Research Horizons Issue 3 2016: The Future of Making

ISSUE 3 2016

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See the Unseen

BY JOSH BROWN

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ADVANCED MANUFACTURING

The Future of Making Innovative technologies and precision processes are leading U.S. manufacturers into new — even life­saving — arenas.

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Healthy Data

BY JOHN TOON

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Jupiter Fly­By

BY JASON MADERER

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Muddy Robot

BY JOHN TOON

EXHIBITA

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AUTOMATED MAPPING To support construction automation, Georgia Tech researchers have developed the Ground Robot for Mapping Infrastructure (GRoMI), which uses a hybrid thermal laser scanning system. GRoMI is a project of the Robotics and Intelligent Construction Automation Laboratory in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Photo by Rob Felt.

R E S E A R C H H O R I ZO N S 1

SPIRALING SAFELY An aerial drone safely navigates through a spiraling formation of other drones using a collaborative safety maneuver developed at the Georgia Tech Robotics and Intelligent Systems Lab. Photo

by Rob Felt.

EXHIBITA

R E S E A R C H H O R I ZO N S 3

EXHIBITA

COMPLICATED WALKING Robotic walking on unstable granular surfaces such as sand is still a challenging problem because the deformable terrain complicates robot dynamics. Researchers in the Complex Rheology and Biomechanics Lab in the Georgia Tech School of Physics are developing a stability model to guide robotic motion on such surfaces with the goal of allowing stable planar bipedal walking.

Photo by Rob Felt.

R E S E A R C H H O R I ZO N S 5

ISSUE 3 2016

CONTENTS

D E PA R T M E N T S 1

Exhibit A Robots walking, flying, and mapping show their moves.

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Cross Talk Georgia Tech spurs a manu­ facturing renaissance in the U.S.

56 Glossary Explanations for terminology used in this issue.

FRONT OFFICE 11 Profile Alex Godwin helps people under­ stand information through visuals.

22 Making the Future 36 Analyzing Health 46 Space Race 50 MuddyBot Meets Mudskipper

Advanced manufacturing produces everything from therapeutic cells to printed electronics.

Informatics technology uses claims and health records data to aid medical decision-making.

Juno uses Georgia Tech microwave research to unlock the mysteries of Jupiter and the solar system.

Robot and fish help reveal how the first land animals walked on sand 360 million years ago.

STAFF Editor John Toon Art Director Erica Endicott Writers Josh Brown, Ben Brumfield, Laura Diamond, Jason Maderer, Péralte C. Paul, Rick Robinson, John Toon Photographer Rob Felt Copy Editor Margaret Tate Designer Brett Lorber COVER Researchers are mov­ ing technology into the world of living things. Illustration by Bose Collins.

Back cover: The Juno spacecraft is provid­ ing new information about Jupiter, our solar system’s largest planet. Photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech/ SwRI/MSSS. ADDRESS CORRECTIONS Please send address corrections to John Toon (jtoon@ gatech.edu) or 404-894-6986.

POSTMASTER Please send address changes to: Research News & Publications Georgia Institute of Technology 177 North Avenue NW Atlanta, Georgia 30332-0181 USA

18 Visualization Crystal lattice of magnetic moments could store data.

Research Horizons magazine is published to communicate the results of research conducted at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Research Horizons is a member of the University Research Magazine Association (URMA).

Web rh.gatech.edu Twitter @gtresearchnews

Georgia Tech researchers are working with Delta Air Lines to take a close look at current methods used to repair composite parts and identify ways to increase efficiency and bring down costs.

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Copyright 2016 by the Georgia Tech Research Corporation.

All rights reserved. ISSN #1060-669

Read us on

issuu.com/georgiatech

B E E S : I S TO C K P H OTO. C O M ; D E LTA : R O B F E LT

15 Expertise Recognition software reads books without turning pages.

N17C10202

12 File Honey bee study leads to more efficient web servers.

REPRINTS Articles from this magazine may be reprinted with credit to Georgia Tech Research Horizons.

CROSS TALK

Owen Webb, a cell therapy recipient. See his story on page 24.

A MANUFACTURING RENAISSANCE ADVANCED TECHNOLOGIES PRODUCE THERAPEUTIC CELLS, 3-D HEART VALVES

Steve Cross is ­Georgia Tech’s executive vice president for research.

R O B F E LT

Georgia Tech is giving new meaning to the term “advanced manufacturing.” As you’ll see in this issue of Research Horizons, we’re extending manufacturing beyond traditional factory-based processes to develop technologies for producing large volumes of therapeutic cells that will be used in next-generation medicine.

We’re using 3-D printing technology to help surgeons plan heart valve replacement operations, and we’re also working with Delta Air Lines and others to develop new techniques for repairing composite parts.

Also in this issue, you’ll read about how a broad-based group of researchers is applying health informatics technology to help clinicians provide better patient care. They’re doing this by analyz­ ing huge data sets: records from millions of patients that can provide information never available before to support treatment decisions. And this work is not just theoretical. Georgia Tech is working with collaborators — including Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — to move this technology into the real world.

In research that promises to both improve robotics and help us understand evolution, we developed a robot that simulates an odd walking fish known as the mudskipper. Working with two

other universities, we studied the robot and the fish together to obtain new insights into how the first land animals moved about on granular surfaces — information that could help designers of robotic systems address the challenges posed by such terrain.

Finally, this issue also describes Georgia Tech’s role in the Juno space mission, which is exploring the mysteries of the planet Jupiter.

Georgia Tech powers an impressive innovation ecosystem that facilitates transformative opportunities, strengthens collaborative partnerships, and maximizes the economic and societal impact of the Institute’s research. Our goal is to conduct leading-edge research and then transition the results of that research into use.

As you read this issue of Research Horizons, you’ll see how we’re leveraging these collaborative partnerships to create game-changing solutions to society’s most challenging problems. We truly are creating the next generation of data science, materials design, technology education, and environmental study.

As always, I welcome your feedback. Enjoy the magazine!

Steve Cross Executive Vice President for Research December 2016 R E S E A R C H H O R I ZO N S 7

FLYING HIGH

(Above) A technician prepares a GTRI TigerShark aircraft for a test flight. (Below) A GTRI team monitors a TigerShark test flight.

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To support its research on airborne multisensor technologies, the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) has acquired two TigerShark unmanned aerial vehicles. The UAVs have been flown and tested with a four-channel multimode radar that can be operated in both monostatic and bistatic configurations.

The military-pedigree TigerShark aircraft have significant capabilities for flying payloads and supporting tactically significant missions. The TigerSharks will also be used in GTRI programs that are developing algorithms for controlling multiple autonomous aircraft simultaneously as they collaborate on specific missions.

The TigerSharks have a 21-foot wingspan, a maximum takeoff weight of about 500 pounds, and significant on-board electrical

R O B F E LT

GTRI acquires TigerShark unmanned aerial vehicles

FRONTOFFICE

capabilities. Other payloads for the aircraft include wideband signals intelligence (SIGINT) and coherent jammers based on GTRI’s Angry Kitten technology base.

“GTRI has extensive experience with sensor development, payload development, and the fielding and execution of radar-­focused missions,” said Breneman Whitfield, a GTRI research engineer who is responsible for integrating the new aircraft into GTRI’s research and development program. “The two TigerShark aircraft provide the payload capability and endurance time required to meet a new set of objectives in our research program.”

Beyond facilitating GTRI’s own research program, the aircraft are also expected to support customer needs for test and

HIGHWAY TO THE SURVIVAL ZONE For plants and animals fleeing rising temperatures, varying precipitation patterns, and other effects of climate change, the eastern United States will need improved “climate connectivity” to give them a better shot at survival.

Western areas of the U.S. provide greater temperature ranges and fewer human interruptions than eastern landscapes, allowing plants and animals there to move toward more hospitable climates with fewer obstacles. A new study has found that only 2 percent

TigerShark aircraft have a 21-foot wingspan and 500-pound takeoff weight.

evaluation services. Having two aircraft greatly expands GTRI’s ability to support research in critical national defense issues, Whitfield noted.

“We will be providing data sets that don’t otherwise exist to facilitate algorithm development and modeling and analysis work,” he said. “Being able to have two TigerShark aircraft in flight at the same time gives us a new capability across many areas of research.”

GTRI personnel flying the aircraft are experienced pilots who have undergone extensive training to become the only civilians qualified to operate these aircraft.

Furthermore, each mission involves extensive preflight planning and safety checks by support staff.

“There are several layers of safety built into the TigerSharks,” said Warren Lee, branch head for GTRI’s Unmanned Flight Operations. “At any time, a pilot on the ground can take over control of the aircraft and fly it using cameras and the kind of instrumentation used in piloted aircraft. The autopilot is programmed to keep the aircraft in approved flight test areas.” — John Toon

of the eastern U.S. provides the kind of climate connectivity required by species that will likely need to migrate, compared to 51 percent of the western United States.

The research, reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for the first time quantifies the concept of climate connectivity in the United States. The research suggests that creating climate-specific corridors between natural areas could improve that connectivity to as much as 65 percent nationwide, boosting the chances of survival by more species.

“Species are going to have to move in response to climate change, and we can act to both facilitate movement and create an environment that will prevent loss of biodiversity without a lot of pain to ourselves,” said Jenny McGuire, a research scientist in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences. “If we really start to be strategic about planning to prevent biodiversity loss, we can help species adjust effectively to climate change.”

The research was supported by the U.S. National Park Service and by the Packard Foundation. — John Toon

Georgia Tech Research Scientist Jenny McGuire is interested in spatial questions about the ecological and evolutionary implications of climate change. In a new paper, she and collaborators quantify the concept of climate connectivity in the United States.

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FRONTOFFICE

Finding What Doesn’t Belong

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Factoid Researchers found 11,000 infected sites among non-commercial top-level sponsored .edu, .gov, and .mil domains worldwide and are working to extend the method to other domains.

Researchers have developed a technique for recycling a specific type of carbon fiber composite material.

The image shows a piece of carbon fiber composite immersed in alcohol.

COMING UNGLUED

A new process for recycling carbon fiber could keep tons of waste out of landfills Researchers have developed a method to recycle nearly 100 percent of the materials in certain types of thermoset carbon fiber composites.

The new method involves soaking the composites in an alcohol solvent, which slowly dissolves the epoxy that binds and gives shape to the carbon fibers. Once dissolved, the carbon fibers and epoxy can be separated and reused.

“This method, we think, could have a lot of immediate industrial applications, with lots of economical and environment benefits,” said Kai Yu, a postdoctoral researcher in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Carbon fiber — prized for its strength and light weight — is used widely in applications from aerospace to automobiles. Jerry Qi, a professor in the Woodruff School who leads a team of researchers affiliated with Georgia Tech’s Renewable Bioproducts

Institute, said traditional carbon fiber composites have presented difficult challenges for recycling because the polymer matrix is usually crosslinked and the material can’t just be melted to reclaim the embedded carbon fibers.

The research team focused on carbon fiber that uses a special type of epoxy called vitrimer epoxy to give the composite component its shape. The new recycling process has the potential to put a dent in the thousands of tons of carbon fiber waste that is generated each year in the United States and Europe, Qi said.

The study, which was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Singapore A*Star Public Sector Fund, and the Singapore NRF-supported Digital Manufacturing and Design Centre (DManD), was published in the journal Advanced Functional ­Materials. — Josh Brown

R O B F E LT

By detecting semantic inconsistencies in content, researchers have developed a new technique for identifying promotional infections of websites operated by government and educational organizations. Such attacks use code embedded in highly ranked sites to drive traffic to sketchy websites selling items like fake drugs, counterfeit handbags, and plagiarized term papers.

The new technique, known as Semantic Inconsistency Search (SEISE), uses natural language processing to spot differences between a compromised site’s expected content and malicious advertising and promotional code. For example, a university site wouldn’t be expected to promote online gambling, and a military site shouldn’t be selling counterfeit drugs.

Using SEISE, the researchers found 11,000 infected sites among noncommercial, top-level sponsored education, government, and military domains worldwide, and they are working to extend the method to other domains.

“The basic idea behind promotional infection is to attack websites that are highly ranked and to leverage their importance to promote various things, most of them illegal,” explained Raheem Beyah, who is the Motorola Foundation Professor and Associate Chair for Strategic Initiatives and Innovation in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “The bad content is nested into the prominent site to leverage the traffic of that domain. That gives the attackers a doorway to whatever they are promoting.”

The research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Natural Science Foundation of China.

It was described in a presentation at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in San Jose, California. SEISE was developed by researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology, Indiana University, and Tsinghua University in China.

— John Toon

PROFILE

Alex Godwin, a Ph.D. student in the Information Interfaces Lab, stands in the parking lot behind the Georgia Tech Police Department. One of the lab’s current projects looks at criminal activity by neighborhood.

THE VISUAL SUSPECTS Alex Godwin is a Ph.D. student in Georgia Tech’s Information Interfaces lab, led by John Stasko, a professor in the School of Interactive Computing. Godwin’s research in visualization and visual analytics focuses on ways to help people understand and investigate information that is important and useful to their lives.

represent complex data — think of criminal activity or building permits — and present it in a clear way so that people who are affected by it can have a conversation about it in a well-reasoned way without needing an expertise in statistics, crime analysis, or urban planning.

WHERE ARE YOU FROM? I’m from Taylorsville, North Carolina. It’s a small town in the foothills of the Brushy Mountains.

I earned my bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in computer science from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. I was studying gaming, and a professor was looking for students who were interesting in going beyond the schoolwork to do research.

That was my first taste of research, and as I got more into it I shifted towards data visualization.

