2016

Dreams for the Sky

Anonymous — Wed, 20 Apr 2016 18:08:33 +0000

Dreams for the Sky Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 04/20/2016 - 12:08

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ drones target severe storms to improve tornado forecasts.

Brian Argrow, professor in aerospace engineering sciences, approached Eric Frew, associate professor of aerospace engineering sciences, about his interest in using unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) to study severe storms.

“It was fascinating and I knew I was on board,” says Frew, who is also director of the Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles. “But, as we worked together, it became clear to me that communication was critical. In a lot of academic work with unmanned aircraft, communication is looked at as a barrier to be overcome. In contrast, here we said, ‘Let’s view communication as the application itself.’ There are many reasons to do this—think about a UAS being of help in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina.”

The researchers got further involved with weather and drones when they proposed a small project to the National Science Foundation as part of the project VORTEX2. “In spring 2010 we were able to spend six weeks in the field doing actual storm chasing with a team of over 100 scientists,” says Frew. “We would get up, check the weather reports, drive six hours, fly our aircraft, see if a storm evolved into a tornado or not and start the whole thing over the next day.”

Through that work, Frew says, the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ group was the first to sample the rear flank downdraft of a supercell thunderstorm, looking at the theory that atmospheric activity in the rear flank downdraft leads to the formation of tornadoes. “In June 2010, we flew in six of these storms, and one of these storms produced tornadoes before we were in it,” he says. “The main accomplishment was that we demonstrated that you can use drones to do this kind of investigation.”

Collaborating with other universities, they went on to exploit wind proactively and close decision-making loops around modeling and wind data in the environment. “VORTEX2 was only about flying the aircraft in the storm using GPS,” says Frew. “We did not deploy any intelligent decision-making technology. With our more recent efforts, we were able to measure the winds in the atmosphere using dual Doppler radar so that we could get a three-dimensional reconstruction of wind while in the air, use that to seed models of what’s happening, and from there plan the aircraft trajectory to take advantage of the wind energy—like birds or glider pilots will do. Compared to our UAS in VORTEX2, we’ve now added some autonomy and intelligence to this system.”

The researchers were awarded $2 million from the National Science Foundation National Robotics Initiative to apply this concept to do targeted observation. “Now we want to better understand and better predict tornado formation,” Frew says. “The question is, can we make the aircraft an autonomous scientist?” This work formally started Jan. 1, 2016, and the project should culminate in flight-testing in Tornado Alley in summer 2018.

An Eye Toward IRISS

Then there’s the Integrated Remote and In Situ Sensing (IRISS) Initiative, part of the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Grand Challenge, a gauntlet thrown down in 2015 to improve aerospace technology for societal good. Teaming Frew and Argrow as leaders, it has multiple benefits.

“The idea is to couple remote sensing with UAS and other ground sensors,” Frew says. “This will create new levels of targeted multiscale sensing.”

The commitment for IRISS is roughly $2 million in the first year to develop infrastructure in areas such as more sophisticated deployment capabilities, ground vehicle support, piloting and staff support.

Through IRISS, projects being focused on include raising awareness of UAS in the business and law schools, working with a miniature radar system that can detect soil moisture, teaming with the geography department to understand ecosystem health, helping the anthropology department utilize drones to visit archaeological sites without disturbing them, and launching a new weather project that will partly look at the forward flank of storms.

“Between building on our weather work and so much involved with IRISS, the school’s future with drones looks bright,” says Frew. “But there is still much more to prove.”

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Getting Personal

Anonymous — Mon, 18 Apr 2016 21:22:32 +0000

Getting Personal Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/18/2016 - 15:22

Everyone knows that no two humans are alike, but Kristi Anseth, the Tisone Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, is focusing her recent workon making sure biomaterials “know” it also. It’s this kind of thinking that has helped lead Anseth and her group on an odyssey to transform the medical landscape.

Getting Personal

“The notion of a personalized biomaterial means that the material itself is custom designed to the patient, and it can even respond to differences in individuals,” explains Anseth, who was recently inducted into the National Academy of Inventors. “We hear about personalized medicine, but biomaterials and medical devices also need to get more personalized.”

Her group specializes in light-sensitive chemistries, which can bring aspects such as 3-D printing into their work. “All of a sudden, we can make materials with custom-tailored sizes, shapes and even material properties for an individual,” she says. As one example, they can custom make biomaterials into a scaffold that is in the shape of a heart valve and then embed it with cells that allow it to grow into a “living” tissue over time. This technology is especially important for children, as the engineered valve has the potential to grow as the child grows.

But beyond just prototyping, Anseth envisions dynamic personalized materials, where the chemistry matters. “What if you could design a material to detect circulating tumor cells and then train your immune cells to fight your specific cancer?” she says. Or, “what if you could culture your own cells in the lab in personalized microenvironments that mimic your heart tissue and then test thousands of drugs to treat your cardiac disease before ever taking a single pill?”

