CP8873 C/ AE8803-SCW Fall 2020
Smart City Workshop - Digital twin systems design for Aerotropolis
Friday 8:00-10:45 am; Hybrid Hands-on

Instructors:

Perry Yang, Associate Professor, School of City and Regional Planning and School of Architecture

Dimitri Mavris, Regents Boeing Professor, School of Aerospace Engineering

Michael Balchanos, Research Engineer II of Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory, School of Aerospace Engineering

Airports and airlines are now in bad shape due to Covid-19. How will the airport city system be redesigned to become safer, cleaner, nimbler and more resilient to mitigate the impact, and adapt to future shocks? The Smart City Workshop in Fall 2020 aims to develop a smart city digital twin concept model of airport city around Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and surroundings. It envisions the post Covid-19 airport city to be a healthy, safe, green, accessible, connected, resilient and socially inclusive urban environment. The workshop applies a method of smart city digital twin including four enablers: 1) urban sensing system, 2) urban data analytics, 3) mobility modeling and 4) digital twin. It is an approach to designing a smart urban system from its sensing, data capturing, analytics and modeling to systems design. The core area of Aerotropolis Atlanta is seen as a living laboratory for research. The project will develop commons goals of performance criteria, including but not limited to the follows:

1. Post Covid-19 airport city environment to be safer, resilient and socially inclusive.
2. Fixing spatial mismatch between jobs and housing affordability of the ATL airport surrounding communities
3. Smart mobility
4. Near-zero energy and emission urban systems

Georgia Tech’s Smart City Workshop in 2020 will collaborate with Aerotropolis Atlanta CIDs (AACIDs), Hartsfield Jackson International Airport of Atlanta, MARTA and city authorities connecting to AACIDs. For more information: perry.yang@design.gatech.edu; michael.balchanos@asdl.gatech.edu

On the Instructional Center lawn, sidled up against the building, sits Georgia Tech’s Community Garden. Maintained by the group Students Organizing for Sustainability (SOS), the garden has been a fixture on Tech’s campus for years. This summer, SOS is still cultivating it, even with summer classes being conducted online and most employees working remotely. What’s more, the garden, along with the one on the roof of The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design, donates some of its bounty to Georgia Tech’s Klemis Kitchen, a food pantry for students with limited access to proper nourishment.

“The community garden has supplied produce to the kitchen in the past on a case-by-case basis, but this summer we are establishing a new and more solidified partnership,” said Camille Butkus, a rising third-year environmental engineering major and garden director of SOS. “Since early June we have begun twice-weekly donations in tandem with the Kendeda rooftop garden and plan to continue this as classes resume.”

The Community Garden donates anything from tomatoes and swiss chard to cilantro and basil to Klemis Kitchen. The Kendeda Building, meanwhile, has made several deliveries of blueberries.

“At Kendeda, we are looking to build partnerships with groups that advance ecological understanding. SOS is awesome, and my hope is that we can consolidate the work we started before the Covid-19 crisis,” Steve Place, horticulturist for The Kendeda Building, said.

During a typical fall or spring semester, SOS holds garden workdays every other weekend. Currently, volunteers are welcome to tend the garden on their own time. They will be asked to sanitize their hands before entering, wear a face covering, and stay at least 6 feet apart from anyone else who might be there. Typical gardeners include SOS members, graduate students, faculty, and even members of the local community not affiliated with Tech.

“I think the garden has been more important this summer than ever before,” said Miriam Campbell, a rising third-year environmental engineering major and vice president of projects within SOS. Campbell is also in charge of maintaining the garden for the summer. “It gives people a safe place to get fresh air, stay active, and stay connected.”

The Goldia Mae Burchfield Memorial Scholarship was established to support students in pursuit of their undergraduate degree. Ms. Burchfield, mother to Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems Financial Manager, Gay Burchfield, died on June 8^th, 2020, at the age of 80, in Starkville, Mississippi of COVID-19.

Ms. Burchfield, lived a life of service to those in her community, with a particular emphasis on education. During the segregation era, her family moved from rural Mississippi to a larger town where she could pursue her high school education, which she completed in 1958. She worked as a part-time custodian in a local bank for 35 years, as well as numerous odd jobs to care for her family and her community. Ms. Burchfield would put together care packages with stipends for the young people of her community who were college bound. She also self-funded an after-school meal and care program to help support families so that kids could stay in school, and parents could remain employed. If asked what her greatest achievements were, she would say that she was a great mom, provided free meals to many, greeted everyone with a heartfelt smile, and genuinely cared for everyone she encountered.