HOW IS YOUR RESEARCH APPLIED? Recently we used Atlanta’s public federal crime database to create a dashboard that compares crime in different neighborhoods.

This could be useful for police officers during their regular beat patrols. They can map out a route based on historical crime analysis. We can optimize crime data so that it looks at a particular time, day, or season.

Police officers could sketch a few different routes and see which one takes them by the most violent type of crime at a specific time of day. Or, if there’s been a surge of break-ins, they can focus their patrols along those areas. Police are good at knowing the communities they are policing. This would provide them with a tool to enhance and complement their own knowledge.

WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO PURSUE A PH.D. FROM GEORGIA TECH? I worked in industry for five years for a small company that did some game-based research, such as creating hand-held mobile games for soldiers to play that also trained them how to use first aid.

One of my favorite parts of my job was when we got a new member of the team and I had the chance to mentor them. I realized academia was one of the few opportunities I would have to mentor on a large scale.

WHY FOCUS ON DATA VISUALIZATION? I like to think of this as a way to democratize data. This is a way to

WHAT ARE SOME CHALLENGES WITH THIS WORK? For the crime data it’s important to have police officers in the room, show it to them, and see what is useful. Having an intense evaluation with them over a long period of time takes the work from being just a pretty good idea and turns it into cutting-edge research. It becomes something that is actually meaningful for a lot of people. — Laura Diamond R E S E A R C H H O R I ZO N S 1 1

A HONEY OF AN IDEA In 1988, Professor John Vande Vate heard a researcher describing the organization of work in honey bee colonies on NPR. He and his colleagues used their systems engineering expertise to model honey bee behavior with an algorithm that is also the most efficient way of routing internet traffic.

A study of how honey bees forage for food has led to development of an algorithm that major web-hosting companies are using to streamline internet services. The project also has attracted a national award for the Georgia Tech team that conducted the research.

John Bartholdi III, Craig Tovey, and John Vande Vate — researchers in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) — are part of an interdisciplinary team that has received the 2016 Golden Goose Award. The award honors scientists whose federally funded work may have been considered silly, odd, or obscure when first conducted but has resulted in significant benefits to society.

Along with Cornell University Professor Thomas Seeley and data scientist Sunil Nakrani (who received his M.S. in computer science in 1998 from Georgia Tech), the team studied honey bee foraging behavior and then developed the Honey Bee Algorithm to allocate shared webservers to internet traffic. The original honey bee research, funded by the National Science Foundation and Office of Naval Research, unexpectedly led to the algorithm.

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“The bees turned out to be even smarter than we thought,” Tovey said. The team developed a model for how colonies’ decentralized foraging system works, which Tovey and Nakrani adapted more than a decade later to develop the Honey Bee Algorithm for allocating shared web hosting servers to variable internet traffic. Their algorithm beats the competition by up to 20 percent in revenue generation for the web hosts and ensures that servers are providing the applications internet clients need, when they need them.

The team was cited for their curiosity-driven research on how honey bee foragers are able to maximize nectar collection in ever-changing environments.

The Georgia Tech researchers were inspired to study honey bee foraging after Vande Vate heard Seeley describing his own honey bee research on National Public Radio. The broadcast led to a years-long examination of the honey bees’ decentralized foraging patterns from a systems engineering perspective, which led to development of the new algorithm. — Shelley Wunder-Smith

ISTOCKPHOTO.COM

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FRONTOFFICE

SIGNAL ACHIEVEMENT Factoid Assistant Professor Ryan Lively and postdoctoral fellow DongYeun Koh hold bundles of hollow polymer fibers that serve as precursors for the carbon membrane fiber used to separate alkyl aromatic chemicals.

S I E V E : J O H N TO O N ; R F: R O B F E LT

MOLECULAR SIEVE CUTS ENERGY USE A research team from Georgia Tech and ExxonMobil has demonstrated a new carbon-based molecular sieve membrane that could dramatically reduce the energy required to separate a class of hydrocarbon molecules known as alkyl aromatics.

The new material is based on polymer hollow fibers treated to retain their structure — and pore sizes — as they are converted to carbon through pyrolysis. The carbon membranes are then used in a new “organic solvent reverse osmosis” (OSRO) process in which pressure is applied to effect the separation without requiring a phase change in the chemical mixture.

The hollow carbon fibers, bundled together into modules, can separate molecules whose sizes differ by a fraction of a nanometer while providing processing rates superior to those of existing molecular sieve zeolites. Because the new membrane uses a commercial polymer precursor, the researchers believe it has potential for integration into industrial chemical separation processes. The research was reported in the journal Science.

Separation is currently achieved through refining processes such as crystallization and adsorption with distillation, which are energy-intensive. Globally, the amount of energy used each year in conventional separation processes for alkyl aromatics is equal to that produced by about 20 average-sized power plants.

“We see this as a potentially disruptive technology in the way we separate xylenes and similar organic compounds,” said Benjamin McCool, an advanced research associate at ExxonMobil Corporate Strategic Research in Annandale, New Jersey. “If we can make this work on an industrial scale, it could dramatically reduce the energy required by these separation processes.”

Fabrication of the new membrane material begins with hollow polymer fibers approximately 200 microns in diameter, slightly thicker than the average human hair. The fibers have pore sizes of less than one nanometer and are treated via cross-linking before they are converted to carbon through a pyrolysis process.

“We take a scalable platform based on polymeric membranes and then turn those materials into inorganic molecular sieves,” explained Ryan Lively, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “Our membranes are mechanically robust, and they can withstand the process conditions required by OSRO.” — John Toon

Globally, the amount of energy used in conventional separation processes for alkyl aromatics is equal to that produced by about 20 average-sized power plants.

Technology development for next-generation RF systems is driven by spectrum access and size, weight, and power. Fiber optic cabling allows bandwidth to be distributed through multiple kilometers with less attenuation than with coaxial cable.

Photonics, the technology that helps drive today’s telecommunications systems, offers major advances in the area of signal transmission. Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) are adapting optical techniques from the telecom arena to enhance U.S. electronic warfare (EW) capabilities.

Optical approaches provide greatly increased frequency coverage and long distance low-loss transfer of analog signals when compared to traditional radio frequency (RF) systems, resulting in substantial performance improvements. Chip-scale integrated photonics may also allow for extensive reductions in size, weight, and power needs.

“U.S. warfighters may soon face adversary systems that use signals outside the traditional EW spectrum, which creates a need for broadband frequency responses beyond the capabilities of conventional RF and digital equipment,” said Chris Ward, a senior research engineer who leads GTRI’s EW photonics development program. “Photonic advances originating in the telecom world have given us the ability to provide EW, radar, and other military systems with unique and advanced performance capabilities.”

Photonics technology uses photons to carry wideband signals used in communications, radar, and other applications via optical fiber efficiently over large distances. Photonics-based

systems transmit data with far less signal loss than conventional metallic conductors and encounter little or no electromagnetic interference while propagating through fiber.

Moreover, photonics allows for radio frequency bandwidths far surpassing modern electronics, being limited by the constraints of the electrical-to-optical and optical-to-electrical conversion processes. — Rick Robinson

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FRONTOFFICE

Cyber Threats and Trends Georgia Tech’s 2017 Emerging Cyber Threats, Trends, and Technologies report highlights concerns about global manipulation of information, health care fraud, data encryption, and other issues likely to affect society in the year ahead. Among the findings:

Global information manipulation by nation-states is now widespread, causing Western nations to curtail free speech and news consumers to view information cautiously.

Health care fraud is taking off in the absence of good defenses, as the value of personal data far surpasses that of stolen credit cards.

Crowdsourced and open-source solutions hold promise for addressing insecure, aging electronic voting systems.

NEW TOOL TO COOL

Public proof of who is behind cyberattacks remains elusive.

“Cyberattacks today are flourishing because almost every organization conducts some portion of its business online — putting even digitally cautious consumers at risk when it is not sufficiently protected,” said Wenke Lee, co-director of the Institute for Information Security and Privacy (IISP) and professor of computer science at Georgia Tech. “There is widespread reluctance to share threat information, and there’s a lack of public attribution about who is responsible, making it nearly impossible for the public to defend themselves.”

Georgia Tech’s broad understanding of cybersecurity issues can be used to develop strategies to address a range of threats, noted Bo Rotoloni, co-director of IISP and director of two cybersecurity labs at the Georgia Tech Research Institute.

“Under this unique combination, Georgia Tech can help foretell how the ‘white hats’ should prepare — because we continually witness how the ‘black hats’ adapt,” he said. — Tara La Bouff

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Baratunde Cola is an associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

Baratunde Cola would like to put sand into your computer. Not beach sand, but silicon dioxide nanoparticles coated with a high dielectric constant polymer to inexpensively provide improved cooling for increasingly power-hungry electronic devices.

The silicon dioxide doesn’t do the cooling itself. Instead, the unique surface properties of the coated nanoscale material conduct the heat at potentially higher efficiency than existing heat sink materials. The theoretical physics behind the phenomenon is complicated, involving nanoscale electromagnetic effects created on the surface of the tiny silicon dioxide particles acting together.

The bottom line could be a potentially new class of high-thermal conductivity materials useful for heat dissipation from power electronics, LEDs, and other applications with high-heat fluxes.

“We have shown for the first time that you can take a packed nanoparticle bed that would typically act as an insulator, and by causing light to couple strongly into the material by engineering a high dielectric constant medium like water or ethylene glycol at the surfaces, you can turn the nanoparticle bed into a conductor,” said Cola, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

“Using the collective surface electromagnetic effect of the nanoparticles, the thermal conductivity can increase 20-fold, allowing it to dissipate heat.”

The research, which involved both theory and experiment, was reported in the journal Materials Horizons. The work was supported by the Air Force Research Laboratory and the U.S. Air Force. — John Toon

MILITARY MODELING TOOLS The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is using collaborative modeling tools and trade study approaches to tackle military design challenges.

For the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, researchers developed the Engineered Resilient Systems (ERS) Tradespace to help design defense equipment for maximum future usability. ERS uses web-based collaborative systems engineering and tradespace

tools to identify the best combinations of adaptability, longevity, and cost-effectiveness.

For the U.S. Navy, GTRI is employing novel set-based design approaches to support capability concepts aimed at ensuring maximum design flexibility for the development of undersea command and control and unmanned underwater vehicles.

— Rick Robinson

R O B F E LT

Cultural differences and unresolved approaches to data encryption continue to mire companies with uncertainty and risk.

EXPERTISE

HOW TO READ A BOOK THROUGH ITS COVER 1

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Layers are identified by the time it takes for the signal to be reflected back. The roughness of the paper helps to create an air gap, even after the pages are pressed together, that delineates the boundary of each page as the camera sees it.

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A terahertz camera sends a pulse at a book (or, in this experiment, a layered stack of papers). The signal will be reflected back with information on page content and distance.

4 page depth: air gap: 300 μm ~20 μm

Large roman letters were used in this experiment and were stacked on top of one another so that the letters occluded each other, as they would in the closed pages of a book.

Each page in the stack will be processed by the shape recognition software, created by Aghasi and Romberg. The first three pages are relatively sharp.

5 The last three pages showed significant noise and occlusion due to their depth and overlap by the first six pages.

6 The final letter in the stack (here, the Greek letter omega) is hardest to read with the interference of the layers above. Another piece of software increases the contrast so the letterform can be seen more clearly.

Even after that, the noisy result is a challenging character-recognition problem. The innovative shape recognition software — Cardinal Convex Shape Composition — uses a database that records shapes such as omega, made up of more simple shapes such as circles, triangles, and rectangles. The software can then recognize a letter using only part of its shape.

SEE THE UNSEEN

Software created by Georgia Tech researchers proved crucial during a recent project to devise an imaging system that could someday allow historians to read fragile antique books without turning the pages.

At its most basic level, the software — created by Alireza Aghasi, a former postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech who now works at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Justin Romberg, Schlumberger Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering — recognizes shapes and patterns in images.

But the software is so powerful it can pick out shapes even a human eye cannot, even in images that are extremely noisy or distorted.

Aghasi and Romberg partnered with researchers at MIT on a terahertz imaging system that uses timed bands of electromagnetic radiation to read letters printed on a stack of pages. The system is able to distinguish letters on different pages based on the time it takes for each image to be reflected back.

GRAPHIC: ERICA ENDICOTT

The noisy images are then processed by the shape recognition software, which strings letters into words and words into sentences.

The shape processing software starts by comparing patterns in a noisy photograph to a database of shapes, looking for matches. The repository uses simple shapes such as circles and squares to create much more complicated shapes and combinations.

For example, to arrive at an omega symbol, the database combines two circles of different sizes, a rectangle, and a triangle. The algorithm knows what pieces of each shape make up the omega and uses those to match and record what it sees in the grainy images.

The project with MIT is just the first step of customizing the software to work with other technologies. Another project in the works is looking at how to decipher pages that are bent or distorted. Outside of reading closed books, the researchers say, the software could be adapted for a range of uses. — Josh Brown R E S E A R C H H O R I ZO N S 1 5

FRONTOFFICE

ON CLOSER EXAMINATION

Titanium dioxide nanoparticles have subtle effects on cells nanoparticles,” said Christine Payne, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

“Our results show that there is a more subtle change in oxidative stress that could be damaging to cells or lead to longterm changes. This suggests that other nanoparticles should be screened for similar low-level effects.”

Melissa Kemp, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, collaborated with Payne on the study. The research was reported in the Journal of Physical Chemistry C and was supported by the National Institutes of Health through the HERCULES Center at Emory University as well as by a Vasser Woolley Fellowship.

— John Toon

Image shows HeLa cells incubated with serum-coated titanium dioxide nanoparticles. Proteins are tagged with a red fluorophore, while cell nuclei are stained blue.

