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.

Chaouki Abdallah, Georgia Tech's executive vice president for Research (EVPR), has been named the new president of the Lebanese American University in Beirut.  

Abdallah, MSECE 1982, Ph.D. ECE 1988, has served as EVPR since 2018; in this role, he led extraordinary growth in Georgia Tech's research enterprise. Through the work of the Georgia Tech Research Institute, 10 interdisciplinary research institutes (IRIs), and a broad portfolio of faculty research, Georgia Tech now stands at No. 17 in the nation in research expenditures — and No. 1 among institutions without a medical school.  

Additionally, Abdallah has also overseen Tech's economic development activities through the Enterprise Innovation Institute and such groundbreaking entrepreneurship programs as CREATE-X, VentureLab, and the Advanced Technology Development Center. 

Under Abdallah's strategic, thoughtful leadership, Georgia Tech strengthened its research partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities, launched the New York Climate Exchange with a focus on accelerating climate change solutions, established an AI Hub to boost research and commercialization in artificial intelligence, advanced biomedical research (including three research awards from ARPA-H), and elevated the Institute's annual impact on Georgia's economy to a record $4.5 billion.  

Prior to Georgia Tech, Abdallah served as the 22nd president of the University of New Mexico (UNM), where he also had been provost, executive vice president of academic affairs, and chair of the electrical and computer engineering department. At UNM, he oversaw long-range academic planning, student success initiatives, and improvements in retention and graduation rates. 

A national search will be conducted for Abdallah's replacement. In the coming weeks, President Ángel Cabrera will name an interim EVPR. 

Researchers at Georgia Tech are creating accessible museum exhibits that explain artificial intelligence (AI) to middle school students, including the LuminAI interactive AI-based dance partner developed by Regents' Professor Brian Magerko.

Ph.D. students Yasmine Belghith and Atefeh Mahdavi co-led a study in a museum setting that observed how middle schoolers interact with the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT. 

“It’s important for museums, especially science museums, to start incorporating these kinds of exhibits about AI and about using AI so the general population can have that avenue to interact with it and transfer that knowledge to everyday tools,” Belghith said.

Belghith and Mahdavi conducted their study with nine focus groups of 24 students at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. The team used the findings to inform their design of AI exhibits that the museum could display as early as 2025. 

Belghith is a Ph.D. student in human-centered computing. Her advisor is Assistant Professor Jessica Roberts in the School of Interactive Computing. Magerko advises Mahdavi, a Ph.D. student in digital media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication.

Belghith and Mahdavi presented a paper about their study in May at the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) 2024 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Their work is part of a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant dedicated to fostering AI literacy among middle schoolers in informal environments.

Expanding Accessibility

While there are existing efforts to reach students in the classroom, the researchers believe AI education is most accessible in informal learning environments like museums.

“There’s a need today for everybody to have some sort of AI literacy,” Belghith said. “Many middle schoolers will not be taking computer science courses or pursuing computer science careers, so there needs to be interventions to teach them what they should know about AI.”

The researchers found that most of the middle schoolers interacted with ChatGPT to either test its knowledge by prompting it to answer questions or socialize with it by having human-like conversations. 

Others fit the mold of “content explorers.” They did not engage with the AI aspect of ChatGPT and focused more on the content it produced.

Mahdavi said regardless of their approach, students would get “tunnel vision” in their interactions instead of exploring more of the AI’s capabilities.

“If they go in a certain direction, they will continue to explore that,” Mahdavi said. “One thing we can learn from this is to nudge kids and show them there are other things you can do with AI tools or get them to think about it another way.”

The researchers also paid attention to what was missing in the students’ responses, which Mahdavi said was just as important as what they did talk about.

“None of them mentioned anything about ethics or what could be problematic about AI,” she said. “That told us there’s something they aren’t thinking about but should be. We take that into account as we think about future exhibits.”