She says her group has a clear interest in understanding how to regenerate tissues that are patient-specific. “If we want to help repair somebody’s heart muscle after a heart attack, then we’re interested in understanding how that person’s cells respond and use their cells to regrow or remodel tissue … bringing cells into the biomaterial itself. Or using your own cartilage cells to regenerate cartilage tissue that is yours.”

Supporting Others’ Visions

Beyond her own passions, Anseth is also supportive of student interests. For example, one of her former doctoral students, Balaji Sridhar, who is simultaneously completing medical school at the Anschutz Medical Campus, wanted to utilize the Anseth lab biomaterials to develop nanoshields for vaccines. The nanomaterials are engineered to keep medicines stable, even when that can’t be refrigerated.

Anseth explains that her role included guidance in such areas as vetting ideas, suggesting people for collaborations and encouraging him to apply for competitions to fund his ideas. Today, Sridhar is the CEO of Nanoly Bioscience, a Boulder-based startup company currently developing a polymer that will enable vaccines to survive without refrigeration so they can be delivered to hard-to-reach areas of the world.

“One of the best things about being a faculty member is that you have the opportunity to interact with exceptional students at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ and help them achieve their goals,” says Anseth.

Anseth is among a very select group of scientists and engineers who belong to all three branches of the National Academies: the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine. She is a Distinguished Professor, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, a Hazel Barnes Prize winner and a member of the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Women’s Hall of Fame.

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The Light Stuff

Anonymous — Mon, 18 Apr 2016 15:48:14 +0000

The Light Stuff Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/18/2016 - 09:48

Computing speed takes a giant leap forward thanks to a new photonics-based microchip

When it came to building a better microchip, Miloš Popovic and his fellow researchers turned to an unusual, but powerful, ally: light.

The groundbreaking result, which debuted in 2015 after nearly ten years of development, is the first microprocessor that uses light rather than electricity to communicate with the external world, all while transferring data at rapid speeds and consuming a minimal amount of energy.

The milestone could pave the way for faster, more powerful supercomputers, network infrastructure and consumer electronics within the next five years.

“Light-based integrated circuits could lead to radical changes in computing architecture in applications ranging from smartphones to supercomputers to large data centers, something computer architects have already begun work on in anticipation of the arrival of this technology,” says Popovic, an assistant professor of electrical, computer, and energy engineering.

Computers have gotten smaller, faster and more powerful over the past 70 years, but the basic underlying hardware has largely remained the same: electrical circuits communicating with each other to transfer information. Recently, however, the sheer amount of electricity needed to power the ever-increasing speed and volume of these data transfers has proven to be a limiting factor.

Popovic is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering and principal investigator of the Nanophotonic Systems Lab. He was previously a postdoctoral associate and independent investigator in the Optics and Quantum Electronics Group at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. There, he directed as principal investigator for projects in nano-optomechanics and in energy-efficient nanophotonic circuits, and pursued related interests in nanoscale device design and photonic circuit theory.

To overcome this, Popovic and his collaborators at MIT and the University of California, Berkeley turned to photonics, or light-based, technology. Sending information with light instead of electricity reduces a microchip’s energy burden because light can be sent across longer distances using the same amount of power.

“One advantage of light-based communication is that multiple parallel data streams encoded on different colors of light can be sent over the same medium,” says Popovic.

Translation: faster data transfers at no additional energy cost. The new chip has a bandwidth density about 10 to 50 times greater than the standard electrical-only microprocessors currently on the market.

The chip measures about half the size of a human fingernail and incorporates 850 optical input/output (I/O) components alongside traditional electronics in order to create the first integrated, single-chip design of its kind. Better yet, it’s largely compatible with the complex and expensive manufacturing processes currently used to produce microchips, which should allow for smooth scaling to commercial production levels.

“We figured out how to reuse the same materials and processing steps that comprise the electrical circuits to build high-performance optical devices in the same chip,” says Mark Wade, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering. “This allows us to design complex electronic-photonic systems that can solve the communication bottleneck in computing.”

“One unexpected and surprising result from this research is that the heavily constrained electronics manufacturing process is not an efficiency killer for the photonic devices,” adds Popovic. “Co-integration ended up being a win-win.”

The achievement could help to better facilitate the growing number of bandwidth-hungry applications. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, data centers consumed about 91 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2013, or about 2 percent of the total electricity consumed in the United States that year.

The research, which was supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has already spawned two startup companies with ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder connections, including Ayar Labs, which will use the technology to commercialize energy-efficient, high-volume data transfers.

So don’t look now, but faster computers may be just around the corner thanks to a year in which microchips finally saw the light.

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A Helping Hand

Anonymous — Mon, 18 Apr 2016 07:06:03 +0000

A Helping Hand Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/18/2016 - 01:06

Prosthetic limb designer helps clients get back to the business of life.

Jacob Segil meets some interesting people in his line of work.