Associate Professor Christine Payne and graduate student Sabiha Runa study the interaction of titanium dioxide nanoparticles with cells. On the screen is a fluorescent microscopy image of human cancer cells.

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R O B F E LT

A nanoparticle commonly used in food, cosmetics, sunscreen, and other products can have subtle effects on the activity of genes expressing enzymes that address oxidative stress inside at least two types of living cells. While the titanium dioxide nanoparticles are considered nontoxic because they don’t kill cells at low concentrations, these cellular effects could add to concerns about long-term exposure to the nanomaterial.

Researchers used high-throughput screening techniques to study the effects of titanium dioxide nanoparticles on the expression of 84 genes related to cellular oxidative stress. The work found that six genes, four of them from a single gene family, were affected by a 24-hour exposure to the nanoparticles.

The effect was seen in two different kinds of cells exposed to the nanoparticles: human HeLa cancer cells commonly used in research, and a line of monkey kidney cells. Polystyrene nanoparticles similar in size and surface electrical charge to the titanium dioxide nanoparticles did not produce a similar effect on gene expression.

“This is important because every standard measure of cell health shows that cells are not affected by these titanium dioxide

FRONTOFFICE

El Niño Turns Up the Heat on Marine Ecosystems Zhiqun Lin is a professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering.

Magnetic nanorods in the vial are attracted to a magnet.

Researchers have developed a new strategy for crafting one-dimensional nanorods based on cellulose and using a wide range of precursor materials.

R O B F E LT

NANO BOTTLEBRUSHES Materials scientists have developed a new strategy for crafting one-­ dimensional nanorods from a wide range of precursor materials.

Based on a cellulose backbone, the system relies on the growth of block copolymer “arms” that help create a compartment composed of the inner blocks of the arms to serve as a nanometer-scale chemical reactor. The outer blocks of the arms prevent aggregation of the nanorods.

The structures resemble tiny bottlebrushes with polymer “hairs” on their surfaces. This new technique enables tight control over the diameter, length, and surface properties of the nanorods, whose optical, electrical, magnetic, and catalytic properties depend on the precursor materials used and the dimensions of the nanorods. The nanorods range in length from a few hundred nanometers to a few micrometers, and are a few tens of nanometers in diameter.

The nanorods could have applications in such areas as electronics, sensing devices, energy conversion and storage, drug delivery, and cancer treatment. Using their technique, the researchers have so far fabricated uniform metallic, ferroelectric, upconversion, semiconducting, and thermoelectric nanocrystals, as well as combinations thereof. The research, supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, was reported in the journal Science.

“We have developed a very general and robust strategy to craft a rich variety of nanorods with precisely controlled dimensions, compositions, architectures, and surface chemistries,” said Zhiqun Lin, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Materials Science and Engineering. “To create these structures, we used nonlinear bottlebrush-like block copolymers as tiny reactors to template the growth of an exciting variety of inorganic nanorods.”

Nanorod structures aren’t new, but the technique used by Lin’s lab produces nanorods of uniform sizes using materials such as barium titanate and iron oxide, which have not yet been demonstrated in the literature via wet-chemistry approaches. The lab has also produced highly uniform core-shell nanorods made by combining two dissimilar materials. Lin and his former postdoctoral research associate, Xinchang Pang, say the precursor materials applicable to the technique are virtually limitless. — John Toon

The northeast Pacific’s largest marine heatwave on record was at least partially caused by El Niño climate patterns.

And unusually warm water events in that ocean could potentially become more frequent with rising levels of greenhouse gases.

Those are the findings of a study by researchers from Georgia Tech and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They linked the 20142015 marine heatwave — often referred to as the “warm blob” — to weather patterns that started in late 2013. The heatwave caused marine animals to stray far outside of their normal habitats, disrupting ecosystems and leading to massive die-offs of seabirds, whales, and sea lions.

“We had two and a half years of consistent warming, which translated to a record harmful algal bloom in 2015 and prolonged stress on the ecosystem,” said Emanuele Di Lorenzo, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. “What we do in the study is ask whether this type of activity is going to become more frequent with greenhouse gases rising.”

The researchers traced the origin of the marine heatwave to a few months during late 2013 and early 2014, when a ridge of high pressure weakened winds that normally bring cold Artic air over the north Pacific. That allowed ocean temperatures to rise a few degrees above average.

Then, in mid-2014, the tropical weather pattern El Niño intensified the warming throughout the Pacific. The warm temperatures lingered through the end of the year, and by 2015, the region of warm water had expanded to the West Coast, where algal blooms closed fisheries for clams and Dungeness crab.

The study, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, was published in the journal Nature Climate Change. — Josh Brown

R E S E A R C H H O R I ZO N S 1 7

VISUALIZATION

LIQUID SOLID Someday, a hard drive could hold more bytes of information than there are stars in the observable universe.

And it may look like the diagram on this page: A crystal lattice of magnetic moments — also called spins — inside a newly created ceramic material. Something like it could end up as part of a quantum computer.

But today, Georgia Tech physicists are using such crystals to tinker with well-known quantum conundrums, such as 1) a particle can be in two states at the same time, and 2) particles, even when they’re miles apart, can be linked in a “spooky” way.

Martin Mourigal is a quantum ghostbuster and assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics.

Along with postdoctoral researcher Joseph Paddison and colleagues at Cambridge University in Britain, he experimented with electrons’ spins carried by dysprosium atoms (symbol Dy) organized on a special crystal lattice named “kagome,” after the Japanese basket weave pattern it strongly resembles.

The researchers tracked the spooky behavior of spins down to a temperature below −272.85 degrees Celsius — almost absolute zero Kelvin, which is −273.15 degrees Celsius. There, they found that slippery quantum properties in the new material with the chemical formula Dy3Mg2Sb3O14 produced straitlaced effects.

To the diagram: At every intersection of the black lines sits a Dy atom. These are not marked on the graph, and the blue and red dots stand for something

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else — an astounding discovery connected to the arrows at the intersections, which create the dots.

The arrows denote electron spin directions, and in any given triangle, no three spins can point to the inside or the outside at the same time. One arrow always must point in one direction and two in the opposing direction.

When any two arrows point inside a triangle, the triangle has a net positive spin, represented by a red dot. When any two arrows — or spins — point out, the triangle has a net negative spin, denoted by a blue dot.

“At nearly absolute zero, we expected a well-­ organized pattern for the spins — like in a (quantum physics) solid,” Mourigal said. “But to our great surprise, we found that spin directions remain frenzied like in a liquid.”

Another great surprise: Despite this, net spin values in the triangles aligned into a well-ordered, stable pattern of positives, or red dots, evenly interspersed with negatives, or blue ones.

“That’s like a solid in the quantum physics sense,” Mourigal said. “So, we’ve found a state of matter that behaves simultaneously like a liquid and like a solid because of the exotic yet concerted interaction between the spins.”

How could that contribute to a 1 quadrillion gigabyte hard drive? Each blue or red dot could represent one bit of information. And since each is on an atomic scale, a concise crystal could hold 1022, or many more.

— Ben Brumfield

MARTIN MOURIGAL

FRONTOFFICE

CRUISE CONTROL For vessels operating at sea, avoiding collisions is a basic operational requirement, so collision avoidance is part of operator training. When those vessels become highly autonomous, collision avoidance must be incorporated into complex autonomy algorithms and thoroughly tested before the vessels enter the water.

Researchers from the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), led by Chief Scientist Lora Weiss, have created an assessment tool for systematically stimulating and testing the logic of fully autonomous systems while they are under development — before they reach the operational test and evaluation stage.

Known as Autonomy Validation, Introspection, and Assessment (AVIA), the tool was developed with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to assess the autonomy logic of unmanned systems, and specifically for a technology-demonstration vessel developed in DARPA’s Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) program.

AVIA stimulates the actual autonomy logic of the unmanned vessel and can run thousands of assessments faster than in real time and in parallel to study how an autonomous vessel would interact with a dozen or more other vessels. Its graphical user interface allows testers to generate

thousands of test scenarios, assess the ability of a vessel to understand a given situation, and determine whether the vessel has responded appropriately. This allows for an extensive analysis of the full autonomy logic and enables detection of any undesirable behavior earlier in the development phase.

“It’s very rare to have a collision between two vessels on the open sea today, and we have to make sure that the performance of autonomous vessels

equals or improves upon that of vessels operated by humans,” said Miles Thompson, a GTRI research engineer. “Using AVIA, we can stimulate the actual autonomy logic of the vessel for thousands of hours to find any issues before the system enters the water for the first time.”

Developed for surface and underwater vessels, AVIA could also be useful for evaluating highly autonomous systems designed to operate on the ground, in the air, or even in space. — John Toon

GTRI Research Scientist Tara Madden developed the user interface for an assessment tool that systematically stimulates and tests the logic of fully autonomous systems while they are under development.

FABRIC USES SUN AND WIND TO POWER DEVICES Fabrics that can generate electricity from physical movement have been in the works for years. Now researchers have taken the next step, developing a fabric that can simultaneously harvest energy from both sunshine and motion.

Combining two types of electricity generation into one textile paves the way for developing garments that could power

M A D D E N : R O B F E LT; FA B R I C : C O U R T E SY Z H O N G L I N W A N G

devices such as smart phones or global positioning systems.

“This hybrid power textile presents a novel solution to charging devices in the field from something as simple as the wind blowing on a sunny day,” said Zhong Lin Wang, a Regents Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Materials Science and Engineering.

To make the fabric, Wang’s team used a commercial textile machine to weave solar cells constructed from lightweight polymer fibers together with fiber-based triboelectric nanogenerators. Triboelectric nanogenerators use a combination of the triboelectric effect and electrostatic induction to generate a small amount of electrical power from mechanical motion such as rotation, sliding, or vibration.

Wang envisions that the new fabric, which is 320 micrometers thick and interwoven with strands of wool, could be integrated into tents, curtains, or garments. The research was reported in the journal Nature Energy. — Josh Brown

R E S E A R C H H O R I ZO N S 1 9

FRONTOFFICE

New Pathway for Solar Power

Researchers are developing a thermal storage system that uses liquid tin as a transport fluid. The technology could help increase the efficiency of energy systems based on concentrated solar thermal energy.

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IDEAS IN THE MAKING Georgia’s manufacturing sector remains a profitable part of the state’s economy, with more companies incorporating strategies such as smart manufacturing to remain competitive. But while the industry is integrating more innovative practices, it is not as focused on cybersecurity vulnerabilities, the 2016 Georgia Manufacturing Survey suggests.

“One of the biggest takeaways is the industry’s use of smart manufacturing, which was a new focus for this year’s survey,” said Jan Youtie, principal research associate at Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute. “Smart manufacturing” refers to the use of data and information to improve product design and development, enhance manufacturing processes, and foster responsiveness to customers and suppliers.

“Manufacturing is one of the most important sectors in Georgia,” Youtie said, noting there are more than 9,000 manufacturers in the state who together employ more than 360,000 workers and account for 11 percent of Georgia’s gross state product.

Georgia manufacturers are increasingly incorporating new technologies into their operations, but the survey findings suggest that industry is not giving enough attention to cybersecurity risks.

“It’s more than just incorporating new technologies into a plant. Manufacturers need to be aware of the human aspect and how they can stay ahead of these potential risks,” said Karen Fite, director of the Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership (GaMEP), a federally funded Georgia Tech economic development program that helps companies grow and remain competitive.

Georgia Tech researchers conducted the survey of 526 manufacturers with 10 or more employees in collaboration with Kennesaw State University, the Georgia Department of Labor, and Habif, Arogeti & Wynne, an Atlanta-based accounting and business advisory firm. — Péralte C. Paul

SMART MANUFACTURING ADOPTION Among manufacturers in Georgia with 50 to 249 employees

91% CUSTOMER ORDERING MONITORING 89% PROCESS IMPROVEMENT 78% SUPPLIER ORDERING AND MONITORING 56% DESIGN SPECIFICATIONS 40% CYBERSECURITY 37% ENERGY MANAGEMENT Source: Georgia Manufacturing Survey 2016

S O L A R : R O B F E LT; M A N U FA C T U R I N G : I S TO C K P H OTO. C O M

A new wrinkle on an old technology — solid-state thermo­ photo­voltaics (TPV) — could provide a high-efficiency alternative for directly converting high-temperature heat from concentrated solar thermal to utility-scale electricity.

New computer modeling suggests that high-temperature TPV conversion — which captures infrared radiation from very hot surfaces — could one day rival combined-cycle turbine systems when used with liquid metal thermal storage at temperatures around 1,300 degrees Celsius. Advances in high-temperature components and improved system modeling, combined with the potential for conversion costs an order of magnitude lower than those of turbines, suggest that TPV could offer a pathway for efficiently storing and producing electrical power from solar thermal sources, a new study says.

“The goal for our study was to provide a heat transfer and thermodynamic perspective on a system that combines concentrated solar power with thermal storage and TPV to show that such a system is worthy of renewed attention,” said Asegun Henry, an assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. “In the context of the full system, we suggest that the efficiency could one day rival the best heat engines available on the planet today.”

The underlying technologies of high-temperature storage and TPV conversion could also be used to produce grid-scale batteries able to rapidly supplement other power sources by storing heat for quick conversion to electricity. TPV operates on the same principle as solar cells in wide use today but converts photons at infrared wavelengths rather than those in the visible spectrum.

The modeling was done by graduate research assistant Hamid Reza Seyf in Henry’s lab. Supported by ARPA-E, the research was reported in the journal Energy and Environmental Science. — John Toon

FRONTOFFICE

MISSING RED GIANTS

Old stars may not be missing, they’ve just grown dim

Tamara ­Bogdanovic is an assistant professor in the School of Physics.

