Russell Clark (right), senior research scientist in the Institute for People and Technology, was honored with a CESIMC Impact Award during the Celebrating Three Decades of CEISMC event in Atlanta last month. 

Georgia Tech’s Center for Education Integrating Mathematics and Computing (CEISMC), has served as the primary connection point between Georgia Tech faculty, students and the K-12 STEM education community. The recipients of the Impact Award are recognized for significant contributions to CEISMC over the years. Clark began working with CEISMC early in his career and has continued to partner and collaborate with CEISMC for many years. Tim Cone, senior program director of Georgia Tech Savannah CEISMC, presented the award to Clark and thanked him for his contributions to the Savannah and Atlanta programs.

Clark is the lead principal investigator for the the Coastal Equity and Resilience (CEAR) Hub. This is a project that joins community organizations, local governments, and educational institutions together to develop the knowledge, tools, and strategies that make our communities more resilient. CEAR Hub partners work alongside members of vulnerable communities to create fair and just solutions to climate challenges through community-led research, training, and outreach.

The Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) at Georgia Tech has named Rudy Gleason, Danielle Willkens, Allen Hyde, and Lisa Marks to lead four new research concentrations within IPaT starting July 1, 2024.

These Georgia Tech faculty members will lead one of the following research areas for IPaT: global health equity and wellbeing; just, resilient, and informed communities; responsible and ethical technologies; and arts, expression, and creative technologies. They hold positions in colleges and centers across campus, and will be instrumental in promoting transdisciplinary collaborative research and engagements.

BACKGROUND: In the fall of 2023, the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) went through a strategic planning exercise and redefined its research concentrations to better align with its values. These new concentrations are also aspirational, encouraging IPaT researchers and academics to engage in new research domains that IPaT is uniquely equipped for generating new innovation. IPaT is one of Georgia Tech’s ten interdisciplinary research institutes (IRIs) that bring together researchers from different disciplines to address topics of strategic importance to Georgia Tech. 
 
IPaT RESEARCH INITIATIVE LEAD DETAILS:
 
1. “Global Health Equity and Wellbeing” research will be led by Rudy Gleason.
Research concentration: From pediatrics to aging, we are protecting health both locally and worldwide. IPaT's continuum of healthcare research is working to promote and enable vibrant and lifelong physical and mental health. Accomplished scholars and clinicians work together to transform healthcare delivery systems by creating novel and easily accessible health and wellness technologies. IPaT has led breakthroughs in health information technology, approaches for increasing patient engagement and treatment adherence, clinical process improvements, and new healthcare delivery knowledge.
Bio: Rudolph (Rudy) L. Gleason is a professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Biomedical Engineering in the College of Engineering. Gleason’s research program has two key and distinct research aims. The first research aim is to quantify the link between biomechanics, mechanobiology, and tissue growth and remodeling in diseases of the vasculature and other soft tissues. The second research aim is to translate engineering innovation to combat global health disparities and foster sustainable development in low-resource settings around the world.

2. “Just, Resilient, and Informed Communities” research will be led by Danielle Willkens.
Research concentration: Discovering strategies that benefit and inform communities from all walks of life. IPaT’s work in this area focuses on the daily lives of communities – how they live, work, and play. We are finding innovative approaches to shaping sustainable cities with research that thinks globally while acting locally. We're examining the transformative role of technology in transportation, civic engagement, and disaster recovery focusing on novel communication and information technologies to aid communities.
Bio: Danielle Willkens is an associate professor in the School of Architecture in the College of Design. Willkens, Assoc. AIA, FRSA, LEED AP BD+C, is a practicing designer, researcher, and FAA Certified Remote Pilot who is particularly interested in bringing architectural engagement to diverse audiences through interactive projects. Her experiences in practice and research include design/build projects, public installations, and on-site investigations as well as extensive archival work in several countries. She was an inaugural Mellon History Teaching Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, exploring the project “From Plantation to Protest: Visualizing Cultural Landscapes of Conflict in the American South.” She currently has several research, documentation, and visualization projects in Selma, AL and Atlanta, GA supported by National Park Service’s African American Civil Rights Grants. She is also leading efforts on heritage documentation and sustainable tourism, alongside a number of collaborators, at the Penn Center, SC, Valencia, Spain, and Petra, Jordan.

3. “Responsible and Ethical Technologies” research will be led by Allen Hyde.
Research concentration: Evaluating potential consequences to mitigate negative effects. IPaT is shaping the human-technology frontier by growing human capabilities at every level. We're exploring new ideas in user experiences that foster creativity, stimulate learning and enable productive collaboration. Through this initiative, we're researching a variety of wearable computing, assistive, augmented reality, and gaming technologies. In addition, to insuring the alignment of these and other future technologies with responsible and ethical practices.
Bio: Allen T. Hyde is an associate professor in the School of History and Sociology in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. Hyde is a quantitative scholar whose main research areas are stratification and inequality, urban sociology, work and occupations, climate and disaster resilience, and immigration. He is currently conducting research on the effects of race/ethnicity and immigration status on homeownership, social and demographic change in Clarkston, GA (known as the most diverse square mile in America), and Principal Investigator for the Youth Advocacy for Resilience to Disasters Program research project funded by the National Science Foundation's Civic Innovation Challenge. He has also been Principal Investigator for a National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps) grant. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at the University of Connecticut and has published research articles in journals like Social Science Research, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Social Currents, Environmental Sociology, Social Indicators Research, City & Community, and Sociological Perspectives.

