The Institute for People and Technology at Georgia Tech (IPaT), the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), and Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems co-sponsored $54,000 in seed grant awards to four research projects. The goal of the grants for 2024-25 is to promote research activities involving faculty and students from the many disciplines represented in IPaT. Engagement grants are also designed to foster new collaborations internal or external to Georgia Tech.

“Congratulations to this year’s four winning research teams,” said Michael Best, executive director of IPaT. “These projects explore sustainability, AI, education, artistic learning, and critical computing. They all advance IPaT’s goal to develop technologies that empower people from all walks of life.”

Congratulations to these winning project teams:

Proposal Title: Making Sustainability Data Public on the Georgia Tech Library Media Bridge
Team Members: Yanni Loukissas, associate professor, School of Literature, Media and Communication; Emily Weigel, senior academic professional, School of Biological Sciences; Alison Valk, Jason Wright, and Charlie Bennett with the Georgia Tech Library; Steve Place, Jermaine Clonts, and Svetlana Sorok with the Georgia Tech Office of Sustainability.
Research Overview: Our research idea is to study the social effects of fostering creative, public experiences with real-time, sustainability-related data on campus with the long-term goal of learning what a resource-conscious campus community might look like. Our approach will be to develop an interactive data visualization prototype for the Georgia Tech Library Media Bridge that will visualize real-time water use data in 47 student housing buildings. This visualization will serve as an adaptable research instrument through which to explore the potential for public experiences with data. It will challenge student residents to reflect on and take practical steps to change the environmental footprint of the places where they live. This research project is co-funded with Georgia Tech's Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems.

Proposal title: Computational Design AI System to Empower Maker Educators
Team members: HyunJoo Oh, assistant professor, School of Industrial Design and School of Interactive Computing; Sehoon Ha, assistant professor, School of Interactive Computing; Sabrina Grossman, program director, Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing at Georgia Tech. 
Research overview: The rise of design and fabrication tools like 3D printers and microcontrollers has expanded maker education from K-12 to higher education. However, access remains a challenge, especially for underprivileged youth. Teachers often struggle to lead maker-centered activities due to a lack of design and engineering expertise, which particularly affects students in low-resource districts where school activities may be their only exposure to creative learning. To address this, we propose developing a web-based AI system that empowers teachers to lead kinetic design and engineering projects. Through participatory design with experienced teachers, the system will assist with project design and offer customized instructional guidance by identifying challenging steps and potential recovery solutions and adapting content to meet teachers’ needs.

Proposal title: Democratizing Creative Agency Through Interactive Technologies and Music Education
Team members: Moeiini Reilly, research technologist, GTRI, and human-centered computing Ph.D. student with the School of Interactive Computing; Paul Brancato, research engineer, GTRI; Nicole Brancato, composer and music educator.
Research overview: Artistic computing learning environments play a crucial role in promoting equity and inclusion in computing by offering diverse opportunities to learn computational thinking through culturally relevant programming. Despite advances in science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) education, there remains a significant gap in understanding how learners interact with and design creatively in these constructionist settings, as well as how the materiality of computational artifacts influences learning processes, meaning-making, and creative agency. This research seeks to build a framework for centering social and cultural dimensions of artistic learning within computational environments augmented by low-cost, technology-enhanced music education.

Proposal Title: Fostering the Landscape of “Critical Computing” at Georgia Tech
Team Members: Richmond Wong, assistant professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication; Heidi Biggs, assistant professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication; Carl DiSalvo, professor, School of Interactive Computing; Betsy DiSalvo, professor, School of Interactive Computing.
Research Overview: Critical computing interrogates the social values, normative orientations, and unintended consequences of computing applications, and it is quickly coming to occupy a central place in research and practice among Georgia Tech researchers and their larger research communities. We seek to build a transdisciplinary critical computing research community at Georgia Tech spanning computing, the social sciences, humanities, and related disciplines. Through a working group and symposium series, we will explore the methods, concepts, theories, history, funding, and evaluation of critical computing research. We will investigate approaches to critical computing research that foreground issues of social values and ethics, engage in just and equitable research approaches, explore new forms of communication and expression, and seek to pursue meaningful alternatives to the status quo.

