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IMPACT REPORT 2017
PHOTO: RICE UNIVERSITY
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Edward W. Knightly Research in our vast and varied field of electrical and computer engineering is constantly evolving and growing, and the changes in our own department show just how true that is. This year, after a tireless and successful search, we welcome new faculty members in the fields of Computer Engineering and Data Science. We are very impressed with their work, and cannot wait to see what they will accomplish at Rice. We are thrilled to welcome our new Dean in the George R. Brown School of Engineering, Dr. Reginald DesRoches, who comes to us from Georgia Tech and shares our strong belief in science for the betterment of humanity. Our interdisciplinary research continues to make waves. Solar desalination research from the Halas lab shows promise in bringing clean drinking water to remote communities around the world; a Rice ECE study on inhaler usage will help patients and doctors make positive
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changes to their practice; and a flat microscope that sits on the brain will help our researchers restore sight and sound to the disabled. All of this good work did not go unnoticed - Dr. Halas won the Weizmann Women and Science Award this year, which honors rolemodels in science to motivate and encourage the next generation of young women scientists. Recently promoted to Associate Professor, Ashok Veeraraghavan received an NSF CAREER Award. Victor E. Cameron Professor Richard Baraniuk made a triple play - he was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received a Vannevar Bush Fellowship. We were proud to hear that professor Behnaam Aazhang would receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Oulu, and loved seeing him receive his hat and sword in the prestigious ceremony. And, as always, our students impressed with their award-winning work. They are truly remarkable, inspiring, and 'unconventional'. This year did not come without losses and challenges. We were saddened by the passing of Professor John Clark, a true scholar with an astounding 49 years of dedicated service to Rice. A pioneer of the bioengineering field and a wonderful friend and colleague, he will be sorely missed.
Edward Knightly is department chair and Sheafor-Lindsay Professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University in Houston, Texas. His research group, the Rice Networks Group, manages the deployment and operation of a large-scale urban wireless network, called Technology for All (TFA), in a Houston under-resourced community. TFA currently serves over 4,000 users. Knightly is an IEEE Fellow, a Sloan Fellow, and a recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. He received best paper awards from ACM MobiCom and IEEE SECON and serves on the IMDEA Networks Scientific Council.
Chair
As Hurricane Harvey rolled through Houston, we were reminded of the devastating power of Mother Nature. While the campus fared well, many in our community are dealing with loss and uncertainty. In true Rice fashion, our students, faculty and staff are volunteering their time to help jump-start Houston's recovery, working with local shelters and organizations to support those affected. We're committed to continue this support as needs evolve in the coming weeks and months. As President Leebron said, "communities are tested and revealed by how they confront a crisis. The responses of the entire Rice community have revealed that we are true to our values." Thank you, as always, for your continued support. Sincerely,
Edward W. Knightly Chair and Lindsay-Sheafor Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor, Computer Science
IN THIS ISSUE New Faculty John Clark Halas Award Vannevar Bush Dean DesRoches Aazhang Honor NSF Center FlatScope Upconverted Light Inhaler Misuse Deep Learning Desalination NanoSPEARS Epilepsy Prevention Student News M.E.E. Program
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RICE ECE WELCOMES FOUR TO THE DEPARTMENT BY JENNIFER HUNTER
Heckel
Lin
Sano
Yang
PHOTOS: RICE UNIVERSITY
The Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering is pleased to welcome three new faculty members: Reinhard Heckel, Akane Sano, and Kaiyuan Yang. All have started their teaching and research this fall, with the exception of Dr. Sano, who will join us in 2018. Additionally, we were happy to have Yingyan Lin, Texas Instruments Visiting Research Assistant Professor, join us this fall. Dr. Heckel comes to us from the University of California, Berkeley, where he did his post-doctoral work. He received his Ph.D. from ETH Zürich in 2014. He is interested in developing algorithms with performance guarantees for machine learning, signal processing, statistics and data analysis. Dr. Sano is currently a research
scientist in the Affective Computing Group at MIT Media Lab, and a visiting scientist at People-Aware Computing Lab at Cornell University. She has been working on multimodal ambulatory human sensing, data analysis and modeling, and application development for affective computing, health and wellbeing. She received her Ph.D. from MIT in 2015. Dr. Yang received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor in 2017. His research focuses on designing low-power digital and mixed-signal circuits for future secure and low-power applications, especially the Internet of Things (IoT). He is also interested in hardware security and circuit and system design with emerging devices. Dr. Lin received her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois-Urbana
Champaign in 2017. She is most interested in energy-efficient machine learning systems for cloud and mobile computing. Read more: ece.rice.edu.