4. “Arts, Expression, and Creative Technologies” research will be led by Lisa Marks.
Research concentration: Using advanced technology to enhance creative processes, artistic expression, and innovation. Through our research, IPaT is merging physical and digital worlds with innovative creative ideas. The creative uses of technology are endless. We seek to identify, nurture, and grow creative and artistic ideas which may unlock new processes, inspire practical solutions with outside the box thinking, or simply lead to new forms of art expression.
Bio: Lisa Marks is an assistant professor in the School of Industrial Design in the College of Design. Marks is a designer and educator teaching studio courses in the undergraduate and graduate programs at Georgia Tech. Her current research focuses on methods of combining endangered and traditional handcraft with algorithmic modeling in order to produce new modes of production. She has a Master of Industrial Design from Parsons School of Design and worked in New York for clients including Google, Nike, and Swarovski.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques are infused across the College of Engineering’s education and research.

From safer roads to new fuel cell technology, semiconductor designs to restoring bodily functions, Georgia Tech engineers are capitalizing on the power of AI to quickly make predictions or see danger ahead.

Explore some of the ways we are using AI to create a better future on the College's website.

This story was featured in the spring 2024 issue of Helluva Engineer magazine, produced biannually by the College of Engineering.

It’s tempting to think that the artificial intelligence revolution is coming — for good or ill — and that AI will soon be baked into every facet of our lives. With generative AI tools suddenly available to anyone and seemingly every company scrambling to leverage AI for their business, it can feel like the AI-dominated future is just over the horizon.

The truth is, that future is already here. Most of us just didn’t notice.

Every time you unlock your smartphone or computer with a face scan or fingerprint. Every time your car alerts you that you’re straying from your lane or automatically adjusts your cruise control speed. Every time you ask Siri for directions or Alexa to turn on some music. Every time you start typing in the Google search box and suggestions or the outright answer to your question appear. Every time Netflix recommends what you should watch next.

All driven by AI. And all a regular part of most people’s days.

But what is “artificial intelligence”? What about “machine learning” and “algorithms”? How are they different and how do they work?

We asked two of the many Georgia Tech engineers working in these areas to help us understand the basic concepts so we’re all better prepared for the AI future — er, present.

Read the full crash course on the College of Engineering website.

This story was featured in the spring 2024 issue of Helluva Engineer magazine, produced biannually by the College of Engineering.

A team’s success in any competitive environment often hinges on how well each member can anticipate the actions of their teammates.

Assistant Professor Christopher MacLellan thinks teachable artificial intelligence (AI) agents are uniquely suited for this role and make ideal teammates for video gamers.

With the help of funding from the U.S. Department of Defense, MacLellan hopes to prove his theory with a conversational, task-performing agent he co-engineered called the Verbal Apprentice Learner (VAL).

“You need the ability to adapt to what your teammates are doing to be an effective teammate,” MacLellan said. “We’re exploring this capability for AI agents in the context of video games.” 

Unlike generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT, VAL uses an interactive task-learning approach. 

“VAL learns how you do things in the way you want them done,” MacLellan said. “When you tell it to do something, it will do it the way you taught it instead of some generic random way from the internet.”

A key difference between VAL and a chatbot is that VAL can perceive and act within the gaming world. A chatbot, like ChatGPT, only perceives and acts within the chat dialog.

MacLellan immersed VAL into an open-sourced, simplified version of the popular Nintendo cooperative video game Overcooked to discover how well the agent can function as a teammate. In Overcooked, up to four players work together to prepare dishes in a kitchen while earning points for every completed order.

How Fast Can Val Learn?

In a study with 12 participants, MacLellan found that users could often correctly teach VAL new tasks with only a few examples.

First, the user must teach VAL how to play the game. Knowing that a single human error could compromise results, MacLellan designed three precautionary features:

• When VAL receives a command such as "cook an onion," it asks clarifying questions to understand and confirm its task. As VAL continues to learn, clarification prompts decrease.
• An “undo” button to ensure users can reverse an errant command.
• VAL contains GPT subcomponents to interpret user input, allowing it to adapt to ambiguous commands and typos. The GPT subcomponents drive changes in VAL’s task knowledge, which it uses to perform tasks without additional guidance.

The participants in MacLellan’s study used these features to ensure VAL learned the tasks correctly. 

The high volume of prompts creates a more tedious experience. Still, MacLellan said it provides detailed data on system performance and user experience. That insight should make designing a more seamless experience in future versions of VAL possible.

The prompts also require the AI to be explainable.

“When VAL learns something, it uses the language model to label each node in the task knowledge graph that the system constructs,” MacLellan said. “You can see what it learned and how it breaks tasks down into actions.”

