic, transport and regulatory functions of the bacterial cell to improve the bioethanol fermentation process.
The lignin portion of the biomass must be extracted from the mixture prior to fermentation. Unfortunately, current pre-treatments break down some of the lignin, which enables it to be carried over to the fermentation process where it acts as a fermentation inhibitor.
William Koros, the Roberto C. Goizueta Chair in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is investigating efficient ways to separate the lignin from the cellulose and hemicellulose portions of the biomass. Koros, a Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) eminent scholar in membranes, plans to extract the lignin byproducts by pulling the hydrolyzed biomass mixture through a selective membrane with a vacuum using a process called pervaporation.
Lignin is an important by-product of the enzymatic process and has many potential uses. Ragauskas is examining the possibility of converting lignin to a biofuel precursor or using lignin as a building block chemical to make new polymers or chemicals. Professors Christopher Jones and Pradeep Agrawal, both of the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, are exploring ways to chemically fractionate pine and convert suitable portions to true gasoline fuels.
To produce a biofuel with a similar energy density to gasoline from renewable feedstocks, they plan to convert pre-treated pine to fuel using chemical catalysts traditionally used by the petroleum industry, rather than enzymes. These biofuels could yield higher miles-per-gallon than traditional ethanol-rich fuels such as E-85, according to Jones.
For bioethanol, once the sugars are fermented into alcohol, a significant amount of water must be separated out. This separation primarily occurs in a distillation column, which involves heating the mixture and separating the components by the differences in their boiling points.
“Distillation is very energy intensive and expensive, and it might defeat the purpose when you’re trying to produce biofuel economically,” says Sankar Nair, an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, who is collaborating with Koros on two separation projects aimed at improving the energy efficiency of the biofuel process.
A membrane-based approach would avoid the need to supply heat energy, and instead rely on differences in the transport rates of the components through a membrane to achieve separation. The challenge is in producing selective membrane systems that can produce pure ethanol. Polymer materials have been widely investigated and have the advantage of high throughput, but such membranes can’t yet produce pure ethanol from a dilute ethanol-water mixture, notes Nair.
Instead, Koros and Nair are exploring membranes that contain nanoparticles of porous inorganic materials called zeolites that are so small they can be dispersed efficiently into a polymer matrix. The very specific porosity of the zeolite should allow separation of ethanol from water. By using two membranes in series – the first hydrophobic to remove ethanol from a large mass of water and the second hydrophilic to remove any trace water in the ethanol product from the first membrane – it may be possible to design an economical membrane process for biofuel separation from water.
Producing ethanol from biomass involves more than these process steps. Researchers must also decide how to ship the biomass to the processing plant, how large the processing plant should be, where it should be located, and how to ship the ethanol to fueling stations.
Bill Bulpitt, an SEI senior research engineer who returned to Georgia Tech in 2004 after working 17 years for Southern Company, is working with students who are running computer simulation models that represent what a full-scale production plant might look like. The models analyze the costs for the various components of the system, which helps to determine the optimal biorefinery size.
“When building a biorefinery, there is a certain size that’s economically viable. That’s what we are trying to determine,” Bulpitt explains.
To evaluate a biofuel system, the project team must consider the energy balance – that is, how much energy goes in versus how much comes out. A biofuel system must take into account positive or negative energy balances, positive or negative net greenhouse gas emissions, and positive or negative environmental and ecosystem impacts.
Ethanol biorefineries could get a significant economic boost from the sale of high-value chemicals that could be generated from the same feedstock. Charles Eckert, a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and collaborators Charles Liotta and Art Ragauskas are exploring the use of environmentally friendly solvent and separation systems to produce specialty chemicals, pharmaceutical precursors and flavorings from a small portion of the ethanol feedstock.
Matthew Realff , an associate professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is developing optimization models to determine the best structure for a biofuel processing system. Realff ’s model integrates information from crop production through processing to fuel distribution. It includes information on the location and number of crop acres available, the current economic value of the crop, distances and ability to ship the crop, the economic scaling of the cost of the processing equipment with size and the location of the distribution terminals.
These optimization models are valuable to companies like C2 Biofuels that plan to build biorefineries. And they complete the comprehensive research approach Georgia Tech has taken toward optimizing bioethanol production process.
“Researchers at Georgia Tech have different strengths and take different approaches toward solving the problem of developing biofuels,” says Christopher Jones. “If you assemble all of the pieces together, you will come up with the best solution.”
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]]>In June 2006, Chevron Corporation and Georgia Tech formed a five-year, $12 million strategic research alliance to pursue advanced technology aimed at making cellulosic biofuels and hydrogen viable transportation fuels.
The alliance focuses its research on four areas:
A portion of the money will be used to set up a bioethanol laboratory on the Georgia Tech campus to support ongoing and future biofuel research. The laboratory will contain new equipment, including analytical equipment to study how much ethanol is being produced, how long it takes to ferment and the quality of the ethanol being produced.
C2 Biofuels is a Georgia Tech VentureLab startup that seeks to develop fuel-ethanol production from biomass material available in large quantities in the Southeast, including Southern yellow pine. Led by Roger Reisert, a Georgia Tech alumnus, C2 Biofuels obtained two $100,000 grants from The Agriculture Innovation Center in Tifton to match the initial investment from Georgia Tech alumnus Glen Robinson Jr.
Reisert has provided grants to Georgia Tech and University of Georgia researchers to evaluate and develop processes and technologies. Since the target ethanol yield has been met by the researchers, Reisert’s efforts are now focused on building a pilot bioethanol plant in Georgia.
Founded in 1990, the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) helps build Georgia’s technology-rich economy by bringing business and state government together to invest in the innovative research at six affiliated Georgia research universities, including Georgia Tech.
With the support of Governor Sonny Perdue and the Georgia Legislature, the GRA added an energy initiative last year, the Energy Research Seed Grant Program (ERSGP), to spark university-based research into the development of new approaches to producing and conserving energy resources.
With Georgia’s abundant resources and potential of cellulosic biomass, this program sought contributions to the growth and efficient harvest of improved cellulosic crops (including forest resources) and the conversion of cellulosic crops to higher value energy and/or chemical co-products. Four Georgia Tech researchers were awarded seed grants under the ERSGP for funding from July 1, 2006 to June 30, 2007.
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]]>Fuel cells can be expensive, and they typically dont last as long as their internal combustion counterparts.
Researchers in the Georgia Tech Research Institutes (GTRI) Center for Innovative Fuel Cell and Battery Technologies believe that understanding how and why fuel cells fail is the key to both reducing cost and improving durability.
Center Director Tom Fuller has been trying to solve what he deems the top three durability problems since he joined GTRI from United Technologies three years ago.
My philosophy is if we can really understand the fundamentals of these failure mechanisms, then we can use that information to guide the development of new materials or we can develop system approaches to mitigate these failures, says Fuller, who is also a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE).
The problems Fuller is addressing include chemical attack of the membrane, carbon corrosion and platinum instability. Fuller described progress toward solving these problems at the 212th Electrochemical Society Meeting in October 2007.
In a typical fuel cell, hydrogen is delivered to the anode side of the cell that contains a catalyst, such as platinum. The platinum splits the hydrogen molecules (H2) into hydrogen ions and electrons. On the cathode side of the fuel cell, an oxidant such as a stream of oxygen or air is delivered.
With a proton exchange membrane in the middle, only hydrogen ions can travel through the membrane to the cathode. Electrons travel on a different path through the electrical circuit to the cathode, creating an electrical current. At the cathode, the hydrogen ions combine with oxygen and the electrons that took the longer path to form water, which flows out of the cell.
Fullers research shows that the membrane, commonly made of a synthetic polymer, is prone to attack by free radicals that create holes in the barrier. The free radicals are formed by the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), a strong oxidizing chemical that can form near the membrane.
In a paper published in March 2007 in the Journal of Power Sources, Fuller and professor Dennis Hess, research scientist Galit Levitin and graduate student Cheng Chen, all from ChBE, used X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) to study the membrane degradation. This work was funded by GTRI, ChBE and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The researchers chose XPS because it is a quantitative technique that uses X-rays to measure the presence and quantity of chemical elements and the formation and breakage of chemical bonds within a material.
We were able to see chemical differences in the membrane with XPS when it went through the degradation process, explains Fuller. Now were trying to figure out what really limits or controls the rate of degradation.
Another challenge with low-temperature fuel cells is that a blockage can occur on the anode side of the fuel cell, possibly from a water drop formed in the fuel channel. The blockage causes carbon (used to support the platinum) to corrode, turn into carbon dioxide and leave the fuel cell as a gas. Frequently starting and stopping the fuel cell also causes this mode of failure.
This can be catastrophic for the fuel cell because without carbon, the platinum catalyst layer collapses and disappears.
Researchers know this problem exists, but were trying to build physics-based detailed models to evaluate different fuel cell designs that will reduce the susceptibility to this type of corrosion, says Fuller, whos working on this project with Norimitsu Takeuchi from Toyotas material research department and students Kevin Gallagher and David Wong with funding from Toyota.
Another problem with fuel cells cycling on and off is that platinum has a small but finite solubility in the acidic membrane given the high electrical potential and oxidizing environment at the cathode.
Platinum is one of the most expensive parts of the fuel cells, so researchers study how to decrease the amount necessary to run a fuel cell, explains Fuller. But if there is less platinum in the fuel cell to begin with, you cant afford to lose any by it dissolving.
When the platinum layer dissolves, a band of platinum typically forms inside the membrane. Fuller, GTRI senior research engineer Gary Gray and graduate student Wu Bi, developed a model to predict where the platinum band would form to help to understand why it was happening. This work was published in March 2007 in Electrochemical and Solid-State Letters.
We found that the platinum can also be deposited throughout the membrane and it can move around to different places, but whenever it leaves where its supposed to be, its no longer effective, says Fuller.
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory funding came from the Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in the Office of Hydrogen, Fuel Cell and Infrastructure Technologies of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract number DE-AC02-05CH11231 through subcontract 6804755.
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How do you visualize hundreds of design parameters, especially in a collaborative environment so decision-makers can discuss the data and come to some kind of consensus? asks Neil Weston, a research engineer at ASDL.
Enter CoVE, formally known as the Collaborative Visualization Environment. Development of this unique facility was spearheaded by ASDLs director Dimitri Mavris and funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research. CoVEs focal point is an 18- by 10-foot, high-resolution multimedia wall (about 9.4 megapixels) that can simultaneously display and manage more than 60 variables. A plug-and-play interface at 12 computer workstations allows outside visitors to display information on the wall without having to copy or share files, and IP-based video conferencing technology enables off-site participants to join sessions.
CoVE represents a dramatic change in design reviews. Previously, participants had to huddle around a single computer or use PowerPoint presentations. This meant only 15 percent of information associated with a design could be viewed at a time, requiring researchers to switch from screen to screen and constantly open and close programs. In contrast, CoVE enables decision-makers to see ASDLs solutions in their entirety.
Whats more, CoVE manipulates data on the spot. Decision-makers can ask what-if questions and see in real time how altering parameters will affect various aspects of a design. CoVE isnt just a static environment where people go to view information, Weston observes. Its a dynamic arena where the audience can interact with the data.
Prior to CoVE, decision-makers attended design reviews to be informed rather than to participate, Mavris explains: If someone asked a question, you would have to get back to them, which could take days or weeks. Even if you had an answer the next day, it was too late; decisions had already been made.
Yet CoVE brings design analysis and decision-making together, says Mavris: This is the beginning of a new era the era of visual analytics.
While analytics is about discovering and understanding patterns, visual analytics is the science of analytical reasoning facilitated by interactive visual interfaces, he explains. This approach provides a mechanism for a user to see and understand large volumes of information at once. Based on the premise that the brain can best process information received through visual channels, this process facilitates the discovery of unexpected trends and highlights transparency of underlying physical phenomena.
During a design review, ASDL researchers divide CoVEs multimedia wall into sections and allocate them to different disciplines. Suppose researchers are working on a new military jet design: One section of the wall might show a mission-planning tool, another would reflect engine-performance, with other areas devoted to aerodynamics, economics and life-cycle management issues. Data is interconnected so various tradeoffs such as safety, environmental impact or costs can be assessed.
If you change something in the left-hand corner, all the other charts update, which is very powerful to see, explains Kristin Kelly, an ASDL research engineer. Decision-makers may have been looking at a design simply from one or two perspectives at a time, such as an engine-performance perspective. Yet when they see the effect on a multitude of perspectives, such as environmental issues, they may have to re-consider to meet regulation constraints.
Making what-if games possible is ASDLs Collaborative Design Environment (CoDE). A sister facility to CoVE, CoDE simulates a war-room setting where ASDL researchers from different disciplines work as a team to introduce physics-based analyses, probabilistic methods, simulation and modeling into the design process at an early stage. Supplying the necessary computational muscle is a cluster with 256 processors, a 7-terabyte storage subsystem and an inifiband (extremely high-speed) network.
One of the techniques ASDL uses to come up with real-time answers is surrogate modeling (also known as meta-modeling). Rather than using actual codes, you can determine which variables are the most important ones and create a model to manipulate those codes, explains Mavris. Surrogate models have tremendous accuracy (95 to 99 percent) and also enable you to calculate things instantaneously.
Another benefit, because surrogate models cant be reverse-engineered, they provide a safe way to collaborate without participants having to share proprietary information, Mavris adds.
With CoVE, ASDL engineers have been able to develop new tools and techniques to increase the accuracy of systems design and increase comprehension for decision-makers. For example:
Boon for Business
CoVE has been a great showcase for ASDL, says Mavris. Prior to having this facility, it was difficult to communicate to sponsors what we were doing.Since the facility launched in January 2004, hundreds of engineers, technologists and decision-makers have conducted high-level projects at CoVE including Boeing, General Electric,
Pratt & Whitney, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Rolls-Royce, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Air Force Research Lab (AFRL).
The latter has used CoVE for technology assessments in three key areas: next-generation unmanned vehicles, long-range strike and directed energy applications.
These assessments are done in a collaborative environment with industry, academia and other government agencies, so you end up with a very large trade space of ideas, says David Brown, Technology Assessment Office lead at the AFRLs Air Vehicles Directorate. CoVE provides an environment to break down those complicated problems so we can make smarter investments in allocating resources.
Besides benefiting Georgia Techs government and industry partners, CoVE plays a vital educational role. Students have full access to CoVE and can use the facility to participate in design competitions and gain experience in design reviews.
Design is a multidisciplinary activity, so its important for students to work closely in teams, says Mavris. At ASDL, students come in as fluids or propulsion specialists, but they leave as more valuable systems integrators.
Benjamin Poole, a graduate student at Georgia Techs School of Aerospace Engineering and ASDL research assistant, agrees that CoVE has made a big difference in his education. As an undergraduate, everything is compartmentalized and discipline-specific, so it was initially difficult to get sense of how a complete design came together, he explains. In CoVE, you can see how data is integrated and make educated decisions based on the manipulations of that data in real time.
ASDL researchers continue to upgrade CoVEs capabilities and explore new visualization tools and processes.
CoVE has given us a real edge on the competition, says Mavris. Granted, there are other big walls where people are working on visualization, but this is a blend of modeling, simulation, parametrics and decision-making. CoVE isnt just a place, its a process where engineers can work together to fuse their data and eventually roll that data up to the appropriate level where risks can be assessed and a business case can close.
To support the complex-systems work it conducts for the federal government and industry, the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) launched a secure version of ASDLs CoVE in June 2007 .
In the SCoVE, researchers can apply techniques developed by ASDL and other Georgia Tech departments along with GTRIs extensive portfolio of network-centric and visualization solutions.
The primary impetus for the Secure CoVE was to create an environment that enables GTRI to develop robust system solutions for government customers at an unprecedented rate, says Allan Williams, associate director at GTRIs Aerospace, Transportation and Advanced Systems Lab. The SCoVE allows us to integrate the expertise of the academic departments of Georgia Tech with the decades of experience of GTRIs systems engineers.
The SCoVE features a 24- by 7-foot high-resolution display wall and seats up to 30 individuals. Its state-of-the-art computer network and audio-visual system supports:
The SCoVE has been designed from the ground up to link users at the Georgia Tech campus with GTRI field offices and government facilities across the country in real time. Instead of going from lab to lab, customers and researchers now can assemble in one room and access all of GTRIs tools, says Williams.
In addition to providing collaborative visualization for systems design, modeling and optimization, SCoVE can also be configured to provide a command-and-control center environment. This allows us to provide real-world testing of solutions before theyre delivered to customers, explains Williams. For example, GTRIs FalconView (a mapping system for flight-planning software) and GTVC (which allows law enforcement, emergency services and other agencies to collaborate online and respond to events) are available at the SCoVE.
A number of organizations are building CoVE-like facilities, but few offer the visualization and computational capabilities of the SCoVE, and none offers the extensive system-optimization tools and techniques developed at Georgia Tech, concludes Williams.
T.J. Becker
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]]>Everyone recognizes such events, and millions like them, as benefits of digital technology of microprocessors and software, of bits and bytes.
Fewer know that these and most other electronic miracles would be impossible without another technology that is also thriving analog electronics.
Designing these ubiquitous circuits which feed information and power to digital components is sometimes called an art form. Thats because analog engineers must choose among a multitude of materials and techniques to best perform a given function. Analog expertise is in high demand globally, and analog microelectronics provide strong revenue for technology companies large and small.
The world is analog, says Joy Laskar, director of the Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC), a 250-person center at Georgia Tech that specializes in analog and mixed-signal (analog-digital) research. Analog circuits model the world and capture real-world information so it can be digitally processed.
Analog electronics are especially important in mobile devices, adds Laskar, who is the Schlumberger Chair in Microelectronics in Georgia Techs School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). Anything thats untethered, from cell phones to hearing aids, will have heavy analog content.
Generally speaking, analog technology plays a crucial role in three major electronic areas:
Those predictions didnt pan out. Not only has analog technology remained essential to microelectronic communications and computing, but todays engineers are extending analogs usefulness in many ways. Through continuing miniaturization and sophisticated new techniques, investigators are utilizing both pure or core analog technology as well as mixed-signal approaches that combine analog and digital functions cooperatively in a single integrated circuit.
Georgia Tech is among a handful of universities that has continued to emphasize analog research and education, even during the 1980s and early 1990s when many were downgrading their analog programs. Today, the number of Georgia Tech faculty who focus on analog and mixed-signal engineering stands at 14, and that total continues to grow. This faculty group combined with numerous research faculty, post-doctoral researchers and hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students pursuing analog degrees mark Georgia Techs analog technology program as probably the largest in the United States.
Georgia Tech professors and researchers are pursuing new analog-based approaches in a variety of areas, including biotechnology and neuromorphic design, reprogrammable analog circuits, power approaches such as microscale fuel cells and power harvesting, and manufacturing reliability and quality. They are designing improved analog and mixed-signal electronics for a host of uses, from optimizing todays civilian and military communications to exploiting underutilized frequencies.
Traditional workhorse analog design is important, too. At the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), some engineers are using their expertise to replace obsolete analog circuits, typically in military aircraft and communications. By using available parts to develop cheaper and more reliable designs, they help keep U.S. aircraft in the air.
Nowhere at Georgia Tech is the analog focus more intense than at the Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC). Established in 2003, the center occupies 42,000 square feet in the Technology Square Research Building. GEDCs assets include 13 professors who serve as research-team leaders, some 200 graduate and undergraduate researchers and more than $20 million in test and other equipment.
The Georgia Electronic Design Centers work is supported by about $13 million in annual research funding. That money comes from federal government agencies, the state of Georgia and more than 40 industry partners, making the center a leader in industry involvement at Georgia Tech.
GEDCs research is varied, but much of its work focuses on analog and mixed-signal approaches aimed at improving wireless/RF and wired/fiber-optic performance.
The centers principal research includes four main focus areas:
Paul Hasler, an associate professor in ECE and a GTAC team leader, has discovered techniques to program analog circuits in ways reminiscent of digital processors. Traditionally, analog circuits have been fixed-function hard-wired to perform a specific task. Working frequently with David Anderson, an ECE associate professor and GEDC researcher who focuses on mixed-signal design, Hasler has been researching core analog capabilities for many years.
Just saying that the world went digital doesnt address the crucial point, Hasler says. Whats key is that a programmable technology overtook a fixed-function technology.
In their research, Hasler and his team have developed programmable analog circuits made with conventional materials and techniques but capable of taking over many functions from digital ICs.
Digital may be a little better for communication, but in terms of computation thats not necessarily the case at all, Hasler says. Programmable analog could be part of the entire-signal processing engine used by mobile devices.
Analog is important, he explains, because analog chips use up to a thousand times less power than their digital counterparts. That makes them far better for mobile uses.
When youre looking at an hour versus a month in terms of your battery life, thats pretty impressive, Hasler says. It just changes the entire game.
Haslers research has led to GTronix, a startup company developing novel technology to extract real-world sensory information for portable consumer electronic products. The company, supported by Menlo Ventures, a major venture capital group, is poised to announce its first product soon.
Farrokh Ayazi, an ECE associate professor and GEDC team leader, is using micro-electromechanical analog technology to develop a frequency-spectrum analyzer and processor on a chip that can offer both the performance and power efficiency needed for mobile use. This technology, known as analog spectral processing, guides an RF signal to lesser-used frequencies and has similarities to GEDCs cognitive-radio work. The research is supported by DARPA.
Ayazi is also researching the integration of microscale MEMS devices with analog, RF and mixed-signal circuits. These micro-mechanical structures could have various applications including minute, highly sophisticated motion sensors.
By converting mechanical signals into electrical signals and processing them using low-power electronics, this motion-sensing technology holds promise in handheld wireless applications such as gaming equipment and for mobile devices that navigate without GPS signals.
Qualtr, a semiconductor-design company based on work at the Integrated MEMS Lab that Ayazi leads, offers six-degree-of-freedom motion sensing devices (three-axis gyroscopes and accelerometers) with low-power integrated read-out and control circuits for consumer products. Qualtr is a member of the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), a startup-company incubator at Georgia Tech.
Ayazi and his team are also investigating silicon arrays of low-power gravimetric gas and bio sensors that are capable of detecting even a single molecule of a target substance. By coating a MEMS device with a molecular-recognition layer, the researchers are bringing the advantages of low-power analog technology to these tiny devices.
In work supported by the National Science Foundation and industry, Ayazi is also studying whether tiny MEMS-based resonators, micromachined into silicon, could replace frequency-producing quartz in mobile devices such as cell phones. The MEMS technology handles higher frequencies than quartz can, while maintaining high performance.
John Cressler, Ken Byers Professor in ECE and a GEDC team leader, develops analog, RF and mixed-signal circuits that exploit the special properties of silicon-germanium (SiGe) alloys. Combining silicon a common microchip material with germanium at nano-scale dimensions, Cressler is helping to develop next-generation microelectronic technologies that promise important gains in speed, flexibility and toughness.
Cressler recently made news when IBM and Georgia Tech research teams collaborated to produce a silicon-germanium transistor able to operate at frequencies above 500 GHz far higher than plain silicon has ever reached. The record was attained at very cold temperatures, but the results suggested that SiGe chips could also attain record speeds at room temperature.
Cressler and his team are also leading a four-year, $14 million NASA program aimed at developing analog/mixed-signal systems for use in exploration of the moon. The work is challenging because of the lunar environments extremely wide, 300-degrees Celsius temperature swings and its exposure to space radiation.
The aim: to use silicon-germaniums robust qualities to replace the bulky, power-hungry, shielded warm boxes currently used in space electronics.
Were taking legacy parts that are the size of a shoebox and putting a single piece of unprotected silicon-germanium in their place, he says.
In the core analog realm, Cressler and his team are investigating the application of silicon-germanium to BiCMOS (SiGe transistors plus CMOS) technology used in very high-performance analog ICs. His team is helping industry researchers understand how to improve the design of these high-end analog circuits and find new applications areas for state-of-the-art analog technologies.
In addition, Cressler is studying the use of SiGe technology to improve data conversion in the very high-speed multi-gigabit range. For years, the problem of converting analog signals into digital code has created a bottleneck because analog-to-digital converters that are extremely fast yet affordable havent existed. New, faster data converters using SiGe could help redefine communications and radar capabilities.
In terms of complexity and challenge in the analog design world, very high-speed data converters are at the top, Cressler says.
Gabriel Rincn-Mora, an ECE associate professor, is focusing analog expertise on powering integrated circuits and other microscale devices, and on using energy and power management to maximize a devices operational life.
Energy/power generation and management for mobile devices will become ever more important in coming years, he says, as new, more capable chips nullify the gains made by advances in power conservation.
Were putting a lot more functionality into a single IC, he says. So we are ultimately increasing power density while maintaining similar power-source levels.
Rincn-Mora is investigating how to provide power to chip-based mobile sensors using a system composed of a proton exchange-membrane fuel cell and a thin-film lithium ion battery. Working with Paul Kohl, a Regents professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Rincn-Mora and his team are studying how to manage power throughout the whole system fuel cell, battery and chip in ways that maximize lifetime and minimize footprint.
Rincn-Mora is also investigating microscale techniques to harvest energy from the surrounding environment. In one project, he is working with Texas Instruments to develop an electrostatic harvesting chip that draws power from the kinetic energy in vibrations. He is also working with Sakis Meliopoulos, another ECE professor, to power wireless microsensors in a power grid by using the field that surrounds an electric cable.
In another project, Rincn-Mora is studying how to scavenge energy from the human body. The aim is to power a biomedical implant called a vestibular prosthesis, a device being co-developed by ECE Assistant Professor Pamela Bhatti to help patients regain their sense of balance. Rincn-Mora plans to power the tiny device through piezoelectric harvesting generating power from the motion of tiny materials that bend as bodily fluids in the inner ear flow around the implant.
Bhatti is also collaborating with Shreyes Melkote, a professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, to develop an electrode array that would provide better results to patients with a cochlear prosthesis, used to treat total deafness.
Analog expertise is an important asset at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), Georgia Techs nonprofit applied-research arm. Several GTRI laboratories focus on the analog-heavy field of radar and RF technology for military and civilian applications. And GTRI researchers are often tasked with finding ways to replace older analog circuits, in aircraft and elsewhere, that are no longer manufactured.
Were developing applications as opposed to developing new technologies in analog, says Richard Levin, a GTRI senior research engineer. We find new ways to apply existing technology so that we can meet the customers needs.
Levin has been performing analog design thats helping to re-engineer an older circuit board in an Air Force radar-warning receiver. Key components in the all-analog board are no longer made, and obtaining custom replicas promised to be very expensive. Levin is part of a team that has crafted a plug-in replacement board, using mixed-signal technology that combines analog and digital functions.
Basically, its a more modern, work-alike circuit made from available parts, says Levin.
Mark Mitchell, a GTRI principal research engineer, reports that his group is working on numerous projects that employ analog-intensive technology to design and develop low-cost phased-array antennas.
Phased-array antennas have historically been extremely expensive, he says. Thats limited the number of applications where they can be used.
In one program, Mitchell and his colleagues are collaborating with ECEs Cressler to create a single-chip, phased-array module using cutting-edge silicon-germanium technology.
Current phased-array antennas, which use many multi-chip modules, are bulky. Mitchell and Cressler want to pack that functionality into a single silicon-germanium chip.
You cant get the kind of high-frequency performance we want out of these analog circuits with conventional silicon, Mitchell says. Only silicon germanium can give us that performance and also cut the cost per element down by a couple of orders of magnitude.
At the Laboratory for Neuroengineering (NeuroLab), the team of Steve DeWeerth, a professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, is designing custom analog circuits. The twofold aim: to use analog systems to mimic biological performance and to interface with biological systems for medical applications development.
I think Georgia Techs analog design strengths will provide some real opportunities to develop new areas in the biomedical field with real potential biomedical devices, prosthetics and implants, says DeWeerth.
Among other things, the NeuroLab team has developed circuitry for stimulation of neural tissue in vitro. They are using novel analog designs to minimize data loss caused by applying electric-stimulus power, and also to enable accurate feedback.
Thanks to the proliferation of foundries that serve circuit designers, the team now pursues its research using analog circuits made to its own specifications.
One of the advantages of designing our own ICs is that were not confined to what exists out there, says Edgar Brown, a research engineer on DeWeerths team. It would be very difficult to do the kinds of things that were doing with off-the-shelf circuitry.
Maysam Ghovanloo, an assistant professor with ECE and GEDC, focuses on design of integrated circuits and microsystems for implantable biomedical applications. His research involves state-of-the-art neuroprosthesis technology that could communicate with the human nervous system to address serious impairments ranging from from blindness to paralysis.
In his recently established lab, GT-Bionics, Ghovanloo is developing a multi-channel neural recording system to wirelessly monitor freely moving animal brain activities. He is also trying to establish a bidirectional telemetry link with the central nervous system at the cellular level for brain-computer interfacing.
At GEDC, Ghovanloo is initiating collaborations on wireless/RF and MEMS technologies to develop electrodes, antennas and packaging needed for implantable microelectronic devices.
Clearly, analog technology is here to stay. Analog engineers are likely to remain in short supply worldwide for years, says GEDC Director Laskar, as demand for both analog research and applications continues to grow.
Analog and mixed-signal technologies are going to become more important, not less, he says. For the entire microelectronic revolution to proceed robustly, analog research has to keep pace and here at Georgia Tech its an ongoing mission to supply the research and the people to help make that happen.
]]>Georgia Institute of Technology
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]]>And thats probably an understatement.
Theres a huge worldwide shortage of analog engineers, says Paul Hasler, an associate professor in Georgia Techs School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and a researcher with the Georgia Tech Analog Consortium (GTAC). Its rather remarkable.
Since the late 1960s, the Georgia Institute of Technology has been a major source of analog graduates. At the dawn of transistor technology and the subsequent integrated-circuit (IC) revolution, Tech emphasized analog electronics right alongside digital, says J. Alvin Connelly, professor emeritus in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Connelly recalls arriving at Tech in 1968 in time to take on the nascent analog program. He was soon spending his summers working in industry to glean new course material, and in 1974 he published an early analog integrated-circuit textbook. He went on to develop courses in analog bipolar and CMOS integrated-circuit design, operational amplifiers and low-noise circuit design, among other areas.
In coming to Tech, Connelly joined other electronics faculty such as John Peatman, who was becoming well-known in digital design.
John covered the digital and I covered the analog, and that gave us kind of a one-two punch in the whole broad field of electronics, Connelly recalls. Meanwhile, he says, numerous other faculty joined Georgia Tech during those years and added tremendously to the program, including Robert Feeney, Marshall Leach, William Sayle and David Hertling.
From the beginning, he says, the analog electronics program became very popular.
In the 1980s, inexpensive digital microprocessors extended programmable computing to everyone, and many predicted the end of fixed-function analog approaches.
Georgia Tech was among a handful of universities that continued to emphasize analog research and education even when many downgraded their analog programs and stopped hiring analog faculty, says Linda Milor, an associate professor in ECE and a GTAC researcher.
When I was in school in the 1980s, the thinking was that the analog piece would go away, she says. Georgia Tech was different, but very few universities were hiring anyone in circuit design. There was an interesting situation where schools had lots of analog courses on their curriculums and nobody to teach them.
Then the 1990s mobile revolution began, and industry demand soared for communication ICs and other analog chip designs. Analog chips whose virtues include low power consumption that extends battery life became once again a hot area as consumers increasingly snapped up cell phones, PDAs, digital cameras, voice recorders, portable video and many other handheld devices.
In 1989, three Georgia Tech professors Connelly, Phillip Allen and Martin Brooke founded GTAC as a way to forge closer ties with the analog electronics industry. In retrospect, Connelly says, that move was probably even smarter than it looked at the time. It allowed Georgia Tech to strengthen its analog commitment just in time for the analog resurgence.
Recent media coverage in Silicon Valley and elsewhere places Georgia Tech among the elite analog education programs, in such company as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and the University of California-Berkeley. So does program size: by most counts, Georgia Tech has a larger analog faculty and graduates more analog engineers than any other U.S. institution.
Today, demand for analog engineers is intense enough that big companies often keep close tabs on graduate programs and offer fellowships and internships to many students. Awaiting those students are very good jobs the highest-paying in the electronics industry, many say.
Gregg Lowe, senior vice president for analog at Texas Instruments, Inc. (TI), recently commented on that analog-heavy corporations close relationship with Georgia Tech.
TIs contact with the faculty and students at the Georgia Electronic Design Center has given us access to highly trained talent and serves TI customers well, he said. These students expertise has provided strong support for our research and development efforts.
J. Stevenson Kenney, an ECE associate professor and a GTAC faculty member, stresses that analog and digital technology are interdependent. Overall systems design is the prime consideration, he says, with both technologies working together for best results.
Many of these traditional compartments that we put things into are blurring together, he says. Where do digital circuits and algorithms stop and RF circuits begin? They overlap.
As a result, Kenney says, electrical engineers graduating from Georgia Tech need to be knowledgeable about both analog and digital technology.
If theyre not utilizing the best approaches to both, he says, its not going to be an optimum solution.
]]>Georgia Institute of Technology
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]]>To promote closer contacts with the analog-chip industry, in 1989 three Georgia Tech faculty started the Georgia Tech Analog Consortium (GTAC). Today, GTAC is part of the Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC), a 250-person center at Georgia Tech that works with nearly 50 industry and government members on analog and mixed-signal technologies for both wireless and wired applications.
We have very tight synergies with the major players in the field such as Texas Instruments, National Semiconductor, IBM, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin and others, says John Cressler, Ken Byers Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and a GEDC faculty researcher. That gives us not only access to state-of-the-art technology, but were also able to interface with industry very directly.
And its a two-way street, with both industry and Tech deriving important benefits.
Industry has an obviously high opinion of the analog engineers coming out of Georgia Tech, says Hal Calhoun, managing director with Menlo Ventures, a large venture-capital firm in Californias Silicon Valley. You dont have to travel far to learn that industry is filled with Tech analog engineers, many in important management positions.