PROFESSOR JOHN CLARK DIES AT AGE 80 BY B.J. ALMOND
S e r v i c e Award “for outstanding service and contributions to the EMB Society and a meritorious career in biomedical engineering John Clark education.” Rob Butera '91 '94, a former student of Clark’s said Clark was “extremely dedicated” to growing biomedical engineering locally and nationally. “‘Many would argue he was the heart and soul of the creation of the Houston Society for Engineering in Medicine and Biology, which held one of the longest-running regional biomedical engineering conferences in the United States,” he said. A funeral Mass was held Aug. 10 on the University of St. Thomas campus. Read more: http://bit.ly/2wXJqtg
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John Clark Jr., professor of electrical and computer engineering and of bioengineering and a former master of Sid Richardson College, died Aug. 6. He was 80. A member of the Rice faculty since 1968 and a full professor since 1979, Clark would have completed 50 years of service next July. “John was a true scholar with an astounding 49 years of dedicated service to Rice,” said Edward Knightly, department chair and the SheaforLindsay Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “His teaching and research seamlessly bridged from electrical engineering to biological systems.” A Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his contributions to modeling in electrophysiology and cardiopulmonary systems, Clark specialized in research on neural and cardiac electrophysiology,
mathematical modeling of biological systems, nonlinear system dynamics and electromagnetic field theory. Behnaam Aazhang, J.S. Abercrombie Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and his colleague for 30 years, noted Clark’s interest in signal processing. “He was one of the first few people in the country that recognized how engineering tools and models could be used in medicine and in health care,” Aazhang said. “He was indeed a pioneer in engineering aspects of electrophysiology.” Clark served as president of the international IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) and was a founding fellow of the Biomedical Engineering Society. In 1993 he was inducted as a founding fellow in the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering in a ceremony held at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. In 2009 he received the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology
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HALAS WINS WEIZMANN WOMEN AND SCIENCE AWARD BY JADE BOYD
BARANIUK AWARDED VANNEVAR BUSH FELLOWSHIP BY JADE BOYD Rice University compressivesensing pioneer Richard Baraniuk has won one of the Defense Department’s most coveted basic research awards: a five-year fellowship worth up to $3 million for “blue sky” basic research that could produce revolutionary new technologies. Baraniuk is one of 13 Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellows announced March 29 by the department. The fellows program provides extensive, long-term financial support for basic research by distinguished U.S. university scientists and engineers. Baraniuk is one of the world’s leading experts on compressive sensing, a branch of signal processing based on mathematical techniques developed in 2004 that enables engineers to glean useful information from far fewer data samples than would typically be required. “There are nearly 1 trillion
Internet-connected sensors on Earth, and the resulting deluge of data from all those sensors stresses our capability to process, understand and make decisions in real time, all of which are important for national security,” Baraniuk said.
“Compressive sensing is one of most exciting new approaches for solving these problems, but there are still misunderstandings and misconceptions about it.” “Compressive sensing is one of most exciting new approaches for solving these problems, but there are still misunderstandings and misconceptions about it,” he said. “Compressive sensing is not a panacea, but it does afford opportunities to profoundly rethink signal models, dimensionality
reduction and recovery algorithms. Our Bush Fellow research program will explore, characterize, optimize and introduce new sensing trade-offs that aim to broaden the applicability of the concept, improve its performance in the wild and enable radically new sensing and processing capabilities.” In addition to his research, Baraniuk is a pioneer in open education. In 2012 he founded Ricebased open textbook publisher OpenStax, whose freely available textbooks have been used by more than 1.8 million college students. Baraniuk and the class of 2017 Bush Fellows join an elite group of 58 scientists and engineers previously recognized by the National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellows program. These include Rice nanophotonics pioneer and ECE faculty member Naomi Halas. More: http://bit.ly/2x1GHOB
PHOTO: JEFF FITLOW
Rice University plasmonics pioneer Naomi Halas has won a 2017 Weizmann Women and Science Award from the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot, Israel. The biennial award, established in 1994, honors internationally renowned women scientists who have made significant contributions, both in their respective fields and to the larger scientific community. The award is designed to promote women in science by providing strong role models to motivate and encourage the next generation of young women scientists. Halas, a pioneer in the study of the fundamental properties and potential applications of light-activated nanoparticles, was recognized by the institute “for pioneering and seminal contributions to the field of plasmonics, which have profoundly influenced modern optics — both in basic understanding and in applications.” Halas and fellow 2017 honoree Ursula Keller of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich accepted their honors and delivered a series of lectures at the Weizmann Institute this past June.