New computer simulations provide a conclusive test for a hypo­ thesis explaining why the center of the Milky Way galaxy appears to be filled with young stars but has very few old ones. According to the theory, the remnants of older, red giant stars are still there — they just aren’t bright enough to be detected with telescopes.

Simulations conducted at Georgia Tech investigated the possibility that these red giants were dimmed after they were stripped of tens of percent of their mass millions of years ago during repeated collisions with an accretion disk at the galactic center. The very existence of the young stars, seen in astronomical observations today, is an indication that such a gaseous

accretion disk was present in the galactic center because the young stars are thought to have formed from it as recently as a few million years ago.

“Red giants could have lost a significant portion of their mass only if the disk was very massive and dense,” said Tamara Bogdanovic, the Georgia Tech assistant professor of physics who co-led the study. “So dense, that gravity would have already fragmented the disk on its own, helping to form massive clumps that became the building blocks of a new generation of stars.”

The study was published in The Astrophysical Journal.

— Jason Maderer

N A S A / J P L- C A LT E C H / S . S TO LO V Y ( S P I T Z E R S C I E N C E C E N T E R / C A LT E C H )

The core of the Milky Way galaxy, shown here in infrared, appears to have many young stars but very few old ones.

R E S E A R C H H O R I ZO N S 2 1

MANUFACTURING

LIFE

A LOOK AT HOW GEORGIA TECH IS EXPANDING THE BOUNDARIES OF WHAT CAN BE MADE

BY JOSH BROWN

PHOTOS BY ROB FELT | ILLUSTRATION BY BOSE COLLINS

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CELL MANUFACTURING

INSIDE THE EFFORT TO BRING LIFE-SAVING CELL THERAPIES TO THE MASSES

MANUFACTURING HOPE

F

or years, medical researchers across the country have been working on a host of groundbreaking therapies using human cells to treat a range of diseases, from neurological leukodystrophies such as Krabbe disease, all the way to certain types of cancer.

For all of its promise, however, cell therapy still faces hurdles before it can be used to treat more than a handful of patients at a time. Challenges range from the need to standardize the way cells are manufactured to figuring out how to produce cells faster, in greater quantities, and at lower cost. Georgia Tech researchers have embarked on a multiyear effort aimed at helping doctors and scientists address these challenges and expand cell therapies to more people and more conditions.

“The fundamental challenge is that we’re dealing with a living entity,” said Krishnendu Roy, Robert A. Milton Chair and professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical 24

Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “Classically we’ve always dealt with manufacturing an inanimate object, like materials or a car or an airplane. Even in biomanufacturing we have mostly dealt with a single molecule or protein, not a complete living product like a cell that can change with every manipulation you make.”

In January 2016, Georgia Tech announced a research center devoted to developing processes and techniques to manufacture living cells — the Marcus Center for Therapeutic Cell Characterization and Manufacturing (MC3M). Made possible by a $15.7 million grant from the Atlanta-based Marcus Foundation, the $23 million center will include a facility to produce cells under strict federal quality control protocols — referred to as a good manufacturing practices facility — and will provide the framework for partnerships with industry as well as research and clinical institutions across the country.

The cell manufacturing effort is just one of myriad research initiatives ongoing at Georgia Tech geared toward advancing manufacturing technologies to solve real-world problems in a broad range of areas.

Along with the Georgia Research Alliance, Georgia Tech is leading the National Cell Manufacturing Consortium representing dozens of research institutions, medical technology firms, and government agencies.

The first initiative was to chart a coordinated approach to fully establishing the cell therapy industry over the next decade — with the ultimate goal of making treatments such as the one Owen received available to patients across the country.

I

t has been nearly six decades since some of the first medical research was published on using bone marrow transplants — one of the earliest forms of cell therapy — to treat patients suffering from cancer. It took another 10 years for researchers to see success from the therapy, which today is standard care for blood cancers.

More recently, other exciting cell therapies have emerged.

Immunotherapy involves infusing a patient with billions of immune-system T cells that have been genetically engineered to kill cancer. Meanwhile, therapies involving stem cells have shown promise in treating neurodegenerative conditions, brain and spinal cord injuries, diabetes, and more.

Many of the treatments involve taking cell samples from a patient or a donor and multiplying them in a lab — a tedious and

(Below) the DUOC01 cord blood cell plays a crucial role in certain cell therapies.

THE ULTIMATE GOAL IS MAKING TREATMENTS SUCH AS THE ONE OWEN RECEIVED AVAILABLE TO PATIENTS ACROSS THE COUNTRY.

DUOC: DUKE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

D

octors knew long before Owen Webb was born that they were racing against the clock to save his life.

Tests had confirmed the developing child suffered from Krabbe disease, a genetic disorder that causes toxins to build up in the nervous system, progressively damaging the brain.

Just days after he was delivered, a medical team at Duke University began Owen on nine days of chemotherapy. His body was then infused with stem cell-rich donor umbilical cord blood. A second dose came four weeks later, through a spinal tap, deliver­ing millions of cells directly to his central nervous system.

The rush to save the newborn came about two months after his 10-month-old sister, Mabry Kate, died from the same disease.

Christin and Kyle Webb had spent months in and out of hospitals searching for answers as to why their daughter no longer smiled and was having muscle spasms and trouble eating.

By the time she was diagnosed with Krabbe at 6 months of age, the disease had progressed too far for treatment.

“We felt helpless,” Christin Webb said. “As parents we were supposed to be able to help her, and we couldn’t.”

But their search wasn’t in vain. It led them to Duke and to the discovery that for Owen, it was not too late.

Owen Webb’s life was set on a new course with cell therapy.

R E S E A R C H H O R I ZO N S 2 5

Krishnendu Roy, Robert A. Milton Chair and professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, is leading the cell manufacturing initiative.

time-consuming process limited to a small number of patients.

“Currently, patients who want one of these treatments need to go to one of the top clinical centers in the world where they’re treating a small number of patients at a time in clinical trials,” Roy said. “But a way to scale up these revolutionary therapies for the masses does not exist. We do not know how to mass manufacture these cells, while ensuring safety and clinical effectiveness.”

Among the foremost goals of the MC3M is to take a process that happens traditionally in small labs and increase production capabilities to the industrial scale.

“For potentially curative therapies like these, clinical centers could get backed up for months with a line of patients unless we can significantly increase capacity, translate this into an industry product, and improve access by ensuring reduced cost of production,” Roy said. “That’s a fundamental manufacturing problem, especially when we have to deal with thousands of patients.”

That sentiment was echoed by Dr. Joanne Kurtzberg at Duke University School of Medicine, who heads the school’s Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant Program and the Carolinas Cord Blood Bank, a vast repository of cord blood from unrelated donors.

She has led much of the research there into therapies using stem cells from cord blood, such as the treatment Owen received.

“There are tens of thousands of patients who might potentially benefit from these treatments, but large-scale manufacturing of cells is challenging,” Kurtzberg said. “That’s what makes our collaboration with Georgia Tech so important. We need to find ways to produce more doses in a shorter amount of time.”

T

he cell manufacturing roadmap outlines a number of strategies for increasing production capabilities, such as developing new large-scale bioreactors — the machines used to grow cells. Another is finding the most efficient formula for culture media, which includes the nutrients given to cells to encourage their growth.

Another challenge researchers face is finding a way to develop standardized protocols and processes for manufacturing each type of cell to achieve consistency across the industry.

“While their names may be the same, cell therapies may be very different from clinic to clinic,” Roy said.

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Even if researchers start with the same cell, the way they manufacture it could dramatically change its properties.

“When we do something as simple as move cells from one petri dish to another, their properties change,” Roy said. “So it’s very difficult to reproduce the same cell from one center to another, or from one hand to another hand.”

If the goal is for cell therapy to be as consistent as a tablet of aspirin from one drug maker to the next, it makes sense to take a pharmaceutical approach to manufacturing cells, he explained.

His team is studying cell therapies to find critical quality attributes — what makes each cell therapy effective.

“We know very little about what property of that cell makes it work,” Roy said. “If I were making an airplane fuselage, I would know what type of mechanical strength I need, what type of fatigue resistance I need. But we know little about that for a cell.

I know that if you put it in certain patients, it works. We know that these cells have some properties or markers, but we don’t know correlation between those properties.”

That research could have implications much broader than the cell manufacturing process itself; it is information that could help shape the development of cell therapies across the medical field in years to come.

P

inpointing the scientific basis for each cell therapy and standardizing treatments will help revitalize the cell therapy industry, said Dr. Fred Sanfilippo, director of the Emory-Georgia Tech Healthcare Innovation Program and medical director of the Marcus Foundation.

“That’s one of the real values in creating this center — to address the issue of consistency and making sure the cells are being used for what they are intended,” Sanfilippo said.

CURRENTLY, PATIENTS WHO WANT ONE OF THESE TREATMENTS NEED TO GO TO ONE OF THE TOP CLINICAL CENTERS IN THE WORLD WHERE THEY’RE TREATING A SMALL NUMBER OF PATIENTS AT A TIME IN CLINICAL TRIALS.

BUT A WAY TO SCALE UP THESE REVOLUTIONARY THERAPIES FOR THE MASSES DOES NOT EXIST.

The initiative will also help add transparency to the industry and potentially improve patient understanding of the various treatments, he said.

Already, Roy’s team is working on projects with medical researchers at other institutions, such as the University of Miami and University of Pennsylvania. Another example is a project with Duke University School of Medicine, where doctors have developed a cell therapy using donated umbilical cord blood to treat patients with certain leukodystrophies — genetic disorders in which the white matter of the brain degenerates.

Kurtzberg, who is also a pediatric hematologist-oncologist at Duke, has pioneered a therapy that treats leukodystrophies caused by the deterioration of the myelin sheath, a barrier that protects nerve cells. Kurtzberg’s team has focused on using a cell manufactured from cord blood called DUOC-01, which resembles cells in the brain that help maintain the myelin sheath.

The treatment, which can be used to fight Krabbe disease, involves taking a sample of cord blood, isolating DUOC-01, and growing it in a bioreactor for 21 days. Then, the cells are transplanted into a patient through a spinal tap. Once the cells engraft in the patient’s nervous tissue, they appear to help rebuild the myelin sheath.

The goal of the Georgia Tech-Duke project is to fine tune that process, potentially finding a way to accelerate cell culturing so that patients could receive treatment faster.

“It’s a cell that’s very hard to manufacture, and so Krish’s group is trying to figure out how the cell attaches to things like plastics, to come up with a more efficient way to manufacture them and get a bigger yield,” Kurtzberg said. “Because it stimulates the re-myelination of the brain, the cell may have a lot of other applications besides the rare disorders we’re treating right now, but to bring it to that level we have to make more.”

I

t’s hard to overstate the impact of the treatment on the Webb family. For all the joy that came with the birth of their first child, Mabry Kate, in March 2014, it was the start of one of the most agonizing and heartbreaking periods for Christin and Kyle, who have been together since

they were middle school sweethearts.

The Webbs first reached out to Kurtzberg while searching for treatment for Mabry Kate. While the infant’s symptoms could not be reversed by that point, for Owen, whose due date was still months away, it was a different story.

“Dr. Kurtzberg wanted to have him delivered as soon as his lungs were ready,” Webb said. “The earlier the treatment can begin, the better.”

As the couple were making plans to travel from Tennessee to Durham, North Carolina, for Owen’s birth, they were also coping with Mabry Kate’s declining health. Not wanting her to be confined within the four walls of their home, the Webbs made a point of taking Mabry Kate out to spend time with friends and relatives and to games of the local high school girls basketball team, which Christin and Kyle coach together.

“We had planned on celebrating her first birthday just before her brother’s birth in March, and to bring her with us to Duke for the long process,” Webb said. “God had other plans.”

Mabry Kate passed away in her parents’ arms on a Saturday night in early February 2015. Seven weeks later, Owen was delivered, and after spending a few days in intensive care, he was admitted to the Pediatric Blood and Marrow Transplant Unit at Duke Children’s Hospital to begin treatment.

It’s been more than a year since Owen’s therapy at Duke, and the Webbs have watched their son grow into a healthy, cheerful child who spends many of his days playing happily with his cousins, smiling for selfie photos with his parents, and learning to crawl at his family’s home in Powell, Tennessee, a town on the outskirts of Knoxville.

The G-tube his parents use to deliver supplemental nutrition every day at mealtime is one of the last remaining clues to the 110 days Owen spent in the hospital.

“It’s really exciting to see the new things he’s doing every day,” Webb said. “His personality is coming out, and he’s really funny and happy.”

Watching their son’s development has also been bittersweet.

While every milestone is a reminder of one their daughter never reached, the Webbs are thankful that Mabry Kate’s struggle with Krabbe illuminated the path to save her little brother.

“It seems crazy to me to look at him and think that he has the same disease that Mabry had,” Webb said. “It’s night and day difference.”

This small-scale bioreactor is the model for how cell manufacturing exists on the industrial scale.

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COMPOSITE MATERIALS

Ben Wang is executive director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute.

DESIGNING A U.S. MANUFACTURING RENAISSANCE To illustrate just how significant manufacturing is to the U.S. economy, three numbers alone tell the story.

The total output from American factories in 2014 was more than $2 trillion, according to the National Association of Manufacturers. Those factories employed more than 12 million workers earning salaries that are, on average, higher than in other sectors. And every dollar invested in manufacturing spurs an additional $1.81 in economic activity.