Dennis Monticelli, chief technologist at analog-industry giant National Semiconductor Corp., reflects that industry interest. Georgia Tech is a school thats maintained its excellence in analog education, he says. Working with GEDC and Techs ECE school, National is able to choose the professors we would like to work with, and we get to work with some top students, both graduates and undergraduates.
Besides collaboration with established companies, Georgia Techs applications-oriented viewpoint has led to numerous startup companies based on the analog/mixed-signal research of GEDC/GTAC, the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and other Georgia Tech groups.
GEDC identifies 11 companies, in varying stages of development, as having emerged from its research. All told, they have raised some $100 million in venture-capital funding.
The list includes two established companies with roots in the work of GEDC Director Joy Laskar RF Solutions, a wireless-LAN company now part of Anadigics, Inc., and Quellan, a collaborative signal-processing company.
Several other analog-heavy companies are now members of the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) or VentureLab Georgia Tech units that help fledgling companies get going by locating startup money, offering business guidance and leasing office space.
These companies include:
The world analog market, now topping $32 billion a year and growing, can open corporate doors for young engineers, asserts Laskar, who holds the Schlumberger Chair in Microelectronics in ECE.
He points to an industry publication listing a number of young analog engineers including several recent Georgia Tech Ph.D.s who are now working for top technology corporations. All of them are being sent by their employers to study in top M.B.A. programs.
These are people who are being groomed to play important management roles in their companies, Laskar says. As analog engineers, theyre so valuable that theyre worth the extra training.
Moreover, Laskar says, young analog graduates frequently do well in startup companies as well. He cites the Korean company Future Communications IC, Inc., a designer of chips for mobile television and wireless communications that was acquired recently by Silicon Motion Technology Corp. for $90 million. Two Georgia Tech analog Ph.D.s, Sangwoo Han and Seungyup Yoo, played major roles in Future Communications success.
Analog training can provide a valuable entre into industry, business and academia, Laskar says.
Georgia Tech researchers frequently work on problems that affect how industry produces its microelectronic products issues with direct consequences for the corporate bottom line.
Analog circuits, especially very-high-frequency, small-scale designs, are susceptible to manufacturing flaws. ECE professors Linda Milor and Abhijit Chatterjee work closely with analog chip makers such as National Semiconductor and Texas Instruments to improve circuit testing during manufacture.
Manufacturing yields of useable chips is very important, Chatterjee says. A small percentage of change in yield even 1 percent is a big number can mean the loss of millions of dollars.
Examining freshly minted circuits can be very expensive, and most analog circuits receive only a cursory automated test during manufacture, says Milor. To enhance robustness and yield, new design approaches with added circuitry could allow chips to examine themselves.
Among other things, Milor has been working on testing of chips input and output signals.
Thats become a problem because of todays high-speed interfaces between chips, she explains. Once the delays have gotten down to tens of picoseconds generating these very precise timing intervals is hard to do off-chip with external testing equipment.
One approach to more reliable and capable chips, Chatterjee explains, involves adaptive electronics circuits that not only test themselves but can also self-recalibrate. Chatterjee and his team are currently researching adaptive electronics technology with support from the Gigascale Systems Research Center (GSRC), a multi-university collaboration sponsored by MARCO, a unit of the Semiconductor Research Corp., and by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
If theres a problem in the manufacturing, the circuit can reconfigure itself to compensate for these variations, he says. In a sense, the chip becomes self-healing.
Adaptive electronics could also allow a circuit to adjust to changes in its surroundings, Chatterjee says. For example, cell phones could cut back on circuit performance in a strong signal environment more efficiently than they do now, thereby conserving power.
Current RF front-end design is relatively static, and most components consume about the same power irrespective of the quality of the signal, Chatterjee says. Our design dynamically adapts supply voltages and circuits performance to channel conditions, so that the system consumes less power when signal strength is good and then can increase power for a weak signal.
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]]>Georgia Tech and Emory researchers discovered that moderate and controlled physical movement of embryonic stem cells in fluid environments, similar to shaking that occurs in the womb, improves their development and suggests that different types of movement could some day be used to control what type of cell they become. The research was published in the September issue of the journal Stem Cells.
"Embryonic stem cells develop under unique conditions in the womb, and no one has ever been able to study the effect that movement has on that development process," said Todd McDevitt, assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and head of the project. "While labs typically add all sorts of things to their cultures to influence cell direction, we were able to control the levels of differentiation and size of cell clusters by simply providing some fluid motion."
It all started with a fortunate accident. Rich Carpenedo, a graduate student and first author of the paper, discovered by chance that a dish of embryonic stem cells left on a common lab shaker (typically used to slowly mix samples) had developed in greater numbers and more uniformly than cells grown in a static environment (i.e. unshaken).
Current popular methods of developing embryonic stem cells in the lab involve single droplets of cells separated by a great deal of space in the dish. This time - and space-consuming technique allows the cells to develop without excessive clumping (a frequent problem for stem cells developed in the lab) and for a greater number to survive in a small space.
Researchers experimented with the shaking plate and determined that they could consistently produce samples with healthier, more uniform cells just by gently sloshing the dishes of stem cells on a shaker plate. The method proved to be much simpler and more space efficient than the current standard for producing embryonic stem cells, McDevitt said.
"We can throw many cells in a dish and not have to worry about clumping and cell survival," McDevitt said. "We call it the 'set it and forget it' method for growing stem cells."
While the secret to the shaken stem cells' success is still unclear, it's suspected that the movement of the fluid likely increases nutrient distribution to cells, creating healthier cells, McDevitt said.
The Georgia Tech and Emory research team then began experiments to determine if the motion could be used to control the size of the cell aggregates and type of cells the embryonic cells would eventually become and found that there was a correlation between different types and speeds of movement and the phenotype and size of the stem cells.
Much work remains to be done before the movement control concept could be used to influence what types of cells embryonic stem cells eventually become. The team's next goal is to pinpoint more precisely exactly what speeds and manners of shaking can influence stem cell phenotype.
]]>The secret? With assistance from the Georgia Institute of Technology, the hospital implemented lean manufacturing principles, a process management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System and known for reducing wasted time and effort in manufacturing.
At one point, the average length of stay for Meadows' emergency department patients exceeded 200 minutes, which was unacceptable to the hospital's management. "We had issues with bottlenecking, turnaround times, decreased satisfaction and overworked nurses," recalled Peggy Fountain, director of the emergency department at Meadows.
With funding from the Georgia Rural Economic Development Center (GREDC), lean specialists with Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute began the hospital's transformation in June 2005. They conducted a three-day lean overview workshop and value-stream mapping event with Meadows' emergency department. In addition to Fountain and CEO Alan Kent, workshop participants included the emergency room nursing staff, an emergency room physician, the radiology director, laboratory manager and business office staff.
The lean team at Meadows developed 44 action items for reducing the time needed to admit, treat and discharge non-critical ER patients. Forty-one percent of the items were determined to be low-cost and high-impact. The ideas fell into one of seven categories: 5S and visual controls, cross-training, equipment, hospital procedures, patient information, general procedures and staffing.
5S - which stands for sort, straighten, shine, systemize and sustain - is a way of organizing and managing the workspace to improve morale and efficiency.
Changes made by the hospital included standardizing mobile supply stations; labeling racks, trays and drawers; installing a color-coded flag system outside patient rooms; issuing patients red allergy armbands to alert medical staff; and adding a holding area for patients who need to see a doctor but who don't need a room.
The hospital also implemented the T System, a software program that shows staff who is in the waiting room, who needs an X-ray and who can be put into a room or a wheelchair. The T System also documents length of stay, lab tests ordered, physician and nurse assigned to the patient and discharge disposition, as well as patient name, room number and prior ER visits, if applicable.
Beyond the more visible improvements, Fountain says emergency room employees are now more empowered to take initiative and make changes that could positively impact their work process - a hallmark of the lean system.
"Staff members realize that it's not just the ER's problem - it's everyone's problem. Whatever we can do to improve the process makes everyone's job easier," Fountain said.
Meadows' management plans on utilizing lean health care principles when it builds a new, state-of-the-art hospital. The original facility, built in 1963, employs 600 people and operates 87 beds, as well as a 35-bed nursing home, an eight-bed outpatient facility, and one part-time and two full-time operating rooms.
"We want to design the new facility using lean processes before architects draw up the building," said Kent, who also plans to incorporate online patient registration, self check-in kiosks and bar-coding into the new hospital. "We want to optimize the process before we draw the first line. We want form to follow function."
Kent says that Meadows' approach could be successful in other hospitals, but notes that change is often difficult, especially in health care.
"If you don't change and innovate, it will kill you," he added. "One of the goals of lean health care is to awaken a new level of thinking and introduce manufacturing approaches that have been proven to produce excellent efficiency and profitability."
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Writer: Nancy Fullbright
]]>Scientists at the Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC) at Georgia Tech are investigating the use of extremely high radio frequencies (RF) to achieve broad bandwidth and high data transmission rates over short distances.
Within three years, this 'multi-gigabit wireless' approach could result in a bevy of personal area network (PAN) applications, including next generation home multimedia and wireless data connections able to transfer an entire DVD in seconds.
The research focuses on RF frequencies around 60 gigahertz (GHz), which are currently unlicensed -- free for anyone to use -- in the United States. GEDC researchers have already achieved wireless data-transfer rates of 15 gigabits per second (Gbps) at a distance of 1 meter, 10 Gbps at 2 meters and 5 Gbps at 5 meters.
"The goal here is to maximize data throughput to make possible a host of new wireless applications for home and office connectivity," said Prof. Joy Laskar, GEDC director and lead researcher on the project along with Stephane Pinel.
GEDC's multi-gigabit wireless research is expected to lend itself to two major types of applications, data and video, said Pinel, a GEDC research scientist.
Very high speed, peer-to-peer data connections could be just around the corner, he believes - available potentially in less than two years.
Devices such as external hard drives, laptop computers, MP-3 players, cell phones, commercial kiosks and others could transfer huge amounts of data in seconds. And data centers could install racks of servers without the customary jumble of wires.
"Our work represents a huge leap in available throughput," Pinel said. "At 10 Gbps, you could download a DVD from a kiosk to your cell phone in five seconds, or you could quickly synchronize two laptops or two iPods."
The input-output (I/O) system of current devices cannot approach such speeds.
Moreover, Pinel said, users of multi-gigabit technology could wirelessly connect to any device that currently uses Firewire or USB.
Wireless high-definition video could also be a major application of this technology. Users could keep a DVD player by their side while transmitting wirelessly to a screen 5 or 10 meters away.
Currently, Pinel said, the biggest challenge is to further increase data rates and decrease the already-low power consumption, with a goal to double current transmission rates by next year. The Georgia Tech team is seeking to preserve backward compatibility with the WiFi standard used in most wireless LANs today.
GEDC researchers are pursuing this goal by modifying the system architecture to increase intelligence and effectiveness in the CMOS RF integrated circuits that transmit the data. The researchers are using advanced computer-aided design tools and testbed equipment to recalibrate system models and achieve the desired improvements in speed and functionality.
Investigators are placing special emphasis on implementing an RF concept called single-input-single-output (SISO) / multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO), which enables ultra-high data throughput. At the same time, they seek to preserve backward compatibility with WLAN 802.11, the WiFi standard used in most wireless LANs today.
"We are pursuing a combination of system design and circuit design, employing both analog and digital techniques," Pinel said. "It's definitely a very exciting mixed-signal problem that you have to solve."
Even when sitting on a user's desk, Pinel stresses, a multi-gigabit wireless system would present no health concerns. For one thing, the transmitted power is extremely low, in the vicinity of 10 milliwatts or less. For another, the 60 GHz frequency is stopped by human skin and cannot penetrate the body.
The fact that multi-gigabit transmission is easily stopped enhances its practicality in an office or apartment setting, he adds. The signals will be blocked by any wall, preventing interference with neighbors' wireless networks.
Currently there are no world standards in this bandwidth, explains GEDC Director Laskar. To address the situation, representatives of the ECMA International computer-standards organization met at GEDC in February to discuss a new international 60 GHz standard. The three-day gathering included representatives from the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute of Korea, GEDC, Intel Corp., IBM Corp., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd. (Panasonic), Newlans, Philips Semiconductors, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd and Samsung Electro-Mechanics Co. Ltd. The ECMA International organization will meet again at GEDC in October to finalize the technical decisions.
The IEEE, the top international association of electrical engineers, is also weighing a 60 GHz standard, to be called 802.15.3C.
Laskar believes that additional applications will emerge as multi-gigabit technology becomes standardized and gains maturity.
"The promise of multi-gigabit wireless is tremendous," he said. "The combination of short-range functionality and enormous bandwidth makes possible a whole range of consumer and business applications that promise great utility."
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]]>The aim: to try to ensure that young workers grasp job-safety basics before they ever reach the workplace.
GTRI instructors and others have already taught OSHA job-safety classes to three Georgia high schools, and more schools are scheduled to receive instruction. The effort stems from a 2006 agreement between OSHA, GTRI, Georgia schools and other groups to make safety and health training more available to the state's students.
"Today, it's an effort for many people in the workforce to remember safety basics - for example, to put their safety glasses on when working with chemicals," said Michelle L. Dunham, a research scientist in the Occupational Safety and Health Division of GTRI's Electronic Systems Laboratory (ELSYS). "We want to make it automatic for kids joining the workforce to take those kinds of precautions - the same way they always put on a seatbelt in a car because that's what they've grown up doing."
Students attend a10-hour course that's team-taught by OSHA and Georgia Tech instructors as well as industry representatives. The modular course covers general safety and health information as well as instruction pertaining to students' areas of work specialization.
"There are lots of different modules, and depending on the school, they'll vary," Dunham said. "We've started out teaching students going into the construction trades, but the course could be helpful to students in other study areas such as automotive and medical services."
To date, GTRI instructors and others have taught the 10-hour course at three Atlanta area high schools - Maxwell High School of Technology in Lawrenceville, McEachern High School in Powder Springs and Dekalb High School of Technology-North in Dunwoody. Well over 100 students have completed the classes.
Those graduating receive the OSHA 10-hour card, which can give them an advantage with employers wanting to comply with OSHA regulations.
The course is rigorous, Dunham notes. Missing even a single class means a student does not receive a 10-hour card.
"We decided that this was an adult learning process," she said. "Students had to learn that this was like being on a job."
Dunham, an industrial hygienist, explains that the Georgia Tech Safety and Health Program also works directly with industry. Georgia Tech staff members perform on-campus training and consultation at the OSHA Training Institute Education Center, and also at job sites throughout Georgia and the Southeast.
Dunham believes the high-school training effort is an important new direction. It not only helps prepare students for the workplace, but it also can expand availability of the OSHA course by training high school faculty to teach it.
Bringing the OSHA 10-hour course to high schools is one of the first results of the Georgia Youth Alliance, a 2006 outreach agreement between OSHA, GTRI, the Georgia Department of Education, the American Industrial Hygiene Association, the American Society of Safety Engineers and the Construction Education Foundation of Georgia.
Dunham -- a second-generation industrial hygienist (her father is also involved in the profession) -- was an initiator of the youth-outreach effort.
"The push to involve youth in health-safety training is big nationally, and since we wanted to make it work locally, I suggested the idea of an alliance," Dunham recalled. "Though we've started out small, there's opportunity for this to really grow through a variety of efforts. For example, we go to career fairs to get the message out, too."
The outreach effort is primarily funded by OSHA. It's also enjoyed volunteer support from industry groups that have participated in the teaching effort.
An additional benefit to youth outreach, she says, is that it informs students about the industrial-hygiene profession itself.
"We're trying to show young people that this is a really interesting career," said Dunham. "It's kind of like [the television program] "CSI," but it's in the workplace. You go in and you're the detective - somebody's complaining that they're having a hard time breathing, and you try to figure out what's causing that."
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]]>Unlike native crabs that eat baby oysters, mussels and fish, the green porcelain crab Petrolisthes armatus is a filter feeder, extracting its food from the water much as oysters do. The fast-reproducing invader therefore isn't directly attacking oyster populations, though it may be competing with them for food - and may impact the predators that normally attack the oysters.
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have spent more than three years studying the effects of the crab, and are reporting their findings in the journal Biological Invasions. The research, believed to be the first to document effects of the crab on oyster and mussel populations off the Southeast coast, was supported by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Harry and Linda Teasley Endowment to Georgia Tech.
"We're seeing opposing effects from these crabs," said Mark Hay, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Biology. "They are probably having more impact on the ecosystem by being prey than by being predators. Other members of the ecosystem are feeding on them, and that is changing the rate at which fish and other crabs are feeding on the native species."
The impact of the crabs is important because oysters are a 'foundation species' essential to the health of coastal ecosystems because their reefs provide homes to dozens of other creatures.
"These non-native crabs slow the rate of growth for organisms like oysters that they compete with, but they enhance the ability of those same organisms to survive when young," Hay noted. "They are probably competing with the oysters for food, but the native crabs have switched to eating these green porcelain crabs rather than eating the baby oysters. Even though their growth is suppressed, the baby oysters are not being attacked as much now by the native consumers."
Though the crabs aren't killing existing populations of oysters, their long-term impact could still be significant. For instance, Hay noted, their availability as food could potentially increase the population of native crabs, disrupting the delicate balance between those predators and the oysters.
But assessing the long-term impact of the crabs has been difficult because the creatures reproduce and grow rapidly, flooding the shallow coastal waters with their young. In research conducted off Skidaway Island and Sapelo Island on the Georgia coast, the researchers found 'extraordinarily high' populations of the crab - as many as 11,000 individuals per square meter.
To assess the impacts of the non-native crab population, graduate student Amanda Hollebone placed oysters and mussels into large baskets and located them on mud flats away from existing oyster reefs. Some of the baskets contained only oysters and mussels and were intended to serve as controls, some had a community of oysters, mussels, oyster drills and native mud crabs, while others had the same community spiked with non-native crabs. The distance from the existing oyster reefs was expected to prevent adult green porcelain crabs from reaching the baskets.
However, the researchers found that within a month, the control baskets also had large populations of the green porcelain crabs that had reached the containers as juveniles settling from the water column. Entry of the crabs to the control baskets interfered with the researchers' ability to compare the traits of communities with and without the non-native crabs.
"You get a true understanding of the sheer densities of these crabs only when you actually pick up or dig through clumps of oysters and oyster shell hash," said Hollebone, who is now a temporary assistant professor at Georgia Southern University in Statesboro. "Particularly in the summer months, I was never able to find a patch of oysters in the Savannah area that did not have the green porcelain crab."
Because the green porcelain crabs quickly took over the control baskets, the researchers only had valid comparison data for 4-6 weeks. However, information from their baskets supported the observations made under more controlled - but less natural - conditions at Georgia Tech's laboratory at the Skidaway Institute of Oceanography near Savannah.
As in the lab experiments, the researchers found that the crabs slowed the growth of small oysters, but not small mussels -- another common filter-feeder.
The long-term effects of the massive crab population are difficult to predict. Their large numbers could lead to population growth among the native crabs and fish that now prefer eating them instead of their normal diet. But if the predator population should grow large enough to control the non-native crabs, that could lead to a decline in their numbers - and force the predators back to their traditional prey of oysters and mussels.
"We're not sure what's going to happen," Hay said. "We can't really raise the alarm because we don't have the data to say these crabs are doing something bad. It's possible that they will not have a huge effect at all."
Long-term observation of the oyster reefs may ultimately provide answers.
"We have observed both positive and negative impacts on oysters and oyster-related biota at small scales, but we cannot definitively answer our concerns about oyster reefs at larger scales," Hollebone added. "With continued monitoring of large expanses of reefs, we may begin to understand the long-term, large-scale effects."
The green porcelain crabs were observed in Florida during 1990s, but have since appeared in large numbers in coastal waters of Georgia and South Carolina. Researchers don't know if they hitched a ride northward in the ballast of ships, whether warming water temperatures encouraged a northerly migration - or both.
Though not much is known about them in their native habitat, Hay said the crabs appear to be thriving in their new home. Population densities observed in the South Atlantic Bight are as much as 37 times higher than the greatest densities reported in their native habitat.
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]]>As utility company executives make plans to meet the growing electricity needs of the Southeast, they're also watching their most experienced personnel approach retirement age. Finding enough skilled personnel to operate complex power-generation facilities poses one of the most critical challenges facing the industry today.
Collaboration between Baltimore-based GSE Systems and the Georgia Institute of Technology offers one solution: a new way of learning that combines traditional classroom training with hands-on experience using advanced computer simulations of complex industrial facilities. Simulations have long been used to train pilots, but are relatively new to other types of industrial training.
This 'learning by seeing and doing' offers utility companies a way to more rapidly meet their most critical human resources needs.
"People learn by seeing, experiencing and actually doing something," explained Eric Johnson, senior operations training specialist for GSE Systems. "We can reinforce what students have learned in class by allowing them to interact with a simulation of a facility. The simulation allows them to gain experience without actually having to be in a real plant, and that helps new employees become productive faster."
To provide that innovative learning environment, GSE has built a multi-million-dollar simulation and education center at Georgia Tech's Global Learning Center in Technology Square. The company officially opened the facility - the first of its kind in the United States - with a ceremony September 13.
The center includes more than a dozen LCD panels driven by a powerful computer to simulate the many key systems operated from the control room of an electric generating plant. Student operators can adjust controls and immediately see the effects of their actions not only on the system they are controlling, but also on the rest of the plant. Realistic warnings indicate potentially dangerous conditions to which the students must respond. Three-dimensional models show the systems and exact components being controlled.
"The simulation allows plant systems to be integrated so the student operators really see the issue and understand the problems," added Johnson. "We can show them how to operate everything from the simplest system to the whole interrelationship of the systems."
The new facility currently offers simulations for gas turbine and combined-cycle gas turbine generating plants. GSE sees a major market for its 'education through simulation' training, and plans to add simulations for nuclear power generating stations, petroleum refineries, desalinization plants, oil and gas platforms, distribution facilities - and perhaps more.
'Every complex entity - airports, seaports, and large production facilities - is going need simulation training to improve the work force," said Michal Krause, director of university programs for GSE. "I believe that with this collaboration, we are headed toward a new dimension in training and education."
To keep its facilities running - and to staff the new ones required by growing demand for power - utility companies will have to heavily recruit and train new staff. An estimated 40 percent of the industry's current work force will retire in the next five years, while as many as 1,200 employees will be needed for each new nuclear power plant built.
Those employees will range from recent high school graduates who need basic industrial instruction to skilled engineers who need to learn more about the power-generation environment. The industry also wants to diversity its work force, bringing in more women and under-represented minorities.
"Nothing in this economy runs without power, so if we are looking for continued economic growth, we'll have to include growth in electric power generation," Krause added. "In the Southeast alone, the electric power industry will have a work force of 100,000 over the next decade."
Georgia Tech is contributing expertise in complex simulations as well as systems designed for augmented reality - and for wireless networking that will allow close monitoring of student operators in the facility.
"Georgia Tech is pleased to be involved with GSE Systems in the opening of the new simulation training center," said Roger Webb, interim director of Georgia Tech's Strategic Energy Institute. "We view this state-of-the-art facility as potentially a great tool for teaching our Georgia Tech students about the 'real-world' issues involved with the generation of electricity. In addition, we see the center as a means of increasing Georgia Tech's involvement with the many electrical utilities that are expanding and developing in the Southeast."
Beyond improvements for the power generation industry, the collaboration is also providing long-term economic development benefits to the state.
"Georgia Tech is helping GSE Systems improve the technological knowledge base and the quality of the power generation work force - an area of critical importance to the state, nation and world," said Wayne Hodges, vice provost in Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute. "As a result, GSE established a research and development operation in Technology Square, brought new high-technology jobs to the state, and will offer co-op, intern and full-time employment opportunities to our students."
GSE operates a similar simulation training facility at Strathclyde University in Scotland. It serves companies all around the world, including the Middle East, where it is building another center in the United Arab Emirates.
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]]>Researchers across the Georgia Institute of Technology campus are focusing their attention on biofuels. And while most experts agree that biofuels are not the silver bullet to solve the world's long-term fuel needs, they see biofuels as a necessary complement to conventional oil and gas.
Biofuel research at Georgia Tech intensified in 2004 with the launch of the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI), created to enable, facilitate and coordinate programs related to energy research and education.
"Many energy issues are truly multi-disciplinary and can't be addressed by one faculty member," says Roger Webb, interim director of the SEI. "The Strategic Energy Institute has been broadly engaging companies to define projects that many faculty members at Georgia Tech can pursue in a collaborative effort."
This interdisciplinary approach was a major reason why Chevron Corporation chose Georgia Tech as its first strategic research alliance partner, according to Rick Zalesky, vice president of the biofuels and hydrogen unit of Chevron Technology Ventures.
"Georgia Tech has the infrastructure so that researchers from various departments work together in the same building to solve complex problems, and we think that's terrific," says Zalesky.
With funding from Chevron, Atlanta startup C2 Biofuels, the Georgia Research Alliance and one of the U.S. Department of Energy's new BioEnergy Research Centers, Georgia Tech researchers are exploring advanced technologies aimed at making transportation fuels from forestry products.
Georgia Tech researchers are examining and optimizing the five major steps required to produce bioethanol, or ethanol obtained from the carbohydrates in many agricultural crops. These steps include selecting the best plant material, preparing the plants for conversion, breaking down the carbohydrates into simple sugars, fermenting the sugars into alcohol and separating the ethanol from water.
Choosing a Plant Source and Preparing It for Conversion
Bioethanol produced from corn is being manufactured at a rate of more than five billion gallons per year in the United States, but concerns exist about the future price and availability of corn as a food crop if it's being used to help meet energy needs.
Because forest products are a more efficient source of ethanol and more than five million tons of trees are available for harvest each year in Georgia beyond what is needed for pulp mill and sawmill production, Georgia Tech researchers are turning to Southern pine trees.
Switchgrass, a fast-growing tallgrass, is another attractive source of plant material because of its ability to grow in poor soil and adverse climate conditions, its rapid growth and its low fertilization and herbicide requirements.
Art Ragauskas, a professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, studies the chemistry and structure of the starting plant material, known as biomass, to determine which varieties and characteristics of switchgrass and pine trees improve conversion to ethanol.
He also examines how different acids react with the wood chips to make accessible the complex interior mixture of carbohydrate polymers, including cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin.
"Pre-treatment is performed under severe chemical conditions and very high temperatures. Understanding the chemistry should allow us to make pre-treatments more efficient, less costly and more effective," says Ragauskas.
After the acid pre-treatment, the wood is placed in a reactor and exposed to high-pressure steam.
John Muzzy, a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Kristina Knutson, a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, are working with Ragauskas to develop a continuous reactor that will employ mechanical energy and/or boiling water instead of acid and high temperatures to break up the wood. That would greatly reduce processing and chemical costs while increasing the life expectancy of the reactors, Ragauskas notes.
Breaking Down the Sugars and Converting Them to Ethanol
After the pre-treatment, the cellulose and hemicellulose are further broken down to free the sugar for fermentation to alcohol. Commercially available enzymes can do this, but they are too expensive to use in biofuel production, according to Andreas (Andy) Bommarius, a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. As an alternative, he is identifying novel enzymes and engineering them to be longer-lasting and more effective at breaking down cellulose polymers to sugars than those commercially available.
"We want to produce enzymes more efficiently and make them more active and stable, at the same time improving bioethanol production at a lower cost," explains Bommarius.
In conventional ethanol production, the sugars obtained are then fermented with yeast to produce alcohol. Rachel Ruizhen Chen, an associate professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is working to increase the ethanol production rate by using the bacteria Zymomonas mobilis instead of yeast in the fermentation process because it has a three- to five-fold higher productivity than yeast when making bioethanol. Chen plans to manipulate the enzymatic, transport and regulatory functions of the bacterial cell to improve the bioethanol fermentation process.
The lignin portion of the biomass must be extracted from the mixture prior to fermentation. Unfortunately, current pre-treatments break down some of the lignin, which enables it to be carried over to the fermentation process where it acts as a fermentation inhibitor.
William Koros, the Roberto C. Goizueta Chair in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is investigating efficient ways to separate the lignin from the cellulose and hemicellulose portions of the biomass. Koros, a Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) eminent scholar in membranes, plans to extract the lignin byproducts by pulling the hydrolyzed biomass mixture through a selective membrane with a vacuum using a process called pervaporation.
Lignin is an important by-product of the enzymatic process and has many potential uses. Ragauskas is examining the possibility of converting lignin to a biofuel precursor or using lignin as a building block chemical to make new polymers or chemicals. Professors Christopher Jones and Pradeep Agrawal, both of the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, are exploring ways to chemically fractionate pine and convert suitable portions to true gasoline fuels.
To produce a biofuel with a similar energy density to gasoline from renewable feedstocks, they plan to convert pre-treated pine to fuel using chemical catalysts traditionally used by the petroleum industry, rather than enzymes. These biofuels could yield higher miles-per-gallon than traditional ethanol-rich fuels such as E-85, according to Jones.
Separating Ethanol from Water
For bioethanol, once the sugars are fermented into alcohol, a significant amount of water must be separated out. This separation primarily occurs in a distillation column, which involves heating the mixture and separating the components by the differences in their boiling points.
"Distillation is very energy intensive and expensive, and it might defeat the purpose when you're trying to produce biofuel economically," says Sankar Nair, an assistant professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, who is collaborating with Koros on two separation projects aimed at improving the energy efficiency of the biofuel process.
A membrane-based approach would avoid the need to supply heat energy, and instead rely on differences in the transport rates of the components through a membrane to achieve separation. The challenge is in producing selective membrane systems that can produce pure ethanol. Polymer materials have been widely investigated and have the advantage of high throughput, but such membranes can't yet produce pure ethanol from a dilute ethanol-water mixture, notes Nair.
Instead, Koros and Nair are exploring membranes that contain nanoparticles of porous inorganic materials called zeolites that are so small they can be dispersed efficiently into a polymer matrix. The very specific porosity of the zeolite should allow separation of ethanol from water. By using two membranes in series - the first hydrophobic to remove ethanol from a large mass of water and the second hydrophilic to remove any trace water in the ethanol product from the first membrane - it may be possible to design an economical membrane process for biofuel separation from water.
Taking a Systems Approach
Producing ethanol from biomass involves more than these process steps. Researchers must also decide how to ship the biomass to the processing plant, how large the processing plant should be, where it should be located, and how to ship the ethanol to fueling stations.
Bill Bulpitt, an SEI senior research engineer who returned to Georgia Tech in 2004 after working 17 years for Southern Company, is working with students who are running computer simulation models that represent what a full-scale production plant might look like. The models analyze the costs for the various components of the system, which helps to determine the optimal biorefinery size.
"When building a biorefinery, there is a certain size that's economically viable. That's what we are trying to determine," Bulpitt explains.
To evaluate a biofuel system, the project team must consider the energy balance - that is, how much energy goes in versus how much comes out. A biofuel system must take into account positive or negative energy balances, positive or negative net greenhouse gas emissions, and positive or negative environmental and ecosystem impacts.
Ethanol biorefineries could get a significant economic boost from the sale of high-value chemicals that could be generated from the same feedstock. Charles Eckert, a professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and collaborators Charles Liotta and Art Ragauskas are exploring the use of environmentally friendly solvent and separation systems to produce specialty chemicals, pharmaceutical precursors and flavorings from a small portion of the ethanol feedstock.
Matthew Realff, an associate professor in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, is developing optimization models to determine the best structure for a biofuel processing system. Realff's model integrates information from crop production through processing to fuel distribution. It includes information on the location and number of crop acres available, the current economic value of the crop, distances and ability to ship the crop, the economic scaling of the cost of the processing equipment with size and the location of the distribution terminals.
These optimization models are valuable to companies like C2 Biofuels that plan to build biorefineries. And they complete the comprehensive research approach Georgia Tech has taken toward optimizing bioethanol production process.
"Researchers at Georgia Tech have different strengths and take different approaches toward solving the problem of developing biofuels," says Christopher Jones. "If you assemble all of the pieces together, you will come up with the best solution."
This article originally appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Research Horizons, Georgia Tech's research magazine.
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]]>"It's much easier to have productive conversations in the hallways if you are clustered in a building with people who have similar research interests, even if they aren't in the same department," he says. "I don't have to walk across campus to find someone to talk with about an issue outside of my own discipline."
Easy collaboration across disciplines and departments provided the design goal for the five-story, 275,000-square-foot structure that opened in August 2006. Everything about it - including the location of faculty offices, design of interior open spaces and orientation to other buildings in the complex - encourages faculty from a broad cross-section of Georgia Tech to work together.
Even Sandhage's lab is interdisciplinary, a necessity to support his interest: creating tiny electronic devices from the unique 3-D micro-shells of diatoms. His lab includes a cell culture room for growing the brownish-red phytoplankton, traditional ceramic engineering furnaces, an electronic test station - and a biochemistry lab for studying peptides that induce the formation of functional inorganic materials.
MS&E can house 41 principal investigators, 50 support staff and more than 400 research staff and graduate students. Research done in the building includes materials and polymer characterization, bio-nanotechnology, chemistry and biomolecular engineering, bio-manufacturing, membrane fabrication, nanochemistry, molecular biophysics and computational chemistry. Five schools from Georgia Tech's College of Sciences and College of Engineering are represented.
That suits Joe Perry's work well. A faculty member in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, he's part of the Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics - which already includes researchers from different schools.
"Just the fact that we run into one another in hallways creates exchanges that can lead to great new ideas," he says. "If these collaborators weren't in the building, I'd have to pick up the phone and potentially interrupt somebody's work. It's a different dynamic when you can talk with somebody face-to-face."
Gary Schuster likes to hear words like those. As dean of Georgia Tech's College of Sciences, he was heavily involved in the design of the building. Now, as Georgia Tech's provost, he's seeing the rewards of that strategy.
"We have built our new buildings so they are interactive and flexible, with a lot of open meeting space," he says. "We have tried to provide a social, interactive environment that allows easy collaboration and cooperation."