Segil, an instructor in the Engineering Plus Program and the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been collaborating with research groups around the world in recent years to design prosthetic limbs to be as functional as possible, some including sensors that allow clients to experience a sense of feeling in their bionic fingers.

As part of the research, Segil and his colleagues recruit clients to come to the lab and test new designs of externally powered myoelectric hands controlled with electrical signals generated by the user’s residual limb muscles. One was Aron Ralston, an outdoorsman who became internationally famous after he was forced to cut off his right forearm during a canyoneering accident in Utah in 2003 in order to save his own life. Ralston, a ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ native, was the subject of the movie 127 Hours.

Another was Tom Southall from Steamboat Springs, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ, who was born without a right arm below the elbow but was named the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ High School Athlete of the Year in 1981 for his astonishing prowess in four sports. He now teaches and coaches at Cherokee Trail High School in Aurora, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ.

“All of the people we work with are remarkable, and many have stories about something that went terribly wrong, and how they recovered,” says Segil. “It is very meaningful work for me.”

Segil’s research—much of it in the BioMechatronics Development Laboratory at the University of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Denver, directed by Professor Richard Weir, his former doctoral advisor—involves all aspects of designing and building myoelectric limbs. That includes creating new prostheses or adapting existing commercial models, developing new sensor technology to better measure and understand signals between human muscles and prosthetics, and developing new software, including unique algorithms, to improve their function.

The myoelectric hands Segil and his colleagues build typically are attached to custom prosthetic sockets integrated with high-tech sensors that can be slipped onto residual forearms and can relay signals between muscles and tiny computers in the hand. The myoelectric hands also are implanted with mini-motors that allow for the rotation of individual fingers and thumbs, allowing users to grasp objects like pennies.

One promising new design is a bionic hand with sensors on the tips of the index and middle fingers. When one of the sensors on a fingertip, for example, comes in contact with an object, it instantly relays a “touch” signal to a particular stimulator on a residual limb muscle, vibrating atop it much like a tiny phone. “We have found that just a small bit of information can allow people to better integrate their prosthesis into their body image—something we call embodiment,” Segil explains.

Segil and his colleagues often work with prosthetics companies, adapting their products using novel electronics and software that allow users to communicate with their prosthetic hands in more intuitive ways. “What we are doing that a lot of groups aren’t is focusing on clinical needs,” he says. “We want our research findings to be deployable and ready to be used the day they are done.”

“I have always been impressed by Jacob’s proactive, go-getting approach to things,” says Weir, who has collaborated with Segil for more than seven years.

Segil, who teaches several undergraduates courses, says the people he and his colleagues work with show enduring will and the dogged determination to get back to their normal lives. “It is a powerful testament to the human spirit,” he says.

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Wearable Technology

Anonymous — Sun, 17 Apr 2016 18:19:39 +0000

Wearable Technology Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 04/17/2016 - 12:19

Halley Profita and Dana Hughes could have spent spring break playing outside. Both were drawn to ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ’s outdoor activities when choosing ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder for their doctoral studies. Hughes and his wife like mountain biking; Profita and her boyfriend enjoy hiking ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ’s lofty peaks. But these computer scientists spent their 2014 break in the lab and landed on the path to a patent.

Profita, a human-computer interaction researcher studying wearable computing, presented a problem to her labmate: a touch jogwheel interface she had integrated into fabric wasn’t waterproof. It’s a common problem that wearable interfaces aren’t designed to withstand the elements.

Similar issues have plagued the wearables industry for years. Heavy, clunky batteries need to be charged. Devices heat up and become uncomfortable.

Hughes, with his background in electrical engineering, suggested using radio frequencies for the needed communication.

In a cross-discipline environment like the Correll Lab, engineers are making devices and sensors sleeker, smarter and more automated as materials become smaller and lighter.

Professor Nikolaus Correll, their advisor, says Profita and Hughes represent the diversity he has tried to foster in his lab.

Their collaboration progressed quickly, and in two weeks the pair produced a paper and prototype interface that recognizes swipes and taps, can be sewn along a garment seam and can be weatherproof.

Among its many possible applications is intuitive, eyes-free wireless control of devices such as a phone or media player hidden away in a jacket during outdoor activities.

The university’s Technology Transfer Office helped them file a patent application and investigate commercial interest. Participating in the university’s annual New Venture Challenge, the pair connected with a backer who bought the rights to the design.

As of spring 2016, the provisional patent has been converted to a full-fledged, or Patent Cooperation Treaty, application, and gaugewear Inc. will market the technology as SwitchBack.

Profita found her niche in wearables while completing her master’s degree in industrial design and helping a team create the Mobile Music Touch glove. Initially designed to teach music, the glove vibrates on the appropriate finger as the wearer learns to play a part on the piano or other instrument. The Mobile Music Touch was then appropriated for rehabilitation purposes as an engaging way to help individuals with quadriplegia improve dexterity.