Donations by check should be made payable to the Georgia Tech Foundation, Inc., with "Goldia Mae Burchfield Memorial Scholarship" noted on the check or in a separate note, and should be mailed to: Georgia Tech Foundation, Inc., 760 Spring Street, NW, Suite 400, Atlanta, GA 30308. 

On-line gifts can be made at https://development.gatech.edu, using the ‘GIVE NOW’ button and following directions provided. In the ‘Other Designation’ box, enter “Goldia Mae Burchfield Memorial Scholarship.” Each donor will be acknowledged by the Georgia Tech Foundation, and a list of all donors will be shared with the Burchfield family.

Application and award selection criteria have not yet been decided upon for this scholarship, since it was so recently established. However, the Burchfield family, in conjunction with the Georgia Tech Foundation, will arrange these details soon.

BBISS director John Crittenden recently published a cover story with co-author David Kujawski in the professional journal, Water Technology. The article appears in the May/June 2020 edition, and is entitled “Oil Refining and Petrochemical Wastewater Treatment: Creating a Better Mousetrap.” The piece describes the current practice for treatment of industrial wastewaters using a biological treatment method that is typically known as activated sludge. This method has been in use for about the past century and its effectiveness at treating the most difficult waste streams, such as those found in Oil Refining and Petrochemical industry, is somewhat limited. Electrochemical Advanced Oxidation Processes (eAOPs) offer notable advantages over activated sludge, especially with waste streams that contain high levels of complex hydrocarbons and exhibit highly variable levels of contaminant concentration.

Pilot studies with eAOPs have been performed in commercial production facilities with favorable results. The major benefits of the latest generation of eAOPs over biological methods include major reduction in treatment time, complete elimination of the treatment and disposal of biological sludge, reduced energy usage and cost, reduced monitoring and management costs, reduced maintenance cost and complexity, and greater overall reductions in contaminant levels. Based on the data gained from pilot studies in certain wastewater treatment contexts, eAOP systems could offer benefits significant enough to warrant complete conversion to the new technology.

Researching technologies and techniques that can provide cleaner water for everyone is a primary research area for the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems. Clean water is also goal number 6 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals established by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015. It states: "Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all." As fresh water supplies become contaminated with a larger variety of novel substances, like agricultural chemicals, petrochemical wastewaters, and pharmaceuticals, new water treatment technologies will be an important area of research to help our society meet our sustainability goals.

BBISS Director John Crittenden, and esteemed co-authors, have been awarded the Top Feature Article of 2019 by the Environmental Science & Technology Editorial Advisory Board.  The article is entitled “The Technology Horizon for Photocatalytic Water Treatment: Sunrise or Sunset?”  It appeared in the March 19, 2019 issue of the journal.  As of the writing of this piece, it has 10,909 views, and has been cited by 56 publications.

Researching technologies and techniques that can provide cleaner water for everyone is a primary research area for the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems.  Clean water is also goal number 6 of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals established by the United Nations General Assembly in 2015. It states: "Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all."  As fresh water supplies become contaminated with a larger variety of novel substances, like agricultural chemicals and pharmaceuticals, new water treatment technologies will be an important area of research to help our society meet our sustainability goals.

For the next several months, visitors to the Atlanta Botanical Garden will be able to observe the testing of a new high-tech tool in the battle to save some of the world’s most endangered species. SlothBot, a slow-moving and energy-efficient robot that can linger in the trees to monitor animals, plants, and the environment below, will be tested near the Garden’s popular Canopy Walk.

Built by robotics engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology to take advantage of the low-energy lifestyle of real sloths, SlothBot demonstrates how being slow can be ideal for certain applications. Powered by solar panels and using innovative power management technology, SlothBot moves along a cable strung between two large trees as it monitors temperature, weather, carbon dioxide levels, and other information in the Garden’s 30-acre midtown Atlanta forest.

“SlothBot embraces slowness as a design principle,” said Magnus Egerstedt, professor and Steve W. Chaddick School Chair in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “That’s not how robots are typically designed today, but being slow and hyper-energy efficient will allow SlothBot to linger in the environment to observe things we can only see by being present continuously for months, or even years.”