But there's much more to it than that.
Building 'Research Neighborhoods'
Universities traditionally organize themselves around disciplines, part of a 'reductionist' approach that solves difficult problems by breaking them down into pieces small enough to understand. That approach has worked well, and is necessary to gain the depth needed to make progress within disciplines, Schuster says.
But that approach won't work against complex and interrelated problems, such as understanding the social aspects of biological systems. Take ant colonies, for example.
"If your objective is to understand ant colonies, you can't study just one ant," Schuster explains. "All of the interactions of ant colonies, which are very complex structures, emerge from interactions among ants. A lot of the problems that the world now faces are of the character of ant colonies."
For instance, he notes, solutions to the world's energy problems must consider not only such issues as British thermal units (Btu) and electrical efficiency, but also environmental impact and sustainability. Those are 'emergent' problems, and they must be solved holistically - and at the intersection of different disciplines.
Hence the organization of the Molecular Science & Engineering building into 'research neighborhoods' housing faculty members from different disciplines who are working on similar issues - but from different perspectives. The concept was also applied in the Ford Environmental Science & Technology Building (ES&T), which is also part of Georgia Tech's four-building Biotechnology Complex.
"What we have done is try to build a physical infrastructure that supports the reductionist approach, but has an emergent overarching view," Schuster explains. "We didn't build a chemistry building or chemical engineering building. We built the Environmental Science & Technology Building, and we built the Molecular Science & Engineering Building. We still have departments that have the disciplinary expertise, but we've put people together to solve the emergent problems."
Within the new building, which completes the four-building complex, faculty offices are clustered in a 'wedge' to encourage casual conversations. The traditional approach would have put faculty together with their laboratories and space for graduate students.
"That puts the faculty into interaction with people, regardless of what their degrees happen to be, who are thinking about similar things, but from different perspectives," Schuster explains. "An electrical engineering faculty member is likely to have his or her office next to a chemistry faculty member."
The faculty members still interact with their graduate students, of course, and the students also benefit from neighbors who may approach issues from a different perspective.
The Impact of Life Sciences
The Environmental Science & Technology Building is the largest research facility on the Georgia Tech campus. The new Molecular Science & Engineering Building is the second-largest. That both are part of the new Biotechnology Complex demonstrates the importance of the life sciences to Georgia Tech, which emerged on the national scene through its strengths in industrial, mechanical, civil, aerospace and other traditional engineering areas.
But that traditional focus is changing rapidly.
"Georgia Tech is defining its own path through the biosciences," Schuster continues. "The path we are defining comes from our tradition of being quantitative and analytical, and this results in a style of approaching life sciences that allows us to step back and apply our strengths. We are able to combine the quantitative engineering and scientific challenges of Georgia Tech with a strong medical school in Emory University."
That collaboration, for example, led to formation of a jointly operated department of biomedical engineering, the first of its kind in the country involving a public and a private university. The Wallace Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering now grants both undergraduate and graduate degrees and is housed in the third building of the Biotechnology Complex, the U.A. Whitaker Biomedical Engineering Building. The fourth building is the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience.
Reconsidering the Physical Environment
Georgia Tech's growth created an opportunity to reconsider how the physical environment affects research, teaching and service. Over the past decade, it has invested nearly $1 billion in new and remodeled facilities, including the Biotechnology Complex.
"This allowed us to think about what a major research university of the 21st century should look like, and it gave us enough flexibility in the construction projects to think seriously about what we wanted to be," Schuster explains. "We were able to think strategically."
But in encouraging collaboration, administrators can do only so much. They can create a supportive environment, but the organization of projects will be done by faculty members who form natural alliances based on mutual benefit.
"I'm a big fan of self-organizing systems," Schuster adds. "It's the responsibility of the administration to be strategic in its thinking and to set the boundary conditions and goals. We have to provide the facilities to allow the faculty members and students to operate. That encourages a spirit of entrepreneurship among our faculty, and leads to collaborations not only within Georgia Tech, but also with government and industry."
The Biotechnology Complex carries entrepreneurship to an unusual level with the ATDC Biosciences Center. Located in the ES&T Building, the Center is a satellite facility of Georgia Tech's science and technology incubator, the Advanced Technology Development Center. The ATDC facility allows researchers with offices and labs in the Complex to tend their companies while maintaining their regular Georgia Tech duties.
A recent graduate of the facility is CardioMEMS, a maker of implantable medical sensing devices that has raised more than $50 million in venture funding since 2001. The incubator currently houses three companies focused on life-science markets.
Beyond entrepreneurship, the self-assembly of chemists, biochemists, materials engineers, biomedical engineers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers and other specialists has already begun to pay off, says Thomas Orlando, chair of Georgia Tech's School of Chemistry and Biochemistry - Joe Perry's home department.
"We have had new faculty join us due to our ability to work together, and this has helped in recruiting some of the best talent in the world," he reports. "We have also noticed that the interdisciplinary nature of our school has been attractive to graduate students and has helped increase the number and quality of students."
Connecting to Green Space
Located in booming midtown Atlanta, Georgia Tech could easily become a concrete wasteland. But creating an attractive environment was important to the school's administration. So the new MS&E Building connects the Biotechnology Complex to an attractive bit of forest in the city - the President's Glade, located behind the campus home of President Wayne Clough.
The facility will also be part of the planned Eco-Commons, which will restore creeks and green space destroyed by development during the last century.
Issues of sustainability also drove the building's design, which was done by the architectural firm CUH2A, Inc. To reduce storm water runoff from the building, for instance, the architects incorporated cisterns that store rainwater and use it for landscape irrigation. Condensation from the building's HVAC system is also used for irrigation - instead of being dumped into the city's sewerage system.
"We also got rid of a lot of concrete that had been in the area and restored permeable soil that allows water to percolate into the ground," notes Fred Dolder, senior capital projects manager in the Georgia Tech Facilities Department. "Terracing of a new quad within the four-building complex provides a great space for the community to sit and enjoy the sun."
The $77 million facility also features an energy recovery system designed to reduce utility costs and cut the building's impact on the environment. A dramatic glass wall faces north - away from the sun - while south-facing windows were designed to admit light while keeping out direct sunlight during the hot Georgia summers. More than three-quarters of the building's space has access to natural light.
Laboratory spaces were designed to be modular, easily reconfigurable to meet changing needs - and hold down construction and renovation costs. Service hallways ensure that supply deliveries are kept separate from pedestrian traffic. Beyond the research laboratories, the MS&E building provides four 40-seat classrooms and a 150-seat lecture hall.
The building replaced facilities that had been the headquarters for Georgia Tech's Facilities Department. Many of the maintenance activities associated with that unit were integrated into the MS&E Building - but few students and faculty will ever seen them because they were separated from public spaces by an access tunnel.
In addition to classroom, office and laboratory spaces, the building also features a two-level 8,000 square-foot 'Quad Cafe' - a restaurant and coffee shop that Dolder describes as the 'little jewel' of the project. To be operated by Georgia Tech's Auxiliary Services, the cafe will also support the goals of interdisciplinary collaboration.
The project's construction manager was Turner Construction Company, and project management was handled by the Staubach Company. Though portions of the building remain to be built out, Dolder considers the project an overwhelming success.
"It was an excellent project not only from the design perspective, but also for the quality of the construction and the teamwork in pulling it off," he adds. "We wanted to create a pleasant environment that would encourage collaboration and interdisciplinary research. When you take these four buildings together with the type of work that is done here, it's a very powerful site by any measure."
Robert Snyder, chair of Georgia Tech's School of Materials Science and Engineering - Ken Sandhage's home department - has his own measure for judging the project a success.
"The Molecular Science & Engineering Building has many of our bio- and bio-enabled faculty working next to nanomaterials faculty who have an interest in cancer, who are next to biomedical engineering faculty and students," he points out. "We have succeeded in knocking down the old traditional walls between engineering and science disciplines. The synergy can be felt in the air."
This article originally appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Research Horizons, Georgia Tech's research magazine.
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]]>Researchers who use sequentially repeated tests to obtain statistical samples of molecular properties usually assume that each test is identical to - and independent of - any other tests in the sequence. In their article, however, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology provide examples of test sequences that may not be composed of independent and identically-distributed (i.i.d.) random variables.
"If you are probing a cell to get a bit of information, how do you know that the cell is not going to respond by changing the information it reveals the next time you probe it?" asked Cheng Zhu, a Regents' Professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. "If you are probing a molecule, can you assume that the molecule will return to its original configuration before you test it the next time? We didn't think about this until we had been doing these kinds of experiments for more than ten years."
Supported by the National Institutes of Health, the research demonstrates that certain cells can 'remember' their earlier encounters through specific receptor-ligand interactions. That would mean that some sequential measurements may not have been truly independent, and could therefore prompt re-examination of some research that obtained data under the i.i.d. assumption.
"People doing research in this area ought to look at what we have found to see if their systems also have memories that may have affected their conclusions," Zhu said. "They may discover new aspects that may have been overlooked."
Using a micropipette adhesion frequency assay, Zhu's research team studied a number of receptor-ligand interactions. The sequence data analysis conducted by Veronika Zarnitsyna, a research scientist in the Coulter Department, revealed examples in which an interaction observed in one test affected the outcome of a future test. Depending on the biological system, the effect could either increase or decrease the likelihood of a future interaction.
For instance, interaction between T cell receptors and an antigen bound to major histocompatibility molecules showed positive correlation, with one interaction increasing the likelihood of a future interaction. Interaction between C-adherins exhibited the opposite behavior, with one interaction reducing the likelihood of a future interaction. In a third system the researchers studied, the events appeared to be truly independent, with one interaction not affecting a future one.
"The i.i.d. assumption in single-molecule experiments was something that people usually took for granted," Zarnitsyna said.
The research reported in PNAS began when Jun Huang, a graduate student in the Zhu lab, examined T cell test data and noted a distinct difference: interactions appeared consecutively in long strings and then disappeared for a long while. Huang asked Zhu about the pattern. Zhu then shared his concerns about the independence of the tests with Zarnitsyna, a biophysicist.
Zarnitsyna analyzed data generated by Huang and Fang Zhang - another graduate student in the Zhu lab - and additional data obtained in the lab by Yuan-Hung Chien, a student from the laboratory of Deborah Leckband at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
"Positive memory increases the likelihood of having two interactions in a row, which generates long strings of interactions," said Zarnitsyna. "The negative memory, conversely, decreases the likelihood of having consecutive interactions, which results in more solitary interactions in the sequence."
Zhu compares the negative correlation to the effects of strong light on the eyes. "If you go from the dark to the bright, time is required before you can see well again," he noted. "Exposure to strong light temporarily inhibits the eyes' response to the next input."
Zhu's research team studies single-molecule mechanics using sensitive force techniques, such as atomic force microscopes and biomembrane force probes, to put cells and molecules together and then measure the forces or times required to pull them apart. Ideas developed for the adhesion frequency assay may also be applicable to this research because the i.i.d. assumption is violated if the force or time depends on where in a test sequence it was measured.
As a next step, Zhu would like to further characterize the memory effect to determine how long it lasts. "It seems reasonable that if you prolong the cycle time - the period between trials - the cell or molecule would gradually forget" said.
He would also like to study the biological mechanisms of the memory effects.
"We believe this phenomenon may be biologically important, though we don't yet know the implications for it," Zhu said. "This may represent a way for cells to regulate their adhesion and signaling. For T cells, the ability to 'remember' even a brief interaction with a pathogen may be related to their ability to tell an intruder from 'self' molecules, which is crucial to the body's defense in the immune system."
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]]>Since this new sensor allows water and air samples to be analyzed in the field, it is an improvement over classical techniques that require samples be carried back to the laboratory for analysis. This research, funded by the National Science Foundation, was presented on August 20 at the American Chemical Society's 234th National Meeting.
The heart of the disk-shaped sensor is a microbalance that measures the mass of pollutant molecules.
"When pollutant chemicals get adsorbed to the surface of the sensor, a frequency change of the vibrating microbalance provides a measure of the associated mass change," said Oliver Brand, associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Cantilever-type balances, which move up and down like a diving board, are common when measuring the amount of a chemical in the gas phase. However, the mechanical vibrations of the balance used to detect the mass changes are damped in liquids, causing the sensitivity of the balance to decrease. Thus, Brand and graduate students Jae Hyeong Seo, Stuart Truax and Kemal Safak Demirci searched for structures whose vibrations were less affected by the surrounding medium.
The researchers chose a silicon disk platform for the sensor. The disk shears back and forth around its center with a characteristic resonance frequency between 300 and 1,000 kHz, depending on its geometry. With proper actuation and sensing elements integrated onto the microstructures, Brand can electrically excite the resonator and sense these rotational oscillations.
Since each sensor has a diameter of approximately 200-300 microns, or the average diameter of a human hair, an array of a dozen sensors is only a few millimeters in size.
To determine how to selectively detect multiple pollutants in the same sample, Brand began collaborating with Boris Mizaikoff, an associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and director of its Applied Sensors Laboratory.
Mizaikoff and graduate students Gary Dobbs and Yuliya Luzinova selected commercially available hydrophobic polymers and deposited them as thin film membranes on the sensor surface. They continue to investigate innovative ways to consistently deposit the polymers at the disk surface, while ensuring sufficient adhesion for long-term field applications.
"By modifying the silicon transducer surface with different polymer membranes, each sensor becomes selective for groups of chemicals," explained Mizaikoff.
An array of these sensors, each sensor with a different chemically modified transducer surface, can sense different pollutants in a variety of environments ranging from industrial to environmental and biomedical monitoring applications.
Brand and Mizaikoff aim to detect volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in aqueous and gaseous environments. VOCs are pollutants of high prevalence in the air and surface and ground waters. They are emitted from products such as paints, cleaning supplies, pesticides, building materials and furnishings, office equipment and craft materials.
A common VOC is benzene, with a maximum contaminant level set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at five micrograms per liter in drinking water. Many VOCs are present at similar very low concentrations, so effective sensors must accurately measure and discriminate very small mass changes.
"We've been able to measure concentrations among the lowest levels that have been achieved using this type of resonant microsensor," noted Brand. "While we have not achieved the required sensitivity yet, we are constantly making improvements."
Brand and Mizaikoff have tested their sensor device in the laboratory by pumping water with specific pollutant concentrations through a simple flow cell device attached to the sensor.
A typical test begins by flowing a water sample containing a known amount of pollutant over a sensor coated with a polymer membrane. When the sample flows through the cell, the mass of the microstructure increases, causing its characteristic vibration frequency, or resonance frequency, to decrease. By monitoring this resonance frequency over time, Brand and Mizaikoff can detect the amount of aromatic hydrocarbons such as benzene present in water.
The researchers plan to run field trials to investigate the use of this new microsensor in aqueous and gaseous environments for rapid on-site screening of multiple pollutants.
"With benzene and other VOCs high on the EPA priority pollutant list, it would be a major advantage to get a rapid reading of VOC concentrations directly in the field," said Mizaikoff.
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]]>This scene may sound normal, but this is no ordinary Porsche Cayenne-it thinks for itself and requires no driver. This autonomous vehicle was designed by the Georgia Institute of Technology in collaboration with Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Urban Challenge.
Georgia Tech's vehicle, named Sting 1, did not qualify for the final challenge during the National Qualifying Event (NQE) held from October 26-31 at the urban military training facility located on the former George Air Force Base in Victorville, California. Sting 1 finished as one of 35 teams that made it to the NQE.
"As a first-time entrant, the team has done an outstanding job making it to the semifinal round of the world's most challenging robotics competition," said Tucker Balch, team lead and associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing.
With six cameras, eight computers, Doppler radar and infrared laser radar on board, Sting 1 was designed to operate without any human intervention and obey California traffic laws while performing maneuvers such as merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles and avoiding moving obstacles.
The road to California began in the summer of 2006, when Georgia Tech and 88 other teams signed up to participate in this year's Urban Challenge.
"Georgia Tech didn't compete in the two previous Grand Challenges, but SAIC did," added Balch. "Their experience helped us develop software that could have enabled a robot to place well in the previous challenges and then we took it further with additional capabilities necessary for the Urban Challenge."
The Georgia Tech team, consisting of researchers in Georgia Tech's College of Computing and College of Engineering and the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), chose the Porsche Cayenne as their vehicle and in August 2006 began to install computers that would drive the car automatically.
Eight computers networked together through two high speed networks were programmed to know the rules of the road. This included knowing how to stay in a lane, how to overtake another car, how to make turns in city traffic, how to maneuver the waiting patterns at an intersection, how to merge into traffic and how to behave in a parking lot.
According to the racing team, the car really had to think for itself.
"When moving forward, the car usually ignored obstacles that were in its planned path," said Tom Collins, electronics lead and GTRI principal research engineer. "But when obstacles were detected, the car would plan and execute a different route."
SAIC engineers developed methods for visual lane detection and tracking. On unpaved dirt roads, the colors of the road and non-road areas were modeled to identify a path, adapting over time as lighting or surface colors changed. On marked paved roads, a camera kept the car in its lane by detecting the typical white and yellow lines that mark a driving lane. If the vision system was unable to find a lane, the car used lasers to follow the curb. Ten laser range finders sent out infrared laser beams that constantly scanned to provide Sting 1 with an accurate measurement of the distance to any objects, such as curbs and other cars.
At intersections, the team used laser and radar sensors to see other waiting or approaching vehicles. Six off-the-shelf Doppler radar systems used to detect moving objects allowed the car to see as far as two football fields away in all directions. Cameras helped guide the car through the intersections and onto new roadways.
"We had to guarantee that there was at least a 10 second window that would allow us to pull out onto a road, accelerate and get up to a reasonable speed without cutting someone off," noted Henrik Christensen, principal investigator for the team and director of Georgia Tech's Robotics and Intelligent Machines Center.
The researchers tested their car for months in the parking lot behind the Centergy One building in Technology Square on the Georgia Tech campus. They also utilized the Georgia Public Safety Training Center in Forsyth, Ga. on weekends to test the ability of the car to maneuver in an urban environment.
The Urban Challenge is the third in a series of DARPA-sponsored competitions to foster the development of robotic ground vehicle technology without a human operator, designed for use on the battlefield. Safe operation in traffic is essential to U.S. military plans to use autonomous ground vehicles to conduct important missions and keep American personnel out of harm's way.
Georgia Tech researchers are already thinking about life after the Urban Challenge.
"We've already talked about expanding this work to other areas," said Vince Camp, hardware lead and GTRI senior research engineer. "We're looking forward to using the technologies in applications such as autonomous lane striping for the Department of Transportation."
Challenges like this also aim to improve safety in vehicles consumers purchase. Some high-end vehicles sold today have backup sensors that alert the driver to obstacles and can parallel park without driver assistance. There are also systems that will alert a driver that is approaching a car in the same lane too quickly or if a driver is leaving the appropriate lane.
"These types of systems will help us become better drivers, but it's probably going to be a decade or so before we see fully autonomous vehicles," said Christensen. "At some point, though, drivers will realize that their cars are probably much more aware of what's going on around the car and are better equipped to deal with a situation than human drivers."
DARPA awarded a first-place prize of $2 million to Carnegie Mellon's Tartan Racing Team. Second and third places went to teams from Stanford Univesity and Virginia Tech.
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Writer: Abby Vogel
]]>The new sustainability standard, approved by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), addresses chemicals and materials used in manufacturing carpet, the energy used in production, the use of recycled or bio-based content, methods of disposal and/or reuse and the overall environmental performance of manufacturers.
"The LEED standards for buildings suggested that standards were an effective strategy for encouraging competition and providing an objective way of evaluating sustainability claims made in the marketplace," said Matthew Realff, an associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering who served as chair of the committee that developed the standard.
This new standard aims to help consumers sort out the complex sustainable attributes and encourage manufacturers and their suppliers to seek out or develop environmentally preferable processes, practices, power sources and materials.
NSF International, an ANSI-accredited standards development body, created the standard and a committee consisting of carpet and rug manufacturers, end users such as interior design professionals, state agencies responsible for environmentally preferable product procurement practices, academics and non-governmental organizations approved it. The effort was spearheaded by Robert Peoples, director for sustainability for the Carpet and Rug Institute (CRI), a nonprofit trade association based in Dalton, Georgia.
"This new standard provides tremendous benefit to those decision makers who specify and purchase billions of yards of carpet annually in the US. The new unified standard assures those purchasers that they are selecting environmentally preferable carpets," said Werner Braun, president of CRI.
The sustainability standard builds on earlier efforts by the carpet industry to address environmental issues. The Green Label certification program developed by CRI that required carpets to meet emissions criteria for volatile organic compounds and other chemicals is part of the new standard.
Silver, gold and platinum certification levels will be awarded to manufacturers based on the number of points earned, with a total of 114 points possible. In addition, some categories mandate that specific requirements be met to achieve the higher certification levels.
California has worked closely to align the platinum level of the new standard with its current California Gold Sustainable Carpet Standard. The state plans to transition all of its carpet purchases to this level over the next 12-18 months, eventually completely transitioning to the new standard.
The standard aims to measure the environmental footprint of carpet products by looking at the whole supply chain and considering five major performance categories: public health and environment; energy and energy efficiency; bio-based or recycled materials; manufacturing; and reclamation and end of life management.
: Public health and environment
A manufacturer can achieve points by taking steps to minimize its use of pollutants and energy use that adversely affects public health and the environment. This section awards points for minimizing the use of known harmful pollutants and additional points for reducing the number of pollutants even further.
: Energy and energy efficiency
The energy and energy efficiency category recognizes the use of renewable energy and implementation of energy conservation and energy efficiency measures.
"We want companies to focus on measuring their environmental impact so that they will continue to strive to reduce it," explained Realff. "Companies can get points for tracking their greenhouse gas emissions and the balance of renewable and fossil-based energy used to produce the carpet."
: Bio-based or recycled materials
Companies can also achieve points by using bio-based materials. This can include biological products, renewable agricultural materials (including plant, animal, and marine animals) or forestry materials.
Recycled materials also count and are measured by calculating the amount of recycled content compared to the total product weight, creating a percentage value. Platinum certification requires 10 percent post consumer recycled content.
"You can gain points for reusing old carpet to produce new carpet," noted Realff. "One example is that old carpet can be used to produce the backing that provides the mechanical integrity of carpet tiles."
Manufacturers can also reclaim carpet to make other products. "There are several successful building products that use old carpet, such as the padding that goes underneath new carpet," added Realff.
: Manufacturing
The manufacturing category encourages corporate environmental responsibility and achievements. A company can gain three points for completing the life cycle assessment of their carpet.
Realff and Michael Overcash, a professor at North Carolina State University, have been building the database to enable companies to assess the life cycle of their products through a project sponsored by Georgia's Traditional Industries Program.
"The life cycle inventory assesses all of the energy and emissions from the various parts of the carpet supply chain - from obtaining the raw materials to its final disposal or reuse," said Realff.
This category also includes points for minimizing the generation of waste materials during production. Inefficient materials selection, supplier delivery, production processes and warehousing operations can lead to high levels of waste generation and corresponding losses in production yields.
: Reclamation and end of life management
The reclamation and end of life management category builds upon the Memorandum of Understanding for Carpet Stewardship signed in 2002 by members of the carpet industry, representatives of government agencies at the federal, state and local levels and non-governmental organizations. Signatures promised to keep at least 40 percent of the total amount of carpet produced out of landfills by 2012. As of 2005, 7 percent was being recycled and 10 percent was diverted from landfills, according to CRI.
If companies can retrieve more than two percent of their carpet, they can gain points. Up to 17 points can be gained for reclamation of 80 percent or more.
"Old carpet shouldn't just be thrown away when it can be used to build new automobile parts or drainage chambers for storm water systems," added Realff.
The first carpet products certified to the new standard are expected to be available in the marketplace by April, according to Realff.
"Companies must gather production data for a year to be able to demonstrate the various performance requirements and some manufacturers might not have even been producing certain carpet styles that would meet certification standards for that length of time," he explained.
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Writer: Abby Vogel
]]>Launched by a multi-year grant from the Charles A. Edison Fund - which is named for the inventor's son, a successful businessman and former governor of New Jersey - the Georgia Tech Edison Fund will provide seed funding for early-stage technology companies that have a close association with Georgia Tech.
"We will focus on startups at the very early stage, because that's the hardest money for an entrepreneur to find," explained Stephen Fleming, Georgia Tech's chief commercialization officer and manager of the new fund. "Once companies have customers, a product and some traction in the marketplace, they can interest larger investors."
In his role as Georgia Tech's chief commercialization officer and director of Commercialization Services within the Enterprise Innovation Institute, Fleming helps faculty members, graduate students and others launch new companies through Georgia Tech's VentureLab. He sees first-hand how difficult locating early funding can be.
"There is certainly a perception that there's not enough early-stage capital in Atlanta," he said. "The Georgia Tech Edison Fund will not by itself be a silver bullet that solves this problem, but I think it will help by putting new energy into and a new focus on early-stage financing."
Fleming plans to make the requirement for a Georgia Tech connection as broad as possible. For example, the Fund will invest in companies that may be founded by Georgia Tech faculty, students and graduates; licensing technology from Georgia Tech; sponsoring research at Georgia Tech; or even hiring a large number of Georgia Tech alumni.
"The Georgia Tech Edison Fund is for the whole community," Fleming added. "There are a lot of Georgia Tech threads running through the entrepreneur community in Atlanta and Georgia. This really won't limit our capability very much because a lot of deals we are going to want to make are well connected to Georgia Tech."
The Fund will be 'evergreen,' meaning it will reinvest the proceeds from any liquidity events back into other opportunities. Fleming is establishing an investment committee to help guide decisions. The investments will generally be less than $250,000.
The Georgia Tech Edison Fund has already made its first investment in Pramana, a member company of the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) that is commercializing Internet technology developed in Institute's College of Computing.
Fleming says the Charles Edison Fund and Georgia Tech are natural collaborators.
"We are excited to be working with them because Edison is one of the instantly recognizable brand names around the world," he explained. "Edison means innovation, invention and creativity - all of which are things we are trying to do. This helps us get our message across very quickly."
For potential donors, the Fund offers a unique opportunity.
"This is a very different charitable giving opportunity for people who are interested in entrepreneurship and in helping the next generation of entrepreneurs," Fleming said. "These potential donors may remember how difficult it was to get their businesses started, and would like to give something forward to the next generation."
Donations to the Georgia Tech Edison Fund will be completely targeted to entrepreneurs. The Fund is not charging a management fee, nor is it paying carried interest to the managers, Fleming noted.
Gifts to the Fund will be received by Georgia Advanced Technology Ventures, a 501(c)3 non-profit affiliated with Georgia Tech, and so will be tax-deductible. Donors will receive no financial benefit from investments made by the Fund, he added.
Beyond seed-level investments, the Fund will also offer entrepreneurs the opportunity to learn from donors who may wish to provide mentoring or service on corporate advisory boards. "The level of energy and enthusiasm in the entrepreneur community is really infectious," Fleming said. "The chance to work with entrepreneurs like these even in small ways will be good for donors who are interested in it."
For the Charles Edison Fund, the new Georgia Tech initiative represents an opportunity to continue the tradition of innovation and entrepreneurship established by the famed inventor. The collaboration with Georgia Tech is the first university partnership for the Edison organization, which supports a broad range of educational activities aimed at keeping the Edison tradition alive.
"This is a novel idea that I don't think has been tried before," said John Keegan, chairman and president of the Charles Edison Fund. "What makes it novel is that it provides support to faculty members whose ideas are literally in the pre-natal stage, before the concept is developed enough to take to a venture capitalist to seek funding."
Georgia Tech alumnus Edward Allman, a long-time member of the Charles Edison Fund board of directors, played a key role in advocating the funding to establish the Georgia Tech Edison Fund.
"I firmly believe that the Georgia Tech Edison Fund will be the starting point for some of our nation's most promising new technologies," Allman said. "Georgia Tech was founded on a tradition of taking theory and applying it to the real world in ways that make people's lives better. Thomas Edison once said that genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, which reminds me of what life was all about at Tech. I am thrilled to be a part of the joining of these organizations and look forward to great progress."
For more information about the Georgia Tech Edison Fund: (404-385-2360) or (cs@innovate.gatech.edu).
-- Dan Treadaway in Georgia Tech's Institute Communications and Public Affairs contributed to this article.
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Writer: John Toon
]]>That's not so good for a standard the world depends on to define mass.
Now, two U.S. professors ' a physicist and mathematician ' say it's time to define the kilogram in a new and more elegant way that will be the same today, tomorrow and 118 years from now. They've launched a campaign aimed at redefining the kilogram as the mass of a very large - but precisely-specified - number of carbon-12 atoms.
"Our standard would eliminate the need for a physical artifact to define what a kilogram is," said Ronald F. Fox, a Regents' Professor Emeritus in the School of Physics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "We want something that is logically very simple to understand."
Their proposal is that the gram - 1/1000th of a kilogram - would henceforth be defined as the mass of exactly 18 x 140744813 carbon-12 atoms.
The proposal, made by Fox and Theodore P. Hill - a Professor Emeritus in the Georgia Tech School of Mathematics - first assigns a specific value to Avogadro's constant. Proposed in the 1800s by Italian scientist Amedeo Avogadro, the constant represents the number of atoms or molecules in one mole of a pure material - for instance, the number of carbon-12 atoms in 12 grams of the element. However, Avogadro's constant isn't a specific number; it's a range of values that can be determined experimentally, but not with enough precision to be a single number.
Spurred by Hill's half-serious question about whether Avogadro's constant was an even or odd number, in the fall of 2006 Fox and Hill submitted a paper to Physics Archives in which they proposed assigning a specific number to the constant - one of about 10 possible values within the experimental range. The authors pointed out that a precise Avogadro's constant could also precisely redefine the measure of mass, the kilogram.
Their proposal drew attention from the editors of American Scientist, who asked for a longer article that was published in March 2007. The proposal has so far drawn five letters, including one from Paul J. Karol, chair of the Committee on Nomenclature, Terminology and Symbols of the American Chemical Society. Karol added his endorsement to the proposal and suggested making the number divisible by 12 - which Fox and Hill did in an addendum by changing their number's final digit from 8 to 6. So the new proposal for Avogadro's constant became 844468863, still within the range of accepted values.
Fast-forward to September 2007, when Fox read an Associated Press article on the CNN.com Web site about the mass disappearing from the International Prototype Kilogram. While the AP said the missing mass amounted to no more than 'the weight of a fingerprint,' Fox argues that the amount could be significant in a world that is measuring time in ultra-sub-nanoseconds and length in ultra-sub-nanometers.
So Fox and Hill fired off another article to Physics Archive, this one proposing to redefine the gram as 1/12th the mass of a mole of carbon 12 - a mole long being defined as Avogrado's number of atoms. They now hope to generate more interest in their idea for what may turn out to be a competition of standards proposals leading up to a 2011 meeting of the International Committee for Weights and Measures.
At least two other proposals for redefining the kilogram are under discussion. They include replacing the platinum-iridium cylinder with a sphere of pure silicon atoms, and using a device known as the 'watt balance' to define the kilogram using electromagnetic energy. Both would offer an improvement over the existing standard - but not be as simple as what Fox and Hill have proposed, nor be exact, they say.
"Using a perfect numerical cube to define these constants yields the same level of significance - eight or nine digits - as in those integers that define the second and the speed of light," Hill said. "A purely mathematical definition of the kilogram is experimentally neutral - researchers may then use any laboratory method they want to approximate exact masses."
The kilogram is the last major standard defined by a physical artifact rather than a fundamental physical property. In 1983, for instance, the distance represented by a meter was redefined by how far light travels in 1/299,792,458 seconds - replacing a metal stick with two marks on it.
"We suspect that there will be some public debate about this issue," Fox said. "We want scientists and science teachers and others to think about this problem because we think they can have an impact. Public discussion may play an important role in determining how one of the world's basic physical constants is defined."
How important is this issue to the world's future technological development?
"When you make physical and chemical measurements, it's important to have as high a precision as possible, and these standards really define the limits of precision," Fox said. "The lack of an accurate standard leaves some inconsistency in how you state results. Having a unique standard could eliminate that."
While the new definition would do away with the need for a physical representation of mass, Fox says people who want a physical artifact could still have one - though carbon can't actually form a perfect cube with the right number of atoms.
And building one might take some time.
"You could imagine having a lump of matter that actually had exactly the right number of atoms in it," Fox noted. "If you could build it by some kind of self-assembly process - as opposed to building it atom-by-atom, which would take a few billion years - you could have new kilogram artifact made of carbon. But there's really no need for that. Even if you built a perfect kilogram, it would immediately be inaccurate as soon as a single atom was sloughed off or absorbed."
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Writer: John Toon
]]>"Georgia Tech is very well-respected here because of the intellectual brainpower that we can access across the pond in Atlanta," said Ahuja. "The goal is to make Georgia Tech-Ireland a raving success."
Prior to his appointment as GTI director Ahuja, who is a Regents Professor in the School of Aerospace Engineering, headed the Aerospace and Acoustics Technologies Division of Georgia Tech Research Institute's (GTRI) Aerospace, Transportation and Advanced Systems Laboratory. He was trained at Rolls Royce in Derby, England, and worked at Lockheed in Marietta, Ga., where he eventually became head of the aeroacoustics research program and acting manager of the Advanced Flight Sciences Department.
"Krish is a proven leader with outstanding technical abilities and sharp business sense. He has years of experience directing large research efforts for major government and corporate sponsors," said Dr. Stephen Cross, Georgia Tech vice president, GTRI director and GTI executive director. "Having worked in both industry and education, he brings a unique perspective to
Georgia Tech Ireland which will further our efforts to build strong bonds between academic discovery and commercial success. I am proud to have him leading this very important international effort."
Georgia Tech Ireland, located in Athlone, Ireland, focuses on industry research and development needs. Over the next five years, the Irish operation plans to build up a portfolio of research programs and collaborations with industry valued in excess of $24 million, and at full operation, it will employ 50 highly qualified researchers.