Seven Georgia Tech students selected for the 2024 summer research internship program sponsored by the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT) presented their projects on August 2. The summer program is an opportunity for students looking to gain real-world experience related to research and community engagement. Summer interns received up to $7,000 for full-time research-related work.

The students’ 2024 summer research projects included:

• Grace Littler, a junior majoring in architecture, worked with Jennifer DuBose, executive director of the SimTigrate Design Lab. She helped gathered data for a NIH proposal from New Horizons, a group in Atlanta, studying sleep and environment issues. She also participated in research activities related to neurorehabilitation centers.
   
• Seongjin Kim, a sophomore majoring in electrical engineering, worked with Celeste Mason, research scientist at IPaT, and Thad Starner, professor in the School of Interactive Computing, on a passive haptic learning and rehabilitation project related to piano playing. 
  
  According to Kim, “playing musical instruments is beneficial for people's mental health and cognitive abilities, but it is also a time-consuming process. The Passive Haptic Learning (PHL) project aims to help people learn piano faster through wearable gloves that use actuator-caused haptic vibrations to stimulate the cutaneous sensory mechanoreceptors in the user's hands. This makes technical practice sessions more efficient as PHL gloves build up procedural memory, and it is a more efficient use of time as the learning process becomes passive, meaning that users may perform other tasks while wearing the gloves.”
  
  Over the summer, the PHL gloves transitioned from using wired connections to flexible PCBs to enhance the glove's electromechanical integrity, and the flexible PCB design and assembly procedure has been simplified. Moreover, an ergonomic form factor was developed to complement the new circuitry.
   
• Shreya Sasmal, a junior majoring in computational media, worked with Kala Jordan, research scientist in IPaT, and Maribeth Coleman, director of research for IPaT. Her project’s goal was to digitize instruction manuals focused on mechanical repair and maintenance to create a more efficient repair process and speed up knowledge transfer between workers.
   
• Nathan Lin, a senior majoring in computational media, worked with IPaT scientists Peter Presti, senior research scientist, and Brian Jones, senior research engineer, on the Aware Home smart bathroom project. Lin programmed and built a full-stack application that can report data of deployable smart toilet seats for occupational therapists to review data.
   
• Sameer Arora, a sophomore majoring in computer science, worked with Peter Presti, senior research scientist, and associate professor, Rosa Arriaga in the School of Interactive Computing, on a prolonged exposure therapy iOS mobile app. He programmed and built the Prolonged Exposure Collective Sensing System for PTSD on iOS which was already available on Android devices. This programming project was funded by the National Science Foundation.
   
• Siddharth Jain, a undergraduate student in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, who worked with Matt Sanders, director of research computing and data at Georgia Tech. Jain architected “Control Point,” a smart interface between legacy operating system built devices and smart environments. Control Point is a component for secure data transfer between legacy devices and modern systems, acting as a bridge that ensures efficient data flow and compliance with industry standards.
   

• Matthew Perry, a junior majoring in computer engineering, worked with Brian Jones, senior research engineer, at the Aware Home. Perry previously worked for the Aware Home for five semesters as a student assistant. His summer research internship accomplishments were numerous

  He developed the third hardware revision of the Gait Speed Clinic Device from TechSage D3.3. The overall goal of this new printed circuit board was to reduce production time, reduce required experience, and reduce the cost of the system to allow for more clinics to access the device. 

  He also revised and setup the Aware Home's network infrastructure to allow the two main floors of the home to be isolated yet managed as one. This was implemented by using new network hardware that allowed for VLANs and more detailed firewall rules. All devices on the old network, as well as new devices, were moved to this new network. Smart home devices on this network are controlled and collect data through “Home Assistant” granting future researchers in the home greater access to device history.