“Ursi Keller has been a friend of mine since our postdoctoral days at AT&T Bell Laboratories, and I am thrilled to win this award with her,” Halas said. Halas pursues research in light-nanoparticle interactions and their applications in biomedicine, optoelectronics, chemical sensing, photocatalysis and sustainability. Halas She has explored how light-activated nanomaterials can be used for applications ranging from the treatment of cancer and molecular sensing to biomimetic photodetection and off-grid solar-powered sterilization. Halas is the first person in the university’s history to be elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering for research done at Rice. She has authored more than 300 refereed publications, and her work has been cited more than 45,000 times. Read more: http://bit.ly/2x0wyju
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RICE ENGINEERING WELCOMES NEW DEAN BY BJ ALMOND
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Reginald DesRoches, chair of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, became dean of Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering on July 1. A fellow of the American Society of Civil Engineers, DesRoches specializes in research on the design of resilient infrastructure systems under extreme loads and the application of smart and adaptive materials. He served as the key technical leader in the United States’ response to the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. “In Dr. DesRoches, we found a world-class scholar, an award-winning educator, an innovative problem-solver, a collaborative and consultative leader, a creative and compelling communicator and a person of tremendous vision for engineering and higher education more widely," said Provost Marie Lynn Miranda. "I am delighted that Reggie has agreed to join us at Rice and very much look forward to working with him.” Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and raised in Queens, a borough of New York City, DesRoches said his love of science and math and his interest in “tinkering with things” led him to pursue a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at Berkeley. DesRoches said he’s “thrilled” about coming to Rice. “I’ve always known that the quality of the faculty at Rice is top-notch,” he said. “And Rice has some of the brightest
students in the world. Some of them ended up coming to graduate school at Georgia Tech, and they were certainly among the best students I’ve had.” He also likes Rice’s size and the university’s location in a major city that is one of the most diverse in the U.S. “It’s a really exciting opportunity for me and my family,” he said. “On meeting Reggie, I DesRoches immediately shared the enthusiasm of the search committee,” said President David Leebron. “I am excited to work with him to achieve our highest aspirations for the Brown School of Engineering and Rice University more broadly. He will be an invaluable member of our leadership team.” DesRoches serves on the National Academies Resilient America Roundtable, the Board on Army Science and Technology, the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Advisory Committee, the Global Earthquake Modeling Scientific Board and the advisory board for the Natural Disasters, Coastal Infrastructure and Emergency Management Research Center. Read more: http://bit.ly/2vUrKe5
AAZHANG RECEIVES HONORARY DOCTORATE In May 2017, Behnaam Aazhang, J.S. Abercrombie Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland. The title is the highest honor that the university, one of the largest in Finland, can bestow.
PHOTO COURTESY BEHNAAM AAZHANG
At the ceremony, Dr. Aazhang received the doctor's hat and sword, following medieval tradition. The doctor's hat symbolizes liberty, scholarship, and freedom of research. The sword, presented at the sword-whetting ceremony the evening before degree conferral, symbolizes the scholar's fight for what she/he has found to be good, right and true. Each honoree sharpened his/ her sword upon receipt using a grindstone dampened with champagne. Read more: http://bit.ly/2wqfC47
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RICE ENGINEERS JOIN GLOBAL NSF HEALTH INITIATIVE PATHS-UP center at Texas A&M will develop tools to diagnose and treat diabetes, heart disease. BY MIKE WILLIAMS Rice University will take part in a National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Center (ERC) focused on developing technologies to alleviate suffering from diabetes and heart disease in underserved communities in the United States and around the world. Ashutosh Sabharwal, a Rice professor of electrical and computer engineering, will lead the Rice team working with the consortium of industry, government partners and academia based at Texas A&M University. The center, to be called PATHSUP, was introduced as one of four announced by NSF. PATHS-UP, which stands for Precise Advanced Technologies and Health Systems for Underserved Populations, will receive $19.75 million in federal funding for five years with the opportunity to renew the mission, potentially for another five years and $15.56 million. The grant will be administered through the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station. “The PATHS-UP ERC comprises a team of extraordinarily dedicated researchers who aim to develop costeffective health care for underserved populations,” said NSF program director Deborah Jackson. “If PATHSUP’s chronic disease interventions are successful, they will have tackled a significant source of the skyrocketing national health care cost.” Partner institutions include Florida International University and the University of California at Los Angeles. “We all have different pieces of the puzzle,” Sabharwal said. “The center is a way to facilitate collaboration and integration across all these teams.” The center will focus on developing two transformative engineered systems, a lab-inyour-palm for inexpensive remote diagnostic capabilities and a lab-on-
a-wrist for continuous monitoring of health status. Sabharwal said Rice engineers will work with collaborators on fundamental core technologies for both engineered systems and provide leadership in biobehavioral sensing, a new area being pioneered by the Sabharwal-led Scalable Health Labs at Rice. “The grand challenge will be successful if we demonstrate wearables, like a watch that can perform continuous monitoring of glucose and other biomarkers that are important for keeping track of chronic conditions,” Sabharwal said.