GTRI, which conducts more than $130 million in research and development each year for industry, government and academic institutions across the world, receives support from IDA Ireland, the Irish Government's economic development agency. The new institute focuses on four technology areas that mirror Ireland's research strengths digital media, radio frequency identification (RFID), biotechnology and energy.
"We are dealing with the scholarship of application as well as the scholarship of integration, and there will be a lot of exchange and collaborative work between Georgia Tech in Atlanta and Ireland," observed Ahuja. "This effort helps Georgia Tech further its mission of defining the technological university of the 21st century, and when Georgia Tech Ireland is successful, we will be able to replicate the model in other countries."
About the Georgia Tech Research Institute
The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), established in 1934, is the nonprofit 'real-world' research unit of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, GA. Approximately 1,300 highly-skilled employees, including many of the world's top scientists and engineers, spend each day creatively solving highly-technical problems for hundreds of government and industry customers.
GTRI is committed to solving tough problems, on time and on budget. We assist clients in federal, state, local and international government agencies, industrial firms, academic institutions and private organizations. Conducting more than $130 million in contract research each year, GTRI is committed to its independent, unbiased approach to solving problems. Additional value is provided through close affiliations with academic colleagues within the Georgia Institute of Technology often contribute additional talent and knowledge for meeting specific technological and engineering challenges.
]]>The evaporator, still in use today, deposits thin films necessary for microfabrication processes. Applications include creating the reflective or anti-reflective coatings on optics and building up layers of insulators, semiconductors and conductors to form integrated electronic circuits.
"It's a very rugged machine and it's gotten better with age," said Mike Harris, a principal research engineer in GTRI's Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory. Harris first used the Model 775 evaporator in 1972 as a student.
The system operates by evaporating a source material, such as a metal, in a high vacuum, allowing vapor particles to travel directly to a target object, such as a semiconductor, where they condense back to a solid state and form a thin film of the source material.
Harris attributes the machine's longevity to its design and documentation - and to the skills of GTRI technicians and engineers. "The operator and maintenance manuals are excellent, with exploded views of the various piece parts, making it very easy for our technicians and engineers to repair it when we have problems," he explained.
In addition to repairing the system, GTRI engineers have upgraded and modified the evaporator several times since it was purchased.
First, they changed the high vacuum pump from a diffusion pump to a more modern cryogenic pump in 2002. The diffusion pump generated a high speed jet of vapor by boiling fluid and directing the vapor in the pump throat down into the bottom of the pump and out the exhaust. The newer cryogenic pump traps gases and vapors by condensing them on a cold surface.
To increase the uniformity of results, GTRI researchers added a planetary substrate fixture that rotates inside the evaporation chamber.
In addition, the original system was designed with a tungsten filament that was heated to a high enough temperature so that the source material placed in a crucible on the filament evaporated. GTRI engineers changed this to an electron beam evaporator that fires a high-energy beam from an electron gun to boil a small spot of material, allowing lower vapor pressure materials to be deposited.
Since the 1957 system still runs and remains optimal for numerous applications, Harris sees no reason to buy a new one. "New systems like this probably cost between $700,000 and $1 million," he added. "And the new systems are designed primarily for throughput and that's not necessarily best for a research environment."
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Technical Contact: Mike Harris (404-407-6015); E-mail: (mike.harris@gtri.gatech.edu).
Writer: Abby Vogel
]]>The new research center - to be called the Investigate Multi-physics Modeling and Performance Assessment-driven Characterization and Computation Technology (IMPACT) Center for Advancement of MEMS/NEMS VLSI -- will be led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and will include teams from Purdue University and Lehigh University as well as Georgia Tech. A consortium of companies - including BAE Systems, Inc., Innovative Design & Technology, MEMtronics Corp., Raytheon Co., Rockwell Collins Inc. and the Rogers Corp. - will also participate financially with DARPA in the center.
Georgia Tech's share of the research will be conducted by a team associated with the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).
The research will seek to develop CAD systems that are based on physical models and therefore can conclusively predict the behavior of MEMS devices. Eventually engineers developing systems with MEMS devices could use a simple drag-and-drop interface to simulate not only the electrical effects of MEMS usage, but also thermal, mechanical and reliability aspects as well.
"This kind of predictive capability could greatly increase the speed with which MEMS-enabled microsystems can be developed," said John Papapolymerou, an associate professor in ECE.
Initially, Papapolymerou said, Georgia Tech will receive about $1.25 million for a six-year effort. However, as more companies join the center, that amount is likely to increase, he added.
In the first year Georgia Tech's efforts will focus on the fundamental physics of MEMS devices - particularly with respect to dielectric charging of MEMS switches, Papapolymerou said.
Although MEMS-enabled microsystems have the potential to revolutionize communications, sensors and signal-processing, he said, their capabilities have been limited by a lack of understanding of how physical phenomena govern MEMS-device functionality. It's particularly unclear how much performance is degraded when MEMS devices are exposed to the operating conditions of a integrated circuit.
"When we have a better understanding of the fundamental physics of MEMS devices, we can then proceed to the higher-order models and levels that are required to develop a CAD program," Papapolymerou said.
The ultimate goal of the IMPACT center, he said, will be to promote the availability of MEMS/NEMS-based micro- and nanosystems in military and commercial applications.
"This is meant to be a dynamic center," Papapolymerou said. "The idea is going to be to expand this in the future, so we can also expand the number of research problems that we undertake."
This research is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The content of this article does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the U.S. Government, and no official endorsement should be inferred.
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]]>The study, published November 19 in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), revealed that as temperatures decreased centuries ago during a period called the Little Ice Age, the number of wars increased, famine occurred and the population declined.
Data on past climates may help accurately predict and design strategies for future large and persistent climate changes, but acknowledging the historic social impact of these severe events is an important step toward that goal, according to the study's authors.
"Even though temperatures are increasing now, the same resulting conflicts may occur since we still greatly depend on the land as our food source," said Peter Brecke, associate professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology's Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and co-author of the study.
This new study expands previous work by David Zhang of the University of Hong Kong and lead author of the study.
"My previous research just focused on Eastern China. This current study covers a much larger spatial area and the conclusions from the current research could be considered general principles," said Zhang.
Brecke, Zhang and colleagues in Hong Kong, China and the United Kingdom perceived a possible connection between temperature change and wars because changes in climate affect water supplies, growing seasons and land fertility, prompting food shortages. These shortages could lead to conflict - local uprisings, government destabilization and invasions from neighboring regions - and population decline due to bloodshed during the wars and starvation.
To study whether changes in temperature affected the number of wars, the researchers examined the time period between 1400 and 1900. This period recorded the lowest average global temperatures around 1450, 1650 and 1820, each separated by slight warming intervals.
The researchers collected war data from multiple sources, including a database of 4,500 wars worldwide that Brecke began developing in 1995 with funding from the U.S. Institute of Peace. They also used climate change records that paleoclimatologists reconstructed by consulting historical documents and examining indicators of temperature change like tree rings, as well as oxygen isotopes in ice cores and coral skeletons.
Results showed a cyclic pattern of turbulent periods when temperatures were low followed by tranquil ones when temperatures were higher. The number of wars per year worldwide during cold centuries was almost twice that of the mild 18th century.
The study also showed population declines following each high war peak, according to population data Brecke assembled. The population growth rate of the Northern Hemisphere was elevated from 1400-1600, despite a short cooling period beginning in the middle of the 15th century. However, during the colder 17th century, Europe and Asia experienced more wars of great magnitude and population declines.
In China, the population plummeted 43 percent between 1620 and 1650. Then, a dramatic increase in population occurred from 1650 until a cooling period beginning in 1800 caused a worldwide demographic shock.
The researchers examined whether these average temperature differences of less than one degree Celsius were enough to cause food shortages. By assuming that agricultural production decreases triggered price increases, they showed that when grain prices reached a certain level, wars erupted. The ecological stress on agricultural production triggered by climate change did in fact induce population shrinkages, according to Brecke.
Global temperatures are expected to rise in the future and the world's growing population may be unable to adequately adapt to the ecological changes, according to Brecke.
"The warmer temperatures are probably good for a while, but beyond some level plants will be stressed," explained Brecke. "With more droughts and a rapidly growing population, it is going to get harder and harder to provide food for everyone and thus we should not be surprised to see more instances of starvation and probably more cases of hungry people clashing over scarce food and water."
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]]>A new biosensor developed at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) can detect avian influenza in just minutes. In addition to being a rapid test, the biosensor is economical, field-deployable, sensitive to different viral strains and requires no labels or reagents.
"We can do real-time monitoring of avian influenza infections on the farm, in live-bird markets or in poultry processing facilities," said Jie Xu, a research scientist in GTRI's Electro-Optical Systems Laboratory (EOSL).
Worldwide, there are many strains of avian influenza virus that cause varying degrees of clinical symptoms and illness. In the United States, outbreaks of the disease - primarily spread by migratory aquatic birds - have plagued the poultry industry for decades with millions of dollars in losses. The only way to stop the spread of the disease is to destroy all poultry that may have been exposed to the virus.
A virulent strain of avian influenza (H5N1) has begun to threaten not only birds but humans, with more than 300 infections and 200 deaths reported to the World Health Organization since 2003. Looming is the threat of a pandemic, such as the 1918 Spanish flu that killed about 40 million people, health officials say.
"With so many different virus subtypes, our biosensor's ability to detect multiple strains of avian influenza at the same time is critical," noted Xu.
To test the biosensor, the researchers assessed its ability to detect two avian influenza strains (H7N2 and H7N3) that previously infected poultry. The results showed that a solution containing very few virus particles could be detected by the sensor.
Xu tested a third strain of the virus as a control. When the sensor coating was modified to collect only the other two strains, the control strain was not detected even at high concentrations.
Results of this study were published online in August in the journal Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry and will be included in journal's print edition on October 16. The work was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Agricultural Research Service (ARS) and the Georgia Research Alliance.
"The technology that Georgia Tech developed with our help has many advantages over commercially available tests -- improved sensitivity, rapid testing and the ability to identify different strains of the influenza virus simultaneously," said David Suarez, a collaborator on the project and research leader of exotic and emerging avian viral diseases in ARS' Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Ga. Suarez is providing antibodies and test samples for GTRI's research.
The biosensor is coated with antibodies specifically designed to capture a protein located on the surface of the viral particle. For this study, the researchers evaluated the sensitivity of three unique antibodies to detect avian influenza virus.
The sensor utilizes the interference of light waves, a concept called interferometry, to precisely determine how many virus particles attach to the sensor's surface. More specifically, light from a laser diode is coupled into an optical waveguide through a grating and travels under one sensing channel and one reference channel.
Researchers coat the sensing channel with the specific antibodies and coat the reference channel with non-specific antibodies. Having the reference channel minimizes the impact of non-specific interactions, as well as changes in temperature, pH and mechanical motion. Non-specific binding should occur equally to both the test and reference channels and thus not affect the test results.
An electromagnetic field associated with the light beams extends above the waveguides and is very sensitive to the changes caused by antibody-antigen interactions on the waveguide surface. When a liquid sample passes over the waveguides, any binding that occurs on the top of a waveguide because of viral particle attachment causes water molecules to be displaced. This causes a change in the velocity of the light traveling through the waveguide.
At the end of the waveguide, the light beams from the sensing and reference channels are combined to create an interference pattern. The pattern of alternating dark and light vertical stripes, or fringes, is imaged on a simple detector. By doing a mathematical Fourier transform, the researchers determine the degree to which the fringe patterns are in or out of step with each other, known as phase shift. This phase shift tells the amount of virus bound to the surface.
"The fringe pattern doesn't look like it changes in the image, but with math we find out the speed of the light in the test channel changed creating this phase change," explained Xu.
Current methods of identifying infected birds include virus isolation, real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RRT-PCR) and antigen capture immunoassays. Virus isolation is a sensitive technique, but typically requires five to seven days for testing. RRT-PCR is commonly available in veterinary diagnostic laboratories, but requires expensive equipment and appropriate laboratory facilities. RRT-PCR can take as little as three hours to get test results, but routine surveillance samples are more often processed in 24 hours. The antigen capture immunoassays can provide rapid test results, but suffer from low sensitivity and high cost.
Beyond the waveguide sensor, the only additional external components required for field-testing with GTRI's biosensor include a sample-delivery device (peristaltic pump), a data collection laptop computer and a swab taken from a potentially infected bird. Power is supplied by a nine volt battery and USB connection. The waveguides can be cleaned and reused dozens of times, decreasing the per-test cost of the chip fabrication.
Xu and Suarez are currently working together to test new unique antibodies with the biosensor and to test different strains. In addition, Xu is reducing the size of the prototype device to be about the size of a lunchbox and making the computer analysis software more user-friendly so that it can be field-tested in two years.
"We are continuing our collaboration and have provided additional money to Georgia Tech to move the project along faster," added Suarez. "Since this technology is already set up so that you can use multiple antibodies to detect different influenza subtypes, we are going to extend the work to include the H5 subtype."
In addition to Xu and Suarez, the research team included David Gottfried, who is now a senior research scientist in Georgia Tech's Microelectronics Research Center.
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]]>The new devices - which have electron-mobility values higher than amorphous silicon, low threshold voltages, large on-off ratios and high operational stability - could encourage more designers to begin working on such circuitry for displays, active electronic billboards, RFID tags and other applications that use flexible substrates.
"If you open a textbook and look at what a thin-film transistor should do, we are pretty close now," said Bernard Kippelen, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics. "Now that we have shown very nice single transistors, we want to demonstrate functional devices that are combinations of multiple components. We have everything ready to do that."
Fabrication of the C60 transistors was reported August 27 in the journal Applied Physics Letters. The research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation through the STC program MDITR, and the U.S. Office of Naval Research.
Researchers have been interested in making field-effect transistors and other devices from organic semiconductors that can be processed onto various substrates, including flexible plastic materials. As an organic semiconductor material, C60 is attractive because it can provide high electron mobility - a measure of how fast current can flow. Previous reports have shown that C60 can yield mobility values as high as six square centimeters per volt-second (6 cm2/V/s).
However, that record was achieved using a hot-wall epitaxy process requiring processing temperatures of 250 degrees Celsius - too hot for most flexible plastic substrates.
Though the transistors produced by Kippelen's research team display slightly lower electron mobility - 2.7 to 5 cm2/V/s - they can be produced at room temperature.
"If you want to deposit transistors on a plastic substrate, you really can't have any process at a temperature of more than 150 degrees Celsius," Kippelen said. "With room temperature deposition, you can be compatible with many different substrates. For low-cost, large area electronics, that is an essential component."
Because they are sensitive to contact with oxygen, the C60 transistors must operate under a nitrogen atmosphere. Kippelen expects to address that limitation by using other fullerene molecules - and properly packaging the devices.
The new transistors were fabricated on silicon for convenience. While Kippelen isn't underestimating the potential difficulty of moving to an organic substrate, he says that challenge can be overcome.
Though their performance is impressive, the C60 transistors won't threaten conventional CMOS chips based on silicon. That's because the applications Kippelen has in mind don't require high performance.
"There are a lot of applications where you don't necessarily need millions of fast transistors," he said. "The performance we need is by far much lower than what you can get in a CMOS chip. But whereas CMOS is extremely powerful and can be relatively low in cost because you can make a lot of circuits on a wafer, for large area applications CMOS is not economical."
A different set of goals drives electronic components for use with low-cost organic displays, active billboards and similar applications.
"If you look at a video display, which has a refresh rate of 60 Hz, than means you have to refresh the screen every 16 milliseconds," he noted. "That is a fairly low speed compared to a Pentium processor in your computer. There is no point in trying to use organic materials for high-speed processing because silicon is already very advanced and has much higher carrier mobility."
Now that they have demonstrated attractive field-effect C60 transistors, Kippelen and collaborators Xiao-Hong Zhang and Benoit Domercq plan to produce other electronic components such as inverters, ring oscillators, logic gates, and drivers for active matrix displays and imaging devices. Assembling these more complex systems will showcase the advantages of the C60 devices.
"The goal is to increase the complexity of the circuits to see how that high mobility can be used to make more complex structures with unprecedented performance," Kippelen said.
The researchers fabricated the transistors by depositing C60 molecules from the vapor phase into a thin film atop a silicon substrate onto which a gate electrode and gate dielectric had already been fabricated. The source and drain electrodes were then deposited on top of the C60 films through a shadow mask.
Kippelen's team has been working with C60 for nearly ten years, and is also using the material in photovoltaic cells. Beyond the technical advance, Kippelen believes this new work demonstrates the growing maturity of organic electronics.
"This progress may trigger interest among more conventional electronic engineers," he said. "Most engineers would like to work with the latest technology platform, but they would like to see a level of performance showing they could actually implement these circuits. If you can demonstrate - as we have - that you can get transistors with good reproducibility, good stability, near-zero threshold voltages, large on-off current ratios and performance levels higher than amorphous silicon, that may convince designers to consider this technology."
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]]>Researchers in the Georgia Tech Research Institute's (GTRI) Center for Innovative Fuel Cell and Battery Technologies believe that understanding how and why fuel cells fail is the key to both reducing cost and improving durability.
Center director Tom Fuller has been trying to solve what he deems the top three durability problems since he joined GTRI from United Technologies three years ago.
"My philosophy is if we can really understand the fundamentals of these failure mechanisms, then we can use that information to guide the development of new materials or we can develop system approaches to mitigate these failures," said Fuller, who is also a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE).
The problems Fuller is addressing include chemical attack of the membrane, carbon corrosion and platinum instability. Fuller described progress toward solving these problems last month at the 212th Electrochemical Society Meeting.
In a typical fuel cell, hydrogen is delivered to the anode side of the cell that contains a catalyst, such as platinum. The platinum splits the hydrogen molecules (H2) into hydrogen ions and electrons. On the cathode side of the fuel cell, an oxidant such as a stream of oxygen or air is delivered.
With a proton exchange membrane in the middle, only hydrogen ions can travel through the membrane to the cathode. Electrons travel on a different path through the electrical circuit to the cathode, creating an electrical current. At the cathode, the hydrogen ions combine with oxygen and the electrons that took the longer path to form water, which flows out of the cell.
Fuller's research shows that the membrane, commonly made of a synthetic polymer, is prone to attack by free radicals that create holes in the barrier. The free radicals are formed by the decomposition of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), a strong oxidizing chemical that can form near the membrane.
Since a typical membrane is approximately 25-50 micrometers thick, or about the thickness of a human hair, it's impossible to see the degradation peroxide causes with the naked eye.
In a paper published in March in the Journal of Power Sources, Fuller and professor Dennis Hess, research scientist Galit Levitin and graduate student Cheng Chen, all from ChBE, used X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) to study the membrane degradation. This work was funded by GTRI, ChBE and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The researchers chose XPS because it is a quantitative technique that uses X-rays to measure the presence and quantity of chemical elements and the formation and breakage of chemical bonds within a material.
"We were able to see chemical differences in the membrane with XPS when it went through the degradation process," explained Fuller. "Now we're trying to figure out what really limits or controls the rate of degradation."
The solution will be difficult because the formation of hydrogen peroxide requires only hydrogen and oxygen to be present. Since these chemicals are readily available in fuel cells, hydrogen peroxide can be produced many ways. The problem is further complicated because free radicals are short lived and difficult to detect.
Fuller will leave the actual engineering of new non-degrading membranes to the materials scientists, but what he has learned can guide what properties new membranes should have and how they can be tested for degradation.
Another challenge with low temperature fuel cells is that a blockage can occur on the anode side of the fuel cell, possibly from a water drop formed in the fuel channel. The blockage causes carbon (used to support the platinum) to corrode, turn into carbon dioxide and leave the fuel cell as a gas. Frequently starting and stopping the fuel cell also causes this mode of failure.
This can be catastrophic for the fuel cell because without carbon, the platinum catalyst layer collapses and disappears.
"If this happens, the fuel cell can be destroyed in days rather than years," noted Fuller.
This problem is more common in non-stationary fuel cell applications, such as cars that require the fuel cell to start and stop when the vehicle is turned on and off.
"Researchers know this problem exists, but we're trying to build physics-based detailed models to evaluate different fuel cell designs that will reduce the susceptibility to this type of corrosion," said Fuller, who's working on this project with Norimitsu Takeuchi from Toyota's material research department and students Kevin Gallagher and David Wong with funding from Toyota.
The models can also be used to determine options for controlling and mitigating this problem to find a more effective alternative material that is more resistant to corrosion.
Another problem with fuel cells cycling on and off is that platinum has a small but finite solubility in the acidic membrane given the high electrical potential and oxidizing environment at the cathode.
"Platinum is one of the most expensive parts of the fuel cells, so researchers study how to decrease the amount necessary to run a fuel cell," explained Fuller. "But if there is less platinum in the fuel cell to begin with, you can't afford to lose any by it dissolving."
When the platinum layer dissolves, a band of platinum typically forms inside the membrane. Fuller, GTRI senior research engineer Gary Gray and graduate student Wu Bi, developed a model to predict where the platinum band would form to help to understand why it was happening. This work was published in March in Electrochemical and Solid-State Letters.
"We found that the platinum can also be deposited throughout the membrane and it can move around to different places, but whenever it leaves where it's supposed to be, it's no longer effective," said Fuller.
Fuller aims to understand these very small platinum particles by modeling the transport and thermodynamics of the particles in fuel cell systems. This work was funded by Hyundai Motors Corporation.
A recent gift of $200,000 from the Hartley Foundation will allow Fuller to purchase new research equipment and continue studying the degradation of fuel cells and how to improve/extend the life cycle and technology of these energy devices.
"Fuel cell failure can occur through many different mechanisms," added Fuller. "Results from these three projects show that new materials, new manufacturing processes and new designs are required to improve the durability of fuel cells and in turn lower costs."
The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory funding came from the Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in the Office of Hydrogen, Fuel Cell and Infrastructure Technologies of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract number DE-AC02-05CH11231 through subcontract 6804755.
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]]>The technique would use a biodegradable polymer containing a chemical group that mimics the neurotransmitter acetylcholine to spur the growth of neurites, which are projections that form the connections among neurons and between neurons and other cells. The biomimetic polymers would then guide the growth of the regenerating nerve.
There is currently no treatment for recovering human nerve function after injury to the brain or spinal cord because central nervous system neurons have a very limited capability of self-repair and regeneration.
"Regeneration in the central nervous system requires neural activity, not just neuronal growth factors alone, so we thought a neurotransmitter might send the necessary signals," said Yadong Wang, assistant professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and principal investigator of the study. The research was supported by Georgia Tech, the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB).
Chemical neurotransmitters relay, amplify and modulate signals between a neuron and another cell. This new study shows that integrating neurotransmitters into biodegradable polymers results in a biomaterial that successfully promotes neurite growth, which is necessary for victims of central nervous system injury, stroke or certain neurodegenerative diseases to recover sensory, motor, cognitive or autonomic functions.
Wang and graduate student Christiane Gumera developed novel biodegradable polymers with a flexible backbone that allowed neurotransmitters to be easily added as a side chain. In its current form, the polymer would be implanted via surgery to repair damaged central nerves.
"One of our ultimate goals is to create a conduit for nerve regeneration that guides the neurons to regenerate, but gradually degrades as the neurons regenerate so that it won't constrict the nerves permanently," explained Wang.
For the experiments, the researchers tested polymers with different concentrations of the acetylcholine-mimicking groups. Acetylcholine was chosen because it is known to induce neurite outgrowth and promote the formation and strengthening of synapses, or connections between neurons. They isolated ganglia nervous tissue samples, placed them on the polymers and observed new neurites extend from the ganglia.
Since these neuron extensions must traverse a growth inhibiting material in the body, Wang and Gumera tested the ability of the biomaterial to enhance the extension of sprouted neurites. More specifically, they assessed whether the ganglia sprouted at least 20 neurites and then measured neurite length and neurite length distribution with an inverted phase contrast microscope.
"We found that adding 70 percent acetylcholine to the polymer induced regenerative responses similar to laminin, a benchmark material for nerve culture," said Wang. Seventy percent acetylcholine also led to a neurite growth rate of up to 0.7 millimeters per day, or approximately half the thickness of a compact disc.
Laminin is a natural protein present in the nervous tissues, but it dissolves in water, making it difficult to incorporate into a conduit that needs to support nerves for months. A synthetic polymer with acetylcholine functional groups, on the other hand, can be designed to be insoluble in water, according to Wang.
Since functional restoration after nerve injury requires synapse formation, the researchers also searched for the presence of synaptic vesicle proteins on the newly formed neurites. With fluorescence imaging, they found that neurons cultured on these acetylcholine polymers expressed an established neuronal marker called synaptophysin.
To provide insights to new approaches in functional nerve regeneration, the researchers are currently investigating the mechanisms by which the neurons interact with these polymers. Since neurons that remain intact after severe injury have only a limited capacity to penetrate the scar tissue, these new findings in nerve regeneration could help compensate for the lost connections.
"This polymer and approach aren't limited to nerve regeneration though, they can probably be used for other neurodegenerative disorders as well," added Wang.
This work was funded by grant number R21EB008565 from the NIBIB of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official view of the NIBIB or the NIH.
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]]>Developed by a team of scientists from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and the Indian Head Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, the highly-uniform copper structures will be incorporated into integrated circuits - then chemically converted to millimeter-diameter explosives.
Because they can be integrated into standard microelectronics fabrication processes, the copper materials will enable micro-electromechanical (MEMS) fuzes for military munitions to be mass-produced like computer chips.
"An ability to tailor the porosity and structural integrity of the explosive precursor material is a combination we've never had before," said Jason Nadler, a GTRI research engineer. "We can start with the Navy's requirements for the material and design structures that are able to meet those requirements. We can have an integrated design tool able to develop a whole range of explosive precursors on different size scales."
Nadler uses a variety of templates, including microspheres and woven fabrics, to create regular patterns in copper oxide paste whose viscosity is controlled by the addition of polymers. He then thermochemically removes the template and converts the resulting copper oxide structures to pure metal, retaining the patterns imparted by the template. The size of the pores can be controlled by using different templates and by varying the processing conditions. So far, he's made copper structures with channel sizes as small as a few microns - with structural components that have nanoscale pores.
Based on feedback from the Navy scientists, Nadler can tweak the structures to help optimize the overall device - known as a fuze - which controls when and where a munition will explode.
"We are now able to link structural characteristics to performance," Nadler noted. "We can produce a technically advanced material that can be tailored to the thermodynamics and kinetics that are needed using modeling techniques."
Beyond the fabrication techniques, Nadler developed characterization and modeling techniques to help understand and control the fabrication process for the unique copper structures, which may also have commercial applications.
The copper precursor developed in GTRI is a significant improvement over the copper foam material that Indian Head had previously been evaluating. Produced with a sintered powder process, the foam was fragile and non-uniform, meaning Navy scientists couldn't precisely predict reliability or how much explosive would be created in each micro-detonator.
"GTRI has been able to provide us with material that has well-controlled and well-known characteristics," said Michael Beggans, a scientist in the Energetics Technology Department of the Indian Head Division of the Naval Surface Warfare Center. "Having this material allows us to determine the amount of explosive that can be formed in the MEMS fuze. The size of that charge also determines the size and operation of the other components."
The research will lead to a detonator with enhanced capabilities. "The long-term goal of the MEMS Fuze program is to produce a low-cost, highly-reliable detonator with built-in safe and arm capabilities in an extremely small package that would allow the smallest weapons in the Navy to be as safe and reliable as the largest," Beggans explained.
Reducing the size of the fuze is part of a long-term strategy toward smarter weapons intended to reduce the risk of collateral damage. That will be possible, in part, because hundreds of fuzes, each about a centimeter square, can be fabricated simultaneously using techniques developed by the microelectronics industry.
"Today, everything is becoming smaller, consuming less power and offering more functionality," Beggans added. "When you hear that a weapon is 'smart,' it's really all about the fuze. The fuze is 'smart' in that it knows the exact environment that the weapon needs to be in, and detonates it at the right time. The MEMS fuze would provide 'smart' functionality in medium-caliber and sub-munitions, improving results and reducing collateral damage."
Development and implementation of the new fuze will also have environmental and safety benefits.
"Practical implementation of this technology will enable the military to reduce the quantity of sensitive primary explosives in each weapon by at least two orders of magnitude," said Gerald R. Laib, senior explosives applications scientist at Indian Head and inventor of the MEMS Fuze concept. "This development will also vastly reduce the use of toxic heavy metals and waste products, and increase the safety of weapon production by removing the need for handling bulk quantities of sensitive primary explosives."
The next step will be for Indian Head to integrate all the components of the fuze into the smallest possible package - and then begin producing the device in large quantities.
A specialist in metallic and ceramic cellular materials, Nadler said the challenge of the project was creating structures porous enough to be chemically converted in a consistent way - while retaining sufficient mechanical strength to withstand processing and remain stable in finished devices.
"The ability to design things on multiple size scales at the same time is very important," he added. "Designing materials on the nano-scale, micron-scale and even the millimeter-scale simultaneously as a system is very powerful and challenging. When these different length scales are available, a whole new world of capabilities opens up."
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]]>"In my opinion, that event unleashed the spending power of the baby boomer. A lot of people decided it was time to do it - they felt their own mortality," observed Hoppes. "In the 12 months following 9/11, we had a 62 percent increase in sales."
In the years following 2001, Hoppes said the company experienced a string of 'wide open' 46 percent average annual growth. After breaking down the company's structure and rebuilding it several times, he realized that sort of growth simply could not continue forever and he needed help in developing a strategy to become more profitable.
"During that time, we were operating on tribal knowledge, simply surviving that incredible thrust of growth. We realized we had a lot of wasted motion, we didn't have good documentation, we didn't know exactly how things moved and we didn't know how many hundreds of miles a day our forklift was moving," he said.
Hoppes, who was already familiar with the environmental management services of Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute (EII), called on the organization again for assistance in lean manufacturing, a process management philosophy derived mostly from the Toyota Production System and known for reducing wasted time and effort. John Stephens and Paul Todd, EII project managers, conducted a lean manufacturing seminar for Seminole Marine with 40 key players, including everyone from supervisors to shop floor associates.
At the workshop, participants learned the principles of lean manufacturing and how to apply them. During a series of simulations as a member of a production team, they applied lean concepts such as standardized work, visual signals, batch-size reduction and pull systems, among others. They also experienced how lean improves quality, reduces cycle time, improves delivery performance and reduces work-in-process.
"The seminar was absolutely fantastic; you could see the light bulb coming on as you watched them," recalled Hoppes. "Within an hour, you could see teamwork and cooperation that you had never seen before. That has been the single most dramatic thing that we've ever done as a company."
Since participating in the lean overview in 2005, Hoppes has added on to his facility, for a total of 150,000 square feet of manufacturing space. With more than a half mile from one end of the plant to the other, he conducted an analysis to determine how workers can be more efficient. While he notes that there is always room for improvement, he says that his workflow is efficient, work-in-process has been reduced and the company has better standards based on the new efficiencies.
Hoppes partially credits the lessons learned in the lean manufacturing seminar with helping Seminole Marine gain market share in a market that is currently down by 30 percent. The company primarily makes two platforms - center console boats and cabin boats ranging from 19 to 31 feet - priced at the upper mid-market level. In 2007, Seminole Marine produced 850 boats.
"When there are fewer buyers out there, you need to deliver a better product more efficiently and more timely. We continued a strong marketing campaign and got the best advice we could get from places like Georgia Tech," Hoppes said. "Companies that maintain that attitude will recover at five times the rate of companies that sit back and played it safe."
Not only has Seminole Marine not participated in a declining market, but it has thrived. Since implementing lean principles, the company has increased sales and productivity by 50 percent, increased profit by double digits, expanded the facility by 50 percent and has reduced setup and changeover times by 25 percent. Hoppes estimates that increased sales totaled $6 million and cost savings equated to $3 million.
Despite these impressive numbers, however, Hoppes said he is most proud of the advances the company has made with its employees. Seminole Marine, which offers medical benefits and 401Ks, is the third largest private employer in Grady County with 200 employees.
"When we moved to south Georgia, one of the intangibles we didn't anticipate was the quality of people available to us. They are what you make them. Before the lean seminar, I hadn't really thought about how important it is to have teamwork, good morale and people all pulling in the same direction," he said. "You have two assets in business - your customers and your employees. The rest of it is scrap metal, and the auctioneers can prove it to you if you doubt it."
Hoppes, who serves on the Industry Services Board for the Enterprise Innovation Institute, also stresses the correlation between a company's business associates and its success.
"Unless you're born with expertise in all areas, you need people like those at Georgia Tech on your team. They have seen the very best of manufacturers and stay on the cutting edge of the most advanced techniques," he said. "It's been a great benefit to us and it's integral to our success."
About Enterprise Innovation Institute:
The Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute helps companies, entrepreneurs, economic developers and communities improve their competitiveness through the application of science, technology and innovation. It is one of the most comprehensive university-based programs of business and industry assistance, technology commercialization and economic development in the nation.
Research News & Publications Office
Enterprise Innovation Institute
Georgia Institute of Technology
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Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986); E-mail (john.toon@innovate.gatech.edu) or Nancy Fullbright (404-894-2214); E-mail: (nancy.fullbright@innovate.gatech.edu).
Writer: Nancy Fullbright
]]>At the Georgia Institute of Technology, researchers are studying the formation of these metal oxide nanotubes to understand the key factors that drive the emergence of nanotubes with specific diameters and lengths from a 'soup' of precursor chemicals dissolved in water. Their goal is to develop general guidelines for controlling nanotube diameter with sub-nanometer precision and nanotube length with precision of a few nanometers.
So far, the researchers have obtained encouraging results with a model system that produces aluminosilicogermanate (AlSiGeO) nanotubes. The research, which was presented August 23rd at the 234th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, could open the door for developing a more general set of chemical 'rules' for dimensional control of nanotubes that could lead to a range of new applications for inorganic nanotubes and other nanometer-scale materials.