“This is why it’s so important for Georgia Tech to serve as a leader in manufacturing and spur innovation across the industry,” said Ben Wang, executive director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) and the Eugene C. Gwaltney Jr. Chair in Manufacturing Systems for the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. “Georgia Tech has the most complete collection of expertise in manufacturing in the country.”

From researching ways to produce large quantities of living cells for groundbreaking medical treatments to developing next-generation methods for repairing aircraft parts, Georgia Tech is at the forefront of innovation in the manufacturing sector.

Part of that leadership is staying ahead of growing trends such as digital manufacturing, which has the potential to reshape the industry.

“There is no doubt that digital manufacturing will be a cornerstone for the next-generation entrepreneur by amplifying the value of innovation and accelerating new concepts into reality,” said Thomas R. Kurfess, professor and HUSCO/Ramirez Distinguished Chair in Fluid Power and Motion Control in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “Already, digital manufacturing is enabling a robust and resilient industrial ecosystem that is driving the global economy.”

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Another important factor behind Georgia Tech’s leadership in advanced manufacturing is its relationships with industry partners, which help keep researchers in tune with demands of modern factories.

“Strategic partnerships such as the Georgia Tech-Boeing Strategic University Partnership, which is focused on next-generation manufacturing technologies, play a crucial role in advancing our academic and research enterprise,” said Shreyes N. Melkote, Morris M. Bryan Jr. Professor of Mechanical Engineering for Advanced Manufacturing Systems. “In return, industry benefits from the ability to recruit a well-trained pool of students who are exposed to companies’ technology needs, as well as from the scientific knowledge and innovations produced by the academic researchers.”

It is through these types of partnerships that GTMI is positioning Georgia Tech to be at the center of industrial innovation in the years ahead.

“Manufacturing is poised to grow substantially in the United States, and we want to be leading the manufacturing renaissance in this country,” Wang said.

COMPOSITE REPAIRS REVISITED

W

hen Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines Inc. announced plans to purchase scores of new airplanes from Airbus and Bombardier, the carrier made clear its focus was on remaking its fleet with lighter, more fuel-efficient aircraft.

Aerospace manufacturers relied heavily on composite materials for this latest generation of passenger jets. While composite parts have been used for decades, today as much as half of all airplane components can be made of composites, including major structures such as wings and the fuselage.

For airlines, the shift to composites creates an opportunity to rethink the repair and maintenance operations needed to keep jets in top form. Although the first of Delta’s new jets won’t enter service until fall 2017, the airline is already searching for better ways to maintain and repair composite aircraft parts — which are very different from the metal parts it has been maintaining for years.

Sanding away the paint reveals the honeycomb pattern of this composite aircraft part. (Below) Chuck Zhang, a professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, inspects a composite part at a Delta Air Lines repair facility.

The airline is partnering with Georgia Tech to take a close look at current methods used to repair composite parts and identify ways to increase efficiency and bring down costs.

“Airlines want to create their own know-how on how to fix these structures because it’s cheaper and probably faster,” said Chuck Zhang, a professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. “But improved technologies are needed to help in the repair of composite parts. Much of it today is done by hand.”

Recently, inside Delta’s maintenance shop for composite parts, airplane nose cones stood in different stages of the process, with black markings identifying areas that needed further inspection or repair. Nearby, thrust reversers awaited sanding, finishing, and painting.

“We’ve certainly been doing composite repairs for many years,” said Todd Herrington, general manager of fleet projects at Delta. “However, what’s changed is that the type of structure now includes what we call principal structural elements — essentially the type of structure that is critical to the aircraft’s continued safe flight.”

Currently, when repairs are needed for composite components that are part of an aircraft’s principal structure, technicians can use metallic or pre-cured composite patches and secure them with metal fasteners. But that’s not ideal, Herrington said.

“The more weight we permanently add to an airplane the less range or more fuel burn we’re adding to that airplane,” he said. “External repair patches are also going to add drag, which will impact aerodynamics in certain places.”

Zhang’s team is researching ways to perfect bonded repairs so that metal fasteners can be replaced with adhesives, which would preserve the composite’s lightweight advantage. And the aerospace industry isn’t the only sector that could benefit from this effort. The automotive industry, for example, also uses advanced composite materials that need improved repair technology, Zhang said.

In an effort sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Georgia Tech has led the Consortium for Accelerated Innovation and Insertion of Advanced Composites in creating a roadmap to chart the development of composite repair technologies over the next 15 years.

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One immediate challenge Zhang’s team is trying to overcome is how to test bonded repairs for strength after they have been completed. Current practices often call for performing a repair, testing its strength to the breaking point, and then making another repair using the destructive testing results as a guideline.

“There needs to be a way to check the integrity of that joint without actually destroying the joint in the process,” Herrington said.

Researchers at Georgia Tech are working on technology that could ensure uniformity in the thickness of the adhesive and pressure during the joining process.

“What we’d really like to do is eliminate any differences due to variability in the operator accomplishing a repair,” Herrington said.

One possibility would be to embed a miniature sensor array into the adhesive bond line itself without negatively affecting the strength of the repaired part using advanced nanomaterials and printed electronics techniques. Those sensors could enable technicians to verify uniformity.

“The idea is to embed some type of grid structure so that you can measure the difference in capacitance values between each node, and that might tell you where you have the highest thickness or pressure variation,” Herrington said.

Zhang’s team is also researching ways to test whether a composite surface has been prepared properly for the bonding process.

Part of that prep process is carefully cleaning and sanding composites on both sides of the bond to get the surface just right to ensure a proper adhesion.

“When you’re preparing an original structure for bonding, what grit sandpaper you use, how worn is that sandpaper, how rough that has left the surface — that all matters,” Herrington said. “It would be nice to be able to determine up front all of those things, including whether there’s contamination of the surface.”

Zhang’s group is in the early stages of evaluating whether infrared technology could detect the presence of contamination as well as measure the characteristics and texture of the composite surface. For both projects with Delta, preliminary research will take place over the next two years to determine whether the technologies hold promise.

“If we can show that a bonded repair can be measured and inspected in a non-destructive way,” Herrington added, “that’s really kind of the holy grail.”

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INTERNET OF THINGS

LEGACY EQUIPMENT LEARNS NEW TRICKS

F Todd Herrington, general manager of fleet projects at Delta Air Lines, and Chuck Zhang, a professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, peer into the underside of a jet at a Delta Air Lines repair facility.

or years, production managers at Mueller Inc. would stay late in the day or arrive in the wee hours of the morning to sketch out plans on paper for cutting parts out of giant rolls of steel.

Since everything was done by hand — from making pattern plans to inputting that information into the cutting machines — getting a head start was essential.

“Few pieces of their equipment communicated with their software,” said Andrew Dugenske, principal engineer and director of the Factory Information Systems Center at Georgia Tech.

“People had to enter data by hand, which was very labor intensive and error prone.”

Managers at the Texas-based manufacturer of metal buildings knew there must be a better way and enlisted factory technology researchers at Georgia Tech to help. The team built a system to link those cutting machines to computers across a network in the factory so production managers could automate the process and monitor the system with more confidence.

The project reduced Mueller’s scrap metal, increased production, and saved significant labor costs.

“This is a great example of how the Internet of Things for manufacturing can provide significant value to manufacturers,” Dugenske said.

Much like internet connections are enhancing a growing range of consumer products, from slow cookers to thermostats, Internet of Things technologies hold great promise for manufacturers looking to automate and monitor their factory machines and systems.

At the basic level, Internet of Things devices simply allow machines to talk to other machines using internet protocols.

Sometimes that data is transmitted over the internet and sometimes over just a local network.

“Very few machines on the factory floor currently collect data, and from the ones that do, very little of it is acted upon,” Dugenske said. “So there’s this huge opportunity for applying software systems to these legacy pieces of equipment.”

For some manufacturers, connected devices can help them collect data about their production processes, which lays the groundwork for optimization efforts.

“Collecting data is important,” Dugenske said. “It’s the first step. But data is not useful by itself — it just fills databases. Data needs to be processed into meaningful information so informed decisions can be made. And we find ways to help manufacturers do just that.”

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Inside the 3-D-printed model of a human heart valve, black regions represent the location of actual calcium deposits.

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CARDIOLOGY

3-D PRINTING GETS A HEART

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ens of thousands of patients each year are diagnosed with heart valve disease, with many in need of lifesaving surgery to treat the condition.

Now, researchers at the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute are working on a tool that could help cardiologists care for patients with the disease.

Using highly detailed imaging from CT scans, mechanical engineers are using 3-D printers to make an exact model of an individual patient’s heart valve. These one-of-a-kind models not only represent the size and proportion of the heart valve but can also mimic its physiological qualities — such as how it feels and responds to pressure.

The goal is to provide doctors with a new tool for planning procedures to treat aortic stenosis, a condition in which the valves in the left side of the heart narrow, restricting blood flow and potentially leading to heart failure. The condition is commonly associated with elderly patients, and its prevalence is thought to be on the rise as the population ages.

The 3-D printed heart valve models are particularly useful in planning a minimally invasive procedure called transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), during which heart doctors use a catheter to deliver a prosthetic heart valve to replace the patient’s impaired valve.

The procedure is a great option for patients who are at high risk for complications with a standard open-heart valve replacement surgery. The prosthetic valves are readily available in a range of types and sizes from multiple manufacturers; however, one of the most important factors for a positive outcome is matching up the patient’s natural heart valve with a prosthetic of the right type and size. That’s where the 3-D model comes into play.

“The issue is, everybody is different,” said Chuck Zhang, a professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. “A male will be different than a female. It’s a big challenge for the doctors to select the right type of that prosthesis for a specific patient.”

Creating a custom model that moves, feels, and stretches similar to a patient’s own valve can make picking the right valve much simpler, he said.

Zhen Qian, chief of Cardiovascular Imaging Research at Piedmont Heart Institute, which has partnered with Georgia Tech researchers on the project, said the 3-D printed models hold great promise for use in preparing for heart procedures.

“The results are quite encouraging,” Qian said. “Our printed model is able to tell you before the procedure how much paravalvular leakage there will be and where it is, a good indicator for short- and long-term mortality.”

Picking the right type and size and getting a good seal between the prosthetic and the natural cardiac valve wall is

key to preventing blood leaking around the prosthetic. That’s where a personalized 3-D printed model can help.

The models are created by a machine that is capable of multimaterial 3-D printing. The researchers are able to adjust the design parameters — such as diameter and curving wavelength — of the metamaterial used for printing, which allows them to more closely mimic physiological properties of the tissue.

For example, the models can recreate conditions such as calcium deposition, which is a common underlying factor of aortic stenosis.

Zhang has been experimenting with embedding sensors on the models as well, using a machine that can print nanomateri-

al-enabled circuitry on the wall of the valve. The sensors could potentially be used to monitor how much a prosthetic valve strains or deforms the model. With this sensing capability, the printed heart valve also can be used as a phantom to monitor pre-surgery practice.

So far, the researchers have printed almost two dozen heart valve models based on actual patient imaging. They are now using images and data from patients who have already undergone the procedure to better analyze how well the models can predict the success of the prosthetics. The next step will be to have the models printed before the procedure for inclusion in the pre-surgery planning phase.

“There is big potential for these models,” Zhang said. “We’re thinking in the future, this may be a standard tool for pre-surgery planning and for training new surgeons.”

Kan Wang, a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech, and Zhen Qian, chief of Cardiovascular Imaging Research at Piedmont Heart Institute, inspect a printed heart valve.

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or pilots, having instant access to data about their aircraft is crucial to safely navigating the skies. Researchers at Georgia Tech are working on a technology that could generate information at an unprecedented level of detail via a network of sensors embedded throughout the airplane like a nervous system.

The concept uses a 3-D printer in tandem with a separate machine that prints electronic circuitry, allowing the network of sensors to be produced along with the aircraft part and fully integrated throughout the material.

“When these sensors are combined with new control and command systems that can process the data, pilots should be able to pinpoint the precise location of a problem,” said Chuck Zhang, a professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

The research is one example of the work ongoing at Georgia Tech in the rapidly growing field of printed electronics. In recent years, advances have resulted in new machines capable of printing custom circuits on a variety of surfaces — rigid or flexible, delicate or sturdy, flat or shaped.

The new printers use conductive inks — made from a variety of materials from silver to polyimide — to “print” the circuits in

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much the same way that an inkjet prints words on paper.

Although most Americans may be unfamiliar with the concept of a printed electronic device, chances are they’ve come into contact with them — from the security stickers on retail goods to plastic badges used to open electronic door locks. Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags have been a mainstay of retail inventory control and proximity door locks for years.

In the latest wave of innovation around printed electronics, industry demand for flexible electronics has been a driving force, Zhang said.

“They want flexible solar energy cells, batteries, and circuits, and the traditional way of making electronics with a wafer of silicon doesn’t work,” he said.

Traditional electronics are also expensive to produce, and chipmakers typically

PRINTED CIRCUITS

ELECTRONICS 3-D PRINTED TO ORDER

Custom-made sensors and interconnects are printed on a flexible substrate.

MODEL-BASED ENGINEERING

GREATER EFFICIENCY THROUGH COMPUTER INTEGRATION

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s modern factories have grown increasingly complex, companies are relying more and more on computer models to monitor how production processes play out on the factory floor. The manufacturing of a single product could involve numerous models, each with dozens of steps.

One challenge for production managers is how to keep all those computer models in sync as designs change. For example, if the size of a hole changes in one model, the other model would have to be updated manually — a tedious and time-consuming process.

Researchers who specialize in model-based systems engineering at Georgia Tech are working on ways to link various industrial computer models so they can be kept in sync faster and with less labor, increasing automation and allowing production managers to see the big picture faster.