“That device solidified my desire to pursue wearables,” she says. She saw the power of merging textiles and technology.

“I was really hooked,” Profita adds. “It’s highly cross-disciplinary.”

Profila wants to eliminate the unwanted attention sometimes associated with devices designed to help those with disabilities. Hearing aids, for example, have a high abandonment rate.

To combat that, Profita and another labmate, Nicholas Farrow, created a smart garment called “Flutter.” A network of embedded microphones and small vibrating winglets line the periphery of this dress and tell the wearer the direction and intensity of incoming sounds. The design could help those with hearing disabilities sense and locate car horns or emergency sirens. Flutter won first prize in two categories at the 2012 International Symposium on Wearable Computers.

Wearables reflect personality, Profita says. “Can we make something beautiful leveraging these new materials? We can make them fashionable accessories rather than highlighting one’s disability.”

Hughes’ path to computer science took another route. After completing his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, he became interested in materials science and nondestructive testing in graduate school. He saw the value of computer science and machine learning to sift through test data.

His research now is focused on extending the capabilities of civil and aerospace structures using robotics and machine learning, such as an airfoil capable of self-repair and changing shape. In the aerospace industry, humans must look for hairline cracks on wings and fuselages every six months to avoid catastrophic failures, but Hughes wants to use embedded sensors and artificial intelligence to conduct these routine tests automatically and continually.

“What sort of cool physics tricks can we do to find these defects?” he asks.

Hughes says computer scientists also can be aerospace engineers, biologists and linguists. “It touches so many fields. It lets you be whoever you want to be and still make huge impacts.”

When he finishes his doctorate in 2017, Hughes hopes to continue working in academia.

Profita, who plans to finish her doctorate in 2016, is interested in the wearable research divisions of companies such as Microsoft, Samsung and Google.

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Waste Not, Want Not

Anonymous — Tue, 05 Apr 2016 22:01:19 +0000

Waste Not, Want Not Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 04/05/2016 - 16:01

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder engineers aim to turn America’s dirty water into cleaner air, energy for industry

Cleaning up municipal and industrial wastewater can be dirty business, but Zhiyong (Jason) Ren and his colleagues have developed the ultimate presto chango: an innovative treatment method that mitigates carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and creates renewable energy in the process.

The new method, known as Microbial Electrolytic Carbon Capture (MECC), purifies wastewater in an environmentally friendly fashion by creating an electrochemical reaction that absorbs more CO2 than it releases. The process also yields excess hydrogen gas, which can be stored and harnessed as energy in a fuel cell.

“This energy-positive, carbon-negative method could potentially contain huge benefits for a number of emission-heavy industries,” says Ren, an associate professor of civil, environmental and architectural engineering and the recipient of the 2015 ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder New Inventor of the Year Award.

Wastewater treatment typically produces CO2 emissions in two ways: the fossil fuels burned to power the machinery, and the decomposition of organic material within the wastewater itself. Plus, wastewater treatment technologies typically consume enormous amounts of energy.

Existing carbon-capture technologies are energy-intensive and often entail costly transportation and storage procedures. The MECC method, however, uses the natural conductivity of saline wastewater to facilitate an electrochemical reaction designed to absorb CO2 from both the water and the air.

The process then transforms that CO2 into stable mineral carbonates and bicarbonates that can be used as raw materials by the construction industry, used as a chemical buffer in the wastewater treatment cycle itself or used to counter acidity downstream from the process such as in the ocean.

“The results should be viewed as a proof-of-concept with promising implications for a wide range of industries,” says Ren.

It’s been a busy year for Ren and his colleagues. Earlier in 2015, they developed a microbe-powered battery that can remove both salts and organic contaminants from wastewater while producing and harnessing additional energy.

That technology, called microbial capacitive desalination, resembles a battery in its basic form, says Casey Forrestal, a postdoctoral researcher in Ren’s lab. “Instead of the traditional battery, which uses chemicals to generate the electrical current, we use microbes to generate an electrical current that can then be used for desalination.”

Not only does the system allow this salt to be removed from the wastewater, but it also creates additional energy that could be used on-site to run equipment, for example.

If scaled, this method could be a game changer for oil and gas operations, where the saltiness of the water and the organic contaminants it contains traditionally make treatment difficult and expensive. Ren’s findings offer the possibility that wastewater could be treated effectively on-site without the risks or costs typically associated with disposal.

“Right now, oil and gas companies have to spend energy to treat the wastewater,” Ren says. “We are able to treat it without energy consumption. Rather, we extract energy out of it.”

The next step? Taking this promising technology out of the lab and into the field. That work has already begun, thanks to grants from the National Science Foundation. Ren and Forrestal have also co-founded a startup called BioElectric Inc. to commercialize their treatment methods.

Once scaled up, this two-in-one wastewater solution could prove to be the ultimate win-win for the environment and industry in ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ and beyond.