The research has been sponsored by the American Chemical Society Petroleum Research Fund.
"We have shown that there is a clearly quantifiable molecular-level structural and thermodynamic basis for tuning the diameter of these nanotubes," said Sankar Nair, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. "We're interested in developing the science of these materials to the point that we can manipulate their curvature, length and internal structure in a sophisticated way through inexpensive water-based chemistry under mild conditions."
Using chemical reactions carried out in water at less than 100 degrees Celsius, Nair's research team - which included graduate students Suchitra Konduri and Sanjoy Mukherjee - varied the germanium and silicon content during the nanotube synthesis and then quantitatively characterized the resulting nanotubes with a variety of analytical techniques to show a clear link between the nanotube composition and diameter.
Simultaneously, the group's molecular dynamics calculations showed a strong correlation between the composition, diameter and internal energy of the material.
"There appear to be energy minima that favor or stabilize certain nanotube diameters because they have the lowest energy, and those stable diameters change with the composition of the material," said Nair. "This shows that the nanotube dimensions are not just a fortuitous coincidence of the many synthesis parameters, but that there is an underlying thermodynamic basis arising from the subtle balance of interatomic forces within the material."
Specifically, the molecular dynamics simulations - which are corroborated by the experiments - show that the variation of germanium and silicon content causes sheets of aluminum hydroxide to form nanotubes with diameters ranging from 1.5 to 4.8 nanometers and lengths of less than 100 nanometers. If that turns out to be a general principle applicable to other metal oxides, it could be used to dramatically expand the catalog of nanotube structures available.
Once the researchers fully understand the factors affecting the formation of nanotubes from aluminosilicogermanate materials, they hope to apply similar principles to other metal oxides. The ultimate goal will be an ability to predictably vary the dimensions of nanotubes - and potentially other useful nanostructures - employing different chemical process conditions across a broader range of metal oxide materials.
"One can get a large range of useful properties with metal oxide materials," Nair noted. "Almost all metals form oxides and many of them form layered sheet-like oxides, so if one can coax them into nanotube form with dimensions comparable to single-walled carbon nanotubes, the range of useful properties would be great."
Controlling the dimensions of nanostructures is critical because properties such as electronic band-gap depend strongly upon the dimensions. Dimension control has proven to be difficult in carbon nanotube fabrication processes, leading to an entire area of research focused on purifying nanotubes of specific dimensions from an initial mixture of different sizes.
"If we are able to produce single-walled nanotubes of specific and controllable diameter with inexpensive water-based chemistry, devices based on them would perform in a consistent and predictable manner," Nair explained. "If we could synthesize the same nanotube structure with predictably different diameters and lengths, we could tune the properties like the band-gap across a wide range. We could even get a limited toolbox of materials to do many different things."
Though the chemical reactions that produce the metal oxide nanotubes are complicated, they occur over a period of days at low temperatures and can be carried out with simple laboratory apparatus. That facilitates control over processing conditions and allows the researchers to track many different aspects of the reaction with a variety of characterization tools.
"There is a lot of complex chemistry that can be done in the aqueous phase, which motivated us to understand the processes by which metal ions dissolved in water organize themselves together with oxygen into specific nanotubular arrangements, perhaps aided by water and other species present in the solution," Nair added.
The metal oxide nanotubes have properties very different from those of carbon nanotubes, which have been studied heavily since they were discovered in the 1990s. "For example, the materials that we are working with are much more hydrophilic than carbon and can load nearly 50 percent of their weight with water," Nair explained. "There is a whole range of behavior in oxide nanotubes that we cannot explore with carbon-based materials."
Other recent results of the group's research were published May 5 in the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and have also been reported in the journals Physical Review B and Chemistry of Materials.
Research News & Publications Office
Georgia Institute of Technology
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Atlanta, Georgia 30308 USA
Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986); E-mail (jtoon@gatech.edu).
Technical contact: Sankar Nair (404-894-4826); E-mail: (sankar.nair@chbe.gatech.edu).
Writer: John Toon
]]>"A vaccine administered through a skin patch would have a number of advantages, including less discomfort to the recipients, lower cost and reduced production time," said Richard Compans, professor of microbiology and immunology in the Emory School of Medicine. "Potentially, individuals could administer the vaccine to themselves, perhaps after receiving it in the mail."
The Georgia Tech and Emory team plans to develop and assess the effectiveness of transdermal patches that include arrays of microscopic needles containing or coated with vaccine. They hope to design patches that could be stored for long periods of time at room temperature and that will increase the breadth and duration of immunity to influenza - perhaps with smaller amounts of vaccine.
"We expect that this research will lead to a better way of delivering the flu vaccine, which will allow more people who need it to receive the immunization in a convenient and effective way," said Mark Prausnitz, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. "Beyond that, the possibility of replacing a hypodermic needle with a microneedle patch should significantly impact the way that other vaccines are delivered."
The project team has extensive experience in microneedle development, influenza vaccines, vaccine delivery systems, product development and interdisciplinary collaboration. Beyond influenza, the research could have implications for immunization programs in developing countries, where eliminating the use of hypodermic needles could make vaccines more widely available and address the problem of disease transmission caused by the re-use of conventional hypodermic needles.
In April the NIH awarded a $32.8 million, seven-year contract to Emory, along with the University of Georgia, to establish the Emory/UGA Influenza Pathogenesis and Immunology Research Center, for which Compans is principal investigator. The center is working to improve the effectiveness of flu vaccines through a number of different projects studying how influenza viruses attack their hosts, how they are transmitted, and what new immune targets might be identified for antiviral medicines.
Prausnitz and his colleagues have been working since the mid 1990s to develop microneedle technology for painless drug and vaccine delivery through the skin. Much smaller than conventional hypodermic needles, the microneedles in the arrays are made of titanium, stainless steel or various polymers - including some that could dissolve into the skin, carrying vaccine with them. The Georgia Tech team has also developed manufacturing processes for microneedle patches and tested the ability of the needles to deliver proteins, vaccines, nanoparticles, and small and large molecules through the skin.
"We expect microneedles to be less painful than conventional hypodermic needles because they are too small to significantly stimulate nerve endings," Prausnitz explained. "The NIH grants will allow us to move forward with perfecting the manufacturing process, refining the techniques for optimally inserting the microneedles into the skin and ensuring that vaccine delivered this way produces the necessary immune response."
Compans and Prausnitz are the principal investigators on these grants. Other members of the microneedle research teams include Emory microbiologists Joshy Jacob, David Steinhauer, Chinglai Yang, and Ioanna Skountzou, Georgia Tech bioengineers Mark Allen, Harvinder Gill and Vladimir Zarnitsyn, and pharmaceutical scientist James Birchall at Cardiff University.
Research News & Publications Office
Georgia Institute of Technology
75 Fifth Street, N.W., Suite 100
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Media Relations Contacts: John Toon, Georgia Tech (404-894-6986); E-mail: (jtoon@gatech.edu) or Holly Korschun, Emory (404-727-3990); E-mail: (hkorsch@emory.edu).
]]>The technique - developed by Bernd Kahn, director of the Georgia Tech Research Institute's (GTRI) Environmental Radiation Center (ERC), and GTRI senior research scientist Robert Rosson - became advantageous when the EPA established new radionuclide drinking water standards in 2000.
While radium is found at low concentrations in soil, water, plants and food, the greatest potential for human exposure to radium is through drinking water. Research shows that inhalation, injection, ingestion or body exposure to relatively large amounts of radium can cause cancer and other disorders. Since radium is chemically similar to calcium, it has the potential to cause harm by replacing calcium in bones.
As a result, drinking water systems are now required to sample and report on the amounts of two isotopes, radium-226 and radium-228, that are sometimes found in drinking water supplies.
"The Georgia Department of Natural Resources recognized the applicability and benefits of our method because of the new rules and proposed it to the EPA in 2002," said Kahn.
The new method developed at GTRI requires only two steps. First, hydrochloric acid and barium chloride are added to a sample of water and heated to boiling. Then concentrated sulfuric acid is added and the radium precipitate is collected, dried and weighed. The samples are then counted with a gamma-ray spectrometry system to determine the content of radium-226 and radium-228.
A gamma-ray spectrometer determines the energy and the count rate of gamma rays emitted by radioactive substances. When these emissions are collected and analyzed, an energy spectrum can be produced. A detailed analysis of this spectrum is used to determine the identity and quantity of radioisotopes present in the source.
"The old method took four hours for each type of radium you needed to test-totaling eight hours for radium-226 and radium-228," said Rosson. "Our method does the two tests simultaneously and it takes about half an hour of actual technician time."
Previously approved EPA methods for measuring radium required several isolation and purification steps involving sequential precipitations from large sample volumes and sometimes liquid-liquid extractions. They all ended with a complicated final preparation step before measurement with an alpha scintillation detection system. The scintillation detector detects and counts the flashes of light that are produced when a radioactive substance interacts with a special coating on the inside of the detection container.
The EPA's December 2007 deadline requiring every water supply be tested for radium-228 and gross alpha radioactivity greatly increased the number of radium-228 measurements required, as well as the likelihood both radium-226 and radium-228 must be measured in the same sample, also increasing the number of measurements required.
If the total radium concentration measured is above five picocuries per liter, then the water supply is out of compliance and radium-226 and radium-228 must be measured quarterly. This may require the water source to be replaced or treated to reduce the radium concentration. If the amount of radioactivity measured is less than five picocuries per liter, samples may be collected at three-, six- or nine-year intervals.
Since the EPA approved this new testing procedure in July 2006, GTRI's ERC has been able to use the testing method they developed to analyze water samples from Georgia's Department of Natural Resources.
"We analyze about 1,200 samples per year for them. With 3,000 to 6,000 water supply entry points in Georgia, we're not done yet," noted Rosson.
Since the new rules were published on March 12 in the Federal Register, the official publication of rules from U.S. government agencies, Rosson and Kahn have received dozens of requests for the testing procedure. Departments of natural resources around the country are interested in saving time and money by using GTRI's procedure that tests for radium-226 and radium-228, according to Rosson.
Research News & Publications Office
Georgia Institute of Technology
75 Fifth Street, N.W., Suite 100
Atlanta, Georgia 30308 USA
Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986); E-mail: (jtoon@gatech.edu) or Kirk Englehardt (404-407-7280); E-mail: (kirk.englehardt@gtri.gatech.edu).
Technical contact: Robert Rosson (404-407-6339); E-mail: (robert.rosson@gtri.gatech.edu).
Writer: Abby Vogel
]]>The new, dedicated Agilent EDA Simulation Center will provide radio frequency (RF) and microwave system and circuit design instruction and additional software design capabilities to Georgia Tech students, and will provide licenses at no cost or at greatly discounted rates to start-ups in wireless communications design at GEDC.
The venture, located at Georgia Tech's Technology Square, is expected to be fully operational by year's end.
"We are excited about Agilent's participation with us. The company's EDA tools help us continue to advance the technology and support our students, as well as to encourage and support commercial innovation," said Joy Laskar, director of the GEDC and Schlumberger Chair in Microelectronics in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). "We also want to contribute to the success of other academic and non-profit institutions through sharing our experience in this partnership with Agilent, and we are making plans to release large portions of work using the Agilent EEsof EDA platforms for academic use."
The deal marks a significant expansion of the long-standing relationship between Georgia Tech and Agilent and is a key part of Agilent's strategy to develop extensive relationships with key universities worldwide through the newly created Agilent EEsof EDA University Alliance program. It includes a tailored, three-year custom license program to provide access to the complete line of Agilent EEsof EDA tools to start-up companies during their critical formative periods.
"This is one of the largest academic donations of Agilent EEsof products to a single institution to date," said Jim McGillivary, vice president and general manager with Agilent's EEsof EDA division. "We realize that universities and startup incubator programs play a crucial role in pushing the limits of EDA tools. They consistently ask for and expect Agilent to offer integrated and leading simulation technology in all areas, and we are pleased to support their efforts."
Academic uses of the Agilent EEsof Simulation Center at GEDC will focus on Agilent EEsof's Advanced Design System (ADS), the 3D Electromagnetic Design System (EMDS) 3D EM simulator and the AMDS simulator that incorporates antenna EM simulation technology recently acquired by Agilent. The center will also be the world's largest academic installation of Agilent's Golden Gate simulator in a parallel processor environment. Golden Gate offers the ability to simulate complex CMOS RFIC designs, including complete network parasitic elements, in production scale SOC implementations. Initial plans include a 60 parallel core configuration.
"We are grateful for Agilent's continued support of GEDC and ECE. By using these specialized tools on a regular basis, students will have important technical concepts enhanced and reinforced that they are learning in our electronics and electromagnetics courses. Upon graduation, our students will be ready to actively contribute to their employers in academia and industry," said Gary S. May, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of Georgia Tech's ECE.
"Georgia Tech is uniquely positioned within our Agilent EEsof University Alliance program to expand research and development activities in tandem with Agilent EEsof products," said Todd Cutler, product marketing manager with Agilent's EEsof EDA division. "The energy, enthusiasm and drive of academics and small companies spark development of new RF and microwave design innovations that our enterprise customers can adopt and run with. It's really exciting for all of us."
Agilent also plans to offer customer training at the GEDC's Agilent EDA Simulation Center.
A ribbon-cutting ceremony for the EDA Simulation Center at the GEDC in Atlanta is planned for October 30, 2007 at 4:30 p.m. ET. The event will take place at the Technology Square Research Building, located at 85 5th Street, on the Georgia Tech campus.
Additional information about Agilent's EDA software offerings is available at www.agilent.com/find/eesof.
About Agilent Technologies
Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) is the world's premier measurement company and a technology leader in communications, electronics, life sciences and chemical analysis. The company's 19,000 employees serve customers in more than 110 countries. Agilent had net revenue of $5.0 billion in fiscal year 2006. Information about Agilent is available on the Web at www.agilent.com.
About the Georgia Institute of Technology
The Georgia Institute of Technology is one of the nation's premiere research universities. Ranked seventh among U.S. News & World Report's top public universities, Georgia Tech's 17,000 students are enrolled in its Colleges of Architecture, Computing, Engineering, Liberal Arts, Management and Sciences. Tech is among the nation's top producers of women and African-American engineers. The Institute offers research opportunities to both undergraduate and graduate students and is home to more than 100 interdisciplinary units plus the Georgia Tech Research Institute.
About the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) is the largest of nine schools and departments in the College of Engineering and the largest individual school at the Georgia Institute of Technology. All ECE undergraduate and graduate programs are in the top 10 of the most recent college rankings by U.S. News & World Report. More than 2,300 students are enrolled in the School's graduate and undergraduate programs, and in the last academic year, 712 degrees were awarded.
More than 110 ECE faculty members are involved in 10 areas of research and education - bioengineering, computer engineering, digital signal processing, electric power, electromagnetics, electronic design and applications, microsystems, optics and photonics, systems and controls, and telecommunications.
About the Georgia Electronic Design Center
The Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC) supports world-class research, active and solution-oriented industry collaboration, intellectual property generation and revenue generating commercialization efforts. GEDC attracts funding support from federal laboratories and industry partners. GEDC's research is broadly focused on fostering technology at the intersection of today's communications applications: wireless/RF, wired/copper and fiber channels. The activities of GEDC provide the state of Georgia the opportunity to grow and expand its technology leadership in the design of broadband (high-speed) communications systems, devices and integrated circuits.
The Center is specifically focused on enabling the mobile Internet with innovative research on mixed-signal systems that are at the boundary between telecommunications, microelectronics, analog/RF and sensing technologies. These efforts produce partnerships with industry that attract new jobs to the state and support smaller, start-up companies that create new jobs for Georgians. Additional information about Georgia Tech and GEDC is available at www.gatech.edu and www.gedcenter.org.
Media Relations Contacts: John Toon, Research News and Publications Office (404-894-6986); E-mail: (jtoon@gatech.edu) or Jackie Nemeth, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (404-894-2906); E-mail: (jackie.nemeth@ece.gatech.edu).
]]>Fast-forward to today: Video gaming has become one of the fastest-growing forms of entertainment. According to a recent study sponsored by the Entertainment Software Association (ESA):
- Sales of video-game software in the United States totaled $8.2 billion in 2004 - not far behind the music industry, which generated $11.4 billion the same year.
- By 2010, U.S. sales of video games are expected to grow to $15 billion.
- Video gaming is expected to generate more than 250,000 jobs by 2009, a 75 percent increase over the industry's 144,000 full-time positions in 2004.
The New Golf
What's caused video games to evolve from a boutique market to a bona fide industry? Experts point to a myriad of reasons, including more powerful central processing units (CPUs) and advanced technology for sound, video, 3-D art and motion in game play.
"Digital media lets you describe the world in ways that older media couldn't," observes Janet Murray, a professor and director of graduate studies at Georgia Tech's School of Literature, Communication and Culture (LCC). "Technology allows us to create imaginary worlds that people can act in. We can set up games that are more challenging and have more variety because they are procedurally created by making up rules in the computer. In contrast to a traditional board game, like Monopoly, which can only do one thing, the computer is tireless."
Michael Nitsche, an assistant professor at LCC, points out that Hollywood films and related video games are often released at the same time. "This blurring of boundaries between media is putting video games more into the limelight," says Nitsche. "Plus, we have a longer history of video gaming now, which means a bigger, older and sometimes more mature fan base."
Stereotypes suggest that video gaming is primarily for adolescents, but ESA statistics show the market is much broader. According to the organization, 69 percent of American heads of household played video games in 2005. The average age of gamers was 33 years, and 25 percent of players were older than 50.
Celia Pearce, an LCC assistant professor who heads up the Experimental Game Lab, studies both female and older players. "There's a popular misconception that older gamers, especially women, are only playing casual games," she says. "It turns out that Baby Boomer gamers are hard core players, though they have very different practices and preferences than the groups for which the industry typically develops and markets games. Plus, they are spending a lot more money."
Pearce sees a demographic shift as gamers get older, and older people get into gaming. The Nintendo Wii machine is leading this shift with aggressive marketing to Baby Boomers and women. "They even had a booth at the American Association for Retired Persons (AARP) National Event and Expo, which is an all-time first for a game company," Pearce notes.
Video games, it seems, have gone beyond mainstream and captured audiences early developers never imagined.
"In many ways, video gaming is becoming the new golf," says Christopher Klaus, founder and CEO of Kaneva, an Atlanta startup focused on building a 3-D virtual entertainment world. (Klaus also founded Internet Security Systems, which IBM purchased recently for $1.3 billion.)
"While players are on a game quest, they're also building friendships and bonds with other people - similar to golf," explains Klaus. In addition to developing an innovative virtual entertainment world, Kaneva also plans to let subscribers use its platform to engineer their own virtual world or video games.
The term 'video games' comes with a lot of baggage, Klaus continues: "Most people think video games are just for kids. Yet this technology is becoming part of our social fabric and culture. It goes beyond being just a game; it becomes part of your identity."
Beyond Entertainment
What's more, gaming technology has transferred to other industries, ranging from health care to defense, where it is used for educational and training simulations.
Take Persuasive Games, an Atlanta startup launched by Ian Bogost, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech's LCC. Among its products, Persuasive Games has developed a game for Cold Stone Creamery that teaches employees about portion sizes and how they affect profitability.
Another game helps grade-school students learn about the science behind telecommunications technologies.
Bogost, who is interested in how games can argue position and attempt to convince people of a particular belief, has also created a number of public-policy games, such as 'Take Back Illinois.' Sponsored by the Illinois Republican Party, this game challenges players to explore four issues tied to the 2004 state elections.
Sparking innovation in hardware, SimCraft - a member company of Georgia Tech's Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) - is introducing a low-cost, military-grade, full-motion simulator that provides a simulated G-force for SimRacing and FlightSim at home.
SimCraft's system features a patent-pending chassis that rotates around three degrees of freedom. At its most advanced setup, the system allows the cockpit's occupant to yaw up to 50 degrees to the left and right, pitch up to 30 degrees fore and aft, and roll up to 50 degrees port and starboard.
"Some experts believe that the physical, tactile element is the most significant factor affecting the realism of any vehicle simulation, " says Sean MacDonald, SimCraft's CEO. "A sense of realism is particularly important if you're using a simulator for training, because it makes learning more intuitive and fun - and consequently more efficient."
Initially, the company is focusing on simulations for amateur race car drivers and general aviation pilots because they receive dual benefits in both training and entertainment at home.
"Since racing and flying are so expensive, a simulator allows enthusiasts in these hobbies to subsidize actual racing or fl ying with realistic simulation," says MacDonald. "It is a safe, convenient and cost-eff ective way for them to enjoy their hobby and get better at it in the comfort of their home."
SimCraft's technology also has broad applications that include more generalized video gaming entertainment and military defense training.
On the Upswing
Georgia's video-gaming industry is relatively small but poised for growth, say observers.
"The overall gaming industry is experiencing tremendous growth and we believe that Georgia has the ingredients to be a hub of activity," says Tony Antoniades, general manager of the ATDC. "From the design industry in Savannah to the computing and visualization expertise in Atlanta, we expect to see more great gaming technologies over the next few years."
Kaneva's Klaus is also upbeat. "If there's one industry that Atlanta could jump into, it's video games. We can leverage the high-tech foundation that already exists here," he says, noting that ISS alone employs some 300 engineers in the metro area. "If you look at where entertainment is going, it's all about high tech. Today, entertainment is being driven by how good the technology is."
For the Atlanta region, video gaming is a comeback story of sorts. For in the early 1990s, there were a number of game studios here, including divisions at IBM and Turner Broadcasting. "But then the market shifted from PCs to console gaming, and both IBM and Turner shut down their gaming groups," says Marcus Matthews, CEO and co-founder of Blue Heat Games, an up-and- coming developer of wireless video games.
Matthews, a graduate of Georgia Tech's Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, was working for Turner at the time of the downturn. He relocated to San Francisco where he joined Sega of America and eventually ran its sports group, which generated about $100 million in revenue.
Yet Matthews had an entrepreneurial itch that led him back to Georgia to launch Blue Heat in 2001. "I felt there was a lot of untapped talent in Atlanta - plus the cost of living was lower here," he explains. Blue Heat, which counts 16 employees, has shipped more than 30 mobile games during the past four years including one on Jimmy Neutron, a movie and TV character that Nickelodeon is distributing.
Blue Heat is one of some 60 companies working in Georgia's video-game arena, says Clinton Lowe, founder of the Georgia Game Developers Association, Inc. (www.ggda.org), a nonprofi t trade organization focused on growing the state's gaming industry.
"I see video games as a new market for Georgia - one that, if we make some fundamental investments, will explode," says Lowe. Among positive signs, the Georgia General Assembly recently passed tax credits aimed at game developers and film companies that base production activities, such as editing, animation and coding, in the state.
Why care about video gaming? For one thing, the industry provides high-paying jobs that could help ease the economic sting of Georgia's eroding manufacturing base. According to ESA statistics, entry-level game developers earn $67,000 per year.
Video-game development is high science, providing white-collar, intellectual jobs, Lowe notes. Today's game development teams must have expertise in a wide range of skill sets, including 3-D graphics, architectural engineering, artificial intelligence, computer networking, databases, mathematics, physics, digital sound and more.
Educating the Next Generation
Education is one advantage that the state already has in its favor, for Georgia Tech is a magnet school for video gaming.
"When game companies hire employees, Georgia Tech is one of three schools that they turn to," says LCC's Murray, noting the other two schools are Carnegie Mellon and the University of Southern California. "We're supplying the next generation of game designers and we're training them in a way that employers can't get elsewhere."
Georgia Tech has offered a master's degree in digital media since 1993. In 2004, the school expanded its offerings by launching both a Ph.D. program in digital media and an undergraduate degree in computational media, the latter being a joint program between the College of Computing and LCC. Currently there are about 40 graduate students and 200 undergraduate students in the three degree programs.
"More than half of the undergraduate students in computational media are interested in the video-game industry, which is difficult to get into," says Blair MacIntyre, an associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing, which is part of the College of Computing.
"Our program sets students apart from other people," he adds. "The degree puts them in a position to bridge the gap between art and technology and get them into production management as opposed to being down in the trenches."
Strengthening Georgia's video-gaming industry would not only improve the state's economy, but also prevent brain drain. "If graduates are getting into video games, they're more than likely relocating to the West Coast," says GGDA's Lowe. "That's a tremendous loss of human capital for the state of Georgia. We're spending tax dollars to educate students and then letting them go."
To bolster gaming, Lowe would like to see more venture capital flowing toward video-game startups. That's because the average cost of developing a video game today has soared from about $40,000 to $10 million during the last decade. "One of the things GGDA is doing is to help companies learn to speak the language of capital sources and learn how to approach venture capitalists," says Lowe.
Attracting a major video publishing company would also be a plus, Lowe adds. Publishers have muscle in managing intellectual property - an area where small design studios typically are weak.
On Matthews' wish list: recruiting more senior-level talent to Georgia. "We have a good pipeline school, but we also need seasoned people who can avoid making mistakes - and that's something that only comes from years of experience in an industry,- he explains.
Still, Matthews remains optimistic. "We're starting to get a nucleus of companies and talent that are doing things," he says. "Georgia has the right pieces in place - state incentives, business and technical talent, the right cost structure - it's just a matter of time."
This article originally appeared in the Summer 2007 issue of Research Horizons Magazine.
Research News & Publications Office
Georgia Institute of Technology
75 Fifth Street, N.W., Suite 100
Atlanta, Georgia 30308 USA
Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986); E-mail: (jtoon@gatech.edu).
Writer: T.J. Becker
]]>As with most public universities, resources are limited and tackling such a project in-house creates additional challenges. However, Georgia Tech's communications and marketing team approached the project like most Tech students and faculty - by applying a creative approach with the latest technology.
From the start, the team was determined to avoid typical images found in university promotional spots often featuring idyllic campus scenes, students studying and labs brimming with test tubes. Instead, the team selected imagery that exemplifies one of the Institute's many flagship technologies - robotics. Georgia Tech's Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines, for example, is helping to position the university as a global leader within these promising, revolutionary new technologies.
The next challenge was figuring out how to use robotics to capture the spirit and legacy of Georgia Tech. With one of the country's most recognized fight songs, the communications team knew that including, 'The Ramblin' Wreck from Georgia Tech,' would do just that. The idea was to introduce the fight song by showing a robotic arm and hand tapping out ringtones on a phone which eventually transitioned to a traditional recording of the fight song sung by the Georgia Tech Glee Club.
"We designed this spot to capture the viewers by opening with dramatic music and imagery, then hold them with the 'Ramblin' Wreck' song for the message," said James Fetig, associate vice president for Georgia Tech's Institute Communications and Public Affairs.
"While there are several robotic arms in research labs on campus, none have the dexterity to play the song on the phone like we were envisioning," Fetig explained. "To improvise, one of our Web developers created a computer-generated version of a robotic arm. Though the final version of the spot may make the robotic arm seem simplistic, development took more than 90 hours to render."
The spot does not feature people and immediately captures attention with compelling music and close-up imagery of the robotic arm - so close that the viewer might not initially know what the object is. With such a captivating opening, viewers are easily drawn into a futuristic environment. There are no voiceovers, just concise text at the end of the spot displaying the message, 'Legendary Heritage, Limitless Future,' along with the Georgia Institute of Technology logo.
To add a hint of humor, the spot cleverly ends with the robotic arm gesturing the 'No. 1' with its index finger and 'dancing' to the tune of the fight song. "The humorous ending helps illustrate how much fun students can have at Tech," said Fetig.
The spot, which debuted during the Georgia Tech-Notre Dame game, will be used to promote Georgia Tech during the football and basketball seasons.
]]>For the 2005-2006 academic year, Georgia Tech was ranked No. 1 in undergraduate degrees in engineering awarded to African-American students with 120 degrees, up from 117 during the 2004-2005 academic year.
Other top five degree producers at the undergraduate level include North Carolina A&T State University, North Carolina State University at Raleigh, Southern University and A&M College and Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University.
"These rankings represent Georgia Tech's continued efforts to attract and graduate top minority students in engineering," said President G. Wayne Clough. "Given the growing need in our state and around the nation for talented citizens, we are proud of Tech's role as a national leader in creating and maintaining a supportive educational environment for minority students."
Georgia Tech was also the No. 1 producer of African-American doctoral graduates in engineering with 11 graduates, up from 4 the previous academic year.
Other top five producers of African-American doctoral engineering graduates include Morgan State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of Florida and North Carolina A&T State University.
Georgia Tech was No. 2 in engineering master's degrees awarded to African-American students with 28 degrees, down slightly from 29 during the previous academic year when Tech held the top spot.
The top spot for master's degrees awarded to African-American engineering students is now held by North Carolina A&T State University, a historically black university. Other top five producers include Southern Methodist University, University of Florida and University of Michigan.
Considered by Georgia Tech to be an important tool to measure the success of campus diversity initiatives, the rankings underscore Tech's efforts to create a diverse campus through strong recruitment and retention practices.
"These rankings are a truly meaningful measurement of Georgia Tech's continued efforts to create an educational environment where minority students can thrive," said Dr. Gary May, chair of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and founder and director of Facilitating Academic Careers in Engineering and Science (FACES), a program designed to encourage minority engagement in engineering and science careers. "Georgia Tech's performance over the past decade in producing African-American engineers at all degree levels has been phenomenal."
One of Tech's most successful minority recruitment projects is FOCUS, an annual event designed to attract the country's finest minority undergraduates to its graduate programs. Each year, African-American students from more than 80 colleges and universities across the nation attend the three-day series of lectures, tours, panel discussions and social events. The event, which is held annually during the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, is now in its 16th year.
In addition, Georgia Tech has a solid relationship with the historically black institutions in the Atlanta area that make up the Atlanta University Center, which include Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morris Brown College, Spelman College, Morehouse School of Medicine and the Interdenominational Theological Center.
Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, a publication that covers minorities in American higher education, used statistics collected by the U.S. Department of Education to compile the rankings edition. The special report identifies the top 100 minority degree producers among institutions of higher education and is the only national report of U.S. colleges and universities awarding degrees to African-American, Latino, Asian-American and Native-American students.
The report was released as a two-part series spotlighting undergraduate and graduate statistics. Graduate and professional degree statistics appear in the July 12 edition of Diverse. Undergraduate statistics were released in the magazine's June 1 edition.
]]>The NSF is supporting The Origins Project as part of an effort to address "big picture" questions in chemistry through the formation of Chemical Bonding Centers (CBC).
"Our ultimate goal is to understand which molecules and which chemical reactions started life on Earth around 3 billion years ago, and to engage the public in this scientific quest," said Nicholas Hud, associate professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Georgia Tech and principal investigator of The Origins Project.
"We now know the molecular coding sequence for the human genome, a scientific achievement that seemed very remote two decades ago. We believe it is also only a matter of time and effort before we will know what is required to get life started," said Emory's David Lynn, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Chemistry and Biology. Lynn will co-lead the center.
The CBC program is designed to support the formation of centers that can address major, long-term basic chemical research problems that have the potential to produce both transformative research and innovation in the field. The Georgia Tech-Emory grant is Phase I funding; at the end of Phase I in three years, the NSF may choose to approve The Origins Project for Phase II funding, which will provide up to $15 million over five years.
The center's research will seek to understand what molecules were present on the prebiotic earth, and to understand how molecular building blocks that are either identical or similar to ones found in life today can spontaneously form larger molecules, similar to proteins and DNA, that are essential for life to exist.
"We are particularly excited about the outreach projects of the center that involve college and high school students," said Hud. "The origin of life is one of the most intriguing questions of all time and one that can certainly attract young people to the field of chemistry, an area of national need."
"The creation of this center in Atlanta also provides us outreach opportunities for dialogue and discussion around some of the more divisive issues between science and religion and the origin of life,"said Lynn.
"It's a big puzzle," said Hud. "We will be looking at several chemical hypotheses regarding the origin of life. We want to understand the formation of the first lifelike polymers, and from that point understand the evolution of these polymers into something that could have given rise to life as we know it."
]]>Parekh, 46, has been deputy director of the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) since 2003. At GTRI, Parekh has had primary responsibility for research operations, business development, commercialization, and the institute's internal research portfolio. He has also served concurrently as associate vice provost for research for the Georgia Institute of Technology and as president of Georgia Tech Ireland (GT Ireland), the university's nonprofit corporation. He led the team that created GT Ireland, which was founded in 2006 to conduct basic and applied research programs with multinational corporations and universities in Europe.
His tenure at GTRI included increasing levels of executive leadership within the institute's Aerospace, Transportation and Advanced Systems laboratory, where he directed the pursuit of innovative research and advanced technical support for the aerospace, transportation and energy markets.
"David epitomizes creativity and innovation and he is very deserving of this wonderful opportunity, but we are sad to see him go," said GTRI Director and Georgia Tech Vice President Dr. Stephen E. Cross. "His years at Georgia Tech have been filled with many firsts. He routinely made the impossible possible and motivated the rest of us to do the same."
Parekh founded the first major Georgia Tech research center focused on fuel cells, supervised Ph.D. students who built one of the world's first fuel cell-powered unmanned aerial vehicles to fly using compressed hydrogen, and launched GT Ireland, the university's first international research institute, Cross added.
Leadership of the GT Ireland initiative will be assumed by Cross. The initiative was announced in June 2006 and now includes five employees based in Ireland, projected to grow to 50 full-time employees and researchers. The international research operation has also gained widespread support from influential Irish government and corporate leaders including Ireland President Mary McAleese, who visited Georgia Tech last April.
"Over the past year a tremendous amount of work has been done to establish Georgia Tech Ireland as a vibrant and unique research institute," said Parekh. "I am proud of the strong leadership and research team we have assembled and I have no doubt that the best is yet to come. The right people and partnerships are in place to ensure a very bright future for GT Ireland."
Earlier in his career, Parekh held several prominent program leadership and principal investigator roles at Boeing Phantom Works and in the McDonnell Douglas Research Laboratories.
As UTRC director, Parekh will be responsible for advancing the corporation's commitment to growth through technology and innovation.