“Those dependencies between models are a problem right now,” said Chris Paredis, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “These things are becoming a cause for lots of rework and effort to maintain consistency between all of these representations. The chances that something will get missed are pretty high.

So anything that we can do to support that process and maintain consistency in an automated fashion is a big step forward.”

Much of Paredis’ work focuses on building the architecture that allows two or more systems to communicate and synchronize information. People in the industry call this consistency management.

“It could be that a diameter becomes a radius in another model. It could be that we have inches becoming meters,” Paredis said. “There are all kinds of things that can be slightly different. Lots of different kinds of information need to come together.”

His team’s research came into play recently on a project with Boeing, where the group considered the manufacturing process of an airplane landing gear assembly.

need to produce large quantities to bring down the cost. That limits their ability to produce smaller quantities of more specialized or customized electronics.

By contrast, making printed electronics is a form of additive manufacturing.

The circuits begin as designs on a computer, which connects to a printing machine capable of forming the thin conductive lines that make up a circuit.

And in contrast to typical 3-D printers, electronics printers can generate a circuit in a matter of minutes, forming lines a few inches per second.

“If you have a special need, we can do prototype circuits or electronic products,” Zhang said. “On one day, you could print four products for one customer, and the next day you could print a different four for a different customer.”

The ability to create custom sensors one at a time also opens up the option for researchers to add greater functionality to other products, such as putting strain sensors on 3-D printed heart valve models.

For Georgia Tech’s research project to create a network of printed sensors in aircraft, one goal is to address a shortcoming of existing sensor systems, which rely on high-frequency signals to monitor structural faults. Those systems can be difficult to implement in large structures.

In theory, the system of sensors would enable a pilot or vehicle operator to have more knowledge about potential aircraft problems and make better decisions about how to handle them. The National Science Foundation is funding this cyberphysical system (CPS) project.

Get all the Georgia Tech research news as it happens. Visit www.rh.gatech. edu/subscribe and sign up for emails, tweets, and more.

Chris Paredis, professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, walks in the Montgomery Machining Mall, in Georgia Tech’s Manufacturing Related Disciplines Complex.

The goal for the project was to design an integrated system model that could update itself within hours in response to changes in the manufacturing process.

“When we design, we need to understand the consequences of the choices we are making,” Paredis said. “If it takes three or four weeks to update the process plan, then every time you make a change to your design, you have to wait three or four weeks to understand what the consequences are. And you can’t do business like that.”

The goal of the research is to enable factory managers to make decisions faster and with more information — rather than spending time updating models and simulations, Paredis said.

“There are too many people spending their time transcribing information and chasing down information produced by others, and these are really non-valueadded tasks,” he said.

Having the computer models updated quickly has helped keep manufacturing companies nimbler, saving them time and money.

“The more inconsistencies you catch, the better, because any one of those can cause a major headache later on,” Paredis said. “The longer businesses wait for all aspects of the system to be updated, the costlier it gets to make changes.”

Josh Brown is a senior science writer at Georgia Tech. A journalist by training, he’s spent the past decade writing about economic development, medical research, and scientific innovation.

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THE HEALTH

BY JOHN TOON PHOTOS BY ROB FELT

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MORE THAN JUST AN ELECTRONIC FILING CABINET, COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY IS NOW OFFERING ADVICE ON CRUCIAL MEDICAL DECISIONS

INFORMATICS REVOLUTION

Margaret Wagner ­Dahl, Georgia Tech’s associate vice president for information technology and analytics, says health informatics requires an integrated approach. She’s shown in the radiology room at Georgia Tech’s Stamps Health Services.

WHEN YOUR DOCTOR DIAGNOSES

a condition and recommends a course of treatment, she relies on her extensive training, guidelines from professional medical organizations, and previous experience with thousands of other patients.

But what if your diagnosis and treatment could be further informed by the experience of millions of other patients, including those who not only had similar symptoms, but perhaps also were your age, gender, ethnicity — and with similar medical history? That’s among the benefits coming soon from health analytics and informatics.

Using massive data sets, machine learning, and high-performance computing, health analytics and informatics is drawing us closer to the holy grail of health care: precision medicine, which promises diagnosis and treatment tailored to individual patients. The information, including findings from the latest peer-reviewed studies, will arrive on the desktops and mobile devices of clinicians in health care facilities large and small through a new generation of decision-support systems.

“There are massive implications over the coming decade for how informatics will change the way care is delivered, and probably more so for how care is experienced by patients,” said Jon Duke, M.D., director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Health Analytics and Informatics. “By providing data both behind the scenes and as part of efforts to change behavior, informatics is facilitating our ability to understand patients at smaller population levels. This will allow us to focus our diagnostic paths and treatments much better than we could before.”

At Georgia Tech, health informatics researchers are partnering with both public- and private-sector organizations to develop and apply transformative technology that will connect incompatible systems and analyze vast data sets. This technology also will help clinicians track the latest research, potentially shortening the time required to move health care advances into practice.

“Our goal is to be directly involved with that health care transformation and to be one of the contributors focusing on what technology can do well,” said Steve Rushing, senior strategic advisor for health extension services at Georgia Tech. “Technology has to be leveraged in a way that will meet the goals of improving the quality of care, bettering the patient experience, and addressing the rising cost of health care.”

Georgia Tech’s health informatics effort combines academic researchers in computing and the biosciences, practitioners familiar with the challenges of the medical community, extension personnel who understand the issues private companies face, and engineers and data scientists with expertise in building and operating secure networks tapping massive databases.

“It takes all of these components to really make a difference in an area as complex as health informatics,” said Margaret Wagner Dahl, Georgia Tech’s associate vice president for information technology and analytics. “This integrated approach allows us to add value to collaborators as diverse as pharmaceutical companies, health care providers, large private employers, and federal agencies.”

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY ERICA ENDICOTT

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“EVEN FOR EXPERIENCED CLINICIANS, IT CAN BE QUITE

ADVICE FROM MILLIONS OF PATIENTS

EmployersLikeMe, facilitated by Georgia Tech, helps major employers identify trends and best practices for the health care services they provide their employees.

Shown are Don Betts, a Georgia Tech extension specialist, and Lisa Evans, director of Living Well at Southwire, a manufacturer of wire and cable. They are shown in the company’s medical facility in Carrollton, Georgia.

The availability of millions of claims records produced by doctors, clinicians, hospitals, pharmacies, and others presents a unique opportunity for providing decision support to individual physicians, who often have less and less time to treat patients whose conditions are more and more complicated.

Finding information useful to doctors within claims records — and electronic health records — offers a challenge much greater than the proverbial needle in a haystack. For one thing, the decision-support system must find that needle quickly enough — in a matter of seconds — to give doctors the information they need while they’re working with patients.

To address that challenge, Associate Professor Jimeng Sun and his graduate students in Georgia Tech’s School of Computational Science and Engineering are using advanced algorithms, machine learning, and high-performance computing to find subtle signals in the data sets. But before they can apply these powerful tools, they must confront the fact that the data they’re using was gathered to help medical providers gain reimbursement — not to aid in diagnosis.

“Every clinic and every hospital has this data, so the benefit of using electronic health records and claims records is that you don’t have to put in extra effort to collect it,” Sun noted. “But it’s very difficult to get the data into a high-quality state that will allow you to use it.”

Once the data is clean, Sun’s lab uses neural networks — modeled on the brain — to teach computers to find useful similarities among patient records. Finding those connections requires access to millions of records: some to train the system, and the rest to analyze. The researchers use high-performance computers based on graphics processing units (GPUs), originally developed for the game industry, to run their algorithms.

Based on factors such as a patient’s age, gender, medical history, previous medication results, and other information, the system may suggest a treatment — perhaps a set of drugs to try — supplementing the doctor’s own training and experience.

“Even for experienced clinicians, it can be quite challenging to figure out which treatment or drug is likely to work best for a given patient,” Sun said. “Using the signals we find in the data sets, we are able to improve the clinician’s accuracy. There can be a dramatic improvement in the disease risk prediction and treatment recommendations.”

Sun’s team has worked with Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta to develop models for treating asthma and medically complex patients using electronic health record information. Sun’s team has also worked with Sutter Health in predicting heart failure, and with Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University on automatic phenotype discovery.

WHAT WORKS FOR WORKERS

Maintaining a healthy and productive workforce is a top priority for many major companies today. One of the leaders of that effort is Southwire, North America’s foremost manufacturer of wire and cable used in electricity distribution and transmission.

With the title “Director of Living Well,” Lisa Evans is responsible for everything that relates to health and wellness for Southwire’s more than 7,000 employees at locations around the country.

CHALLENGING TO FIGURE OUT WHICH TREATMENT OR DRUG IS LIKELY TO WORK BEST FOR A GIVEN PATIENT. USING THE SIGNALS WE FIND IN THE DATA SETS, WE ARE ABLE TO IMPROVE THE CLINICIAN’S ACCURACY.”

The company offers broad-based programs for its employees, and its headquarters in Carrollton, Georgia, includes a pharmacy, wellness center, and fully certified primary care medical facility.

For Evans, the challenge is to measure what works so she can guide the company’s investment into new initiatives. That’s one reason she is a member of EmployersLikeMe, a Georgia Tech-facilitated initiative that brings together the state’s major employers to discuss common issues such as health care – and share data that could help participants identify trends and best practices.

“Our people are what differentiates us in the marketplace, and it’s important for us to create and sustain an environment that allows people to be the best they can be,” Evans said. “We want to make sure we can glean information from our health care data to help us take action or create awareness that could facilitate more healthy behaviors in the people we serve.”

EmployersLikeMe (ELM) began as a roundtable for representatives from top Georgia companies to share concerns and best practices. Because health care is a major cost today — one that is rising faster than other costs of doing business — ELM has moved into health care informatics.

“We are working to get data from dozens of private companies, all of whom have different pieces of data in different formats with different third-party administrators,” said Don Betts, an extension specialist who leads ELM in Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute. “Employers have a lot of data, and their data is from the private-pay, real-world that’s very different from Medicaid or Medicare information.”

Bringing that information together could help employers identify trends affecting their work force and get feedback on programs designed to help prevent and control such chronic issues as high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, and obesity — medical concerns that affect most companies across the board.

“The potential and the power that this knowledge could unleash is amazing,” Betts said. “Most of the ELM employers have self-funded health care programs, so they have an interest in looking at how they can improve access, ensure the best quality of care, and test new approaches for having healthy and productive people.”

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“WE WANT TO SEE THE ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN THE PATIENT’S CONDITION AND THEIR FINAL OUTCOME. THE INSIGHTS WE CAN GAIN FROM THIS DATA COULD GO BACK INTO HELPING PHYSICIANS.”

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In non-metropolitan areas of Georgia, finding and retaining the best workers is a challenge, and access to health care can be among the reasons. Wellness initiatives — sometimes as basic as teaching nutrition and exercise — can be part of attracting people and helping them remain productively on the job. The cost of health problems goes beyond medical claims; costs related to lost productivity, retraining, and other issues also add up, Betts noted.

“If there were any other cost that was going up 10 to 15 percent a year, the company would wrestle it to the ground and figure out what to do,” he added. “But health care is seen by many companies as something they can’t do anything about. The ability to get good data could change that. We want to give executive leadership the information they need to make good decisions.”

Besides Southwire, EmployersLikeMe has representation from major Georgia employers including Fieldale Farms, the Georgia Power Company, The Langdale Company, Mohawk Industries, Newell Brands, Procter & Gamble, Rollins, Inc., Sunset Foods, and The Savannah Business Group. In addition to facilitating sharing among the companies, Betts helps them collaborate with outside initiatives in areas such as telemedicine and addressing chronic health issues.

With its statewide extension presence, Georgia Tech is in a unique position to provide real value for these companies, noted Dahl. “What these companies are most interested in is Georgia Tech’s ability, as a neutral and trusted source, to take their patient data and claims data and aggregate it in a way that will inform them about trends and what works,” she said.

DEATH RECORDS HELP THE LIVING

About 2.6 million people die each year in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). For each one, a death certificate is issued listing the conditions and causes of death. Aggregating and analyzing that data not only provides information about the state of public health, but also offers clues that could help clinicians treat the living.

With support from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), Georgia Tech researchers are looking at death certificate data both to see what can be learned and to support efforts to create an improved and uniform reporting system.

While there is a national standard death certificate, 57 different reporting jurisdictions — corresponding to each state and some municipalities — may collect additional data elements.

“Most physicians do a good job of ascertaining the immediate cause of death, but for public health and planning purposes, we need information about the underlying causes,” said Paula Braun, entrepreneur-in-residence at the CDC. “We are really

excited to be working with Georgia Tech to understand the nuances and components that need to come together to make this information more useful.”

May Dongmei Wang, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, is leading an effort on using up to 40 years of National Vital Statistics System (NVSS) public use death records data published by NCHS, along with data provided by states, to assist in the design of a next-generation electronic death registration system. The system will be based on Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), the emerging health data interoperability standard.

The project will advise the CDC on what kinds of data should be gathered in future electronic death records and ways in which technology could assist doctors with a task many of them don’t do often.

“We are looking at novel ways to use technology to inform and simplify this very complicated process,” Braun said. “Death certificate data is one of the best sources of health information at the population level, and it is used in many different policy-setting purposes, so we want to improve this process.”

Researchers also will look into possible disease pathways leading to death. That information could be useful to clinicians in intensive care units, for instance, who often must prioritize care for patients with complex medical conditions, balancing treatment for conditions like congestive heart failure, kidney disease, heart valve problems, and loss of lung function.