About three feet long, SlothBot’s whimsical 3D-printed shell helps protect its motors, gearing, batteries, and sensing equipment from the weather. The robot is programmed to move only when necessary, and will locate sunlight when its batteries need recharging. At the Atlanta Botanical Garden, SlothBot will operate on a single 100-foot cable, but in larger environmental applications, it will be able to switch from cable to cable to cover more territory.

“The most exciting goal we’ll demonstrate with SlothBot is the union of robotics and technology with conservation,” said Emily Coffey, vice president for conservation and research at the Garden. “We do conservation research on imperiled plants and ecosystems around the world, and SlothBot will help us find new and exciting ways to advance our research and conservation goals.”

Supported by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research, SlothBot could help scientists better understand the abiotic factors affecting critical ecosystems, providing a new tool for developing information needed to protect rare species and endangered ecosystems.

“SlothBot could do some of our research remotely and help us understand what’s happening with pollinators, interactions between plants and animals, and other phenomena that are difficult to observe otherwise,” Coffey added. “With the rapid loss of biodiversity and with more than a quarter of the world’s plants potentially heading toward extinction, SlothBot offers us another way to work toward conserving those species.”

Inspiration for the robot came from a visit Egerstedt made to a vineyard in Costa Rica where he saw two-toed sloths creeping along overhead wires in their search for food in the tree canopy. “It turns out that they were strategically slow, which is what we need if we want to deploy robots for long periods of time,” he said.

A few other robotic systems have already demonstrated the value of slowness. Among the best known are the Mars Exploration Rovers that gathered information on the red planet for more than a dozen years. “Speed wasn’t really all that important to the Mars Rovers,” Egerstedt noted. “But they learned a lot during their leisurely exploration of the planet.”

Beyond conservation, SlothBot could have applications for precision agriculture, where the robot’s camera and other sensors traveling in overhead wires could provide early detection of crop diseases, measure humidity, and watch for insect infestation. After testing in the Atlanta Botanical Garden, the researchers hope to move SlothBot to South America to observe orchid pollination or the lives of endangered frogs.

The research team, which includes Ph.D students Gennaro Notomista and Yousef Emam, undergraduate student Amy Yao, and postdoctoral researcher Sean Wilson, considered multiple locomotion techniques for the SlothBot. Wheeled robots are common, but in the natural world they can easily be defeated by obstacles like rocks or mud. Flying robots require too much energy to linger for long. That’s why Egerstedt’s observation of the wire-crawling sloths was so important.

“It’s really fascinating to think about robots becoming part of the environment, a member of an ecosystem,” he said. “While we’re not building an anatomical replica of the living sloth, we believe our robot can be integrated to be part of the ecosystem it’s observing like a real sloth.”

The SlothBot launched in the Atlanta Botanical Garden is the second version of a system originally reported in May 2019 at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation. That robot was a much smaller laboratory prototype.

Beyond their conservation goals, the researchers hope SlothBot will provide a new way to stimulate interest in conservation from the Garden’s visitors. “This will help us tell the story of the merger between technology and conservation,” Coffey said. “It’s a unique way to engage the public and bring forward a new way to tell our story.”

And that should be especially interesting to children visiting the Garden.

“This new way of thinking about robots should trigger curiosity among the kids who will walk by it,” said Egerstedt. “Thanks to SlothBot, I’m hoping we will get an entirely new generation interested in what robotics can do to make the world better.”

This research was sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research through Grant N00014-15-2115 and by the National Science Foundation through Grant 1531195. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the sponsoring agencies.

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0181  USA

Media Relations Contacts: John Toon, Georgia Tech (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu); Danny Flanders, Atlanta Botanical Garden (404-591-1550) (dflanders@atlantabg.org).

Writer: John Toon

With electric vehicles making their way into the mainstream, building out the nationwide network of charging stations to keep them going will be increasingly important.

A new study from the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy harnesses machine learning techniques to provide the best insight yet into the attitudes of electric vehicle (EV) drivers about the existing charger network. The findings could help policymakers focus their efforts.

In the paper, published in the June 2020 issue the journal Nature Sustainability, a team led by Assistant Professor Omar Isaac Asensio describes training a machine learning algorithm to analyze unstructured consumer data from 12,270 electric vehicle charging stations across the U.S.