"David is an outstanding scientist with proven expertise in identifying and guiding research and innovation across a broad range of aerospace and commercial technologies," said Dr. J. Michael McQuade, UTC senior vice president, science and technology. "He is well-suited to the unique leadership role at UTRC, which pursues fundamental technologies to enable the growth of UTC's current and future businesses. We look forward to the successes David will inspire and direct in filling this vital role for UTC."
Parekh holds a doctorate in mechanical engineering and master's degrees in mechanical and electrical engineering from Stanford University, as well as a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Virginia Tech.
Founded in 1929, United Technologies Research Center provides advanced technologies, innovative thinking and disciplined research in aerospace propulsion, building infrastructure and services, heating and air conditioning, fire and security systems and power generation. UTRC is located in East Hartford, Conn.
About Georgia Tech Research Institute
Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit applied research arm of the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Approximately 1,300 employees perform or support more than $130 million in research yearly for hundreds of clients in industry and government.
For nearly 75 years, GTRI has solved some of the toughest technical problems confronting federal, state, local and international government agencies, industrial firms, academic institutions and private organizations. More than 70 percent of GTRI's research personnel hold advanced degrees, and all are committed to an independent, unbiased approach to solving problems. GTRI's close ties to Georgia Tech's academic faculty provide additional talent and knowledge for meeting today's most difficult technological and engineering challenges.
GTRI research is conducted in seven laboratories, in field locations around the country and at its international location in Ireland. Much of GTRI's research benefits the defense/security market; however the organization is uniquely positioned to translate those innovations into solutions for other markets such as healthcare, energy and environment and food processing.
]]>"I am extremely pleased that Mark will be leading our research, commercialization, and economic development activities here at Georgia Tech," said Gary Schuster, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs. "He brings a wealth of experience and expertise in both research and technology transfer to our leadership team, and he will be an excellent advocate for Tech."
Allen, 44, was selected from four finalists and comes to the provost's office after serving as Regent's Professor and J.M. Pettit Professor in Microelectronics in Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. He is also co-founder of CardioMEMS, a successful biotechnology start-up company that produces innovative cardiovascular sensors based on micro-electro-mechanical systems technology he developed.
As a member of the provost's senior leadership team, Allen will be instrumental in setting the Institute's research and economic development agenda and strategic direction. He will not only manage Tech's $458 million research portfolio, but also oversee the commercialization of innovation, ensuring that the Institute takes maximum advantage of the intellectual property developed in its research labs.
"I'm excited about the opportunity to serve Georgia Tech in this new capacity and hope to continue the success we have experienced in research and technology transfer," said Allen. "Georgia Tech is already a recognized leader in these areas, and I look forward to helping us realize the significant potential for further growth that is vitally important to Tech's future."
The finalists were selected by a committee comprised of faculty members and campus leaders and chaired by College of Engineering Dean Don Giddens.
Allen replaces Charlie Liotta, who has returned to the faculty following a long and successful tenure in this position.
]]>"In May, Georgia Tech announced a comprehensive review of all PCard usage across the campus," said James Fetig, associate vice president for communications and public affairs. "We are extremely disappointed that a very small number of employees have violated the trust placed in them."
Georgia Tech initiated an intensive review of PCard purchases after the Georgia Department of Audits identified concerns at a number of units within the University System. One Georgia Tech employee was terminated on May 4, 2007, as a result of initial findings. The exact amount of PCard malfeasance can be determined only after the full review is complete.
As part of its effort to further strengthen its internal controls, the Institute has formed a team to develop additional management procedures for those who oversee PCard usage. Additional electronic measures designed to flag suspect purchases are also under evaluation.
Georgia Tech is insured against this type of malfeasance and will seek repayment of the stolen funds from those employees involved.
Georgia Tech employees are encouraged to report PCard waste, fraud or abuse at the Internal Audit anonymous hotline: 1-866-294-5565 or on the Internal Audit web site: www.audit.gatech.edu
PCards are widely used in business, government and higher education to provide significant cost savings over other purchasing tools. A Visa purchasing card is the Institute's primary tool for purchases of non-equipment, business related items. Cardholders must follow State and Georgia Tech purchasing guidelines. The PCard provides significant cost savings to Georgia Tech while providing electronic control and accountability. PCards may not be used for personal purchases. The Georgia Tech PCard policy is located at:
http://www.admin-fin.gatech.edu/business/purchasing/0500218.html
Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University researchers are the first to create a nanoparticle capable of detecting and imaging trace amounts of hydrogen peroxide in animals. The nanoparticles, thought to be completely nontoxic, could some day be used as a simple, all-purpose diagnostic tool to detect the earliest stages of any disease that involves chronic inflammation - everything from cancer and Alzheimer's to heart disease and arthritis.
The research, lead by the laboratories of Niren Murthy at the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University and Dr. Robert Taylor in the Division of Cardiology at the Emory University School of Medicine, will appear in the October issue of Nature Materials and was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Hydrogen peroxide is thought to be over-produced by cells at the early stages of most diseases. Because there were previously no imaging techniques available to capture this process in the body, the details of how the hydrogen peroxide is produced and its role in a developing disease must still be determined.
The Georgia Tech and Emory nanoparticles may be the key to better understanding the role of hydrogen peroxide in the progression of many diseases and later play an important diagnostic role, Murthy said.
"These nanoparticles are incredibly sensitive so you can detect nanomolar concentrations of hydrogen peroxide. That's important because researchers aren't yet certain what amounts of hydrogen peroxide are present in various diseases," Murthy said.
The ultimate goal, however, is that the nanoparticles could some day be used as a simple, all-purpose diagnostic tool for most diseases. In the future, the nanoparticle would be injected by needle into a certain area of the body (for instance, the heart). If the nanoparticles encountered hydrogen peroxide, they would emit light. Should a doctor see a significant amount of light activity in the area, the doctor would know that the patient may be presenting early signs of a disease in that area of the body.
The Georgia Tech and Emory nanoparticles penetrate deep tissue and operate at a high wave length, making them sensitive indicators of the presence of hydrogen peroxide produced by any sort of inflammation.
The nanoparticle polymer is made of peroxalate esters. A fluorescent dye (pentacene) is then encapsulated into the polymer. When the nano particles bump into hydrogen peroxide, they excite the dye, which then emits photons (or light) that can be detected in a simple, photon-counting scan.
"It's using this nanoparticle made of peroxalate esters that allows you to do this three component reaction in vivo. If you were to inject a peroxalate ester and a dye, they would go their own ways once in the body. With the nanoparticles, we can sequester both of these reagents within nanometers of each other, in vivo," Murthy said.
The goal was to maximize the wavelength of the particles. Wavelength determines the sensitivity in vivo. And if the particle's wavelength is high enough, it can penetrate the skin and display clearly on a scan.
The research team started with a nanoparticle that was made of dye and filled with peroxide esthers. They later realized that the reverse (a particle made of peroxalate esters and filled with dye) was more effective at imaging hydrogen peroxide, Murthy said.
The group will conduct further tests with the nanoparticles to confirm their safety and effectiveness.
]]>Three ceremonies will feature approximately 1,600 graduates. More than 850 bachelor's degrees, approximately 580 master's degrees and more than 150 Ph.D.s degrees will be awarded.
Cagle was first elected to the state Senate in 1994, where he served 12 years representing the 49th District. On November 7, 2006, Cagle made history by becoming the first Republican ever elected to the state's second highest office.
During his time in the Senate, Cagle served as chairman of the Finance Committee and on several other key committees, including the influential Appropriations, Banking and Financial Institutions, Higher Education and Natural Resources Committees. He has been a staunch supporter of lowering taxes and protecting private property rights, as well as a passionate advocate for protecting Georgia's families. In 1999, Senator Cagle was instrumental in the passage of 'Heidi's Law,' which toughened penalties for repeat drunk drivers.
The 2005 Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Robert H. Grubbs, will address the Ph.D. and master's ceremony during a 7 p.m. ceremony on Friday December 14. Grubbs won the Nobel Prize for his work in chemistry and is currently the Victor and Elizabeth Atkins Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, where he has been a faculty member since 1978. Before moving to Caltech, he was at Michigan State University from 1969 to 1978. Grubbs will also be receiving an honorary degree from Georgia Tech during the ceremony.
Former Chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Norman Augustine will address the afternoon undergraduate engineering degree ceremony at 2 p.m. on Saturday December 15. After retiring from Lockheed Martin in 1997, Augustine became a lecturer with the rank of professor on the faculty of Princeton University, where he served until 1999.
Augustine was chairman and principal officer of the American Red Cross for nine years, chairman of the National Academy of Engineering, president and chairman of the Association of the United States Army, chairman of the Aerospace Industries Association, and chairman of the Defense Science Board. He is a former president of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Boy Scouts of America.
He is a current or former member of the Board of Directors of ConocoPhillips, Black & Decker, Procter & Gamble (of which he is presiding director) and Lockheed Martin and was a member of the Board of Trustees of Colonial Williamsburg. He is a trustee emeritus of Johns Hopkins and a former member of the Board of Trustees of Princeton and MIT. He is a member of the Advisory Board to the Department of Homeland Security, was a member of the Hart/Rudman Commission on National Security, and has served for 16 years on the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society and the Council on Foreign Affairs, and is a Fellow of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Explorers Club.
]]>"We are very proud of the four Georgia Tech researchers who were selected as Georgia Cancer Coalition scholars," says Wayne Clough, president of Georgia Tech. "We're grateful to the Georgia Cancer Coalition for their generous support of Georgia's efforts to attract the world's top scientists and researchers not only to Georgia Tech, but also to other Georgia universities and organizations."
Fan earned her Ph.D. in cell biology from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, where she earned the Outstanding Postdoctoral Scholar Award of the Belfer Institute. She was recruited to Georgia Tech's School of Biology in January 2007, where she joined the ovarian cancer epigenetics initiative. Her research is expected to provide crucial analysis and study in search of markers that can improve diagnosis and treatment of ovarian cancer, one of the leading causes of cancer deaths in women.
Kemp was recruited to the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Technology and Emory University in August 2006. She earned her Ph.D. in bioengineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, and conducted a postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research takes a cross-disciplinary approach, combining systems biology, cancer biology, computer science and engineering to provide insights into appropriate drug targets for cancerous cells, uncover novel indicators of drug-resistant cancer cells and look at the appropriateness of pharmaceuticals alone or in optimal combinations. The ultimate goal is to develop individualized therapy strategies, especially for drug-resistant cancer patients. Kemp has played an active role in the development of Georgia Tech's Integrated Biosystems Institute.
Storici was named an assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Biology in August 2007. She attended the University of Trieste in Italy, where she qualified as a biologist and earned a Ph.D. in molecular genetics from the International School for Advanced Studies. She was recruited from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina, where she was a research fellow. Her research involves new approaches that have implications for defining the impact of DNA repair in the origin of cancer, for developing novel gene targeting technologies as research tools to understand cancer mechanisms, and for the development of cancer-free strategies of gene therapy.
Yuan is an assistant professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Information Science; an M.S. in Probability and Statistics and Computer Science, and earned his Ph.D. in Statistics at University of Wisconsin. In the study of breast cancer, Yuan is developing novel computation and mathematical approaches using a wide variety of data sources in order to stratify breast cancer into biologically distinct types and correlate them with outcome and therapy response. Yuan has developed revolutionary bioinformatics techniques to successfully address questions related to aging and diabetes; it is hoped that bioinformatics techniques can similarly address questions in various cancer studies.
The Coalition cooperates with Georgia's research universities, medical schools, hospitals and nursing programs to recruit research scientists, with the goal of strengthening the state's research talent, capacity and infrastructure.
Since its inception in 2001, the Georgia Cancer Coalition has named 113 Distinguished Scholars; 12 have been from Georgia Tech. Scholar funding is an investment not only in Georgia's future as a national leader in cancer control, but also is valuable in attracting increased funding to Georgia for cancer research. The sponsoring institutions must provide at least a dollar-for-dollar match. The review committee examines the scholars' history of grants, publications and patents and considers the researcher's potential for attracting future funding. In fiscal year 2007, Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Scholars were responsible for securing $47 million in privately and federally funded research grants to the state of Georgia. Scholar Selection is based on how the applicant's research relates to the goals of the Coalition, the research priorities of the National Cancer Institute and the strategic plan of the sponsoring institution. Each application is reviewed by both an external scientific review committee and an advisory review committee, appointed by the Coalition in cooperation with Georgia's research universities. Kate Canterbury, director of Research Programs, staffs the Coalition committees. Members rank scholars according to predetermined scientific and technical criteria.
"The National Cancer Institute has identified areas of discovery that hold promise for making significant progress against all cancers. The Distinguished Cancer Clinicians and Scientists program is the cornerstone of the Georgia Cancer Coalition's efforts to advance scientific discovery into the prevention, treatment, causes and cures of cancer. These scientists play an important role in positioning Georgia as a national leader in cancer research," says Bill Todd, president and chief operating officer of the Georgia Cancer Coalition.
The Georgia Cancer Coalition is an independent, not-for-profit organization that unites government agencies, academic institutions, civic groups, corporations and health care organizations in a concerted effort to strengthen cancer prevention, research and treatment in Georgia, with the ultimate goal of making Georgia one of the nation's premier states for cancer care. The mission is to reduce the number of cancer-related deaths in Georgia. The Coalition is the first of its kind in the nation and is fast becoming a national model.
]]>"We are retaining more students in larger classes at the undergraduate level while we are more successfully recruiting graduate students, particularly at the master's level," said Sandi Bramblett, director of institutional research and planning. "For example, we enrolled a larger-than-usual freshman class last fall (2,839 students) and according to preliminary studies, we've retained 92 percent of them."
By retaining more undergraduates each year, the enrollment naturally increases, but attracting more graduate students has increased enrollment as well.
"In addition to continuously improving retention of current students, much of the total enrollment increase can be attributed to the growth of the graduate population," said Ingrid Hayes, director of undergraduate admission. "Undergraduate enrollment has only increased about 2 percent since last year, but graduate enrollment has jumped 10 percent since last year and 22 percent over the last five years."
Georgia Tech's director of graduate studies, Gail Potts, suggests that the increase in graduate admissions can be attributed to several factors including the favorable economy, new automated systems that make the application process accessible worldwide, a concerted effort to remain in contact with potential graduate students throughout the admissions process, and a national resurgence in master's programs.
"We are very pleased and proud of our accomplishments in attracting more and better graduate students," said Potts. "It appears that early application numbers for fall 2008 would indicate that this trend likely will continue since we are already seeing application numbers in excess of this same time last year."
Tech has also increased its housing capacity as the growing student population has heightened the demand for more housing. The university added more than 1,400 beds this year, most of those coming from North Avenue Apartments.
"We increased our capacity and increased it where we needed it most," said Dan Morrison, associate director of residence life. "North Avenue Apartments are made up mostly of sophomore students who want to extend their on campus living experience. You won't see this type of capacity at other universities with our size and urban location."
Nearly 9,500 students currently live on campus - 8,100 students live in campus housing (that number of people living on campus increases to 8,300 when you factor spouses and children that live in family housing), and about 1,300 additional students live in Greek housing on campus.
]]>Johnson, who becomes the 12th head coach at the Institute, coached six successful years at Navy (45-29) and coached five seasons at Georgia Southern (62-10), winning back-to-back 1-AA National Championships in 1999 and 2000.
Radakovich described Johnson as the 'best fit, the best choice and the best man' for the position, after saying he had met with many qualified individuals during the last 10 days.
"President (Wayne) Clough and I are convinced that Johnson will be the steady leader, the principled teacher to our student-athletes and the point-producing conductor that will energize our fans and fill our game days with excitement," Radakovich said. He compared Tech's rigorous academic discipline to the Naval Academy's, and touted Johnson's achievement as one of four Division 1 coaches who won 50 games in four seasons. "He looks at his talent and maximizes it, using what it takes to win games."
Johnson, who was named the Bobby Dodd National Coach of the Year in 2004, thanked President Wayne Clough, Radakovich and his wife and daughter along with 'the entire Georgia Tech family' as he stood before the podium.
"It's truly humbling to be here," Johnson said. "When I met with the committee, it seemed like a match made in heaven. There's not another program I would have left the Academy for. From an academic standpoint, the two institutions are very similar. We're looking for the total package [in student athletes]."
Johnson faced the Atlanta press for roughly 20 minutes, answering questions on what offense will be used, how will he tackle recruiting and what members of Navy's coaching staff will come with him, as well as will he do what it takes to 'sell the program' and energize the fan base.
"I think that's all part of being a football coach at any major program," Johnson said. "The way to achieve [excitement for the program] is to win games. If you have a good program, people will come. If you win, people will leave excited."
Johnson said he will not be involved with Tech's appearance in the Humanitarian Bowl, nor will he be involved in the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl where Navy will face Utah, citing that he was now Tech's coach and eager to 'hit the ground running' on Monday morning, where he listed his top priorities as [putting] together a top-flight staff, a top recruiting class, and meet with every player one-on-one.
"I want to get in touch with the committed recruits, and sit with the recruiting coordinator and look at the board." While he touted Tech as an institution with the ability to recruit on the national level, he said the state of Georgia would be the team's primary recruiting concern.
Johnson was an assistant coach at Navy prior to landing the head coaching position at Georgia Southern, and he was an offensive coordinator at the University of Hawaii from 1987 to 1994. At Navy, his team defeated rival Army six years in a row-the record number of consecutive wins from either team in their meetings.
]]>"The Macy's Parade will be the most fitting way for the band to celebrate our centennial anniversary in front of 50 million viewers, as well as an opportunity for the students to shine as ambassadors for the Institute," said Associate Director of Bands, Chris Moore.
"Anyone who has been a part of the band or who has experienced the energy, entertainment and enthusiasm the band brings to the Tech community and the city of Atlanta understands what a treasure we have," said Assistant Director, Donny Allen.
The full marching band, concert band and symphonic band will all participate in the New York trip. "We are planning a large-scale concert and gala for our alumni, fans, locals and tourists in one of the major concert halls in New York City," said Dr. Andrea Strauss, Director of Bands. "We hope students get a strong sense of pride in representing the Institute and a feeling of satisfaction knowing they reach so many people through their talents and hard work."
More than 1,100 Tech students sing, play or study music each semester. They come from every major on campus, and from many nations around the world. Music ensembles provide a challenging academic and aesthetic experience for the Georgia Tech student. Directors believe that band members will have a unique opportunity while at Tech for the 2008 academic year in celebration of the band's anniversary.
The band hopes to raise $500,000 to cover the cost of the trip. The funds will cover the cost of the traveling party's air, hotel and food expenses, as well as concert hall rental. Band Directors hope this is the first of many high-profile opportunities to share their music programs with the Tech community
]]>On the nanoscale, energy may be produced by radiating photons of light between two surfaces very close together (sometimes as close as 10 nanometers), smaller than the wavelength of the light. Light behaves much differently on the nanoscale as its wavelength is interrupted, producing unstable waves called evanescent waves. The direction of these unpredictable waves can't be calculated, so researchers face the daunting task of designing nanotechnologies to work with the tiny, yet potentially useful waves of light.
Researchers at Georgia Tech have discovered a way to predict the behavior of these unruly waves of light during nanoscale radiation heat transfer, opening the door to the design of a spectrum of new nanodevices (or NEMS) and nanotechnologies, including solar thermal energy technologies. Their findings were featured on the cover of the Oct. 8 issue of Applied Physics Letters.
"This discovery gives us the fundamental information to determine things like how far apart plates should be and what size they should be when designing a technology that uses nanoscale radiation heat transfer," said Zhuomin Zhang, a lead researcher on the project and a professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. "Understanding the behavior of light at this scale is the key to designing technologies to take advantage of the unique capabilities of this phenomenon."
The Georgia Tech research team set out to study evanescent waves in nanoscale radiation energy transfer (between two very close surfaces at different temperatures by means of thermal radiation). Because the direction of evanescent waves is seemingly unknowable (an imaginary value) in physics terms, Zhang's group instead decided to follow the direction of the electromagnetic energy flow (also known as a Poynting vector) to predict behavior rather than the direction of the photons.
"We're using classic electrodynamics to explain the behavior of the waves, not quantum mechanics," Zhang said. "We're predicting the energy propagation - and not the actual movement - of the photons."
The challenge is that electrodynamics work differently on the nanoscale and the Georgia Tech team would need to pinpoint those differences. Planck's law, a more than 100-year-old theory about how electromagnetic waves radiate, does not apply on the nanoscale due to fact that the space between surfaces is smaller than a wavelength.
The Georgia Tech team observed that instead of normal straight line radiation, the light was bending as protons tunneled through the vacuum in between the two surfaces just nanometers apart. The team also noticed that the evanescent waves were separating during this thermal process, allowing them to visualize and predict the energy path of the waves.
Understanding the behavior of such waves is critical to the design of many devices that use nanotechnology, including near-field thermophotovoltaic systems, nanoscale imaging based on thermal radiation scanning tunneling microscopy and scanning photon-tunneling microscopy, said Zhang.
]]>The findings appeared in the Oct. 10 edition of The Journal of Neuroscience.
The research team, led by Krish Sathian, MD, PhD, professor of neurology in Emory University School of Medicine, included first author Randall Stilla, research MRI technologist at Emory, and Gopikrishna Deshpande, Stephen Laconte and Xiaoping Hu of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory. Dr. Hu is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers found heightened neural activity in a network of frontoparietal regions of the brain when people engaged in fine tactile spatial discrimination. Within this network, the levels of activity in two subregions of the right posteromedial parietal cortex--the right posterior intraparietal sulcus (pIPS) and the right precuneus--were predictive of individual participants' tactile sensitivities.
To determine which areas of the brain were involved in identifying fine spatial details, the researchers asked 22 volunteers to determine only by touch whether the central dot of three vertically arranged dots was offset to the left or to the right of the other two.
"Using their right index fingers, the subjects got to feel the dots for one second to determine in which direction the central dot was offset," says Dr. Sathian. "We also varied the amount the dot was offset from the other two, which allowed us to quantify people's sensitivity. In other words, we asked what is the minimal offset required to discriminate."
In a separate control task, the subjects were asked to determine how long they were touched by three perfectly aligned dots. Brain activity during that temporal task was contrasted with brain activity during the spatial task. The researchers found that different brain regions showed more activity during either spatial or temporal processing.
"What is interesting is that we found the most relevant areas of the brain for spatial processing are on the right side, the same side of the body that was used to feel the stimuli. This is the opposite side to the one that might be expected," says Randall Stilla.
"We usually think of the left side of the brain as controlling the right side of the body, which is generally true. But more and more we are finding that the right side of the brain is particularly important in many types of sensory processing," adds Dr. Sathian.
Dr. Sathian's and Dr. Hu's laboratories also collaborated to determine the strength and direction of the connections between the areas of the brain that govern tactile spatial acuity (perception). Such collaboration, explains Dr. Hu, allows the application of cutting-edge image analysis methods to fundamental questions in neuroscience.
"We found that there are two pathways into the right posteromedial cortex that not only predict individuals' acuity but also predict the magnitude of neural activation," says Dr. Deshpande, who performed the connectivity analyses. "In better performers, the paths predicting acuity converge from the left somatosensory cortex and right frontal eye field (an attentional control center), onto the right pIPS. What's more, these paths are stronger during spatial discrimination than temporal discrimination."
The researchers are not yet sure why this particular neural pathway exists. Dr. Sathian suggests the signal patterns may be a combination of attentional, tactile, and visual processing reflecting the visualization of the spatial configurations. Future research, he says, will attempt to unravel the mechanisms underlying these different component processes.
This study was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health.
]]>The technique is surprisingly simple. Using an atomic force microscope (AFM), researchers heat a silicon tip and run it over a thin polymer film. The heat from the tip induces a chemical reaction at the surface of the film. This reaction changes the film's chemical reactivity and transforms it from a hydrophobic substance to a hydrophilic one that can stick to other molecules. The technique is extremely fast and can write at speeds faster than millimeters per second. That's orders of magnitude faster than the widely used dip-pen nanolithography (DPN), which routinely clocks at a speed of 0.0001 millimeters per second.
Using the new technique, researchers were able to pattern with dimensions down to 12 nanometers in width in a variety of environments. Other techniques typically require the addition of other chemicals to be transferred to the surface or the presence of strong electric fields. TCNL doesn't have these requirements and can be used in humid environments outside a vacuum. By using an array of AFM tips developed by IBM, TCNL also has the potential to be massively scalable, allowing users to independently draw features with thousands of tips at a time rather than just one.
"Thermochemical nanolithography is a rapid and versatile technique that puts us much closer to achieving the speeds required for commercial applications," said Elisa Riedo, assistant professor in Georgia Tech's School of Physics. "Because we're not transferring any materials from the AFM tip to the polymer surface (we are only heating it to change its chemical structure) this method can be intrinsically faster than other techniques."
It's the heated AFM tips that are one key to the new technique. Designed and fabricated by a group led by William King at the University of Illinois, the tips can reach temperatures hotter than 1,000 degrees Celsius. They can also be repeatedly heated and cooled 1 million times per second.
"The heated tip is the world's smallest controllable heat source," said King.
TCNL is also tunable. By varying the amount of heat, the speed and the distance of the tip to the polymer, researchers can introduce topographical changes or modulate the range of chemical changes produced in the material.
"By changing the chemistry of the polymer, we've shown that we can selectively attach new substances, like metal ions or dyes to the patterned regions of the film in order to greatly increase the technique's functionality," said Seth Marder, professor in Tech's School of Chemistry and Biochemistry and director of the Center for Organic Photonics and Electronics. Marder's group developed the thermally switchable polymers used in this study.
"We expect thermochemical nanolithography to be widely adopted because it's conceptually simple and can be broadly applied," said Marder. "The scope is limited only by one's imagination to develop new chemistries and applications."
For nanolithography to be commercially viable, it must be able to write at high speeds, be used in a variety of environments and write on a variety of materials. While the technique demonstrated here doesn't yet allow writing at the centimeters per second rate that would be ideal, it does put researchers much closer to the goal than previous techniques. Once perfected, nanolithography could be used to draw nanocircuits for the electronics industry, create nanochannels for nanofluidics devices or be adapted for drug delivery or biosensing technologies.
The research was supported by the National Science Foundation's Center for Materials and Devices for Information Technology Research, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, the Georgia Institute of Technology Research Foundation, the GT College of Sciences Cutting Edge Research Award and ONR Nanoelectronics. In addition to Riedo, Marder and King, the interdisciplinary research team consisted of Robert Szoszkiewicz, Takashi Okada, Simon Jones and Tai-De Li from Georgia Tech.
]]>Leading up to Georgia Tech's homecoming, Yellow Jacket fans will want to drop by the Avenue East Cobb location of Mori Luggage and Gifts. On October 17, from 6 - 8 p.m., refreshments and balloons will be available along with a 20 percent discount on Georgia Tech merchandise. Buzz will be on hand and there will be a chance to enter a drawing for two tickets to the Georgia Tech homecoming football game against Army on October 20.
Tech fans will also have the opportunity to join thousands of their fellow Georgia Tech supporters to take part in a unique moment in history when a panoramic portrait of Bobby Dodd Stadium at Historic Grant Field is made during the homecoming game. Everyone is encouraged to wear their gold and white to the game to enhance the impact of the shot.
"We targeted the Tech/Army game since our opponent's colors are gold and black and we have a higher probability to blanket the stadium in gold," said Georgia Tech Licensing Manager Aimee Anderson. "We encourage all Georgia Tech fans attending the game that day to wear gold and white so that we'll have an image blazing with our official colors."
Rob Arra and his associates, who specialize in panoramic sports stadium images, will be capturing this memorable photograph. The print should be available on the photographer's Web site at www.e-stadium.com a week following the game and eventually will be sold at the Barnes & Noble @ Georgia Tech Bookstore.
"With skyscrapers surrounding the area, Georgia Tech's football stadium is certainly located in one of the nation's most unique settings," said Arra. "We are so excited to have the opportunity to capture this treasure and the spirit of Georgia Tech's dedicated fans."
"We are making a concerted effort to grow our licensing program this year," said Katherine Bows, Georgia Tech's director of marketing communications. "We encourage our fans to have fun participating in these activities while also supporting the many student programs funded by our licensing program."
]]>The discussion focused on three areas: defining domestic policy, accelerating research and innovation, and identifying an effective model for international cooperation. Insights from the discussion will be shared with presidential candidates, congressional leaders, the White House, federal agencies, the research community and thought leaders.
The Center plans on offering to work with the presidential transition team next year and encourage the new administration to make this issue a priority of the new president. If asked, the Center will also help refine a strategy for effective domestic and international action on greenhouse gas emissions and periodically report on implementation efforts by the administration, Congress, the research community and other nations.
]]>The hit stock-picking show came to Georgia Tech as part of the program's 'Back to School' college tour. Mad Money, which airs Monday through Friday at 6 PM and 11 PM EST, has now filmed at 10 business schools since early 2006.
Show host Jim Cramer is known for his manic hosting style involving sound effects, props, and frequent use of the catchword 'booyah!'
Several hours before filming began, Cramer engaged management students in a question-and-answer session in which he explained the origins of 'booyah.' He said that prior to Mad Money's debut in March 2005, he once took a caller on his radio show who expressed gratitude for Cramer's recommendation of Kmart stock by using the New Orleans colloquialism 'boo-yah,' which refers to making money.
After Cramer transferred into TV, callers remembered the expression and would use it. Exclamatory use of the word has since become synonymous with Cramer's show.
During taping of the show, Cramer said he frequently hears criticism of his larger-than-life hosting style. "I do some entertaining, and I do some educating," he said. "Some people say it's wrong to do stocks and entertain. I say I'm a showman in the tradition of Jack Benny and Bob Hope."
Management students enthusiastically supported Cramer's performance in pep-rally style by wearing Georgia Tech t-shirts and chanting school cheers from the bleachers set up in the courtyard. Georgia Tech mascot Buzz and cheerleaders were on stage to get the crowd pumped.
Mad Money also taped a segment of the show at the World of Coca-Cola museum, where Cramer praised The Coca-Cola Company's recent performance. "Coke is not only back, it's also better than ever," said Cramer, who interviewed Coca-Cola CFO Gary Fayard.
Cramer had harsher things to say about other companies students asked about in the 'Lightning Round,' a showcase for the host's knowledge of stocks. "This show is not making friends," Cramer says. It's all about making money, he stressed.
Cramer defines 'mad money' as funds available to invest in stocks - not money people would invest in retirement vehicles like 401Ks or IRAs.
In another segment of the show, he fielded questions from members of the Georgia Tech Student Foundation Investment Committee. He praised their performance investing endowment funds in recent years. The student-run group has consistently outperformed the S&P 500 Index Fund, distributing earnings to student organizations.
Jonathan Clarke, associate finance professor at Georgia Tech, said he's a fan of Mad Money because it "gets students interested in finance and investing and that helps bring some excitement to the classroom. Cramer's very passionate about what he does."
Randy Lambert, a master's student in quantitative and computational finance (QCF), said he appreciates Cramer's attitude toward trading. "I don't think his stock picks are necessarily what's important," says Lambert, whose studies focus on trading. "It's how he picks them. He's got a very specific understanding of how the market works and how business works, and that's what's really important".
"I'm not trading very much yet, but I really enjoy watching his show," Lambert adds. "There are all these boring shows on all day, and then Cramer comes on, and he's so exciting."
]]>Clough and Palmisano's involvement in the National Innovation Initiative - a call to action to bolster U.S. competitiveness and innovation - paved the way for the American COMPETES Act, which President George W. Bush recently signed into law. This statute was called for in the Council's NII report, "Innovate America," and authorizes increased funding for math and science education, supports increased research budgets and implements a national innovation agenda.
The dinner is held in conjunction with the Council on Competitiveness annual meeting, which takes place Friday, October 26, 2007. The meeting will explore five policy goals that will be critical to sustained U.S. competitiveness: challenging frontiers in science and technology; renewing access to competitive, secure and sustainable energy; achieving creative and cutting-edge talent; transforming risk intelligence into resilience; and engaging in the global economy.
]]>Within the Office of the Provost, McLaughlin will work closely with all units on campus to ensure that the Institute's global efforts in education and research meet the highest standard of excellence. His office provides leadership and strategic direction to the Office of International Education which includes education abroad programs and its international student and faculty exchange programs.
In announcing the appointment, Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs Anderson Smith cited McLaughlin's intimate understanding of Tech's overseas operations and how those partnerships are fostered.
"Steve McLaughlin has served as deputy director of Georgia Tech Lorraine since 2004 and is aware of how important research and economic development are in our international plans," he said. "We have outstanding opportunities for our students to be involved in international study and work, and we need to expand those opportunities. However, we also have to support our international initiatives that involve research and graduate education at international sites.
"Steve will be Georgia Tech's point person on all our international activities. I look forward to working with him as we shape the global Georgia Tech."
During a public presentation in August, McLaughlin outlined his perspective on and vision for Tech's global initiatives. First and foremost, he said, these programs are essential ingredients in making both its students and faculty more competitive in the so-called 'flat world' of globalization.
"If we accept the flattened world proposition, then it comes down to preparing individuals - not only to compete against others but also to work together - and I think that's what Tech's international programs are all about."
"At Georgia Tech Lorraine we have interaction with dozens of companies, and all of them want students with experience in multicultural, multilingual environments," that mesh with their own multinational business operations, he said.
McLaughlin also sees Tech's international initiatives as a key differentiator of its brand over the next several decades.
"We're already being recognized as a leader in some aspects of international education and research. I'm absolutely convinced that this should be a major piece of our brand for the next generation or two." Moreover, this is an area "where we can be the clear leader, in a way that sets our nation's vision and defines policies and priorities for others."
Mindful of its responsibility to the state, McLaughlin said Tech also has an obligation to foster the kind of international partnerships that in can have an impact on Georgia's economic development.
"As a state institution, we need to do things that are in line with what the state needs," he said. "The competition is primarily going to be in the technology space, and I think we're in a position to be the leading university in this area."