Using the public use mortality data from the NVSS, researchers have identified the top 10 causes of death and the many issues associated with the direct causes. “We want to see the associations between the patient’s condition and their final outcome,” Wang said. “The insights we can gain from this data could go back into helping physicians.”

DATA DRIVES HEALTH CARE POLICY DECISIONS

Individual states have significant independence in setting health care priorities and determining how those goals will be met through specific service offerings. But how do policymakers evaluate those decisions?

That’s a question Nicoleta Serban and Julie Swann are addressing by studying billions of transaction records from

With support from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Georgia Tech is examining death certificate data to determine what can be learned from these records. Shown are May Dongmei Wang, a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Paula Braun, entrepreneur-in-residence at the CDC; and Mark Braunstein, M.D., a professor of the practice in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing.

the nation’s Medicaid program. Medicaid largely addresses the needs of children, whose issues differ dramatically from those of private-sector workers and older Americans. The Georgia Tech researchers have access to eight years of complete records from 50 million patients, 38 million of them children.

“People want to make informed decisions, and we can help them make decisions based on data,” said Serban, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. “Health care policies have often been set by clinicians or public health agents who are making decisions based on their experience. We can add a layer of data and health analytics to that.”

For example, in a project supported by Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, Serban looked at how states in the Southeast were managing asthma in children — a condition identified by the CDC as a priority. With proper diagnosis and management, acute asthma attacks can be minimized.

Based on the Medicaid data, however, she found significant differences among the states in the degree to which the disease was being managed in accordance with guidelines. In the best-performing state, 80 percent of children studied received the recommended care, while in the worst-performing state, only 30 percent of the children studied did.

The implications of care quality are significant and can be measured in costs of emergency treatment, chronic diseases carried into adulthood, time away from work for parents, and the quality of life for affected children. “If we can provide the best care now for these children, we can rely on them as adults to be healthier and more productive,” Serban said.

The findings could spur underperforming states to re-examine their policies, perhaps by looking at states that have done a better job. In some states, care for children with asthma is limited by a shortage of medical providers and practices that accept Medicaid. “We cannot charge either patients or clinicians for lack of

adherence,” Serban said. “We are simply looking at compliance within the system and how to intervene.”

Serban and Swann — also a professor in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering — have also looked at access to mental and oral health care, access to primary care, the cost-effectiveness of telemedicine, and at the potential return on investment for expanding Medicaid services to cover more preventive care for children.

The Medicaid data includes personal information about patients, so Georgia Tech has an extensive protocol for securing it.

For instance, the data is maintained on networks not connected to the internet, and can be accessed only in secure data review rooms from which cellphones and other electronic devices are excluded. Only Georgia Tech employees can see the information, and then only for research permitted by the agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Working out the security infrastructure and agreements for using the data took nearly two years, including the construction of secure data rooms housed at the Institute for People and Technology, a Georgia Tech interdisciplinary research institute.

“When we started, I was a bit naïve about the level of security that would be required to protect these data,” Serban said. “Now that we have established the infrastructure for this database, it is a proof-of-concept for how Georgia Tech can deal with that level of data security and data complexity.”

STUDENTS MOVE INNOVATION INTO THE WORLD

Pushing health care informatics into the nation’s health care system will require more than research. In Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, faculty members are working toward a course concentration in health informatics, building a group of students who are highly sought-after by organizations now developing and implementing real-world health informatics systems and tools.

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“We are well on our way to having a significant concentration with a heavy emphasis on analytics and big data,” said Mark Braunstein, M.D., a professor of the practice who teaches health informatics as an elective graduate seminar in the college and in the Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program.

Students in Braunstein’s course are the first in any university to work on real-world problems applying HL7’s Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR), a new standard for describing data formats and elements for exchanging electronic health records. FHIR addresses the challenges of interoperability among health information systems, and Braunstein says training students in the new standard will help transfer a new way of thinking into the industry.

“The development of FHIR is transforming the whole field because, for the first time, if you can use analytics to develop rules that can help doctors and patients, you can deliver them to where they can be used,” he said. “FHIR allows us to develop applications that can operate essentially as built-in enhancements to the electronic medical records systems that doctors and health care organizations are using.”

One example is a FHIR application developed in collaboration with Emory University clinicians to support advanced patient monitoring at the Emory Electronic ICU Center. The center is linked to intensive care units at Emory Saint Joseph’s Hospital, Emory University Hospital, Emory University Hospital Midtown, East Georgia Regional Medical Center, and Emory Johns Creek Hospital. Braunstein’s students worked with Tim Buchman, M.D., Emory’s Critical Care Center director, to develop and test the application.

At the end of each semester, student projects from Braunstein’s class are presented in a briefing attended by health care industry

Using FHIR, Georgia Tech students developed an application to assist the Emory Electronic ICU Center, which monitors intensive care units at multiple hospitals. Shown are Tim Buchman, M.D., Emory’s Critical Care Center director; Cheryl Hiddleson, MSN, director of the Emory Electronic ICU Center; and Georgia Tech graduate student Robert Allen.

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representatives from as far away as California. “People want to partner with Georgia Tech because we have the knowledge and skills, our faculty are willing to work on practical problems, and we have great students,” Braunstein said.

INFRASTRUCTURE NEEDED

Health informatics applications couldn’t operate without extensive and secure infrastructure. Myung Choi and Richard Starr work behind the scenes for all these projects as part of Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) and the Interoperability and Integration Innovation Lab (I3L).

They make sure data storage is available, provide security, help faculty members navigate approval processes, and make sure research projects comply with data use agreements and federal rules such as HIPAA. “We must have infrastructure to connect systems, a protocol that allows them to communicate with each other, and data content that is in the same language,” said Choi, a senior research engineer in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI). “My part is to make sure that all those systems work together.”

Humans can understand data structures that are similar, but machines must have exact matches. Part of Choi’s job is to help researchers structure the data they’re using to meet the needs of individual projects. “We are trying to free the data so researchers can do what they need to do,” he said.

Starr, a research scientist in IPaT, considers himself an enabler for researchers. He helps them work through institutional review board regulations, data use agreements, and protection requirements. Most data has been de-identified to remove information that could lead directly to patients, but savvy programmers might be able to combine information from different sources to restore identities. Part of Starr’s job is to make sure that doesn’t happen.

“We can take the steps required to get data in less time if we prepare in time,” he said. “From the time we get data from our research partners until the time it’s ready for researchers to use, there’s a lot of work to be done. Every data set we get has to be maintained in its own environment.”

Starr and Choi operate a health informatics data hub in which information can be stored centrally. That lifts the data management and security burden from researchers, and allows them to know about specific data sets and the restrictions on using them, potentially accelerating projects.

Before becoming involved in health informatics, Choi worked with secure computer network communication systems and simulations for Department of Defense customers. Like many others in the group, he heard a presentation made by a patient who described her struggle to overcome a disease.

“This helped us to understand that we were doing a good thing,” he said. “I feel like I am making an impact.”

WHAT’S AHEAD

The growth and application of health informatics faces challenges as great as its promises. For instance, most data consists of information collected for other purposes, either for submitting claims to insurance companies or maintaining health records to help clinicians treat patients.

In addition, the data contains errors — known as “noise” to researchers. Data fields may not match, and there may be duplicate information that could skew results. And the data is maintained in perhaps hundreds of different proprietary software systems that aren’t designed to talk with one another.

“Taking these disparate information sources and systems, and putting them together in a way that is computable, is one of the challenges we are tackling,” Dahl said.

“THE DEVELOPMENT OF FHIR IS TRANSFORMING THE WHOLE FIELD BECAUSE FOR THE FIRST TIME, IF YOU CAN USE ANALYTICS TO DEVELOP RULES THAT CAN HELP DOCTORS AND PATIENTS, YOU CAN DELIVER THEM TO WHERE THEY CAN BE USED.”

Beyond working with existing information, Georgia Tech researchers are looking ahead to integrate genomics data, which could provide a more complete description of each patient. Doing that will require a new set of collaborators at Georgia Tech, Emory University, and other leading institutions.

One major project underway, led by Rushing, supports the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) as it plans a new digital health platform (DHP) to replace its pioneering electronic health records system — the country’s first. As a neutral third party, Georgia Tech is building the VA a scalable, proof-of-concept DHP model.

According to Rushing, the architecture for the new platform relies on FHIR as well as other Internet of Things standards within an open application program interface gateway. This architecture opens the platform for care delivery and operations process innovations made possible by flexible and agile interoperability with future technology innovations. The DHP

is intended to be as groundbreaking now as the VA’s VistA electronic health records system was 40 years ago.

“The VA is looking for a flexible, future-focused health platform and architecture focused on a services-based model,” said Duke, whose research center is funded jointly by GTRI and the College of Computing. “They are taking a really ambitious approach to it, and this could have a tremendous impact on care for veterans as well as on health systems more broadly.”

The project illustrates the role Georgia Tech can play because it doesn’t have a medical school or hospital and isn’t tied to any specific technology platform.

“When we are working with health systems, we’re neither a competitor nor a vendor,” Duke noted. “We approach each problem from a ‘white hat’ perspective, working to find the right data and infrastructure needed, often using open-source platforms.”

Health informatics is also bringing Georgia Tech units together with industry and government to work on common issues in unique ways. The new Coda building, a mixed-used facility featuring a high-performance computing center scheduled for construction in Georgia Tech’s Technology Square, will bring industry and academics together to help spur the health care revolution many are expecting.

“I see that building as a hub, with the spokes extending out to all the major care delivery systems in the region that are part of a collaborative health research network,” Braunstein said. “You cannot find a more multidimensional space than health care.”

Jon Duke, M.D., director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Health Analytics and Informatics, says health informatics is bringing big changes to health care. He’s shown at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Egleston.

John Toon is editor of Research Horizons magazine and director of research news at Georgia Tech.

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When Juno arrived at Jupiter, it was traveling faster than any human-made object ever. The planet’s gravity pulled it in until it reached a speed of more than 150,000 miles per hour.

Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech.

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JUNO

U N LO C K I N G T H E M Y S T E R I E S O F JUPITER — AND THE SOL AR SYSTEM

BY JASON MADERER

The excitement that Paul Steffes felt five years ago as he watched Juno lift off into the Florida sky is nothing compared to the feelings he has these days.

“It really is amazing,” Steffes said recently.

Steffes, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is a member of the Juno Science Team, giving him first access to data beamed to Earth from Jupiter. The basketball court-sized spacecraft is currently circling the gaseous giant after finding its orbit on the evening of July 4. The mission is designed to improve our understanding of the birth of the solar system and the mysteries of its largest planet.

“We’ve already been surprised countless times, and Juno has only circled Jupiter a few times,” he said. “It’s different from what we expected.”

Steffes and the remainder of the team are purposely being coy when publicly discussing the early data. They want to be sure their findings are correct, then they will submit them to a scientific journal for review.

“We’re learning so much, and we can’t wait to share the news soon.”

Officially, the spacecraft is the Jupiter Near-polar Orbiter. It’s called Juno because of the tales of Greek and Roman mythology.

Juno was the wife of Jupiter, the king of the gods who visited other worlds and used clouds to hide his mischief. But Juno was able to look through them to see what Jupiter was up to. That’s what the spacecraft will do as it orbits the giant planet from as low as 3,000 miles above the clouds.

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Bellotti said. “This portfolio of possible signatures will, at first look, give us a sense of the elements and compounds that form Jupiter’s atmosphere. Over a period of years, we’ll discover the actual mixture of different constituents in the atmosphere.”

The MWR is just one of Juno’s nine instruments. The others, which Georgia Tech is not associated with, will help determine the core of the planet; map magnetic and gravity fields; explore the planet’s poles, auroras, and magnetosphere; and take pictures from never-before-seen vantage points.

Jupiter contains more material than every other planet, comet, and asteroid in the solar system combined. It was the first planet to form, and scientists believe it can unlock countless mysteries of the solar system’s formation.

“I think we may discover that conditions vary from location to location,” Steffes said. “For example, conditions under the Great Red Spot could be totally different from the rest of the planet.

These next 18 months will be very interesting and exciting.”

Jason Maderer is assistant director of Georgia Tech’s media relations team. He is a former television reporter.

S T E F F E S : F I T R A H H A M I D ; J U P I T E R : N A S A / J P L- C A LT E C H / S W R I / G S F C

(Right) Jupiter’s Great Red Spot as seen by Voyager I in 1979. Juno’s closest approach to Jupiter will bring it within 2,600 miles, inside the radiation belts that block microwave detection from Earth.

Now that Juno has found its home for the next year and a half, Steffes and his graduate student, Amadeo Bellotti, are beginning to decipher Juno’s information based on years of work atop Georgia Tech’s Van Leer Building. Steffes’ research group has performed more than 6,000 microwave measurements to simulate the Jupiter atmosphere in their pressure vessel, which is located inside an oven on the roof of the building. They are trying to match Juno’s planetary data with their lab simulations.

“Our measurements cover a variety of pressures, temperatures, and compounds that Juno will likely find during its mission,”

Juno’s six microwave detectors will provide data on the structure, movement, and chemical composition of Jupiter’s atmosphere up to 342 miles below the visible cloud tops.

The largest of MWR antenna, above, takes up a full side of the spacecraft.

MWR: NASA/JPL; VOYAGER: NASA’S GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER;

Get all the Georgia Tech research news as it happens. Visit www.rh.gatech. edu/subscribe and sign up for emails, tweets, and more.

“When you see a picture of Jupiter, you’re seeing cloud tops that form the outer reaches of the atmosphere,” Steffes said. “It’s like seeing a veneer. You’re not seeing deep down.”

To sense what’s below those clouds, Steffes and his peers are utilizing Juno’s microwave radiometer (MWR) instrument. It measures radio waves from Jupiter’s deep atmosphere, providing a first-ever glimpse of what the planet is made of.