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Tech for Trunks

Anonymous — Tue, 05 Apr 2016 17:55:16 +0000

Tech for Trunks Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 04/05/2016 - 11:55

Tourism brings in billions of American dollars for the East African country of Tanzania. It accounted for nearly 13 percent of the country’s economy, totaled nearly $2 billion in 2013, and continues to rise. But a sophisticated and well-funded enemy threatens Tanzania’s tourism: big game poachers. According to a report in The Guardian last year, Tanzania’s elephant population has shrunk from 109,051 to fewer than 43,000 between 2009 and 2014.

How can the Tanzanian tourism industry fight back against poaching? It turned to an unlikely ally: a team of ATLAS Institute graduate students. Joseph Lyon, Cassie Cladis and Jack Pierce were tapped to develop a digital method for soliciting and tracking materials such as night vision binoculars, ranger uniforms and communication devices to help safari rangers combat poachers in Tanzania—all for the cost of buying a laptop computer.

The students found the project as part of their graduate practicum at the ATLAS Institute through Boulder-based ECOS Communications. Chip Isenhart of ECOS has been working with Honeyguide, a Tanzanian nonprofit that conserves wildlife in Africa, to build an on-site museum and cultural heritage center in Tanzania. Visitors and tourists would be asked to make donations of the much-needed materials, which would then be managed by Honeyguide.

A Sophisticated and Well-Heeled Foe

“A poacher could kill an elephant or any other game animal and harvest it before Honeyguide even knew,” says Lyon, explaining the grim reality of combating poaching. Park rangers in Tanzania are not just outnumbered, but outgunned. Poachers are a sophisticated and well-heeled foe, possessing better equipment and greater access to resources and people to complete their illegal missions.

Through the course of the project, Lyon, Cladis and Pierce learned that the park rangers are in need of better technology, better equipment and more robust communications—especially in the remote wilderness of the parks. Given the rugged, hot and wet climate as well as the inherent danger of patrolling for poachers, the equipment deteriorates quickly.

Anti-Poaching Weapon of Choice

The students focused their efforts on developing a digital system that can log, track and communicate information about the donated goods—binoculars, walkie talkies, etc.—and share the data directly with the donors. The technology behind the system is as simple and basic as what has been in use for decades: bar codes.

That’s right. The same system that tracks the can of peas you buy and pay for at your local supermarket provides the underpinning for

a global effort to help curb poaching in Africa. And it’s pretty cheap, too, thanks to the team’s use of open source software through Google. The team spent about $50 to build the solution. Upgrades to make it operational on the scale required by Honeyguide would cost about $1,000, Lyon estimates.

“We got really lucky,” Lyon says. “Barcoding has been in use forever. But we couldn’t find any specific instances where something was barcoded for donor designation.”

How Does It Work?

In a sense, it works like a typical fitness tracking device you wear around your wrist. The team developed a system where anti-poaching rangers can enter pertinent information about what they’ve done with the donated equipment—and its condition—and upload it daily into a database.

Not only does the data allow Honeyguide to better track and defend against poachers, it allows donors to learn more about their impact.

“This system provides a chain of custody for donations,” Lyon says. “Honeyguide can also view an item’s deterioration and better determine not only what they need, but when they need it.”

Using Open-Source Solutions

“Honeyguide was already using the software for payment tracking and other stats,” says Lyon. “So we are incorporating an Open Data Kit code scanner as well as photos.”

“We built different forms to collect information throughout various stages of the [donation] process,” says Lyon. “From purchase to donor information to the ‘life’ of the donation, and so on.”

From Tracking Donations to Battling Poachers

“We talked about how, in certain areas of Africa, this is the only source of income,” Lyon says. “You can charge $70,000 to kill a lion, or you can bring in some wealthy people for a bucket list safari trip. If the lions and elephants stick around, you can generate a lot more income.”

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Researchers Tackle Cyberbullying

Anonymous — Tue, 05 Apr 2016 17:38:09 +0000

Researchers Tackle Cyberbullying Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 04/05/2016 - 11:38

For many teens, cruel digital messages are a disturbing part of their daily social experience. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 15 percent of high school students were cyberbullied in the past year, and more than 55 percent of LGBT students experienced cyberbullying. Unlike face-to-face bullying, which is often confined to school grounds, cyberbullying can affect students 24/7, leading to increased anxiety, lowered academic performance and increased risk of suicide.

A team of researchers at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder wants to help protect children from cyberbullying. But unlike others working on the issue, who mainly address it from a sociological angle, the team is tackling cyberbullying using computer science.

Shivakant Mishra, Richard Han and Qin (Christine) Lv from the Department of Computer Science founded the Cybersafety Research Center to explore this emerging research area, which crosses the boundaries of several traditional computing research areas, including security, privacy and reliability.

“Cybersafety addresses misuse of computing systems that falls into a gray legal area,” says Mishra. “When we look at the computing research being done, cybersafety doesn’t fit into any one of those areas.”