Most of all, McLaughlin is enthusiastic about international opportunities for the kinds of life-altering experiences they produce. Having spent three years in Metz, France, he noted the impact that experience has had on both his career and family.
"I'm convinced that these international programs change people, sometimes in profound ways but also in ordinary ways. It also changes our international partners, the way they view us and the way we view them."
]]>The PECASE program recognizes outstanding scientists and engineers who, early in their careers, show exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of knowledge. This Presidential Award is the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government on scientists and engineers beginning their independent careers.
Moore's primary research interests are in finding objective markers in speech that can be used to characterize the human condition. His current research centers around the analysis of vocal affect as it relates to the overall mental state of the speaker. He has done work on analyzing the effectiveness of objective speech features as indicators of clinical depression and is continuing to explore other types of emotional disorders and types of affective expression. His research will be helpful in analyzing speech for emotion and stress, detecting deception, improving human-computer interaction in dialogue applications and clinical applications related to emotional and vocal disorders.
Moore was a recipient of the NSF's Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award in 2005. He is a member of IEEE's Signal Processing Society and Engineering in Medicine and Biology society. He is also a member of the Acoustical Society of America.
]]>The summit will convene the nation's premiere leaders of business, government, academia and the research community to address the core components and lessons of the role of the private sector; education and workforce issues, energy independence and partnerships in innovation.
President Clough's panel will focus on the 'human' challenges of the current marketplace including keeping America economically competitive with a highly skilled workforce, attracting the best and brightest students from across the globe and evaluating the academic, government and private sector's role in ensuring America's education system is world class. The panel is set to begin Tuesday, September 18 at 10:30 a.m. in the Ronald Reagan International Trade Center in Washington, D.C.
"The National Summit on American Competitiveness provides an opportunity to highlight the progress we've made and the need for America to continually advance strategies that keep our country on the competitive edge," said Gutierrez. "It will be a time to learn from America's most prominent and successful leaders and innovators. I am excited about the potential for the National Summit to make a significant contribution toward shaping the national debate and developing policies that will help foster innovation and competitiveness."
To view a full listing of speakers and the summit agenda, please visit www.americancompetitiveness.com or www.commerce.gov.
]]>The study, by Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Peter Webster of Georgia Institute of Technology, will be published online July 30 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London.
"These numbers are a strong indication that climate change is a major factor in the increasing number of Atlantic hurricanes," said Holland.
The analysis identifies three periods since 1900, separated by sharp transitions, during which the average number of hurricanes and tropical storms increased dramatically and then remained elevated and relatively steady. The first period, between 1900 and 1930, saw an average of six Atlantic tropical cyclones (or major storms), of which four were hurricanes and two were tropical storms. From 1930 to 1940, the annual average increased to 10, consisting of five hurricanes and five tropical storms. In the final study period, from 1995 to 2005, the average reached 15, of which eight were hurricanes and seven were tropical storms.
This latter period has not yet stabilized, which means that the average hurricane season may be more active in the future. Holland and Webster caution, however, that it is not possible at this time to predict the level at which the frequency and intensity of storms will stabilize.
The increases over the last century correlate closely with SSTs, which have risen by about 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit in the last 100 years. The changes in SSTs took place in the years prior to the sharp increases in storm frequency, with an SST rise of approximately 0.7 degrees Fahrenheit leading up to 1930 and a similar rise leading up to 1995 and continuing even after. The authors note that other studies indicate that most of the rise in Atlantic SSTs can be attributed to global warming.
Natural cycles and global warming
The unusually active hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005 have spurred considerable research into the question of whether more intense tropical cyclones are correlated with natural cycles, global warming, or some other cause. The new study indicates that natural cycles are probably not the entire cause because the increase has happened across the last century rather than oscillating in tandem with a natural cycle.
The study also finds that enhanced observations in recent decades cannot account for all of the increase. To observe storms in the Atlantic more systematically, meteorologists began relying on data from aircraft flights in 1944 and satellites about 1970. The distinct transitions in hurricane activity noted by Holland and Webster occurred around both 1930 and 1995.
"We are of the strong and considered opinion that data errors alone cannot explain the sharp, high-amplitude transitions between the climatic regimes, each with an increase of around 50 percent in cyclone and hurricane numbers, and their close relationship with SSTs," the authors stated.
While the number of storms has steadily increased, the proportion of hurricanes to all Atlantic tropical cyclones has remained steady. Hurricanes have generally accounted for roughly 55 percent of all tropical cyclones. However, the proportion of major hurricanes (those with maximum sustained winds of at least 110 miles per hour) to less intense hurricanes and tropical storms has oscillated irregularly, and has increased significantly in recent years.
Last year's storms
The 2006 hurricane season was far less active than the two preceding years, in part because of the emergence of an El Nino event in the Pacific Ocean. However, that year, which was not included in the study, would have ranked above average a century ago, with five hurricanes and four other named storms.
"Even a quiet year by today's standards would be considered normal or slightly active compared to an average year in the early part of the 20th century," Holland said.
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research under primary sponsorship by the National Science Foundation. Opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this release are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Full caption for image:
A new climate study indicates that hurricanes and tropical storms became more frequent in the Atlantic Ocean during three distinct periods over the last century, as shown in this graphic. The first part of the 20th century (in white) was relatively quiet, with an annual average of 6 observed hurricanes and tropical storms. The annual average increased to 10 after 1930, and then reached 15 from 1995 to 2005 (in darkest shading). This graphic shows both the total number each year (blue line) and the nine-year running average, calculated from four years back through four years ahead of a given year. Called a running mean, this method smoothes out year-to-year variability to reveal the long-term trend. The new research associates the increasing storms with rising sea-surface temperatures. (Image courtesy: Steve Deyo, UCAR)
The primary partner institutions, along with major collaborators, will match the NIH award in additional financial commitments, space, personnel and other support. Georgia collaborators include the Georgia Research Alliance, Kaiser Permanente of Georgia, the Atlanta Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Georgia Bio (formerly the Georgia Biomedical Partnership), and Grady Memorial Hospital and Health System.
The award is part of a new national clinical research consortium launched last year by the NIH and supported through Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSAs). Part of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research, the consortium is designed to spur the transformation of clinical and translational research in the U.S. so that new treatments can be developed more efficiently and delivered more quickly to patients.
As one of the early CTSA partners, the Atlanta CTSI is among the 12 recipients announced today who will join 12 announced in 2006 in a national network that will include 60 CTSAs when fully implemented in 2012.
"The Atlanta Clinical and Translational Science Institute (ACTSI) will harness the tremendous and diverse scientific, technological and clinical strengths of these partner institutions," says David S. Stephens, MD, executive associate dean for research in Emory University School of Medicine and principal investigator of the grant. "The institute will function as a citywide magnet for clinical and translational research using discovery, training and community engagement to improve the healthcare of the Atlanta community."
"We have a unique opportunity to transform healthcare and eliminate health disparities by actively engaging the broader physician community, and sharing best practices," says Elizabeth Ofili, MD, MPH, associate dean for clinical research, Morehouse School of Medicine and co-principal investigator. "Such academic community partnerships are critical to the success of the Atlanta CTSI as we work to effectively translate scientific discoveries to improve the health of all Atlantans."
The goals of the Atlanta CTSI mirror those of the national CTSA consortium - to create new and innovative programs that accelerate discovery, engage communities in clinical research and the development of new scientific knowledge; train and develop interdisciplinary investigative teams; and create new research tools and information technologies that improve human health.
"This grant will bolster our research efforts and produce real solutions to improve the health of Georgia's citizens," said Governor Sonny Perdue. "This announcement is another step along Georgia's path to becoming a leader in healthcare research. Georgia is a center for innovation and collaboration, and we will continue to seek out opportunities to capitalize on Georgia's resources and talent."
"Emory, Morehouse School of Medicine, Georgia Tech and Children's all are distinguished national leaders in educational excellence, innovative multidisciplinary research and ethical and effective engagement with the community," says Michael M.E. Johns, MD, CEO of Emory's Woodruff Health Sciences Center. "The existing solid partnerships and the commitment of these Atlanta institutions to contribute their intellectual strengths, resources, technologies and clinical facilities to this joint effort provide an extraordinary opportunity to create a national model for translating research discoveries into the most advanced patient care."
Each institution will contribute strengths to the partnership that will help create unique and valuable synergies. Emory is a national leader in healthcare and biomedical research and Georgia Tech is a national leader in biomedical engineering and the application of innovative systems engineering to health care solutions. Morehouse School of Medicine is a leading historically black institution that brings ethnic diversity to the biomedical research community, addresses health disparities through successful community engagement and serves as a pipeline for training minority investigators.
By partnering with Children's, the ACTSI also will create a new and innovative pediatric clinical and translational research center that builds on the established relationships of Emory, Morehouse School of Medicine and Children's and the shared healthcare they provide and adds new research relationships with Georgia Tech in bioinformatics.
"This grant is a clear indication of the quality of the researchers at Emory, Morehouse School of Medicine, Georgia Tech and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta and the strong partnerships they have formed," says Thomas J. Lawley, MD, dean of Emory University School of Medicine.
Collaborations with and strong support from the Georgia Research Alliance will create opportunities to foster and accelerate the development and application of new and emerging technologies, an effort also facilitated through Georgia Bio. Collaborations with Kaiser Permanente of Georgia, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the VA Medical Center will enable dynamic community, public health, informatics and population studies programs.
The Atlanta CTSI will bring together laboratory scientists with clinical investigators, community clinicians, professional societies, and industry collaborators in a wide variety of dynamic programs and research projects. The institute will apply new research methods in genomics, imaging, nanotechnology, proteomics, metabolomics, glycomics and informatics to develop the most advanced and innovative therapies. It also will create and sustain partnerships with Atlanta's diverse communities to support community-based clinical research.
By using new research approaches in drug discovery and design, predictive health, regenerative biology, health disparities, computational and life sciences, translational animal models, imaging, and vaccines, the institute's scientists will accelerate the transfer of new technology, therapeutics and applications into routine use and focus their collective scientific expertise on the most critical health problems facing our country today.
For more information about the ACTSI, specific programs and primary investigators, see http://www.AtlantaCTSI.org
For information about the NIH national CTSA consortium, see http://www.ctsaweb.org.
]]>"We're extremely fortunate to have Dene Sheheane represent Georgia Tech in our Government Relations office," said Georgia Tech President Wayne Clough. "Dene has experience supporting educational issues at the chancellor's office, Board of Regents and state capitol, and has developed strong relationships with our state and federal elected officials."
Sheheane has extensive state and local government experience. Most recently he was associate vice president for external affairs at Georgia State University. Prior to that, he worked in the governor's office during the early 1990s prior to moving to Georgia State in 1994.
"As a graduate of Georgia Tech, I am eager to return to campus and serve the Institute that played such a major role in shaping my life," said Sheheane. "Representing Georgia Tech in the State Capitol will be both an honor and a privilege. I look forward to meeting the talented faculty and staff at Georgia Tech as we work together to communicate the value of a strong investment in the Institute."
Sheheane continued, "Georgia Tech has earned many friends in state government, and I am committed to strengthening those relationships to ensure the Institute's strategic goals and priorities receive outstanding support and recognition."
Sheheane is a native Georgian and a graduate of Norcross High School. He graduated from Georgia Tech in 1991 with a degree in management. He received a Master of Business Administration from Georgia State University.
His professional affiliations include serving as chairman of the National State Relations Task Force, an organization comprised of higher education government relations professionals from across the country.
A resident of the historic downtown district of Acworth, Georgia, Sheheane serves on the Acworth Downtown Development Authority.
Sheheane replaces Andrew Harris, who retired earlier this year.
]]>"High-performance computing will enable breakthrough science and engineering in the 21st century," said Bader. "My goal in developing this book was to inspire members of the high-performance computing community to solve computational grand challenges that will help our society, protect our environment, and improve our understanding in fundamental ways, all through the efficient use of petascale computing."
Featuring contributions from the world's leading experts in computational science, 'Petascale Computing: Algorithms and Applications' discusses expected breakthroughs in the computational science and engineering field and covers a breadth of topics in petascale computing, including architectures, software, programming methodologies, tools, scalable algorithms, performance evaluation and application development. Covering a wide range of issues critical to the advancement of the high-performance computing/supercomputing industry, this edited collection illustrates the application of petascale computing to space and Earth science missions, biological systems and climate science, among others, and details the simulation of multiphysics, cosmological evolution, molecular dynamics and biomolecules.
"In the same way as petascale computing will open up new and unprecedented opportunities for research in computational science, I expect this current book to lead to a deeper understanding and appreciation of research in computational science and engineering," said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computing sciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and editor of Chapman & Hall/CRC Press' new Computational Science book series.
The College of Computing at Georgia Tech is a young and rising leader in high-performance computing, computational science and engineering (CSE), and real-world computing. Focusing on research and education that impacts and influence social and scientific progress, the College of Computing Georgia Tech is unlocking 21st century grand challenges through fundamental and real world research, and educating tomorrow's computational science innovators with advanced degrees in CSE. In November 2006, the College of Computing was recognized for its innovation and leadership role in this industry through its selection as the first Sony-Toshiba-IBM Center of Competence focused on the Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) microprocessor.
About Chapman & Hall/CRC Press
As part of the Taylor and Francis Group, an Informa business, Chapman & Hall/CRC Press is a preeminent publisher in computer science, mathematics, statistics, and physics, and the publisher of the new Chapman & Hall/CRC Computational Science book series, edited by Horst Simon, Associate Laboratory Director, Computing Sciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. With the publication of this series, Chapman & Hall/CRC is committed to disseminating the latest research and applications in computational science and engineering, through the publication of a broad range of textbooks, reference works, and handbooks. For further information, please visit www.crcpress.com.
About the College of Computing at Georgia Tech
The College of Computing at Georgia Tech is a national leader in the creation of real-world computing breakthroughs that drive social and scientific progress. With its graduate program ranked 11th nationally by U.S. News and World Report, the College's unconventional approach to education is defining the new face of computing by expanding the horizons of traditional computer science students through interdisciplinary collaboration and a focus on human centered solutions. For more information about the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, its academic divisions and research centers, please visit www.cc.gatech.edu.
"It's always nice to be honored by your peers," said Curry, chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. "Overall, it adds to the prestige of the Institute when you have a number of fellows named."
Curry was recognized for her work in both the relationships between global climate change and hurricane intensity and for her contributions that led to understanding feedbacks in the Arctic system. She was named a fellow in the American Geophysical Union in 2004 and in the American Meteorological Society in 1995.
"I am always a little surprised by such things," said Engle, School of Psychology Chair and associate dean for the College of Sciences. "For me, [this distinction] helps us to convey that there is a science of psychology that plays a crucial role in the community of scientists."
Engle was recognized for his work in understanding the nature of working memory and individual differences. "I look at our amazing young faculty and the incredible senior people we have hired in the Institute in recent years and I am struck by how good we have become and how much talent there is here [at Georgia Tech]."
"I deeply appreciate this recognition of my work," she said. "My orientation to research has always been policy and practice in terms of making a difference in individual lives as well as transforming institutions. This is not only important nationally, but globally, as who is not 'at the table' is as significant as who is." In 2006, Leggon was elected to membership in Sigma Xi, an honorary scholarly society.
Physics Professor Trebino credited the work of many in receiving this honor. "It means that many grad students, post-docs, and others who have worked with my group over the years have done a very nice job making my ideas-as well as their own-happen," he said.
He was honored for the development of techniques and devices for measuring ultrashort laser pulses.
"My group's work impacts the wide range of fields that use these pulses, from biology to physics to manufacturing, and [the] AAAS Fellowship acknowledges this wide impact." Trebino is a 2006 Fellow of the American Physical Society and a 1999 Optical Society of America Fellow.
AAAS is the world's largest general scientific society. The 471 AAAS Fellows for 2007 were named in the News & Notes section of the Oct. 26 edition of the journal Science and will be honored at the Fellows Forum Feb. 16, 2008. In 2006, four members of Tech's community were named AAAS Fellows; six were named in 2005.
]]>Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable regions on Earth to floods. Rising waters in recent days have left dozens of people dead and several million marooned or displaced, with the toll likely to mount.
The 1- to 10-day forecasts are delivered directly, when possible, to more than 100,000 people living in floodplains of the Brahmaputra and Ganges rivers. They will be distributed more widely in coming years.
"Our goal is that long-range flood forecasts, for the first time, will consistently reach many rural individuals in Bangladesh who are in jeopardy of losing their homes, businesses, and possibly their lives," said NCAR scientist Thomas Hopson, who helped develop the forecasting system.
The forecasting system predicted the current floods several days in advance, but volunteers on the ground cannot yet confirm the extent to which it helped people prepare for these floods.
The system uses a combination of weather forecast models, satellite observations, river gauges, and new hydrologic modeling techniques. It is part of a larger initiative, known as Climate Forecast Applications in Bangladesh, to improve flood and precipitation warnings in the low-lying nation. Peter Webster, a professor in Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, is the principal investigator of the overall initiative.
Hopson and Webster have provided forecasts to Bangladeshi agencies since 2003, but the forecasts often have not reached rural regions, where many residents lack radios and even electricity. This year, the Thailand-based nonprofit Asia Disaster Preparedness Center has established a network of governmental and nongovernmental organizations, as well as volunteers, to distribute the forecasts directly to people in five districts along the Brahmaputra and Ganges, including impoverished families living on islands known as river chars. The center's Ramasamy Selvaraju and A.R. Subbiah are overseeing the distribution efforts.
Additional areas of Bangladesh will receive forecasts in coming years.
The project, which has received funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), is supported by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the relief agency CARE.
Protecting lives and income
Almost every other year in recent decades, the Brahmaputra and Ganges rivers have flooded for periods ranging from a few days to a month or more, often with devastating results for local residents. Farmers and fishers can easily lose a year's worth of income in a single flood.
Residents of the largely impoverished districts in the forecast area have said that advance notice of floods could help them ward off some of the worst impacts of rising waters. If they had sufficient warning, they could harvest at least a portion of their ripening crops, move some livestock to safety, encircle fish ponds with nets to prevent fish from escaping, and stock food and other supplies.
"The goal here is to help very local, grassroots economies," Hopson explained. "The forecasts also alert relief agencies to prepare to bring in drinking water, cholera tablets, and other essentials in case of a major flood."
The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts provides data and weather forecasts, which are fed into hydrological models of the Ganges and Brahmaputra river basins. The system also incorporates estimates of precipitation from two satellite-based systems developed at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and NOAA Climate Prediction Center, along with discharge measurements of rivers in Bangladesh.
The forecasting system emphasizes modeling and satellite data to compensate for a lack of river gauge data upstream of Bangladesh, as well as for a lack of radar data. It is updated daily with new model runs and measurements.
Longer-range forecasts
Hopson, Webster, and Georgia Tech scientists Carlos Hoyos and Hai-Ru Chang have worked to create forecasts that go out more than 10 days, thereby giving residents additional time to prepare for floods. Over the next year or two, increasing numbers of Bangladeshis will begin to receive 20-day forecasts, followed by one- to six-month seasonal forecasts.
The team will also study the feasibility of applying its forecasting technology and methods to other vulnerable countries, such as Cambodia and Vietnam.
"We feel that the prediction modules we have developed for Bangladesh are templates for flood forecasting in developing nations with limited infrastructure and resources," Webster said.
The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research manages the National Center for Atmospheric Research under primary sponsorship by the National Science Foundation. Opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this release are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
Figure caption:
In the summer of 2004, the forecasting system developed by NCAR and Georgia Tech scientists generated these 10-day forecasts showing that the Brahmaputra River in Bangladesh would likely exceed critical flood level (the horizontal dotted line) on two occasions in July. At the time, the forecasts were not fully integrated into Bangladeshi warning systems, and approximately 500 people in Bangladesh and India died in the floods. This summer, for the first time, the forecasts are being distributed directly to more than 100,000 people living in flood-prone areas along the Brahmaputra and Ganges rivers. (Illustration by Thomas Hopson, NCAR.)
A bee dance-inspired communications system developed by Georgia Tech helps Internet servers that would normally be devoted solely to one task move between tasks as needed, reducing the chances that a Web site could be overwhelmed with requests and lock out potential users and customers. Compared with the way server banks are commonly run, the honeybee method typically improves service by 4 percent to 25 percent in tests based on real Internet traffic. The research was published in the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics.
After studying the efficiency of honeybees, Craig Tovey, a professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, realized through conversations with Sunil Nakrani, a computer science colleague visiting from the University of Oxford, that bees and servers had strikingly similar barriers to efficiency.
"I studied bees for years, waiting for the right application," Tovey said. "When you work with biomimetics (the study of how biological principles can be applied to design and engineering), you have to look for a close analogy between two systems - never a superficial one. And this definitely fit the bill."
The more Tovey and Nakrani discussed bees and servers, the surer they became that somehow the bees' strategies for allocating limited resources in an unpredictable and constantly changing environment could be applied to Internet servers.
Honeybees have a limited number of workers at any given time to fly out to flowers, collect nectar, return to the hive and repeat until the nectar source is depleted. Sometimes, there's an abundance of nectar to be collected; at other times nectar is scarce. The bees' environment is constantly changing - some flower patches occasionally yield much better nectar than others, the seasons shift and rainy days make nectar collection difficult. So how do the bees manage to keep a steady flow of nectar coming into the hive?
Internet servers, which provide the computing power necessary to run Web sites, typically have a set number of servers devoted to a certain Web site or client. When users access a Web site, the servers provide computing power until all the requests to access and use the site have been fulfilled. Sometimes there are a lot of requests to access a site (for instance, a clothing company's retail site after a particularly effective television ad during a popular sporting event) and sometimes there are very few. Predicting demand for Web sites, including whether a user will access a video clip or initiate a purchase, is extremely difficult in a fickle Internet landscape, and servers are frequently overloaded and later become completely inactive at random.
Bees tackle their resource allocation problem (i.e. a limited number of bees and unpredictable demand on their time and desired location) with a seamless system driven by 'dances.' Here's how it works: The scout bees leave the hive in search of nectar. Once they've found a promising spot, they return to the hive 'dance floor' and perform a dance. The direction of the dance tells the waiting forager bees which direction to fly, the number of waggle turns conveys the distance to the flower patch; and the length conveys the sweetness of the nectar.
The forager bees then dance behind the scouts until they learn the right steps (and the particulars about the nectar), forming a bobbing conga line of sorts. Then they fly out to collect the nectar detailed in the dance. As long as there's still nectar to be found, the bees that return continue the dance. Other forager bees continue to fly toward the source until the dancing slowly tapers off or a new bee returns with a more appealing dance routine (Hey, the nectar over here is even better!).
While all that dancing may not sound like a model of efficiency, it's actually optimal for the unpredictable nectar world the bees inhabit, Tovey said. The system allows the bees to seamlessly shift from one nectar source to a more promising nectar source based on up-to-the-minute conditions. All this without a clear leader or central command to slow the decision making process.
"But the bees aren't performing a computation or strategy, they ARE the computation," Tovey added.
Internet servers, on the other hand, are theoretically optimized for 'normal' conditions, which are frequently challenged by fickle human nature. By assigning certain servers to a certain Web site, Internet hosts are establishing a system that works well under normal conditions and poorly under conditions that strain demand. When demand for one site swells, many servers sit idly by as the assigned servers reach capacity and begin shifting potential users to a lengthening queue that tries their patience and turns away potential customers.
Tovey, a co-director of the Center for Biologically Inspired Design at Georgia Tech, and Nakrani set to work translating the bee strategy for these idle Internet servers. They developed a virtual 'dance floor' for a network of servers. When one server receives a user request for a certain Web site, an internal advertisement (standing in a little less colorfully for the dance) is placed on the dance floor to attract any available servers. The ad's duration depends on the demand on the site and how much revenue its users may generate. The longer an ad remains on the dance floor, the more power available servers devote to serving the Web site requests advertised.
]]>With an eye towards building robots that can balance like humans, researchers at Georgia Tech and Emory University have created a computer simulation that sheds new light on how the nervous system reinvents its communication with muscles after sensory loss. The findings could someday be used to better diagnose and rehabilitate patients with balance problems (through normal aging or diseases such as Multiple Sclerosis or Parkinson's) by retraining their muscles and improving overall balance. The research will be published in the October issue of Nature Neuroscience.
"The ultimate goal of rehabilitation is for patients to find the best way to adapt to their particular deficit. This system may help predict what the optimum combination of muscle and nerve activity looks like for each patient, helping patients and doctors set realistic goals and speeding recovery," said Lena Ting, lead researcher on the project and an assistant professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University.
In a body without balance impairment, the nervous system collects sensory information from all over the body (skin, ears, feet, arms, eyes, etc.) and transmits this information to the muscles that control balance. When that information changes through the introduction of something like a strong wind, a raised crack in the pavement or an accidental bump from a nearby stranger, the nervous system sends the new information to the muscles and they adjust accordingly to maintain the body's balance.
Impairments and injuries to the nervous system or the senses that report to the nervous system (experienced with a loss of vision or touch and problems in the inner ear) lead to balance problems. Experts traditionally have had little understanding of how the nervous system's communication with the muscles associated with balance changes when one or several pieces of necessary sensory information are missing.
Georgia Tech and Emory researchers set out to create an effective way to interpret how commands from the nervous system to muscles (measured through electrical signals in the muscles) are changed by sensory impairment - similar to the numbing of feet experienced by diabetes patients - and how these changes affect balance control. The team started with data sets from animals. They were able to determine that, after a period of rehabilitation, subjects with some sensory damage were able to regain their balance despite the loss of some sensory information. So how do the nervous system and muscles fill in the information gaps?
The Georgia Tech and Emory team hypothesized that the nervous system relies on the relationship between the body's center of gravity and its environment to control balance. They reasoned that the best predictor of how muscles would be activated when the subject experienced a balance threat was not the motion of the individual body parts, but the horizontal motion of the body's center of gravity.
To test their theory, the researchers created a computer simulation that could accurately simulate standing balance and muscle reactions to balance disturbances by focusing on the relation of the subject's center of gravity to the ground. Rather than predicting neural control patterns for the multitude of sensory information processed by the body to maintain balance, the team instead tracked a small set of signals related to the body's control of its center of gravity.
The Georgia Tech and Emory team determined that subjects who had impaired sensory information were slowly using new sensory pathways to track the motion of the body's center of gravity, compensating for the loss of information from the damaged sensory pathways. In effect, the subjects' muscles were using different neural information to perform the same balance tasks, resulting in muscle activity patterns that looked 'abnormal,' but that were actually similar to the predicted optimum.
The research team is now testing its center of gravity simulation with human subjects and a small robot with simulated muscles. They predict that the simulation could recognize impairment and pinpoint the optimum recovery points for each sensory-impaired subject - all based on the body's reliance on center of gravity information. When applied to a robot, these neural communication patterns allowed the robot to successfully move fluidly like an animal, in contrast to what its gears and motors might suggest. The robot demonstrates all of the different strategies that could be used by normal and sensory-loss patients.
"This finding will change the way we approach rehabilitation," Ting said. "We can't expect patients to mimic normal balance performance when they're using a different set of sensory information. Instead, our work can help identify the best performance possible given a patient's level and type of sensory impairment."
]]>CATEA's Consumer Network (CCN) is an on-line community that shares information about new developments in disability and aging related-products and services. By joining CCN, members are among the first to preview new advances in disability and aging-related products and provide input to make them more usable and accessible.
"CNN is unique because it is the only consumer network of its kind to include all facets of disability and aging issues," said CATEA researcher Robert Todd. "No one will be left out because they don't fit a 'profile.'"
CATEA researchers also benefit greatly from the network since they are able to identify CCN members willing to test new prototypes, products and services in order to improve them through focus groups, field-testing, and surveys.
'CCN is a young initiative as it was launched in October of 2006," said Todd. "The network has already been responsible for the successful completion of numerous research projects, private and federally funded."
College of Architecture Ph. D student Young Mi Choi used CCN to find subjects for her research on portable wheelchair ramps. The network helped identify potential users from a pool of members and also allowed Choi to be more precise in sending out invitations targeting only those who would qualify to participate in the study.
"CCN allows users to learn more about research that would be helpful to their lives," said Choi. "Most importantly though, by showing interest in becoming a CCN member, it allows them an opportunity to actually take part in developing innovations that may be able to impact them directly."
Participation in CCN is growing rapidly among consumers, nearly doubling between March and June of 2007.
"Although CCN was developed at Georgia Tech's CATEA, the network is intended for use by all researchers who will abide by its rules and regulations," said Todd. "It is thus a more universal source for disability and aging research than any other in the nation."
According to Todd, CCN accomplishes this broad mission while still maintaining 100% privacy and anonymity for its members. Additionally, membership is free of charge, and members are often compensated for their participation in studies.
CATEA plans to open the network to researchers across the nation during the second half of 2007.
]]>Growing inside the caves of the tropical Pacific island of Borneo are some of the keys to understanding how the Earth's climate suddenly changed - several times - over the last 25,000 years. By analyzing stalagmites, the pilar-like rock formations that stem from the ground in caves, they were able to produce a high-resolution and continuous record of the climate over this equatorial rainforest.
"These stalagmites are, in essence, tropical ice cores forming over thousands of years," said Partin. "Each layer of the rock contains important chemical traces that help us determine what was going on in the climate thousands of years ago, much like the ice cores drilled from Greenland or Antarctica."
The tropical Pacific currently plays a powerful role in shaping year-to-year climate variations around the globe (as evidenced by the number of weather patterns influenced by the Pacific's El Nino), but its role in past climate change is less understood. Partin and Cobb's results suggest that the tropical Pacific played a much more active role in some of the abrupt climate change events of Earth's past than was once thought and may even have played a leading role in some of these changes.
Polar ice cores reveal that the Northern Hemisphere and the Southern Hemisphere each have their own distinct patterns of abrupt climate change; the tropical Pacific may provide the mechanistic link between the two systems. Understanding how the climate changes occurred and what they looked like is important to helping scientists put into context the current trends in today's climate. They published their findings in the Sept 27, 2007, issue of the journal Nature.
The research team collected stalagmites from the Gunung Buda cave system in Borneo in 2003, 2005 and 2006. Analyzing three stalagmites from two separate caves allowed the pair to create a near-continuous record of the climate from 25,000 years ago to the present. While this study is not the first to use stalagmites to examine climate over this time period, it is the first to do so in the tropical Pacific. Typically, in these types of studies, only one stalagmite is analyzed, but Partin and Cobb compared their three stalagmite records to isolate shared climate-related signals.
Stalagmites are formed as rain water, mixed with calcium carbonate and other elements, makes its way through the ground and onto the cave floor. As this solution drips over time, it hardens in layers, creating a column of rock.
Partin and Cobb cut open each stalagmite and took 1,300 measurements of their chemical content to determine the relative moisture of the climate at various periods in history starting from the oldest layers at the bottom to the present at the top. They dated the rocks by analyzing the radioactive decay of uranium and thorium, and determined the amount of precipitation at given times by measuring the ratio of oxygen isotopes.
"Our records contain signatures of both Northern and Southern Hemisphere climate influences as the Earth emerged from the last ice age, which makes sense given its equatorial location," said Cobb. "However, tropical Pacific climate was not a simple linear combination of high-latitude climate events. It reflects the complexity of mechanisms linking high and low latitude climate."
For example, Partin and Cobb's records suggest that the tropical Pacific began drying about 20,000 years ago and that this trend may have pre-conditioned the North Atlantic for an abrupt climate change event that occurred about 16,500 years ago, known as the Heinrich 1 event.
"In addition, the Borneo records indicate that the tropical Pacific began to get wetter before the North Atlantic recovered from the Heinrich 1 event 14,000 years ago. Perhaps the tropical Pacific is again driving that trend," said Partin.
"Currently our knowledge of how these dramatic climate changes occurred comes from just a few sites," said Cobb. "As more studies are done from caves around the world, hopefully we'll be able to piece together a more complete picture of these changes. Understanding how the dominoes fell is very important to our understanding of our current warming trend."
]]>"As a first year competitor in the Urban Challenge, qualifying for the semi-final round is a major accomplishment and testament to the passion and dedication of our team," said Dr. Henrik Christensen, KUKA Chair of Robotics for the College of Computing at Georgia Tech and Principal Investigator for Sting Racing. "Our robotics program at Georgia Tech is relatively new, but the progress we have shown over a short period of time has positioned us among the best in the nation."
During the visit, DARPA personnel assessed the ability of the autonomous vehicle to perform tasks and operate safely. Sting was evaluated on its ability to navigate a test course that included a four-way intersection, and moving traffic. This evaluation cover a subset of the challenges that the robotic vehicles will face on the final Urban Challenge course, including merging into moving traffic, navigating traffic circles, negotiating busy intersections and avoiding obstacles.
Sting Racing, a joint collaboration between Georgia Tech's College of Computing, College of Engineering, the Georgia Tech Research Institute and SAIC, selected a Porsche Cayenne, designated Sting 1, as the base vehicle for its entry in the Urban Design Challenge. For nearly a year the members of the Sting Racing team have been working to program the robot to drive autonomously by staying on course and recognizing obstacles in its way, such as other cars.
"We have put in a lot of long hours over the past year preparing Sting 1 for this site visit - the first major trial in the Urban Grand Challenge," noted Matt Powers, a student at Georgia Tech and member of the Sting Racing team. "So passing all four tests during the site visit was extremely rewarding. We look forward now to making it all the way to the finals."
DARPA uses the site visit evaluation to select the competition's semi-finalists - the top 36 teams that will participate in the National Qualification Event (NQE), an exercise to demonstrate the safety of the vehicles on October 21-31. Earlier this afternoon, DARPA announced the other semi-finalists as well as the location of the NQE and Urban Challenge - the former George Air Force Base in Victorville, California.