  Additionally, he developed the Smart Bathroom's (TechSage D1.1) grab bar system to allow automated and manual movement via actuators. He implemented a button box for physical therapists to move the grab bars to the desired position. In the future, these positions can be saved for a voice command system to utilize.

More than a decade after publication, the research impact of School of Interactive Computing faculty members Judy Hoffman and James Hays still resonates.

Hoffman, an assistant professor in computer vision and IPaT faculty member, received a test of time award Thursday at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) in Vienna, Austria, for a paper she co-authored in 2014.

Hays, an associate professor in computer vision and robotics and IPaT faculty member, will receive a test of time award next week at the 2024 SIGGRAPH conference in Denver for a paper he co-authored in 2012. SIGGRAPH is the official conference hosted by the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.

ICML, SIGGRAPH, and other computer science conferences recognize researchers whose work is at least 10 years old and has had a lasting impact since publication.

Read the full story from the College of Computing >>

The Craft Lab, a unique campus makerspace sponsored by the Institute for People and Technology (IPaT), recently added new equipment, including an Artec Leo 3D scanner. 

Artec Leo is a wireless, handheld professional 3D scanner designed to make scanning easy and effortless. It allows students, engineers, product designers, CAD technicians, VFX artists, archeologists, game designers, and virtual reality app developers to create precise and workable 3D models out of a diverse range of physical objects and surfaces. The Artec Leo scanner captures an object as the user simply moves around the object as if filming a video. A 3D replica is built in real time on a display as the capture is occurring. 

“The Artec Leo is a great addition to our capabilities. It is one of those tools that ups your game on what kind of work you can do,” said Noah Posner, a research scientist in IPaT and manager of the Interactive Product Design Lab in the College of Design. “It is just so easy compared to other 3D scanners I have used in the past. It is fast, portable, and does a great job at capturing geometry. It is also fast and versatile enough to capture a scan of a person in instances where we are designing wearable devices.”

Additional equipment and upgrades are also being installed in the Craft Lab and its companion space, the Prototyping Lab:

• Bambu Lab X1E printer – This 3D printer excels in handling high-temperature materials for versatile and precise 3D printing. Its AI algorithm enhances print quality by rectifying initial layer flaws, ensuring consistent results. This printer supports various high-performance materials, making it ideal for both intricate prototypes and everyday items.
• Epilog Fusion Galvo Laser – This laser machine combines fast engraving and produces a variety of marks on metal including deep engraving, polished white marks, and deep black annealed etching. It makes an excellent companion and expansion to the existing capabilities of the Prototyping Lab’s 48” x 36” CO2 laser cutter from Epilog while sharing the same software workflow.
• Kniterate – This compact digital knitting machine turns digital designs into knitted garments automatically. It is a first-of-its-kind, fully automated knitting machine meant for desktop/small-scale use and makes these operations more accessible than traditional industrial machines.

Equipment Upgrade:

• Added a digital motor and encoder to the industrial leather stitcher – While the industrial equipment normally comes with a clutched motor that is difficult for new users to control, the lab has replaced it with a digital servo motor that can be run much slower without compromising the power benefits of industrial equipment. They also added a digital encoder, which ensures the needle always ends down in the material being stitched, allowing for precise control, and can be raised with the foot pedal instead of manually moving the handwheel. Those upgrades make the machine more user-friendly and easier to use.

“We are committed to the continuous improvement of IPaT’s Craft and Prototyping Labs, as spaces leveraged by the entirety of campus,” said Tim Trent, director of these spaces and IPaT faculty member. “From the Prototyping Lab’s inception in 2006 through the Craft Lab’s opening in 2022 and on to today, we are always looking to find ways to collaborate with and meet the needs of our users, whether they are individual researchers, student groups, or whole departments at Tech.”

The IPaT Craft Lab is located in the Technology Square Research Building, Room 225B. The IPaT Prototyping Lab is located on the basement level in Room S21. Equipment in the lab may be used for academic and research purposes across the entire Georgia Tech community. Contact the Craft Lab staff at craftlab@cc.gatech.edu or the Prototyping Lab staff at protolab@cc.gatech.edu.