One of their first projects was to create a system that would detect misbehavior, like flashing, on video chat websites. When their SafeVchat system was implemented on Chatroulette, a site that matches up random strangers for video chats, it successfully reduced misbehaving users from 25 percent to less than 2 percent.

Now, the group is taking on cyberbullying and developing tools that would recognize it in real time and notify parents. That project brings a new set of challenges, Mishra says, from access to data to successfully identifying bad behavior.

The team started with social media sites Askfm, where anonymous users can post and answer text-based questions; the Instagram photo-sharing platform; and Vine, where users post short videos. Because posts on these sites are publically accessible, they were able to collect large amounts of data and begin manually marking instances of cyberbullying.

“A key problem is that bullying is so subtle and depends on the context of the language,” says Mishra. “The language is social and cultural, so even our team doing the marking may not be able to figure that out.”

The team developed an initial system of classifiers, or algorithms, that detect the frequency of negative words and then use semantic analysis to determine whether they’re being used in a negative context. They are now moving on to the second step, which is to improve the accuracy of their classifiers.

“Classification algorithms are usually used on data that is ambiguous in nature,” says Mishra. “You never have classifiers that are 100 percent accurate, but you try to get them as good as they can be.”

To improve their classifiers, the team has to go to the end users—students and parents. They have partnered with a local school district and are developing a website where parents could register their children’s social media accounts in order to receive notifications of potential abuse. The parents would then provide the team with feedback on whether those instances were, in fact, cyberbullying. The team would also like to involve students in helping them to analyze posts and identify abuse.

“One of the issues is that it’s typically very difficult to actually know the students being bullied because they don’t talk about it,” says Mishra. “Personally, we don’t know anyone.”

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Pay it Forward

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 18:45:19 +0000

Pay it Forward Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/04/2016 - 12:45

Alumnus funds up to 20 architectural engineering scholarships a year

Every year, David DeCook (ArchEngr ’71) hosts a dinner for new recipients of his architectural engineering scholarship. When he meets them, he likes to issue a challenge. “We want you to try to do the same we’re doing for you,” he tells them. “You’re going to make good bucks, and we want you to try to repay it down the line.”

He added that it’s fun to watch them work out the math when he asks them to consider what the reach will be if each of them funds 20 scholarships.

“We really ask them to look in their hearts and get back into the giving mode when they get to that point,” he says. “Most of the kids look at you like, ‘I can do that.’”

DeCook estimates he and his wife, Debbie, have helped more than 200 students since they began funding scholarships for architectural engineering students 12 years ago. When they began exploring scholarship-giving opportunities, they had to decide between funding one large scholarship or several smaller ones.

Their decision to fund smaller scholarships for up to 20 students each year—and personally meet all of them—came in part from DeCook’s own personality. He describes himself as a gregarious person, and says he was interested in touching the lives of as many students as he could.

Recipient Bethany Diamond noticed DeCook’s personality when she met him at the scholarship dinner this past fall.

“He took the time to get to know everyone at the party, which shouldn't have surprised me but did,” she says. “Not only is he very generous to offer a scholarship, but he genuinely cares about the students he gives them to.”

As for the decision to give back to ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder, that was an easy one for the DeCooks. The couple met in Boulder while Dave was working in Debbie’s parents’ lighting shop, and the two were married at a chapel just off campus, near Folsom and ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ.

DeCook also credits ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder with providing the education he needed to be successful in his 26-year career at UPS, where he worked his way up through the ranks of the project engineering management staff that coordinates construction of UPS facilities throughout the country.

“I’m an average guy who got with a great company and worked his ass off,” he says. DeCook moved several times with UPS, finally landing in Georgia, where he is now retired.

One of his favorite achievements was overseeing the design of the first UPS facility to use high-pressure sodium lights instead of mercury vapor. When the contractor suggested the switch, DeCook didn’t realize it was a controversial topic at UPS. But he was convinced it would save the company money, so he stuck to his guns. Soon, sodium was in use in facilities throughout the country.

That perseverance when it comes to new ideas is something he imparts to both his scholarship recipients and the many engineers he has managed over the years.

“We can’t be static. You have to take a chance and try something new,” DeCook says. “That’s why we’re engineers.”

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College News 2016

Anonymous — Mon, 04 Apr 2016 18:13:36 +0000

College News 2016 Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 04/04/2016 - 12:13

Chevron Corporation Labs Dedicated

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Engineering has strong associations with the business community, as demonstrated by two undergraduate labs that are made possible with generous support from Chevron Corporation.

The Chevron Chemical Engineering Teaching Lab is located in the Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotechnology Building on ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder’s East Campus, while the Chevron Mechanical Engineering Design Studio is in the Idea Forge on the main campus.

“These labs exemplify the highly successful collaboration between engineering and this corporate partner,” says Melinda Seevers, senior director of corporate and foundation relations. “Chevron is very supportive of student success and retention. They are interested in talented engineers and hire many of our students.”