“The grand challenge will be successful if we demonstrate wearables, like a watch that can perform continuous monitoring of glucose and other biomarkers that are important for keeping track of chronic conditions.” Sabharwal and Rice colleagues Ashok Veeraraghavan, Genevera Allen, Rebecca Richards-Kortum and Tomasz Tkaczyk and their labs will take part in the center. The team is uniquely qualified to design medical devices for underserved populations. Sabharwal and his lab have engineered a self-use retinal imaging system, a mobile spirometer, wearable technology for dietary monitoring and apps for evaluating depression and extracting accurate vital signs from videos. Sabharwal and Veeraraghavan are also part of the Scalable Health Lab, which is pioneering the new area of biobehavioral sensing to simultaneously measure biological and behavioral markers to understand the relationships between human behavior and human health. Sabharwal said the team will
attempt to push boundaries in mobile sensors and systems for health monitoring. “The PATHS-UP center is empowered to envision and develop bold new clean-slate designs,” he said. According to the Texas A&M team, PATHS-UP’s two overarching goals will be to engineer technologies to overcome the barriers usually faced by point-of-care devices and to recruit and educate the scientists and engineers who will develop them. The technologies need to be deployable, highly accurate, easy-touse and affordable. Sabharwal noted the center will work directly with under-resourced populations in Texas. “That’s very important: From day one we’re going to start working with all the stakeholders to bring them into the center’s research orbit,” he said. “For over 30 years, NSF Engineering Research Centers have promoted innovation, helped to maintain our competitive edge and added billions of dollars to the U.S. economy,” NSF Director France Córdova said. “They bring together talented innovators and entrepreneurs with resources from academia, industry and government to produce engineers and engineering systems that solve real-world problems. I am confident that these new ERCs will strengthen U.S. competitiveness for the next generation and continue our legacy of improving the quality of life for all Americans.” PATHS-UP will be the third active NSF Engineering Research Center in Texas. The Nanomanufacturing Systems for Mobile Computing and Mobile Energy Technologies, or NASCENT, ERC was established at the University of Texas in 2012, and the Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment, or NEWT, Systems ERC was established at Rice in 2015. Read more: http://bit.ly/2h4fJR2
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RICE ECE TEAM DEVELOPING FLAT MICROSCOPE FOR BRAIN DARPA project's aims include restoring sight and sound to disabled. BY MIKE WILLIAMS
PHOTO: JEFF FITLOW
Rice University electrical and computer engineers are building a flat microscope, called FlatScope TM, and developing software that can decode and trigger neurons on the surface of the brain. Their goal as part of a new government initiative is to provide an alternate path for sight and sound to be delivered directly to the brain. The project is part of a $65 million effort announced this week by the federal Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to develop a high-resolution neural interface. Among many long-term goals, the Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) program hopes to compensate for a person’s loss of vision or hearing by delivering digital information directly to parts of the brain that can process it. The Rice researchers will focus first on vision. They will receive $4 million over four years to develop an optical hardware and software interface. The optical interface will detect signals from modified neurons that generate light when they are active. The project is a collaboration with the Yale University-affiliated
John B. Pierce Laboratory led by neuroscientist Vincent Pieribone. Current probes that monitor and deliver signals to neurons — for instance, to treat Parkinson’s disease or epilepsy — are extremely limited, according to the Rice team. “Stateof-the-art systems have only 16 electrodes, and that creates a real practical limit on how well we can capture and represent information from the brain,” Rice faculty member Jacob Robinson said. Robinson and colleagues Richard Baraniuk, Ashok Veeraraghavan and Caleb Kemere, are charged with developing a thin interface that can monitor and stimulate hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions of neurons in the cortex, the outermost layer of the brain. “The inspiration comes from advances in semiconductor manufacturing,” Robinson said. “We’re able to create extremely dense processors with billions of elements on a chip for the phone in your pocket. So why not apply these advances to neural interfaces?” Kemere said some teams participating in the multi-institution project are investigating devices with thousands of electrodes to address
ECE researchers have built a lab prototype of a flat microscope they are developing as part of DARPA's Neural Engineering System Design Project.
individual neurons. “We’re taking an all-optical approach where the microscope might be able to visualize a million neurons,” he said. That requires neurons to be visible. Pieribone’s Pierce Lab is gathering expertise in bioluminescence — think fireflies and glowing jellyfish — with the goal of programming neurons with proteins that release a photon when triggered. “The idea of manipulating cells to create light when there’s an electrical impulse is not extremely far-fetched in the sense that we are already using fluorescence to measure electrical activity,” Robinson said. The scope under development is a cousin to Rice’s FlatCam, developed by Baraniuk and Veeraraghavan to eliminate the need for bulky lenses in cameras. The new project would make FlatCam even flatter, small enough to sit between the skull and cortex without putting additional pressure on the brain, and with enough capacity to sense and deliver signals from perhaps millions of neurons to a computer. Alongside the hardware, Rice is modifying FlatCam algorithms to handle data from the brain interface. “The microscope we’re building captures three-dimensional images, so we’ll be able to see not only the surface but also to a certain depth below,” Veeraraghavan said. “At the moment we don’t know the limit, but we hope we can see 500 microns deep in tissue.” “That should get us to the dense layers of cortex where we think most of the computations are actually happening, where the neurons connect to each other,” Kemere said. A team at Columbia University is tackling another major challenge: The ability to wirelessly power and gather data from the interface. “Part of the fundamental research challenge will be developing a deep understanding of how the brain
FLATSCOPE continued on page 14
PHOTO: TOMMY LAVERGNE
Gururaj Naik is developing technology to upconvert light by using lasers to power devices that combine plasmonic metals and semiconducting quantum wells.
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'UPCONVERTED' LIGHT HAS A BRIGHT FUTURE Guru Naik is developing plasmon-powered devices for medicine, security, and solar cells. BY JADE BOYD Rice University ECE faculty member Guru Naik has developed a method to “upconvert” light to try and make solar cells more efficient and disease-targeting nanoparticles more effective. His experiments combined plasmonic metals and semiconducting quantum wells to boost the frequency of light, changing its color. In a nanoscale prototype Naik developed as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University, custom-designed pylons that were struck by green light produced a higher-energy blue glow. “I’m taking low-energy photons and converting them to high-energy photons,” he said. Efficient upconversion of light
could let solar cells turn otherwisewasted infrared sunlight into electricity or help light-activated nanoparticles treat diseased cells, Naik said. The work appears in the American Chemical Society’s Nano Letters. The magic happens inside tiny pylons that measure about 100 nanometers across. When excited by a specific wavelength of light, specks of gold on the tips of the pylons convert the light energy into plasmons, waves of energy that slosh rhythmically across the gold surface like ripples on a pond. Plasmons are short-lived, and when they decay, they give up their energy in one of two ways; they either emit a photon of light or produce heat by transferring their energy to a single electron — a “hot” electron.