The study demonstrates how machine learning tools can be used to quickly analyze streaming data for policy evaluation in near-real time. Streaming data refers to data that comes in a continuous feed, such as user reviews from an app. The study also revealed surprising findings about how EV drivers feel about charging stations. 

For instance, the conventional wisdom that drivers prefer private stations to public ones appears to be wrong. The study also finds potential problems with charging stations in larger cities, presaging challenges yet to come in creating a robust charging system that meets all drivers' needs.

“Based on evidence from consumer data, we argue that it is not enough to just invest money into increasing the quantity of stations, it is also important to invest in the quality of the charging experience,” Asensio wrote.

Perceived Lack of Charging Stations a Barrier to Adoption

Electric vehicles are considered a crucial part of the solution to climate change: transportation is now the leading contributor of climate-warming emissions. But one major barrier to broader adoption of electric vehicles is the perception of a lack of charging stations, and the attending “range anxiety” that makes many drivers nervous about buying an EV.

While that infrastructure has grown considerably in recent years, the work hasn’t taken into account what consumers actually want, Asensio said.

“In the early years of EV infrastructure development, most policies were geared to using incentives to increase the quantity of charging stations,” Asensio said. “We haven’t had enough focus on building out reliable infrastructure that can give confidence to users.”

This study helps rectify that shortcoming by offering evidence-based, national analysis of actual consumer sentiment, as opposed to indirect travel surveys or simulated data used in many analyses.

Asensio directed the study with a team of five students in public policy, engineering, and computing. Two were from Georgia Tech: Catharina Hollauer, a recent graduate of the H. Milton School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Sooji Ha, a dual Ph.D. student in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the School of Computational Science and Engineering.

The other three were participants in the 2018 Georgia Tech Civic Data Science Fellows program, which draws talented students from around the country to the Georgia Tech campus for a summer of research and learning. They are Kevin Alvarez of North Carolina State University, Arielle Dror of Smith College, and Emerson Wenzel of Tufts University.

EV Charging Sore Spots Revealed

Asensio’s team used deep learning text classification algorithms to analyze data from a popular EV users smartphone app. It would have taken most of a year using conventional methods. But the team’s approach cut the task down to minutes while classifying sentiment with accuracy similar to that of human experts.

The study found that workplace and mixed-use residential stations get low ratings, with frequent complaints about lack of accessibility and signage. Fee-based charging stations tend to get more poor reviews than free charging stations. But it is stations in dense urban centers that really draw complaints, according to the study.

When researchers controlled for location and other characteristics, stations in dense urban areas showed a 12 – 15% increase in negative sentiment compared to nonurban locations.

This could indicate a broad range of service quality issues in the largest EV markets, including things like malfunctioning equipment and an insufficient number of chargers, Asensio said.

The highest rated stations are often located at hotels, restaurants, and convenience stores, a finding that may support incentive-based management practices in which chargers are installed to draw customers. Stations at public parks and recreation facilities, RV parks, and visitor centers also do well, according to the study.

But, contrary to theories predicting that private stations should provide more efficient services, the study found no statistically significant difference in user preferences when it comes to public versus private chargers.

That finding could be an inducement to invest in public charging infrastructure to meet future growth, Asensio said. Such a network was cited in a study by the National Research Council as key to helping overcome barriers to EV adoption.

Improving Policy Evaluation Beyond EV’s

Overall, Asensio said the study points to the need to prioritize consumer data when considering how to build out infrastructure, especially when it comes to requirements for charging stations in new buildings. 

But EV policy is not the only way the study’s deep learning techniques can be used to analyze this kind of material. They could be adapted to a broad range of energy and transportation issues, allowing researchers to deliver rapid analysis with just minutes of computation, compared to time lags measured sometimes in months or years using more traditional methods.

“The follow-on potential for energy policy is to move toward automated forms of infrastructure management powered by machine learning, particularly for critical linkages between energy and transportation systems and smart cities,” Asensio said.

The article, “Real-time Data from Mobile Platforms to Evaluate Sustainable Transportation Infrastructure,” was published in Nature Sustainability on June 1. The article is available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-020-0533-6.

The research was supported by National Science Foundation Award No. 1931980, the Civic Data Science REU program at Georgia Tech (NSF Award No. IIS-1659757), the Anthony and Jeanne Pritzker Family Foundation, and the Sustainable LA Grand Challenge.