The Chevron Mechanical Engineering Design Studio showcases the creativity, ingenuity and technical competence of mechanical engineering seniors, as well as the entrepreneurial, multidisciplinary teams who use the space during the summer. The lab promotes peer-to-peer collaboration among students from a wide range of industries.

The Chevron Chemical Engineering Teaching Laboratory facilitates chemical and biological engineering students’ lab course work, ongoing laboratory projects and general learning opportunities.

Both labs were dedicated in early 2015 with unique “ribbon cutting” ceremonies. The chemical engineering teaching lab was dedicated by shattering tubing frozen with liquid nitrogen, while the mechanical engineering design studio’s ceremony used a Sawzall to cut a piece of wood painted in Chevron colors of red, white and blue.

An event acknowledging Chevron’s partnership was held January 27 during the men’s basketball game with Stanford University.

Math Teams Shine in International Competition

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder once again came out on top, this time in the February 2015 International Mathematical Contest in Modeling. ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder won two top prizes, two meritorious designations and an honorable mention. Out of the 10 papers designated as “outstanding,” ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder students authored two of them, earning the meritorious designations.

Seven ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder teams participated in the four-day event, along with 456 other U.S. teams representing 239 institutions and 7,000 teams worldwide.

Mathematical modeling presents solutions to real-world problems such as finding a lost airplane, eradicating Ebola or creating the perfect brownie pan. The contest, which is administered by the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications, is essentially a mini-research project done in just 96 hours.

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder has a stellar track record in this event, with eight “outstanding” awards and seven named prizes from 2000 to 2015.

Students Matthew Hurst, Nathan J. Yeo and Jordan Deitsch received an outstanding designation and the top awards for the contest—the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics Award and a Two Sigma Scholarship.

Deitsch, a junior from Monument who is majoring in engineering physics, says the contest was unlike anything he had ever done. “The question itself was extremely open-ended; we were allowed to go almost anywhere in our solution, as long as we still focused on the primary question of designing a search effort for a lost aircraft.”

Marc William Thomson, Derek Gorthy and Christine Reilly received the second outstanding designation.

“It was an intense experience,” says Reilly, an aerospace engineering major from Sunnyvale, California. “I wouldn’t describe the MCM as a math contest. I would describe it as a problem-solving contest that requires the ability to understand the implications of a difficult question.”

Outreach

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder hosted a full-day professional learning event for Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) science teachers in fall 2015 at the Idea Forge. The focus was on how to teach engineering to middle and high school students. Presentations and breakout sessions were given by faculty and staff from BVSD and ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder, including representatives from ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ Science Discovery as well as the BOLD Center and the Integrated Teaching and Learning (ITL) Program, both from ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science.

Transformation Power Plant Cooling Technology

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) has awarded ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder a three-year, $3 million grant to develop cooling technology that will enable efficient, low-cost supplementary cooling for thermoelectric power generation.

ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder’s research team, led by Ronggui Yang, associate professor of mechanical engineering, will develop cold storage modules and a system called RadiCold, which cools by infrared thermal emission. If successful, the design could provide power plant operators a low-cost way to supplement cooling without using as much water as they do now.

“I am confident that we will be successful in developing this novel cooling technology that could be useful for both power plants and buildings,” says Yang.

In thermoelectric power generation, only 40 percent of the energy in the fuel is used for power generation. The remaining 60 percent becomes low-grade heat that needs to be carried away by cooling systems.

There are two types of cooling systems: Wet cooling systems use water resources such as a river, lake or ocean and pass it directly over tubes containing condenser water, and then return it, warmer, to the original source. Dry cooling systems use air to cool condenser water.

Most U.S. power plants use wet cooling technologies because water can cool better than air, which allows power plants to operate more efficiently. In fact, thermoelectric power plants are among the biggest consumers of fresh water in the world. ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ 139 billion gallons per day—or 41 percent of total fresh water withdrawal—is used to cool condenser water. Three percent of the cooling water is evaporated and lost. This has an enormous environmental impact, especially in areas already suffering from fresh water shortages. These systems also release heat waste into the environment, which adversely affects wildlife, says Marta Zgagacz of ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ’s Office of Technology Transfer. Zgagacz is on the team that will evaluate the commercialization potential of this innovative technology.

Researchers say dry cooling has the potential to significantly reduce water consumption, but the high cost and low efficiency of current technologies discourage their use.

Improved air-cooled heat exchangers can help overcome these challenges. Since air-cooled heat exchangers can only cool water temperatures as low as the surrounding temperature, supplemental cooling technologies—such as RadiCold—are needed to further decrease water temperatures in certain conditions.

Methods to cool a building roof by sending long-wavelength infrared light into the dark night sky have been known for a long time. However, cooling under direct sunshine and, more critically, manufacturing these cooling systems in a scalable and cost-effective way are areas ripe for research, says co-principal investigator Xiaobo Yin, an assistant professor in both mechanical engineering and in the materials science and engineering program.