Naik’s work at Stanford was inspired by the groundbreaking work of professors Naomi Halas and Peter Nordlander at Rice’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics, who had shown that exciting plasmonic materials also excited “hot carriers” – electrons and holes – within. (Electron holes are the vacancies created when an electron is excited into a higher state, giving its atom a positive charge.) “Plasmonics is really great at squeezing light on the nanoscale,” said Naik, who joined Rice’s faculty a year ago. “But that always comes at the cost of something. Halas and Nordlander showed you can extract the optical losses in the form of electricity. My idea was to put them back to optical form.” Read more: http://bit.ly/2w9N2IO
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INHALER STUDY: INCORRECT USE WASTES MEDICATION Rice ECE researchers measure the impact of patients' common mistakes. BY JADE BOYD Tens of millions of Americans with lung disease use metered-dose inhalers each day, and new studies by Rice University electrical engineers and pulmonologists at Baylor College of Medicine have identified critical errors that are causing many inhaler users to get only about half as much medicine as they should from each puff. “Metered-dose inhalers are used every day by people with asthma, COPD and other chronic lung diseases, and the vast majority of the time — between 70 and 90 percent — patients make mistakes that keep some of the medicine from making it to their lungs,” said Ashutosh Sabharwal, professor of ECE at Rice. “While inhalers are the most efficient delivery mechanism for many patients, these devices require deft maneuvers on the part of patients. The common errors are well-known, but fixing them continues to be a challenge.” Sabharwal’s team at Rice’s Scalable Health Lab uses the latest electronic technology — smartphones, wearable devices and inexpensive sensors and components — to address this and similar health and wellness issues. The
PHOTO: RICE UNIVERSITY
Biswas in the Scalable Health lab.
lab’s creations to date include a selfuse retinal imaging system, a mobile spirometer, wearable technology for dietary monitoring and apps for evaluating depression and extracting accurate vitals signs from videos. In partnership with pulmonologist Nick Hanania, associate professor of medicine and director of the Airways Clinical Research Center at Baylor College of Medicine, Sabharwal and Rice graduate student Rajoshi Biswas co-authored two recent studies aimed at finding out which mistakes are most common and the impact of those mistakes.
“In the best case, a puff from an inhaler results in about 40 percent of the medicine reaching the lungs. In the worst case, if someone does everything wrong, that drops to 7 percent." “For years, we as clinicians have known that our patients do not use their inhalers as they should,” Hanania said. “In the best case, a puff from an inhaler results in about 40 percent of the medicine reaching the lungs. In the worst case, if someone does everything wrong, that drops to 7 percent. We know the two extremes, but the vast majority of everyday use falls somewhere in the middle. In this study, we have been able to objectively measure the errors, and, using new technology, learn about their impact on drug delivery to the lungs.” Biswas, a Ph.D. student in Rice’s Scalable Health Lab, spent six years gathering evidence
for the studies. She has measured how patients use inhalers, explored the mathematics of their inhalation patterns, examined how doctors and therapists evaluate inhaler use and created an experimental setup to mimic human inhaler use. The research was spurred by an observation she kept returning to just after she came to Rice in 2011. Virtually all the inhaler-dosing studies she found focused on bestcase scenarios, the rare cases where patients used the inhaler perfectly, even though the average case was far from perfect. “What’s been lacking is a rigorous quantitative examination of how much medicine is making it to the lungs for those everyday cases,” Biswas said. Biswas said errors are common because inhaler use requires precision, timing and coordination. Even the slightest deviation can significantly reduce the amount of medicine that reaches the lungs. For example, in a study in the journal CHEST involving 23 Houston patients who have asthma or COPD, each patient made at least one error. Sabharwal, Hanania and Biswas said they hope the medical community will examine their latest study in the Journal of Aerosol Medicine and Pulmonary Drug Delivery and consider further research to evaluate and update recommended guidelines for inhaler use and set up educational strategies for their patients. “Our results differ from the current Global Initiative for Asthma inhaler use guidelines,” Sabharwal said. “The propellant used in inhalers has changed in recent years, and the current guidelines were developed based on studies of the old inhalers. Our findings, coupled with the recent changes in inhaler propellants, suggest it is time to revisit these guidelines." Read more: http://bit.ly/2h3XnvO
PHOTO: RICE UNIVERSITY
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RICE, BAYLOR TEAM SETS NEW MARK FOR 'DEEP LEARNING' Image-processing system learns largely on its own, much like a human baby. BY JADE BOYD Neuroscience and artificial intelligence experts from Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine have taken inspiration from the human brain in creating a new “deep learning” method that enables computers to learn about the visual world largely on their own, much as human babies do. In tests, the group’s “deep rendering mixture model” largely taught itself how to distinguish handwritten digits using a standard dataset of 10,000 digits written by federal employees and high school students. In results presented this year at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference, the researchers described how they trained their algorithm by giving it just 10 correct examples of each handwritten digit between zero and nine and then presenting it with several thousand more examples that it used to further teach itself. In tests, the algorithm was more accurate at correctly distinguishing handwritten digits than almost all previous algorithms that were trained with thousands of correct examples of each digit.