The Urban Challenge is the third in a series of DARPA-sponsored competitions to foster the development of robotic ground vehicle technology without a human operator, designed for use on the battlefield. The Urban Challenge, set for November 3, 2007, will feature autonomous ground vehicles executing simulated military supply missions safely and effectively in a mock urban area. Safe operation in traffic is essential to U.S. military plans to use autonomous ground vehicles to conduct important missions and keep American personnel out of harm's way. DARPA will award $2 million, $1 million and $500,000 awards to the top three finishers that complete the course within the six-hour time limit.
The Sting 1 Porsche Cayenne is available for media demonstrations. For more information, visit www.sting-racing.org.
]]>This prestigious award is one of 19 made available each year through the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. The scholarships are awarded to college students who have exhibited exceptional performance, initiative and creativity in the science or engineering field of their major. While scholarship recipients must display intellectual daring, the committee also looks for well-rounded students who are involved in campus and community activities.
"These scholarships are a way for me and my fellow astronauts to give back to a country that provided us with an extraordinary opportunity," said Captain Lovell. "Nicole will be one of the many leaders who will keep the United States at the edge of breakthrough technology and I consider it an honor to be presenting her with this check."
The award will be applied toward Larsen's ongoing education at Georgia Tech, where she currently holds a 3.88 academic average. As a double major in Mathematics and Physics, Larsen is one of only a few women majors in the mostly male dominated world of Mathematics. Last summer, she participated in the Cornell Laboratory of Elementary Particle Physics REU, where she performed in a group working on the CMS particle detector for the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is scheduled to begin operation in November to probe energy scales that have never before been seen. When not working in the laboratory, you can find Larsen tutoring fellow Georgia Tech students in math and physics. Larsen believes, "The best part of my job, as a tutor, is when I have managed to impart some enthusiasm for the material!"
"It is a pleasure to see an exceptional student like Nicole recognized of her accomplishments," said Georgia Tech Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Gary Schuster. "Nicole is a great example of a Georgia Tech student who has set herself apart from her peers by excelling both academically in the classroom and also in the research lab."
Selected as a NASA astronaut in 1962, Captain Lovell has logged over 715 hours in space on four space missions. He piloted a then-record 14-day space trip in Gemini 7. Next he commanded Gemini 12, and then orbited the moon on man's maiden voyage on Apollo 8. Captain Lovell is most known for his commanded and then aborted Apollo 13 moon mission. He retired from NASA in 1973, and was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in 1993. Captain Lovell served as the ASF Chairman and President from 1997 thru 2005 and is still an active member of the organization.
The Astronaut Scholarship Foundation is a non-profit organization established in 1984 by the six surviving members of America's original Mercury astronauts. Its goal is to aid the United States in retaining its world leadership in science and technology by providing scholarships for college students who exhibit motivation, imagination, and exceptional performance in the science or engineering field of their major. ASF funds 19 $10,000 scholarships annually and has awarded nearly $2.5 million to 226 students nationwide.
]]>"Efficient and effective communication is critical during an emergency and ultimately saves lives," said Andy Altizer, Georgia Tech emergency preparedness director. "This system will work in tandem with existing notification protocols and preparedness activities." Currently, emergency campus messages can be distributed via e-mail, the Institute's Web site and campus media including the cable network and radio station, WREK.
As part of GTENS, the Institute will be utilizing a number of communication methods to distribute critical information including a campus siren warning system designed to notify those located in outdoor areas around campus, a weather tracking system that will provide information regarding severe weather impacting the campus, campus radio and cable networks, e-mail notifications and the Georgia Tech Web site.
In addition, this fall, Georgia Tech is launching an 'Emergency Preparedness' certificate program making the Institute the first within the University System to provide structured training for building/facility managers and for other Georgia Tech employees and campus organizations. This training requires five mandatory and two elective courses ranging from Advanced Topics in Emergency Preparedness to Adult CPR. The new certificate program is part of the Institute's aggressive training and exercise program conducted throughout the year to prepare the campus for a wide range of emergency scenarios. For example, the Georgia Tech Police Department recently completed a 'response to a shooter' training class that included realistic and stressful scenarios with role players. Georgia Tech has approximately 70 sworn police officers on campus.
Georgia Tech also has an Emergency Preparedness Advisory Group that convenes monthly to assure that ongoing concerns are addressed. The group not only includes representatives from across campus, but also members from the Atlanta Police and Fire Departments and the Atlanta Fulton County Emergency Management Agency.
]]>The Hewlett-Packard/Harriet B. Rigas Award specifically honors female faculty members who have significantly benefited electrical and computer engineering education through excellence in teaching, encouraging and supporting increased participation of women in both fields, demonstrated scholarship and research, development of educational technology that enhances student learning and/or service to the engineering profession.
In her role as associate chair for graduate affairs, Ferri is responsible for one of the largest graduate ECE programs in the country. She oversees graduate curricula and student recruitment, admissions and advising for a program comprising approximately 1,000 students. As part of her ongoing efforts to improve the education and experience of ECE graduate students, Ferri has instituted training policies for graduate teaching assistants.
A talented and valued teacher, Ferri has maintained superior student ratings on teaching effectiveness throughout her 19-year career, and she has won two teaching awards. Ferri also has been very active in curriculum development and in applying technology to innovative teaching. She has played an integral role in developing several undergraduate and graduate courses in controls, as well as in the introduction of computer-enhanced and Web-based instruction in courses on signals, systems and controls. She has created a broad range of supplemental electronic materials to support the courses she teaches, and she was a pioneer in the use of WebCT at Tech. Her book Fundamentals of Signals and Systems, co-authored with Professor Emeritus Edward W. Kamen, has been adopted by more than 50 universities around the world.
Ferri joined Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) in 1988 as the School's first full-time, tenure-track female faculty member. She became the first woman faculty member named to an ECE administrative leadership role when she was named as associate chair for graduate affairs in 2006. Ferri has been an outstanding role model and leader for the women faculty hired subsequently, as well as for ECE's female undergraduate and graduate students.
As part of her longstanding commitment to promoting the engineering profession to women, Ferri has worked closely with the Women in ECE (WECE). Ferri is a faculty advisor and founding member of this student organization, which raises awareness among young women about opportunities in electrical and computer engineering and provides community and resources for those pursuing this career path. WECE has undertaken an ambitious outreach program targeting undergraduate and graduate students, as well as female K-12 students. With help from WECE students, Ferri has developed and conducted numerous sessions on ECE material at various camps for middle school and high school students.
In addition to her many contributions to education at Tech, Ferri has also taken a leadership role on educational issues within the IEEE Control Systems Society. For example, she was appointed to a two-year term as chair of this society's Technical Committee on Education, she organized several sessions on control education at conferences, and she guest-edited a special issue of the IEEE Control Systems Magazine called 'Future Directions in Controls Education.'
Ferri earned her B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Notre Dame, her M.S. in mechanical and aerospace engineering from Princeton University and her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech. Her research area is in control systems, and she is particularly interested in control theory, industrial controls, embedded controls, and software architecture for control systems.
]]>"Right now, I think we're all feeling a little bit of stress and a little panic, but mostly we're really excited about getting to D.C.," said Amelia Mendez, a senior in the College of Architecture. "I can't wait to see all of the components of the house assembled and working together."
The Solar Decathlon is a competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and it has 20 universities from around the world competing to build the most energy efficient house. This is the third Solar Decathlon and the first time Georgia Tech has entered the competition. As the team sets their eyes on the nation's capital, the students aren't the only ones excited about getting to the National Mall.
"It has been a long process, but I'm just incredibly happy and proud of the way this project has come together and the incredible effort that students have put into it," said project manager and College of Architecture professor Franca Trubiano. "The sponsors have also been tremendous and we're still receiving materials from them. Many of the sponsors have even offered their support in D.C. if we need it. Without their support, this project would not have been possible."
"The key to this project has been the students," said Ruchi Choudhary, Solar Decathlon project manager and College of Architecture professor. "The students are so dedicated. They have worked around the clock and without much sleep. They truly have been remarkable."
The plan is for the house to arrive on the Mall in D.C. on Wednesday, October 3, and that is when students will begin the final construction phase. According to Mendez, the focus of the team will be shifting when they get to the Mall.
"Right now, we've been working on putting the big pieces put together, but when we get to Washington, we'll be focusing on the detail work," said Mendez.
Many of the participants say this has been the experience of a lifetime and they can't wait to see what other teams have done with their houses.
"I'm looking forward to seeing what other schools have done," said Jonathon Schwartz, a senior in the College of Architecture. "I've seen so much of what we've done and I've been very impressed with my teammates work. I can't wait to see all the houses set up on the Mall and becoming a solar neighborhood."
"I'm really excited to see the other teams," said Mendez. "I know they put just as much time into this project and I want to see what comes out of the minds of other schools."
The Solar Decathlon opening ceremonies are October 12 and the competition will end with the closing ceremonies on October 19. The houses on the Mall will be open for public tours October 12-20.
]]>"Right now, I think we're all feeling a little bit of stress and a little panic, but mostly we're really excited about getting to D.C.," said Amelia Mendez, a senior in the College of Architecture. "I can't wait to see all of the components of the house assembled and working together."
The Solar Decathlon is a competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and it has 20 universities from around the world competing to build the most energy efficient house. This is the third Solar Decathlon and the first time Georgia Tech has entered the competition. As the team sets their eyes on the nation's capital, the students aren't the only ones excited about getting to the National Mall.
"It has been a long process, but I'm just incredibly happy and proud of the way this project has come together and the incredible effort that students have put into it," said project manager and College of Architecture professor Franca Trubiano. "The sponsors have also been tremendous and we're still receiving materials from them. Many of the sponsors have even offered their support in D.C. if we need it. Without their support, this project would not have been possible."
"The key to this project has been the students," said Ruchi Choudhary, Solar Decathlon project manager and College of Architecture professor. "The students are so dedicated. They have worked around the clock and without much sleep. They truly have been remarkable."
The plan is for the house to arrive on the Mall in D.C. on Wednesday, October 3, and that is when students will begin the final construction phase. According to Mendez, the focus of the team will be shifting when they get to the Mall.
"Right now, we've been working on putting the big pieces put together, but when we get to Washington, we'll be focusing on the detail work," said Mendez.
Many of the participants say this has been the experience of a lifetime and they can't wait to see what other teams have done with their houses.
"I'm looking forward to seeing what other schools have done," said Jonathon Schwartz, a senior in the College of Architecture. "I've seen so much of what we've done and I've been very impressed with my teammates work. I can't wait to see all the houses set up on the Mall and becoming a solar neighborhood."
"I'm really excited to see the other teams," said Mendez. "I know they put just as much time into this project and I want to see what comes out of the minds of other schools."
The Solar Decathlon opening ceremonies are October 12 and the competition will end with the closing ceremonies on October 19. The houses on the Mall will be open for public tours October 12-20.
]]>"Georgia Tech continues to distinguish itself as one of the top national universities over the last decade," said President Wayne Clough. "This recognition reflects the high quality of our programs, faculty and students, and our growing momentum."
Georgia Tech's nationally prominent College of Engineering, which is the nation's largest, moved up in the rankings to fifth compared to sixth last year. The College of Engineering had four of its programs ranked in the top five among specialty areas. Industrial Engineering ranked first, Aerospace ranked second, Biomedical placed third (up from fourth last year), and Civil Engineering ranked fifth.
Georgia Tech's internship and cooperative education programs were ranked among the 14 "Academic Programs to Look For" under internships for the second consecutive year. Tech was also selected as one of 35 outstanding examples of undergraduate research opportunities among undergraduate research/creative projects for the second consecutive year.
"I am especially pleased to see Georgia Tech among the leaders in internship and co-op opportunities as well as undergraduate research," said Clough. "Georgia Tech consistently seeks to offer our students the best academic experience possible, and that includes real-world and research opportunities."
Georgia Tech alumni continue to be among of the most generous. The percentage of Tech graduates contributing to the Institute is the highest for any public university ranked in the top 50.
]]>In response to a call at around 7 PM on August 21, Georgia Tech Police found a truck with a deceased male in a parking lot at 353 Ferst Drive. According to the Fulton County Medical
Examiner's report, the victim did not suffer external trauma. Toxicology reports are pending.
The victim was identified as Johnathan M. Grams. The Georgia Tech Registrar's Office has confirmed that Grams was a former student at the Institute, last enrolled in the fall of 2003 as a
mechanical engineering major.
Georgia Tech continues to cooperate with the Atlanta Police Department, the law enforcement agency in charge of the investigation.
]]>Georgia Tech's business school jumped 11 spots in Forbes magazine's MBA rankings, rising to 34th (15th among public universities). Forbes bases its rankings, which are issued every two years, on graduates' return on investment, meaning compensation five years after graduation minus tuition and forgone salary during school.
"We're pleased that our considerable jump in the rankings reflects the overall trajectory of our business school," says Georgia Tech College of Management Dean Steve Salbu. "We're working hard on many fronts to take our College to the next level of prestige and educational achievement, becoming the world's preeminent business school for management and technology."
In its first-time rankings of "America's Best Colleges for Entrepreneurs," Fortune Small Business listed Georgia Tech College of Management among the 26 top schools for MBAs and among the 24 best for double major/cross disciplinary students (i.e. business and engineering). The magazine, which is including the rankings in its September issue, didn't assign a specific order (1st, 2nd, etc.) to schools listed.
U.S. News & World Report ranked Georgia Tech's undergraduate business program 33rd in the nation, up two spots from last year. In specialty areas, the magazine ranked the business school eighth in Quantitative Analysis, 10th for Production and Operations Management, and 15th for Management Information Systems.
Earlier this year, Georgia Tech College of Management jumped nine spots in U.S. News & World Report's annual rankings of the nation's top full-time MBA programs, rising from 34th to 25th (10th among public universities).
]]>Liu's research is in simulating the complex phenomenon of natural human movement by applying optimization and machine learning algorithms. Her work aims to expand computer-generated character animation from a visualization tool to an interdisciplinary research area focused on autonomous control and realistic human motion.
"Dr. Liu's highly regarded work simulating human movement will be key to Georgia Tech's contributions to the field of digital entertainment," said Aaron Bobick, chair of the School of Interactive Computing at Tech. "She has just started her career here after moving from the University of Southern California, and we couldn't be more pleased that she is already making such an impact."
Wang is a research scientist working in Zhong Lin Wang's group at the School of Materials Science and Engineering. His research focuses on self-assembling aligned piezoelectric nanowires and developing their novel applications. He received his PhD in Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech in 2005.
In 2004, Wang developed an effective and low-cost method for growing large-area patterned, and vertically aligned ZnO nanowires, which can be directly applied for nanodevices integration. Recently, based on these vertical aligned ZnO nanowires, Wang and his co-workers developed a piezoelectric nanogenerator that converts ambient wave/vibration energy into electricity. This is a new concept for scavenging mechanical energy from the ambient environment, such as vibration, air/liquid flow and pressure fluctuation. Development of such nanogenerators sets the foundation for eliminating batteries to realize self-powered electronic devices from integrated nanosystems to implantable biomedical devices to portable electronic devices.
"This is a major step toward a portable, adaptable and cost-effective technology for powering in-vivo nanosensors, MEMS and wireless nanosensors," said Professor Zhong Lin (Z.L.) Wang. "Xudong has been very creative in developing this prototype and demonstrating its potential applications, which is the most remarkable advance in my group's research in the last few years. He is very deserving of this honor."
Liu, Wang and the other TR35 winners for 2007 will be featured in the September issue of Technology Review magazine and honored at the Emerging Technologies Conference, to be held at MIT September 25-27.
"The TR35 honors young innovators for accomplishments that are poised to have a dramatic impact on the world as we know it," said Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief and publisher of Technology Review magazine. "We celebrate their success and look forward to their continued advancement of technology in their respective fields."
]]>For 2008, GTISC is forecasting five key areas in which cyber security threats are expected to increase and evolve:
-Web 2.0 and Client-Side Attacks - including social networking attacks and new attacks that will exploit Web 2.0 vulnerabilities
-Targeted Messaging Attacks - including Instant Messaging attacks and malware propagation via online video-sharing
-Botnets - specifically the spread of botnet attacks to wireless and peer-to-peer networks
-Threats Targeting Mobile Convergence - including voice spam, vishing and smishing
-Threats to Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Systems - evolving and varied threats in this emerging technology sector
Financial gain will continue to be the primary motivator behind all five emerging threat categories. As the rapid rate of application development for cyber mediums continues to outpace information security technologies and countermeasures, GTISC advocates closer coordination between the security industry, carriers, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), application developers and the user community to begin closing the security gap in 2008. Representatives from the organizations that participated in the GTISC Security Summit contributed to the development of this report.
"As newer and more powerful applications enabled by technologies like Web 2.0 continue to grow, and converged communications applications increasingly rely on IP-based platforms, new challenges will arise in safegaurding these applications and the services they rely on," said Mustaque Ahamad, director of GTISC. "The GTISC Emerging Cyber Threats Report for 2008 highlights those areas of greatest risk and concern, particularly as continued convergence of enterprise and consumer technologies is expected over the coming year. We wish to thank the esteemed members of the GTISC Security Summit panel who assisted us with the creation of this report."
More than 200 corporate executives, industry leaders and technologists from across the country attended the GTISC Security Summit on Emerging Cyber Security Threats and Countermeasures Summit, keynoted by Dr. Vint Cerf, vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google. Following Cert's address on the continued research and development needs to secure the multi-layered systems of the Internet, Summit panelists engaged in a lively discussion moderated by Chris Rouland, chief technology officer of IBM Internet Security Systems and IBM distinguished engineer. The panel discussion helped educate the audience on the proliferation of cyber threats, including those listed in the report, and highlighted possible countermeasures to safeguard the user and business communities.
To view the entire GTISC Emerging Cyber Threats for 2008 report and for more information on GTISC, please visit http://www.gtisc.gatech.edu. To watch a pre-recorded Web cast of the event, please visit http://www-static.cc.gatech.edu/streaming/gtisc.
About Georgia Tech Information Security Center (GTISC)
The Georgia Tech Information Security Center, a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance Education, is an interdisciplinary center involving faculty from the College of Computing, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and the School of Public Policy.
Students in Alan Harp's furniture design studio in the Advanced Wood Products Lab (AWPL) are producing world-class wood furniture; seven were selected as finalists in a national student furniture competition held this year in Las Vegas.
More than 220 students nationwide enter this competition, known as Fresh Wood, sponsored by AWFS machinery show. Furniture creations, ranging from modern coffe tables to antique reproductions, were judged by a diverse group of furniture industry professionals. Fifty-eight finalists were invited to bring their pieces to the show in Las Vegas for display and to attend an awards ceremony.
"I was able to have 90 percent control over what I wanted to do," said Nicholas Komor, whose oak coffee table finished in second place. "I wanted to design a coffee table, and I designed it. Professor Harp was essential in guiding the engineering of my table and I learned so much from him, but I didn't feel pressured to change what I wanted. Instead, he encouraged me to work harder and be more of a perfectionist."
The Georgia Tech students who participated in the competition were all students of Harp, who teaches furniture design at the AWPL, a research center within the College of Architecture. Of the seven Georgia Tech finalists, four were in the senior Industrial Design furniture design studio course, while the other three were taking independent study courses in furniture design.
"The most significant lesson I learned about furniture design and fabrication is the importance of planning before building," said Jessica Wood, an Industrial Design major. "It took several difficult experiences for me to learn the value of the 'measure twice, cut once' process.
"Prior to taking this course, I worked as an intern (and now work full-time) for a NASA subcontractor building full-scale mock-ups out of wood," Wood continued. "My experience as an intern really made me comfortable working around power tools, and I learned a lot about project planning."
During the awards ceremony, hosted by Richard Karn, TV's Al Borland from Tool Time, four of the Georgia Tech students received awards and cash prizes for their work. Georgia Tech not only accrued more awards than any other school, but the Institute also had more finalists than any other school in the competition. This is the third time that students from Georgia Tech have participated in this competition, and the second time that Georgia Tech students have placed.
The winners from Georgia Tech were:
Kate Schindel: Intimates Armoire: Honorable Mention: Case Goods
Jessica Wood: Walnut Miter Table and Stools: 2nd Place: Production/Contract Furniture
Katina Zachas: Aerri Dresser: Honorable Mention: Contract Furniture
Nick Komor: Unraveling Oak Coffee Table: 2nd Place: Tables
The other three students who were finalists, but who did not place, were:
Jake Tompkins: Chicken Coop Farm Table: Reproduction Furniture
Marisa Topping: Communal Dining Table: Tables
Stephanie Radbill: Regalo Ribbon Chest: Case Goods
Bredas, professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and chair of Molecular Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology, had 23 papers on organic thin-film transistors cited a total of 2,583 times with an average of 112.3 cites per paper, according to ESI. Bredas' total record includes 331 papers cited a total of 9,658 times.
ESI's interview with Bredas is at the link below.
]]>Tech's team is in the construction phase of its house, and the competition has brought out the best from around campus. The College of Architecture is leading the effort, but it is the collaboration between all of the colleges involved (College of Engineering, College of Management, and the College of Sciences) as well as numerous research centers that has this project pulling Georgia Tech resources together.
"No matter how many cross-listed courses, joint appointments, dual-degree programs, minors and certificates we have, nothing creates true interdisciplinary collaboration better than a project like this," said College of Architecture Interim Dean Doug Allen. "No single discipline carries all the knowledge necessary to undertake and successfully complete such a project. The diverse backgrounds of the students have to work together in ways that cannot be duplicated by any other means."
The process of constructing the house and learning to work together is laying the foundation for future projects.
Allen is fond of using an analogy that he tells his students. "The Renaissance did not build the Duomo in Florence, Italy. The Duomo built the Renaissance. Once you have organized yourselves to undertake such a project, the question is what you do for a second act."
"I hope and I believe that this will be true here as well," said Allen. "For the first time in my 30 years at Tech, I have seen Civil Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Architecture, and Building Construction students working together in a sustained relationship. The lasting impact, however, will come from the collaborations developed among the many faculty members across all these disciplines."
The competition grades each house on a variety of elements in construction, marketing and planning. However, one of Georgia Tech's biggest challenges has been the competition for dollars.
"We are still looking for partners to help underwrite the project," said Solar Decathlon Project Manager Chris Jarrett. "Our partners are truly investing in Georgia Tech when they invest in this project. By doing so, it strengthens the bond between the four colleges toward future collaboration and potentially new creative research and innovation."
The U.S. Department of Energy provided each Solar Decathlon team with $100,000 to get started. The actual project cost, including research, design, building materials, construction and transportation of the house to and from Washington, DC. rent, equipment, faculty support and overhead, typically exceeds $600,000 per school. Each school must raise the remaining funds, with either cash or in-kind gifts.
"Team sponsorship means everything," said Jarrett. "It enables Georgia Tech's team to get the job done, to be creative and competitive; it enables them to pursue state-of-the art sustainable design and technology integration."
The team's construction phase will take on a new life in July as the house walls are erected and the shape of the house begins to become visually apparent. However, it's the shape of the team that organizers hope will continue to heat up throughout the summer in the form of new sponsors joining the team.
If you are interested in learning more about becoming a Georgia Tech Solar Decathlon Team Sponsor, please contact the College of Architecture at 404-894-1096.
"It's a great challenge and a wonderful way to have an impact directly on east Asia," said Endicott.
Endicott will be the first American president of a four-year private university in South Korea, and the second overall. Woosong University has approximately 7,000 students enrolled in undergraduate and graduate courses. It has the only college of railroad technology in South Korea, and features other college-level programs in information technology, health and welfare, hotel management and culinary arts. Its newest college, Solbridge International, will specialize in international affairs and business management.
Approximately 85 percent of the university courses are offered in English, and the school offers intensive training in Korean, Japanese and Chinese languages. It has more than six hundred international students from the United States, China, India, Vietnam and Japan. The university is in the process of expanding by establishing satellite campuses in other Asian countries.
"We're building an innovative school of business and international studies in Daejeon that will give students a real international experience not only in Korea but other parts of Asia," Endicott said.
"Another thing I look forward to is continuing my research and writing on the sentiment of the Korean youth toward America," he said. "This gives me an opportunity to dialog and understand their criticisms and objections of the U.S. first-hand."
Endicott has an important history in Asian affairs. In 1991, he founded the Limited Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone for Northeast Asia, which seeks to permanently remove nuclear weapons from the Korean Peninsula, Japan, Taiwan and Mongolia. It is also moving to remove tactical nuclear weapons from eastern Siberian Russia, northeast China and parts of Alaska. Both Endicott and the program were nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. He hopes that the future success of this project will serve as a model for creating nuclear-free zones elsewhere.
"There's no place in northeast Asia that's more critical for international security than the Korean peninsula," he said.
In addition to his non-proliferation work, Endicott also began the Korean Initiative while at Georgia Tech. The initiative works to offer courses at Tech in Korean affairs, security issues, language, political economies as well as guest lectures. The Korea Foundation has been instrumental in the success of this initiative.
"It's very difficult to leave Tech, but this is one of those opportunities that has to be taken in order to complete what I hope to do in my career," Endicott said.
Biographical Information:
Endicott received his Ph.D. in international affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, run jointly by Tufts and Harvard Universities in 1974. His areas of specialization include all aspects of Asian security studies, with special emphasis on the Korean Peninsula and Japan, American defense policy, professional military education, and nuclear proliferation.
His published books include, Japan's Nuclear Option, The Politics of East Asia, American Defense Policy, Regional Security Issues, and U.S. Foreign Policy: History, Process, and Policy,published in December 2004.
Endicott had a 31-year career in government, with 28 of those years as an officer in the United States Air Force and three as a member of the Senior Executive Service of the Department of Defense. He held posts that include: Director, International Affairs, Planning Directorate of Air Force Headquarters; Deputy Air Force Representative to the Military Staff Committee of the Security Council, the United Nations; Associate Dean of the National War College; and Director of the Institute for National Strategic Studies, serving both the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff. His operational experience included assignments with Strategic Air Command Headquarters during the Cuban Missile Crisis; service with the 522nd Fighter Squadron, Vietnamese Air Force; and Chief of Target Plans, 5th Air Force during the Blue House Raid and Pueblo Crisis.
He currently serves as the Chairman of the Interim Secretariat of the Limited Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone for Northeast Asia (LNWFZ-NEA). Both Endicott and the Limited Nuclear Weapons Free Zone for Northeast Asia Program were nominated for the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize. From April 2004 he served for two years as President of the Korea-Southeast U.S. Chamber of Commerce and in 2005 was appointed a visiting professor at Montesquieu University IV of Bordeaux, France. He was designated Honorary Consul for the State of Georgia by the Mongolian government in 2005. He is married to the former Mitsuyo Kobayashi of Tokyo, and they have two children, Charlene Noble and John, and four grandchildren.
]]>The AC Josephson effect refers to work that Brian Josephson published in 1962 regarding the flow of an electrical current between superconductors. In this work, for which he shared a 1973 Nobel Prize, Josephson predicted that when a constant voltage difference is maintained across two weakly linked superconductors separated by a thin insulating barrier (an arrangement now known as a Josephson junction), an alternating electrical current would flow through the junction (imagine turning on a water faucet and having the water start flowing up as well as down once it leaves the spigot). The frequency of the current oscillations is directly related to the applied voltage.
These predictions were fully confirmed by an immense number of experiments, and the standard volt is now defined in terms of the frequency of the Josephson AC current. The Josephson effect has numerous applications in physics, computing and sensing technologies. It can be used for ultra high sensitive detection of electromagnetic radiation, extremely weak magnetic fields and in superconducting quantum computing bits.
Now, experimental physicist Alexei Marchenkov and theoretician Uzi Landman at Georgia Tech have discovered that the AC Josephson effect can be used to detect mechanical motion of atoms placed in the Josephson junction.
"We show here that in addition to being able to detect the effects of electromagnetic radiation on the AC Josephson current, one can also use it to probe mechanical motions of atoms or molecules placed in the junction," said Landman, director of the Center for Computational Materials Science, Regents and Institute professor, and Callaway
Chair of Physics at Georgia Tech. "The prospect of being able to explore, and perhaps utilize, atomic-scale phenomena using this effect is very exciting."
In January 2007, Marchenkov and Landman published a paper in Physical Review Letters detailing their discovery that fluctuations in the conductance of ultra-thin niobium nanowires are caused by a pair of atoms, known as a dimer, shuttling back and forth between the bulk electrical leads.
In this latest research, Marchenkov and Landman, along with their collaborators Zhenting Dai, Brandon Donehoo and Robert Barnett, report that when a microfabricated junction assembly is held below its superconducting transition temperature, unusual features are found in traces of the electrical conductance measured as a function of the applied voltage.
"In our experiments, only nanowires - which we know now to contain a single dimer have consistently shown a series of additional peaks in the conductance versus voltage curves. Since a peak in such measurements signifies a resonance and knowing that we have intrinsic high-frequency Josephson current oscillations, we started looking into the possible physical mechanisms," said Marchenkov, assistant professor in the School of Physics.
The team hypothesized that the new measured peaks likely originate from mechanical motions of the dimer, which causes enhancement of the electrical current at particular values of the applied voltage. At each of the peak voltages, the frequency of the AC Josephson current would resonate with the vibrational frequency of the nanostructure in the junction.
Subsequent first principles calculations by Landman's team predicted that such peaks would occur at three different frequencies, or voltages, and their integer multiples. One corresponds to a back and forth vibration of the dimer suspended between the two niobium electrode tips, a second corresponds to motion in the direction perpendicular to the axis connecting the two tips, and the remaining corresponds to a wagging, or rocking, vibration of the dimer about the inter-tip axis. Ensuing targeted experiments demonstrated that the resonance peaks disappear gradually as one approaches the superconducting transition temperature from below, while their positions do not change. These observations, exhaustive qualitative and quantitative agreement between experimental measurements and theoretical predictions confirm that vibrational motions of the nanowire atoms are indeed the cause for the newly observed conductance peaks.
Marchenkov and Landman plan to further explore vibrational effects in weak link junctions, using the information obtained through these studies for determining vibrational characteristics, atomic arrangements, and transport mechanisms in metallic,
organic and biomolecular nanostructures.
"One of our aims is the development of devices and sensing methodologies that utilize the insights gained from our research," said Landman.
Full caption:
Atomic-scale mechanical motions in nanowires can be excited by high-frequency alternating superconducting Josephson currents. In niobium dimer nanowires three vibrational modes were experimentally observed and identified through first-principles theoretical calculations. At top is a curve of the measured conductance plotted versus applied voltage showing a sequence of peaks corresponding to vibrational modes of the dimer of niobium atoms suspended between the left and right tip-electrodes, as depicted in the atomic configuration shown in the middle. (Image: Georgia Tech/Alexei Marchenkov and Uzi Landman)
Launched in 2005, the joint study examined in detail a variety of factors - including wind resources, technology, siting, environmental, climate, permitting and economics - associated with sites off the coast of Georgia. In conclusion, the study recommended that Southern Company continue to pursue the potential development of wind energy resources off the Georgia coast.
"We continue to believe that renewable energy resources, possibly including wind, need to be a part of our energy supply portfolio. We will continue to pursue this and other renewable energy options that allow us to provide reliable and affordable electricity to our customers," said Leonard Haynes, Southern Company executive vice president for supply technologies, renewables and demand-side planning.
"We believe that given the available wind resources and the extent of the shallow water continental shelf, there is considerable ultimate potential for wind power generation off the coast of Georgia. While the 20-year levelized cost of wind power is higher than current production from existing power plants, offshore wind power may become a viable option for green power generation. We, therefore, support the conclusion that development of offshore wind power should be pursued," said Sam Shelton, Strategic Energy Institute research program director.
Currently, the Department of Interior Minerals Management Service (MMS) has jurisdiction over alternative energy-related projects on the outer continental shelf, including wind power developments. MMS is currently outlining the permitting requirements for such projects, a process that should be completed in late 2008. Until these regulations are finalized, only limited activities to develop an offshore wind farm in federal waters may be conducted.
Though the Southeast in general does not have sufficient wind speeds on land to effectively support wind power generation, the conditions are better off the Georgia coast, the study said. The average wind speeds there are about 16-17 mph. Wind technologies currently available typically require sustained winds of 14 mph or greater.
Among the other key findings, the water in the area is relatively shallow, which makes it easier to construct the foundations of a wind farm. Also, the study said, Jekyll Island and Tybee Island are the two locations with the best potential for connecting power from an offshore wind farm to the transmission grid.
Of the two locations determined to be feasible for development, the study noted that Tybee Island was better suited because the turbines would be less visible from the beach, the wind resource is slightly better and it is closer to industrial and maintenance resources.
However, the study found that based on today's prices for wind turbines, the 20-year levelized cost of electricity produced from an offshore wind farm would be above the current production costs from existing power generation facilities.
Additional costs for offshore wind power generation include the relatively high cost of purchasing and installing undersea cable and the costs of construction and maintenance of a facility in the ocean. While specific installation and maintenance infrastructure is in place in Europe, the offshore wind industry is in its infancy in the United States.
Southern Company is currently involved in a variety of renewable energy projects, including extensive research into the use of biomass, which has yielded promising results for the use of materials such as switchgrass and wood chips to produce energy. Through its subsidiaries, Southern Company also offers customers the opportunity to purchase 'green' energy from renewable sources such as a generating plant in DeKalb County, Ga., that provides electricity produced from landfill gas to Georgia Power.
With 4.3 million customers and more than 42,000 megawatts of generating capacity, Atlanta-based Southern Company is the premier energy company serving the Southeast, one of America's fastest-growing regions. A leading U.S. producer of electricity, Southern Company owns electric utilities in four states and a growing competitive generation company, as well as fiber optics and wireless communications. Southern Company brands are known for excellent customer service, high reliability and retail electric prices that are significantly below the national average. Southern Company has been listed the top ranking U.S. electric service provider in customer satisfaction for seven consecutive years by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI).
Georgia Tech's Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) serves as a conduit for integrating, facilitating and enabling Institute-wide programs in energy research and development. Engaging the best and brightest from industry, government and academia, SEI creates innovative solutions to current and future energy challenges.
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