A RadiCold surface reflects sunlight and allows cooling for both daytime and nighttime power plant operation.

“I am excited to work with my colleagues at ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder to transform innovative materials and component research into engineering systems,” says Gang Tan, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering at the University of Wyoming and a co-principal investigator. “I also foresee great potential in building energy savings by developing cooling roof and ceiling systems using RadiCold surfaces.”

In addition to these senior researchers, the team will include three postdoctoral research associates, three doctoral students and a few undergraduate students. Two MBA students from the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder Leeds School of Business will work closely with the team on technology to market analysis.

Tony Tong, associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the Leeds School, is also part of the team that will commercialization potential of this innovative technology.

$2.8 Million in Cybersecurity Research

As defensive technologies against cyberattacks mature, adversaries are forced to find new ways to attack computer systems. One of these methods is to create “inputs of coma,” which cause a system to exhaust its processing resources and leave it unavailable for legitimate users. The attackers also can observe network traffic and computational activities in order to deductively infer secret information without having direct access to it.

In order to protect and assure information flows over critical enterprise networks for military and industrial systems, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is making pivotal research investments in breakthrough technologies for national security. ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder recently received more than $2.8 million from the agency to develop new program analysis techniques and tools for identifying vulnerabilities that are inherent in software algorithms.

Pavol Cerny, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, leads the research team. Cerny is joined by four researchers from the Department of Computer Science: associate professor John Black, assistant professor Evan Chang, associate professor Sriram Sankaranarayanan and research scientist Ashutosh Trivedi.

The ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder team will be joined by colleagues from the University of Texas and Kestrel Technology to develop a breakthrough set of tools, called AUDITR, which statically analyzes Java bytecode and automatically uncovers security vulnerabilities in software algorithms that could be exploited. AUDITR will provide security analysts with quick and reliable capabilities to assess vulnerabilities and take the necessary actions to reduce the vulnerabilities prior to attack.

The research will take place over 48 months and in several phases. The project will include simulated attack demonstrations run by DARPA that will allow the team, including graduate students, to test its developments in a simulated cyberattack environment.

Interdisciplinary Telecom Program Develops Skilled Workforce

A recently renovated lab is giving graduates of the Interdisciplinary Telecom Program (ITP) a competitive edge.

The lab provides students access to state-of-the-art, enterprise-grade networking equipment, allowing them to combine theory with extensive hands-on experience. And the lab is paying dividends for the more than 3,000 students who have completed the program since 1971.

In 2015, with strong demand for well-rounded telecom employees, the employment rate of graduates was 100 percent with an average salary of $80,000. ITP has strengthened its engagement with industry partners to increase student internships and employment.

ITP offers master’s and doctoral degrees and has grown to include five-year BS/MS programs in partnership with the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering and the Department of Computer Science.

This year, the curriculum evolved to include four new focus areas: wireless, network security, network engineering, and telecom policy and strategy. Each specialty incorporates courses in law, policy and business combined with a technology focus to create an interdisciplinary engineering program that is cutting-edge.

The vision of ITP is to build a comprehensive research program, augment graduate level faculty and fund incoming doctoral candidates with teaching assistant fellowships. ITP students are industry’s future employees and they’re unstoppable in the marketplace.

Launching Ideas at AeroSpace Ventures Day

Over the past 25 years, innovations in aerospace science and technology have influenced the way we live our daily lives. These technologies have transformed how we sleep, eat, communicate, get our news, navigate our environment and engage in local, regional and global commerce.

AeroSpace Ventures facilitates collaboration among campus units, industry and government partners in order to transition academic innovation into industry products and services. AeroSpace Ventures focuses on developing instruments, vehicles, systems and methods that observe, measure and better understand Earth and space.

A highlight of this initiative is AeroSpace Ventures Day. “The AeroSpace Ventures program provides an opportunity to collaborate with ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ’s extensive resources and experience in research and development to advance our technologies and have access to the next generation of aerospace professionals,” says Frank Backes, CEO of Braxton Technologies.

This year, ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder welcomed more than 35 aerospace executives including attendees from Ball Aerospace, Braxton Technologies and Lockheed Martin. Gregg Burgess, the vice president of technology and engineering at Sierra Nevada Space Systems, was the industry keynote speaker. Attendees networked with some of the nation’s leading scientists and researchers and spent the day learning about using small satellites for advanced weather forecasting, remote sensing opportunities, climate variability, and their impact on air travel.

The day also included a technical career fair for students and recruiters. “Currently, our major source of talent is ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder,” says Steve Jolly, chief engineer for the GOES-R (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites) at Lockheed Martin. “This pipeline is dependent on the quality of education and its intersection with industry. Thus, it’s in our best interest to support the ŷ��ڱ��Ƶ-Boulder community.”

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