The School of Public Policy is a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

Research News
Georgia Institute of Technology
177 North Avenue
Atlanta, Georgia  30332-0181  USA

Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986) (jtoon@gatech.edu).

Writer: Michael Pearson

The Institute for Leadership and Social Impact (ILSI) is thrilled to announce the results of the 2020 Ideas to Serve Competition (I2S). Now in its 11th year, I2S provides Georgia Tech students with the opportunity to address pressing social, economic, and environmental challenges with a learning-first approach, creativity, and collaborative solutions.

Applications were solicited from across Georgia Tech, with individuals and teams entering from five colleges and 10 majors. For the first time, a USG-wide expansion invited students from other Georgia universities to participate, and submissions were received from Kennesaw State University and Agnes Scott College.

Leading up to the competition, teams participated in workshops on problem discovery, stakeholder mapping, and asset-based community development. Participants who applied for a mentor also received support from Scheller MBA students. Participants prepared an application that included an executive summary and a 3-minute video presentation.

Amidst the application and education process, ILSI was forced to quickly pivot and, with the help of its partners, shift to a virtual format for the competition as a result of the coronavirus health crisis. However, the students were not deterred, and 21 teams entered the final stages of the competition.

A panel of judges from a global community of NGOs and the local academic and business community convened virtually to determine the winners, runners-up, and finalists, all of whom receives cash prizes.

These winners represent a diverse set of student teams tackling a very broad set of problem areas. In the Problem Discovery Track, Amanda Miller (BA) took home the top slot and $2,500 for examining effects of the city of Atlanta’s sex trafficking industry on minors through her project “Trafficked.” Her submission was based on and inspired by her work with Wellspring Living, an Atlanta nonprofit providing transformative services to those affected by trafficking.

It was Amanda's commitment to elicit a deep understanding of the root causes and factors of the problem that impressed Tech alumni Susan Davis, global coordinator of Agenda for Change and lead Problem Discovery Track judge.

“My goal for being involved in Ideas to Serve is to encourage students who are already clearly motivated to address social and environmental issues to think more critically about how others have tried to address these issues and what their effective role can be,” said Davis.

“In “Trafficked,” Amanda Miller described the exact process of looking beyond the obvious symptoms of trafficking to explore root causes, including policy, enforcement, economics, and culture,” continued Davis.

The second and third-place teams in the Problem Discovery Track addressed land conservation in Chile (Strategic Park Design for Sustainability) and menstrual hygiene issues in developing countries (Partners in Dignity). Fight Girls Mutilation (addressing female genital mutilation in Kenya), Aqualove (examining better hydration practices for at-risk elderly population), and Resource Bridge (homeless services) rounded out the list of top teams in this track.

In the Solutions Discovery Track, teams were judged based on their potential solutions to the social and environmental issues they addressed. The winner of this track was the five-student team Invenovate. They are working on a solution to the elopement or wandering off tendency and associated risks for caretakers of children with autism and seniors with dementia.

The runner-up in this category, Atlanta Youth Energy Corps, addressed issues of energy inequity, specifically in metro Atlanta. The Reflex (optimizing EMS response times) and Afterlife (tackling household waste through DYI projects) teams earned Honorable Mention in the Solutions Discovery Track. 

Finally, all teams were eligible to receive specialty prizes based on specific sections of their submission. Invenovate received the Best Pitch award, as did Carrie’s Closet, an interdisciplinary Leadership Minor Capstone team. Carrie’s Closet worked with the Center for Civic Innovation Fellow Mamie Harper to address the Foster Care Bill of Rights in Georgia.

More than 1300 votes were cast in the People’s Choice category, and team Reflex came out on top, while Afterlife won both the Best Video and the Net-Impact MBA award. Fight Girl’s Mutilation earned the Best System/Stakeholder Map award that required a demonstrated understanding of the underlying interactions and root causes of the social issue examined.

Lastly, Partner in Dignity was chosen as the Georgia Tech delegate for the Map the System Global Challenge, a social impact solution competition organized by the Skoll Center for Social Entrepreneurship at the Said Business School in Oxford, England (which will be held virtually this year).

“It was amazing to see that, despite the challenges of dealing with the public health crisis and participating virtually – from three different continents - students eagerly persevered. They did an outstanding job studying the systems around their chosen issues, identifying community-based solutions, and recognizing ways they can affect positive change,” said Terry Blum, Tedd Munchak Chair in Entrepreneurship and faculty director of the Institute for Leadership and Social Impact.