Beyond Gaming

MacLellan’s Teachable AI Lab is devoted to developing AI that inexperienced users can train.

“We are trying to come up with a more usable system where anyone, including people with limited expertise, could come in and interact with the agent and be able to teach it within just five minutes of interacting with it for the first time,” he said.

His work caught the attention of the Department of Defense, which awarded MacLellan multiple grants to fund several of his projects, including VAL. The possibilities of how the DoD could use VAL, on and off the battlefield, are innumerable.

“(The DoD) envisions a future in which people and AI agents jointly work together to solve problems,” MacLellan said. “You need the ability to adapt to what your teammates are doing to be an effective teammate.

“We look at the dynamics of different teaming circumstances and consider what are the right ways to team AI agents with people. The key hypothesis for our project is agents that can learn on the fly and adapt to their users will make better teammates than those that are pre-trained like GPT.”

Design Your Own Agent

MacLellan is co-organizing a gaming agent design competition sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 2024 Conference on Games in Milan, Italy.

The Dice Adventure Competition invites participants to design their own AI agent to play a multi-player, turn-based dungeon crawling game or to play the game as a human teammate. The competition this month and in July offers $1,000 in prizes for players and agent developers in the top three teams.

A College of Computing alumna has earned the highest honor given to doctoral candidates.

Nivedita Arora received the 2024 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Doctoral Dissertation Award during an awards ceremony on Saturday in San Francisco. Arora, an assistant professor at Northwestern University, is the first Georgia Tech alumna to win the award, which includes a prize of $20,000.

Arora was a postdoctoral researcher at Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing during the 2022-2023 academic year. She also earned her Ph.D. in computer science and her master’s in human-computer interaction from Georgia Tech.

At Northwestern, she directs the VAK Sustainable Computing Lab, which re-envisions computing from a sustainability-first approach.

“The ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award is the most prestigious recognition for doctoral research in our field,” said Josiah Hester, an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing who mentored Arora during her postdoc. “The award is a testament to the recipient's exceptional contributions to the field of computing, marking them as a world-class leader and innovator.”

Arora creates sustainable computational materials that harvest energy from their surrounding environments and can be responsibly disposed of at the end of their life cycles. Under the advisement of Professor Thad Starner and former Georgia Tech Professor Gregory Abowd, she won the dissertation award for her work involving interactive sticky notes.

The interactive sticky notes perform computing tasks and allow wireless communication without battery dependency. 

Through her dissertation, Sustainable Interactive Wireless Stickers: From Materials to Devices on Applications, Arora demonstrated that interactive sticky notes can capture audio, store it as memory, and relay it to another location. For example, an Amazon Alexa user can communicate commands to Alexa without being nearby.

“With rising climate change and e-waste, it is imperative to build computing technologies with a sustainability-first approach,” Arora said. “My dissertation represents this core thinking. I am honored that ACM has recognized my research on sustainable computational materials. I am extremely grateful to my advisers, collaborators, friends, and family for their support.”

Her dissertation also earned Outstanding Dissertation recognition from Georgia Tech’s College of Computing in 2023. She also won the college’s 2022 Outstanding Graduate Research Assistant Award.

Arora was a finalist in the 2022 Fast Company Design Innovation Competition. In 2021, She won the ACM Gaetano Borriello Outstanding Ubiquitous Computing Student Award and was named an EECS Rising Star and a Foley Scholar.

David Peeler, a research scientist with the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) at Georgia Tech, dedicates his time to supporting high teachers and students across the state of Georgia by teaching computer programming-related topics.

Peeler is a key team member supporting Georgia Tech’s Rural Computer Science Initiative launched in 2022. This initiative offers co-teaching lessons prepared by Georgia Tech faculty and offers virtual classes in computer science to expose Georgia high school students to a variety of technical topics and career pathways.

The program was conceived by Georgia Tech’s Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing (CEISMC)) and the Georgia Tech Research Institute, specifically STEM@GTRI, to create and launch a pilot program for rural Georgia school districts with support from Georgia’s legislators to bring technical knowledge directly into high school classrooms.

“I’ve created and taught Java professional development courses for high school teachers to learn and use in their classes,” said Peeler. “Part of my job is to be on call for instructors who need me to troubleshoot problems. In addition, we typically have a week of in-class instruction where I virtually beam into the class to teach directly, then we introduce a project for them to try and tackle on their own based from the in-class material that we taught. I really like what I’m doing for Georgia high schools.”

Peeler has also created an instructional module introducing students to robotic programming. Students develop and deploy code using the MakeCode environment which is an online platform and toolset developed by Microsoft that enables users, especially beginners and students, to learn programming and computer science concepts through blocked-based coding.

Through this initiative and with the help of Peeler, Georgia Tech is empowering the next generation of tech-savvy leaders fostering interest in STEM fields and opening doors to exciting career opportunities.

“I'm extremely proud to be a part of this initiative and kickstarting the next generation of high school students in the computer science realm,” said Peeler.