“In deep-learning parlance, our system uses a method known as semisupervised learning,” said lead researcher Ankit Patel, an assistant professor with joint appointments in neuroscience at Baylor and ECE at Rice. “The most successful efforts in this area have used a different technique called supervised learning, where the machine is trained with thousands of examples: This is a one. This is a two. “Humans don’t learn that way,” Patel said. “When babies learn to see during their first year, they get very little input about what things are. Parents may label a few things: ‘Bottle. Chair. Momma.’ But the baby can’t even understand spoken words at that point. It’s learning mostly unsupervised via some interaction with the world.” Patel said he and graduate student Tan Nguyen, a co-author on the new study, set out to design a semisupervised learning system for visual data that didn’t require much “hand-holding” in the form of training examples. Their semisupervised algorithm is a “convolutional neural network,” a piece of software made up of layers
of artificial neurons whose design was inspired by biological neurons. “It’s essentially a very simple visual cortex,” Patel said of the convolutional neural net. “You give it an image, and each layer processes the image a little bit more and understands it in a deeper way, and by the last layer, you’ve got a really deep and abstract understanding of the image. Every self-driving car right now has convolutional neural nets in it because they are currently the best for vision.” Patel said the theory of artificial neural networks, which was refined in the NIPS paper, could ultimately help neuroscientists better understand the workings of the human brain. “What I and my neuroscientist colleagues are trying to figure out is, what is the semisupervised learning algorithm that’s being implemented by the neural circuits in the visual cortex, and how is that related to our theory of deep learning?” he said. “Can we use our theory to help elucidate what the brain is doing? Because the way the brain is doing it is far superior to any neural network that we’ve designed.” Read more: http://bit.ly/2wXD64R
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MOBILE, OFF-GRID SOLAR DESALINATION Rice ECE researchers create fresh water from salt water using only solar energy. BY JADE BOYD
“Direct solar desalination could be a game changer for some of the estimated 1 billion people who lack access to clean drinking water." NEWT’s new technology builds upon research in Halas’ lab to create engineered nanoparticles that harvest as much as 80 percent of sunlight to generate steam. By adding low-cost, commercially available nanoparticles to a porous membrane, NEWT has essentially turned the membrane itself into a one-sided heating element that alone heats the water to drive membrane distillation. “The integration of photothermal heating capabilities within a water purification membrane for direct, solar-driven desalination opens new opportunities in water purification,” said Yale University ‘s Menachem “Meny” Elimelech, a co-author of the new study and NEWT’s lead
PHOTO COURTESY HALAS LAB
A federally funded research effort to revolutionize water treatment has yielded an off-grid technology that uses energy from sunlight alone to turn salt water into fresh drinking water. The desalination system, which uses a combination of membrane distillation technology and light-harvesting nanophotonics, is the first major innovation from the Center for Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT), a multiinstitutional engineering research center based at Rice University. NEWT’s “nanophotonicsenabled solar membrane distillation” technology, or NESMD, combines tried-and-true water treatment methods with cutting-edge nanotechnology that converts sunlight to heat. More than 18,000 desalination plants operate in 150 countries, but NEWT’s desalination technology is unlike any other used today. “Direct solar desalination could be a game changer for some of the estimated 1 billion people who lack access to clean drinking water,” said Rice scientist and water treatment expert Qilin Li, a corresponding author on the study. “This off-grid technology is capable of providing sufficient clean water for family use in a compact footprint, and it can be scaled up to provide water for larger communities.” The oldest method for making freshwater from salt water is distillation. Distillation has been used for centuries, but it requires complex infrastructure and is energy inefficient due to the amount of heat required to boil water and produce steam. More than half the cost of operating a water distillation plant is for energy. An emerging technology for desalination is membrane distillation, where hot salt water is flowed across one side of a porous membrane and cold freshwater is flowed across the
other. Water vapor is naturally drawn through the membrane from the hot to the cold side, and because the seawater need not be boiled, the energy requirements are less than they would be for traditional distillation. However, the energy costs are still significant because heat is continuously lost from the hot side of the membrane to the cold. “Unlike traditional membrane distillation, NESMD benefits from increasing efficiency with scale,” said Rice’s Naomi Halas, a corresponding author on the paper and the leader of NEWT’s nanophotonics research efforts. “It requires minimal pumping energy for optimal distillate conversion, and there are a number of ways we can further optimize the technology to make it more productive and efficient.”