The Ideas to Serve Competition would not be possible without the support of our generous sponsors. Thank you to The Cecil B. Day Program for Business Ethics, the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain, the Steven A. Denning Technology & Management Program, Tedd Munchak Chair in Entrepreneurship, Center for International Business Education and Research, Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business, Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, LEAD Program, Hands on Atlanta, Richard Hill, Innovation and Design Collaborative, Moseley Ventures, and Speechworks.

Participation in the Ideas to Serve Competition fulfills the Final Deliverable requirement for the SLS Innovating for Social Impact Program – a collaboration between the Institute for Leadership and Social Impact and the Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain.

Full List of I2S Awardees

Problem Discovery Track Winner:

Trafficked ($2,500)
Team: Amanda Miller (BA)

Runner-Up: Strategic Park Design for Sustainability ($1,500)
Team: Angelica Acevedo (LMC), Shrinka Roy (MBA & Masters in ID)

Third Place: Partners in Dignity ($1,000)
Team: Adele Payman (AE), Dharesha Jhaveri (IE), Jonathan Hou (CS), Jessica Zhang (IE), Aisha Abdullahi (IE)

Honorable Mentions:

Fight Girls’ Mutilation 
led by Yvonne Njeri Mogwanja (CE)

Aqualove
led by Jinwoo Park (CS), Alice Zeng (CS), Benjamin Rochford (CS), Zachary Beckham (IE), Luke Dague (BME), Chandler Pitts (ME)

and
Resource Bridge
led by Samuel Costa (BA), Kathryn Farley (BME), Shenelle Campbell (Architecture), Swaraj Agarwal (ID) 

Solution Discovery Track Winner:

Invenovate ($2,500)
Team: Alejandro Campos (ME), Tillson Galloway (CS), Mark Saad (ME), Andre Prieto, Martin Jacobson (BME)

Runner-Up:

Atlanta Youth Energy Corps ($1,500)
Team: Sharon Gurung (Env. Engineering), Gwyn Rush (IA), Dakota Mitchell (Biology), Brittany Judson (Math & Econ)

Honorable Mentions:

Afterlife
led by Clotilde Bignard (MBA)

Reflex
led by Usman Jamal (CS), Nevin Gilbert (CS), Reed Blanchard (ME), Amelia Abernathy (BA), Akash Harapanahalli (CE), Lauryn Wright (BME)

Specialty Prizes

People's Choice Award ($500):

Reflex

Best Video Award ($500):

Afterlife

Best System/Stakeholder Map ($500):

Fight Girl’s Mutilation

Best Pitch Awards ($500):

Invenovate

Carrie’s Closet
Team: Huda Tauha (CS), Benjamin Frumkin (ME), Riley Geran (ChemE), Sakshie Rao (IA) 

Scheller Net Impact MBA Award ($500):

Afterlife

You can find descriptions of teams and their video presentations on the Ideas to Serve Teams page.

Scientific endeavors across Georgia Tech are broad, deep, and varied — a fact underscored last week when the National Academy of Sciences announced three Tech scholars among its newest members.

Marilyn Brown is one of the nation’s top analysts of clean energy policy; Randall Engle is a leader in understanding individual differences in memory and attention; and Arkadi Nemirovski has helped shape the field of continuous optimization.

Each now joins an elite group of the nation’s foremost scientists in a historic moment for the Institute: It’s the first time three scientists from Tech have been elected to the Academy in a single year.

“The election of Georgia Tech faculty members from across multiple disciplines into the National Academy of Sciences is extraordinary,” said Rafael L. Bras, provost, executive vice president for Academic Affairs, and K. Harrison Brown Family Chair. “We are incredibly proud and congratulate Professors Brown, Engle, and Nemirovski on this well-deserved honor. This distinction is a testament to their significant contributions and an honor that recognizes that critical research happens at the intersection of disciplines.”

Election to the National Academy of Sciences is among the highest honors a scientist can receive, recognizing “distinguished and continuing achievements in original research,” as the Academy puts it. It has been reserved for just 2,403 people in the United States. Nominations for new members can come only from current Academy members.

“In the hierarchy of scientific acknowledgment, the only things higher are the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Nobel Prize,” said Engle, professor in the School of Psychology. “In my wildest dreams, I never imagined it for myself.”