Making an Impact

The researchers visited the Museum of Science and Industry June 1-2 to conduct the first trial run of three AI-based exhibits they’ve created. One of them is LuminAI, which was developed in Magerko’s Expressive Machinery Lab.

LuminAI is an interactive art installation that allows people to engage in collaborative movement with an AI dance partner. Georgia Tech and Kennesaw State recently held the first performance of AI avatars dancing with human partners in front of a live audience.

Duri Long, a former Georgia Tech Ph.D. student who is now an assistant professor at Northwestern University, designed the second exhibit. KnowledgeNet is an interactive tabletop exhibit in which visitors build semantic networks by adding different characteristics to characters that interact together.

The third exhibit, Data Bites, prompts users to build datasets of pizzas and sandwiches. Their selections train a machine-learning classifier in real time.

Belghith said the exhibits fostered conversations about AI between parents and children.

“The exhibit prototypes successfully engaged children in creative activities,” she said. “Many parents had to pull their kids away to continue their museum tour because the kids wanted more time to try different creations or dance moves.”

Heart attacks have been the leading cause of death in the U.S. for a century. While most treatments for cardiac events target breaking down blood clots, Georgia Tech researchers have found a way to prevent blood clots from even forming. Dramatically, their drug is shown to completely knock out the formation of blood clots without increasing the risks of bleeds in vivo.

This drug is both affordable and already widely available for other uses, meaning patients could experience these benefits sooner than waiting for a completely new drug to go through FDA approval. Eventually, the drug could be used to prevent second heart attacks for high-risk patients or even primary heart attacks, strokes, and other complications caused by blood clots.

The researchers presented their findings in the paper, “N-Acetyl Cysteine Prevents Arterial Thrombosis in a Dose-Dependent Manner In Vitro and in Mice,” in Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology in April.

How Blood Clots Form

Most existing preventive treatments for clots involve anti-platelet drugs that can cause bad side effects for the patient.

“Doctors are between a rock and a hard place — we can give you a drug that may help prevent a second cardiac event, but it might also cause a lot of bleeding,” said David Ku, Lawrence P. Huang Endowed Chair for Engineering Entrepreneurship and Regents' Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering (ME). “These blood clots are held together by a protein called von Willebrand factor (VWF), which is a different target for drugs.”

VWF is a long protein, occurring naturally in plasma, that allows blood clots to form quickly.  Under normal conditions, it functions like an inert ball of yarn, but when VWF unravels, it becomes sticky and catches platelets.

 “The VWF grabs platelets and the platelets activate, so they release more VWF, which grabs more platelets, creating a positive feedback loop that leads to really fast clot formation,” explained Christopher Bresette, an ME postdoctoral researcher.

Breaking Down Blood Clots

Bresette and Ku sought to break down VWF proteins using a drug already on the market, N-acetyl cysteine (NAC), typically used to treat acetaminophen overdose. Earlier researchers had tried using NAC to break down clots after formation, but Ku’s team wanted to stop clots before they even started. 

“We chose NAC because of its current clinical use and safety history,” Bresette said. “Using an existing drug for off-label use can speed up the time it takes to start helping patients.”

At the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience, the researchers ran blood through a small channel similar to a narrowing artery that could lead to a heart attack or stroke. NAC completely prevented a clot from forming under these conditions. Next, they tested NAC in a mouse model and found comparable results. Even better, NAC’s benefits lasted six hours after it left the bloodstream, keeping arteries clear for longer. 

The researchers envision the drug will be most useful if a patient has already had a heart attack but is at risk of having a second one soon after. An IV injection of NAC could lower immediate risk. Eventually, NAC derivatives could be administered orally as a daily pill to reduce heart attack risk.

Heart attacks and strokes are just the beginning. From stopping embolisms to other blockages, the future with NAC is only just beginning. The researchers are hoping to conduct a clinical trial and receive FDA approval so NAC can help patients as soon as possible.