researcher for membrane processes. In the PNAS study, researchers offered proof-of-concept results based on tests with an NESMD chamber about the size of three postage stamps and just a few millimeters thick. The distillation membrane in the chamber contained a specially designed top layer of carbon black nanoparticles infused into a porous polymer. The lightcapturing nanoparticles heated the entire surface of the membrane when exposed to sunlight. A thin halfmillimeter-thick layer of salt water flowed atop the carbon-black layer, and a cool freshwater stream flowed below. Li, the leader of NEWT’s advanced treatment test beds at Rice, said the water production rate increased greatly by concentrating the sunlight. “The intensity got up 17.5 kilowatts per meter squared when a lens was used to concentrate sunlight by 25 times, and the water production increased to about 6 liters per meter squared per hour.” Li said NEWT hopes to produce a modular system where users could order as many panels as they needed based on their daily water demands. “You could assemble these together, just as you would the panels in a solar farm,” she said. “Depending on the water production rate you need, you could calculate how much membrane area you would need." Read more: http://bit.ly/2x1sVeQ
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'ASSEMBLY LINE' MEASURES WORM CELLS WITH A POKE The technique could revolutionize data-gathering for disease characterization, drug interactions. PHOTO COURTESY ROBINSON LAB
BY MIKE WILLIAMS Microscopic probes have simplified the process of measuring electrical activity in individual cells of small living animals. The technique allows a single animal like a worm to be tested again and again and could revolutionize data-gathering for disease characterization and drug interactions. ECE's Jacob Robinson has invented “nanoscale suspended electrode arrays”—aka nano-SPEARs—to give researchers access to electrophysiological signals from the cells of small animals without injuring them. Nano-SPEARs replace glass pipette electrodes that must be aligned by hand each time they are used. “One of the experimental bottlenecks in studying synaptic behavior and degenerative diseases that affect the synapse is performing electrical measurements at those synapses,” Robinson says. “We set out to study large groups of animals under lots of different conditions to screen drugs or test different genetic factors that relate to errors in signaling at those synapses.” Most of what is known about muscle activity and synaptic transmission in the worms comes from the few studies that successfully used manually aligned glass pipettes to measure electrical activity from individual cells, Robinson says. However, this patch clamp technique requires time-consuming and invasive surgery that could negatively affect the data that researchers gather from small research animals.
The platform works something like a toll booth for traveling worms. As each C. elegans nematode passes through a narrow channel, it is temporarily immobilized and pressed against one or several nanoSPEARS that penetrate its body-wall muscle and record electrical activity from nearby cells. That animal is then released, the next is captured and measured, and so on. The team constructed microfluidic arrays with multiple channels that allowed testing of many nematodes at once. In comparison with patchclamping techniques that limit labs to studying about one animal per hour, Robinson says his team measured as many as 16 per hour. The nematodes were practical for several reasons: First, Robinson says, they’re small enough to be compatible with microfluidic devices and nanowire electrodes. Second, there were a lot of them down the hall in the lab of Rice colleague Weiwei Zhong, who studies nematodes as transparent, easily manipulated models for signaling pathways that are common to all animals. “I used to shy away from measuring electrophysiology because the conventional method of patch clamping is so technically challenging,” says Zhong, an assistant professor of biochemistry and cell biology and co-author of the paper. “Only a few graduate students or postdocs can do it. With Jacob’s device, even an undergraduate student can measure electrophysiology.” “This meshes nicely with the high-throughput phenotyping she
does,” Robinson says. “She can now correlate locomotive phenotypes with activity at the muscle cells. We believe that will be useful to study degenerative diseases centered around neuromuscular junctions.” In fact, the labs have begun doing so. “We are now using this setup to profile worms with neurodegenerative disease models such as Parkinson’s and screen for drugs that reduce the symptoms,” Zhong says. “This would not be possible using the conventional method.” Initial tests on C. elegans models for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Parkinson’s disease revealed for the first time clear differences in electrophysiological responses between the two. Testing the efficacy of drugs will be helped by the new ability to study small animals for long periods. “What we can do, for the first time, is look at electrical activity over a long period of time and discover interesting patterns of behavior,” Robinson says. “It was in some ways easier than working with isolated cells because the worms are larger and fairly sturdy,” says lead author Daniel Gonzales, an ECE graduate student. “With cells, if there’s too much pressure, they die. If they hit a wall, they die. But worms are really sturdy, so it was just a matter of getting them up against the electrodes and keeping them there.” NIH, DARPA, the Hamill Foundation, NSF, the Keck Center, and the Gulf Coast Consortia supported the research. Read more: http://bit.ly/2f7mPDv
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Team "Ictal Inhibitors" won the top prize in the George R. Brown Engineering Design Showcase held April 13 at Rice University’s Tudor Fieldhouse. The Excellence in Engineering Award brought with it a prize of $5,000. PHOTO: RICE UNIVERSITY
The Ictal Inhibitors team, from left: Sarah Hooper, Erik Biegert, Justin Pensock, Marissa Levy, Xiaoran (Randy) Zhang and Luke Van der Spoel, all 2017 graduates in electrical and computer engineering.