Engle studies the nature of working memory and its relationship to attention control. At its most basic, his work focuses on how people differ in their ability to concentrate on a single task. Understanding these differences helps us understand why individuals’ cognitive performance varies.

Engle came to Georgia Tech in 1995 to lead the School of Psychology. After 13 years, he stepped down to create the Georgia State University/Georgia Tech Center for Advanced Brain Imaging. His work has been influential in social and developmental psychology, emotion, and psychopathology, among other areas. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

“I don’t know of any successful scientists who do what we do for the glory. We are driven by questions and are so fortunate to have jobs where people actually pay us to spend our lives looking through the metaphorical microscope,” Engle said. “At the same time, we all love having our work acknowledged and respected by our scientific heroes. That is what this feels like: People who I have read about in my field since I was an undergraduate are saying that my work has value.”

Like Engle, Nemirovski expressed surprise at his election to the Academy, despite more than five decades of contributions to optimization theory and algorithms.

“While I respect my professional achievements, I do not value them as matching the honor,” said Nemirovski, who came to Georgia Tech in 2005 and is the John Hunter Chair and Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

Yet he is credited with several significant achievements in the field of convex optimization — the Ellipsoid algorithm (with D. Yudin), mirror descent, interior point methods for nonlinear convex problems (with Y. Nesterov), and robust optimization (with A. Ben-Tal) — and in non-parametric statistics (with A. Juditsky).

In fact, Nemirovski credited his collaborators with helping him build an impactful career.

“The excellent professional training I got under supervision of Professor Eugene Shilov at the Department of Mechanics and Mathematics of Moscow State University, and the honor and privilege to communicate and, in many cases, to collaborate with outstanding colleagues — Boris Polyak, Rafail Khasminskii, Yuri Nesterov, Aharon Ben-Tal, Anatoli Iouditski, Alexander Shapiro, David Donoho, Stephen Boyd — their influence made me what I am as a professional,” he said.

Nemirovski also is a fellow of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Brown has established herself as an international leader in the analysis of clean energy policies. She’s a pioneer in incorporating behavioral and social science principles into complex energy-engineering models that are used to evaluate policy proposals and to assess opportunities such as the size of the energy-efficiency gap in the United States.

She developed an approach as a regulator of the Tennessee Valley Authority that characterizes energy efficiency in terms of a power plant — in essence, the size, cost, and reliability of the plant that would not have to be built if companies took steps to conserve energy. She also developed carbon accounting methods at Georgia Tech that were applied to the first carbon footprint assessments of the nation’s largest 100 metropolitan areas.

“Being elected to the National Academy of Sciences is a great honor,” said Brown, Regents Professor and Brook Byers Professor in Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy. “It is also a great testament to the outstanding faculty and students across Georgia Tech, who are fostering the kind of sustainable energy systems and policies that will help the world step back from the brink of climate disaster.”

Brown arrived at Georgia Tech in 2006 after establishing herself at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory as a national leader in the analysis and interpretation of energy futures in the United States. A year later, she and her co-authors won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group III Assessment Report on Mitigation of Climate Change.

Earlier this year, Brown also was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

“Colleagues like Professors Brown, Engle, and Nemirovski are what makes Georgia Tech such a special place,” Bras said. “They are true scholars and dedicated teachers, and they are examples to their students, their friends, and colleagues. We all rejoice with them.”

Georgia Tech was among the 100-plus colleges and universities that participated in the 2020 RecycleMania Competition. The competition ran from February to March with each school submitting metrics on waste, recycling and compost. This allows schools across the country to benchmark themselves against one another and share best practices. Georgia Tech won first place for the Race to Zero Waste One Building Challenge for the program at The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design. We reported the weight of different categories of waste for 30 days from the building, as well as, completed a waste audit to assess contamination.

Beyond this honor, Georgia Tech placed in the following categories:  

• Top 5 most cardboard recycled 
• Top 7 most recycling overall 
• Top 10 Per Capita (less total waste produced per person)
• Top 40 most bottles and cans recycled

This highlights Georgia Tech's source separated program and the marketability of these materials as commodities that can contribute to the economy when we divert them from the landfill. A huge thank you goes to the Office of Solid Waste Management & Recycling, Office of Campus Sustainability, Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design, and Building Services, as well as, all students, faculty, staff and visitors who recycled while on campus. For the full results, please visit the RecycleMania Website.