Steffes says microwave radio waves are similar to cellphone signals, which are constantly modified by clouds, rain, and gases.

“If you look at the bars on your phone as you walk next to a fish tank, you’ll notice you’ll have fewer bars. The water absorbs the radio energy from the cell tower to your phone,” he said. “Just like the cellphone idea, we’re going to measure the microwave radiation — the signals coming out of the atmosphere. Based on how they’re affected by the clouds and gases, we’ll know what’s down there.”

While revealing levels of hydrogen, ammonia, and other atmospheric components, Juno will discover the depths of Jupiter’s bands and clouds that are scattered high in the atmosphere.

This includes the famous Great Red Spot, which has swirled on the planet for more than 300 years and is two to three times as large as Earth.

PAUL STEFFES’ GEORGIA TECH LEGACY

S

ince his arrival at the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) in 1982, Paul Steffes has had substantial support from NASA to develop techniques for using microwave systems to remotely sense the composition and structure of planetary atmospheres.

His research has supported Magellan-Venus, which mapped the surface of Venus and determined the topographic relief of the planet; Pioneer Venus, which investigated the solar wind in the Venusian environment, mapped the planet’s surface through a radar imaging system, and studied the characteristics of the upper atmosphere and ionosphere; and Juno, with which he has been involved since 2005. Juno’s goals are to understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter, look for a solid planetary core, map its magnetic field, measure water and ammonia in its deep atmosphere, and observe auroras.

In addition to support for the Juno mission in particular, Steffes’ research in this area has been supported by NASA under a continuous, single-subject grant for more than 31 years, making it the longest-running NASA research program at Georgia Tech. His total career support for all of his solar system research activities totals $5.5 million. He and his team have produced 160 journal and conference papers, and he has graduated 14 Ph.D. students who have published dissertations that focus on this area.

Over the years, Steffes has also worked on the design and implementation of Earth-based microwave and millimeter-wave measurements of the emissions from planets, using facilities such as the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Large Array (VLA), the largest single-site radio telescope in the world, located west of Socorro, New Mexico. In 1991, Steffes was selected by NASA to serve on the investigator team of the High Resolution Microwave Survey, a program to search for artificial microwave signals characteristic of civilizations outside our solar system. When Congress acted to terminate the program in 1993, a new donor-funded program for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was begun by the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California.

Steffes’ leadership in planetary atmospheric research has been recognized by several national and international groups and at Georgia Tech. In 2011, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) elevated him to the level of Fellow “for contributions to the understanding of planetary atmospheres through innovative microwave measurements,” and in 2004, he was elevated to IEEE Fellow “for contributions to the understanding of planetary atmospheres.” In 1996, Steffes received the IEEE Judith A. Resnik Award “for contributions to an understanding of the Venus atmosphere through innovative microwave measurements.”

NASA also recognized the level of Steffes’ contributions by naming him to the NASA Advisory Council (Planetary Science Subcommittee) in 2010 and to several mission selection panels.

Steffes has also chaired several NASA research grant selection panels and subpanels. At Georgia Tech, he was recognized with the ECE Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award in 2010 and the D. Scott Wills ECE Distinguished Mentor Award in 2015.

— Jackie Nemeth

REVEALING JUPITER’S SECRETS Juno’s principal goal is to understand the origin and evolution of Jupiter. Underneath its dense cloud cover, Jupiter safeguards secrets to the fundamental processes and conditions that governed our solar system during its formation.

With its suite of science instruments, Juno will investigate the existence of a solid planetary core, map Jupiter’s intense magnetic field, measure the amount of water and ammonia in the deep atmosphere, and observe the planet’s auroras.

Juno will let us take a giant step forward in our understanding of how giant planets form and the role these titans played in putting together the rest of the solar system. — NASA/JPL

The first look into Jupiter’s clouds by the microwave radiometer.

JUNO SCIENCE OBJECTIVES: Origin Determine the abundance of water and place an upper limit on the mass of Jupiter’s possible solid core to decide which theory of the planet’s origin is correct.

Interior Understand Jupiter’s interior structure and how material moves deep within the planet by mapping its gravitational and magnetic fields.

Atmosphere Map variations in atmospheric composition, temperature, cloud opacity, and dynamics to depths greater than 100 bars at all latitudes.

Magnetosphere Characterize and explore the three-dimensional structure of Jupiter’s polar magnetosphere and auroras.

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WHEN EARLY TERRESTRIAL ANIMALS BEGAN MOVING

about on mud and sand 360 million years ago, the powerful tails they had used as fish may have been more important than scientists previously realized.

That’s one conclusion from a new study of African mudskipper fish and a robot — nicknamed MuddyBot — modeled on the fish.

Animals analogous to the mudskipper would have used modified fins to move around on flat surfaces, but for climbing sandy slopes, the animals would have needed their tails to propel themselves forward, the researchers found. Results of the study, reported in the journal Science, could help designers create amphibious robots able to move across granular surfaces more efficiently — and with less likelihood of getting stuck in the mud.

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, and the Army Research Laboratory, the project involved a multidisciplinary team of physicists, biologists, and roboticists from Georgia Tech, Clemson University, and Carnegie Mellon University. In addition to conducting a detailed analysis of the mudskipper and developing a robot model that used the animal’s locomotion techniques, the study also examined flow and drag conditions in representative granular materials and applied a mathematical model incorporating new physics based on the drag research.

“Most robots have trouble moving on terrain that includes sandy slopes,” said Dan Goldman, an associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics. “We noted that not only did mudskippers use their limbs to propel themselves in a kind of crutching motion on sand and sandy slopes, but that when the going got tough, they used their tails in concert with limb propulsion to ascend a slope. Our robot model was only able to climb sandy slopes when it similarly used its tail in coordination with its appendages.”

Based on fossil records, scientists have studied

52

how early land animals may have gotten around, and the new study suggests their tails — which played a key role when they swam as fish — may have helped supplement the work of fins.

“We were interested in examining one of the most important evolutionary events in our history as animals: the transition from living in water to living on land,” said Richard Blob, alumni distinguished professor of biological sciences at Clemson University.

“Because of the focus on limbs, the role of the tail may not have been considered very strongly in the past.

In some ways, it was hiding in plain sight. Some of the features that the animals used were new, such as limbs, but some of them were existing features that they simply co-opted to allow them to move into a new habitat.”

The small mudskipper, which uses its front fins and tail to move on land, lives in tidal areas near shore, spending time in the water and on sandy and muddy surfaces. With Ph.D. student Sandy Kawano, now a researcher at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis, Blob’s lab recorded how the mudskippers (Periopthalmus barbaratus) moved on a variety of loose surfaces, providing data and video to Goldman’s laboratory.

Benjamin McInroe was a Georgia Tech undergraduate when he analyzed the mudskipper data provided by the Clemson team. He applied the principles to a robot model known as MuddyBot that has two limbs and a powerful tail, with motion provided by electric motors. Information from both the mudskipper and robotic studies were also factored into a mathematical model provided by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University.

“We used three complementary approaches,” said McInroe, who is a now a Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley. “The fish provided a morphological, functional model of these early

Dan Goldman, associate professor in the Georgia Tech School of Physics, is shown with the “MuddyBot” robot in a trackway used to study how the robot — which was modeled on the mudskipper fish — moves across granular surfaces.

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walkers. With the robot, we are able to simplify the complexity of the mudskipper and, by varying the parameters, understand the physical mechanisms of what was happening. With the mathematical model and its simulations, we were able to understand the physics behind what was going on.”

Both the mudskippers and the robot moved by lifting themselves up to reduce drag on their bodies, and both needed a kick from their tails to climb 20-degree sandy slopes. Using their fins alone, both struggled to climb slopes and often slid backward if they didn’t use their tails, McInroe noted.

Early land animals likely didn’t have precise control over their limbs, and the tail may have compensated for that limitation.

The Carnegie Mellon University researchers, who have worked with Goldman on relating the locomotion of other animals to robots as well, have demonstrated that theoretical models developed to describe the complex motion of robots can also be used to understand locomotion in the natural world.

“Our computer modeling tools allow us to visualize, and therefore better understand, how the mudskipper incorporates its tail and flipper motions to locomote,” said Howie Choset, a professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

“This work also will advance robotics in those cases where a robot needs to surmount challenging terrains with various inclinations.”

The model was based on a framework proposed to broadly understand locomotion by physicist Frank Wilczek — a Nobel Prize winner — and his then-student Alfred Shapere in the 1980s. The so-called “geometric mechanics” approach to locomotion of human-made devices (like satellites) was largely developed by engineers, including those in Choset’s group.

ABOVE Image shows a robot — dubbed “MuddyBot” — that uses the locomotion principles of the mudskipper to move through a trackway filled with granular materials. The robot uses two limbs and a powerful tail to move through the trackway, which can be raised to provide a sloping surface.

BELOW Researchers study the motion of mudskippers to understand how early terrestrial animals might have moved about on mud and sand. This animal was photographed at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta.

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Georgia Tech graduate student Perrin Schiebel and postdoctoral fellow Jennifer Rieser measure the properties of the granular material on which the MuddyBot moved.

To provide force relationships as inputs to the mudskipper robot model, Georgia Tech postdoctoral fellow Jennifer Rieser and Georgia Tech graduate student Perrin Schiebel measured drag in inclined granular materials.

Information from the MuddyBot study could help in the design of robots that may need to move on surfaces such as sand that flows around limbs, Goldman said. Such flow of the substrate

We want to ultimately know how natural selection can act to modify structures already present in organisms to allow for locomotion in a fundamentally different environment.

can impede motion, depending on the shape of the appendage entering the sand and the type of motion.

But the study’s most significant impact may be to provide new insights into how vertebrates made the transition from water to land.

“We want to ultimately know how natural selection can act to modify structures already present in organisms to allow for locomotion in a fundamentally different environment,” Goldman said. “Swimming and walking on land are fundamentally different, yet these early animals had to make the transition.”

The project also represents a combination of physics, biology, and engineering.

“Professor Goldman and his collaborators are combining physics and engineering prototyping approaches to understand the physical principles that allow animals to move in different environments,” said Krastan Blagoev, program director in the National Science Foundation’s Division of Physics, which sponsored the research. “This novel approach to living organisms promises to bring to biological sciences higher predictive power and at the same time uncover engineering principles that we have never imagined before.”

In addition to participants already mentioned, the project also included co-first author Henry Astley, a Georgia Tech postdoctoral researcher when the project was underway, and Chaohui Gong, a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University.

John Toon is director of research news at Georgia Tech and editor of Research Horizons magazine. He’s been writing about Georgia Tech research and economic development activities for more than 30 years.

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation and the NSF Physics of Living Systems program through grants PHY-1205878, PHY-1150760, CMMI-1361778; the Army Research Office through grant W911NF-11-1-0514, and the Army Research Laboratory MAST CTA program. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, the Army Research Office, or the Army Research Laboratory. The Robotics Collaborative Technology Alliance also supported this work.

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GLOSSARY

A container from the small-scale bio­ reactor used to hold cells and cell media while the cells are replicating.

Organic Solvent Reverse Osmosis

PAGE 13, MOLECULAR SIEVE CUTS ENERGY USE

Organic solvent reverse osmosis (OSRO) uses carbon membranes to separate hydrocarbon molecules, using pressure to effect the separation without requir­ ing a phase change in the chemical mix­ ture. The hollow carbon fibers, bundled together into modules, can separate mol­ ecules whose sizes differ by a fraction of a nanometer while providing process­ ing rates superior to those of existing molecular sieve zeolites. Georgia Tech researchers worked with scientists from ExxonMobil to develop the technology.

FHIR

PAGE 36, THE HEALTH INFORMATICS REVOLUTION

Cell Media PAG E 2 2 , M A N U FA C T U R I N G CO M E S TO L I F E

(ˇSEL ˇMĒ-DĒ-ə)

The cocktail of nutrients used to grow cells is critical to the success of cell manufacturing. The exact ratio of sugar, water, essential nutrients, and proteins could mean the difference between cells that grow rapidly or not at all. Georgia Tech researchers are refining cell culture conditions to enable consistent quality for cell therapies and to grow cells faster and for more patients.

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FHIR (pronounced “fire”) is Fast Health­ care Interoperability Resources, a new and simplified health care data model that leverages existing web services for data sharing. FHIR addresses the challenges of interoperability among health information systems, allowing different systems to communicate with one another more easily. It is being used to create a “universal health app plat­ form” intended to stimulate innovation.

Georgia Tech researchers are working with a number of health care organiza­ tions to develop transformative applica­ tions that will integrate tightly with health information systems.

Juno

PAGE 46, JUNO: UNLOCKING THE MYSTERIES OF JUPITER — AND THE SOLAR SYSTEM

Juno is the Jupiter Near-polar Orbiter, a basketball court-sized spacecraft that is currently circling the planet Jupiter after finding its orbit on the evening of July 4.

The mission is designed to improve our understanding of the birth of the solar system and the mysteries of its largest planet. Georgia Tech researchers helped develop Juno’s microwave radiometer (MWR) instrument, which measures radio waves from Jupiter’s deep atmosphere.

R O B F E LT

CONNECT WITH GEORGIA TECH RESEARCH From discovery to development to deployment, Georgia Tech is leading the way and “creating the next” in scientific and technological progress.

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The people listed on this page are responsive, well-connected, and ready to help you tap into everything Georgia Tech has to offer. Find out what’s new, and what’s next. Contact us today.

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ENERGY AND SUSTAINABLE INFRASTRUCTURE

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MATERIALS

ROBOTICS

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