A DIGITAL CURE FOR EPILEPSY Rice ECE undergraduates work to predict and prevent seizures. BY DAVID RUTH A team of Rice engineering students recently took top honors and a $5,000 prize for its development of a potential digital cure for epilepsy. When undergoing a seizure, the brain is considered to be in an “ictal” state. Team Ictal Inhibitors‘ goal was to develop a neurostimulator that stimulates the brain to prevent the onset of seizures. To create the system, the team first needed to develop a seizure-prediction algorithm. The students created a machine-learning algorithm that was “very good” at predicting seizures: It predicted all seizures in their data set at least two minutes before their onset with 3.9 false positives per hour. The team then transferred this prediction algorithm to custom hardware that runs on patient data to predict seizures in real time. “What our system is trying to do is predict and prevent seizures in real time,” said Sarah Hooper '17. “The first stage of our system is to record neural activity from the brain. That activity is then sent to our piece of hardware, which has the algorithm that produces a seizure prediction. Using the electrical signals that are produced in the brain,
we can predict if a seizure is going to occur in the next five minutes or so.” Hooper said that if a seizure were about to occur, the hardware would then communicate back to electrodes implanted in the brain to apply electrical neurostimulation, which can actually stop the seizure before it occurs. “About one-third of the 3 million epilepsy patients in the United States don’t respond to anti-seizure medications. The only option left for those patients is to undergo surgery to remove the part of the brain that is the issue; we hope to replace that option with something a lot less invasive," said Erik Biegert '17. The project is part of Rice’s Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program, which integrates undergraduate students in research projects. “This is a work in progress, and we’re just scratching the surface,” said the team's advisor, Professor Behnaam Aazhang. “This is at least three to five to seven years away from a product that could begin the clinical trials process, and then there is forming a business partnership, along with the whole FDA approvals process.” Read more: http://bit.ly/2wqekpN
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UNCONVENTIONAL STUDENTS AT RICE: SENTHIL NATARAJAN '17
PHOTO: YOUTUBE
BY BRANDON MARTIN Senthil Natarajan '17 used his four years at Rice to explore his passions for sports and technology. “I think the number one thing I describe about my time at Rice is the fact that it’s allowed me to not be restrictive by what my degree is.” Natarajan said. “I came into Rice as an engineering student but I’ve never been forced to follow the traditional path.” Natarajan has his own startup, Ziel Solutions, that is developing a sensory sleeve for baseball pitchers to help reduce their risk of injury. He also taught a class on basketball analytics. “It’s really cool every time you introduce a new concept; the students get wide eyed over the realization of just how many complexities there are of analyzing a concept— like rebounding,” he said. Natarajan has accepted an analyst position and plans
to continue working on Ziel Solutions. “I wanted to make these four years a time of growth and self-discovery and evolution as a person in my academic and personal interests,” he said. Watch: http://bit.ly/2w396Rp
UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH ACCEPTED TO SECON BY PATRICK KURP
PHOTOS: RICE UNIVERSITY
A paper co-authored by two undergraduates and a doctoral student in ECE was accepted for presentation at the IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication and Networking (SECON) 2017. “LiRa: a WLAN architecture for Visible Light Communication with a Wi-Fi Uplink” was written by Sharan Naribole, a fifth-year doctoral student, and Shuqing “Erica” Chen '17 and Yuqiang “Ethan” Heng '17. All belong to the Rice Networks Group of Edward W. Knightly, professor, chair of ECE and co-author of the paper, who refers to the project as “Edison meets Marconi.” “With our work, Visible Light Communication (VLC) can achieve its full potential through efficient error control feedback transmitted over Wi-Fi. Despite heavy internet traffic, our design enables smartphones to provide nearinstant short Wi-Fi responses to maintain connection. Hospitals have heavy internet traffic and equipment
Ethan Heng, Sharan Naribole, and Erica Chen.
that can prevent doctors from receiving real-time critical messages about patients’ conditions. Doctors can rely on this technology to save time and save lives,” Naribole said. Read more: http://bit.ly/2h37pNN
FLATSCOPE continued from page 7 processes hearing, speech and vision simultaneously with individual neuron-level precision and at a scale sufficient to represent detailed imagery and sound,” according to the agency's announcement. “The selected teams will apply insights into those biological processes
to the development of strategies for interpreting neuronal activity quickly and with minimal power and computational resources.” “It’s amazing,” Kemere said. Our team is working on three crazy challenges, and each one of them is pushing the boundaries. It’s really
exciting. This particular DARPA project is fun because they didn’t just pick one science-fiction challenge: They decided to let it be DARPAhard in multiple dimensions.” Read more: http://bit.ly/2x1eFRO
The Rice University M.E.E. Program
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Engineering Leaders. In 3-4 Semesters.
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The Professional Master's in Electrical Engineering from Rice University is designed to enhance and strengthen a career in industry. Expand your engineering knowledge while learning valuable leadership skills. No thesis is required. The M.E.E. can be completed in as little as three or four semesters.
ece.rice.edu "My experience at Rice would completely transform my view of how I approach technical learning and practice engineering, and it would open new electrical engineering avenues for me." -Saadiah '17, Schlumberger
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Students showcase their research during the poster session of ECE Corporate Affiliates Day. The annual event brings students, faculty, alumni and friends in industry together for a day of discussion and scholarship. Affiliates Day 2018 will be held March 23.
PHOTO: DONI SOWARD