Novel Use of Existing Drug Could Significantly Cut Heart Attack Risk
Jun 18, 2024 — Atlanta
![Chris Bresette in the lab](/sites/default/files/styles/news_first_image/public/news-images/24-R10400-P64-001.jpg?itok=L9Bk0AJv)
Christopher Bresette in the lab. [Photo by Rob Felt.]
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.
![The microfluidic device the researchers use to quantify clot formation.](/sites/default/files/news-images/24-R10400-P64-003.jpg)
The blood comes in from the top and splits into four channels that can be observed separately. The middle region is where the channel narrows to mimic an atherosclerotic plaque. [Photo by Rob Felt]
Tess Malone, Senior Research Writer/Editor
tess.malone@gatech.edu
Enterprise Innovation Institute Hosts Foreign Entrepreneurs Through U.S. State Department Program
Jun 18, 2024 —
![Group shot](/sites/default/files/styles/news_first_image/public/news-images/5-16-24%20Event-24.jpg?itok=rKOMirD2)
Nineteen entrepreneurs — mostly from Ukraine but some from other countries, including from Asia, the South Pacific, Latin America, and Africa — were at Georgia Tech’s Encore for several weeks in May and early June 2024 as part of a U.S. Department of State program focused on startup leaders seeking guidance on how to scale, explore potential expansion in the U.S., and how to build successful ecosystems. (VIDEO: Chris Ruggiero)
In the war between Russia and Ukraine, Yevhen Popov is something of an information warrior.
Popov is director of civic partnerships and research with Osavul, a Kyiv, Ukraine, information security startup founded in 2022.
Using artificial intelligence, the company’s software allows governments, non-governmental organizations, media, and other private sector clients to collect and analyze data from online networks and platforms to fight disinformation and cyberattacks. It launched just as war broke out in Ukraine.
“The invasion was not only on the ground, which was military with military force, but also with the minds of people,” Popov said. “So, with the disinformation attacks happening almost every day — two or three times a day — this is our response. It's a way to guide agencies and businesses to protect them from these harmful narratives and the harmful effects of these attacks.”
Popov and 18 other entrepreneurs — mostly from Ukraine but some from other countries, including Sri Lanka, Jordan, Fiji, Botswana, Brazil, and Mongolia — were at Georgia Tech’s Encore for several weeks in the spring as part of a U.S. State Department program.
That effort, the Global Innovation Through Science and Technology Initiative (GIST), connects innovators from emerging economies who want to scale with faculty experts and ecosystem builders from the U.S. who can help them succeed.
GIST is working with Nakia Melecio, who heads the Innovation Lab initiative at Georgia Tech’s economic development arm, the Enterprise Innovation Institute. Melecio has been tapped to lead several GIST-related ecosystem-building efforts in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America.
While at Tech, the entrepreneurs met with campus leaders, researchers, and economic development experts from across the Institute, including the Office of Commercialization, VentureLab, CREATE-X, International Initiatives, and the Enterprise Innovation Institute’s EI2 Global.
“We've got the opportunity to share not only our resources, but our best practices to help these innovators blaze a trail within their own ecosystems and also figure out how to penetrate the U.S.,” Melecio said, adding that Georgia Tech is slated to host a cohort of entrepreneurs from Egypt later in the summer.
“We’re excited here at the Enterprise Innovation Institute to provide the level of coaching, support, and access that these founders need so they can be successful and hit their goals.”
The visiting entrepreneurs are just as excited.
“It's very interesting to be here because the ecosystem of startups is quite huge in Atlanta and in Georgia,” Popov said. “It's a good opportunity to be here with people who know what they're doing and know how they're doing it.”
Expanding her network and eyeing global expansion drew Ariuntuya Altangerel, co-founder and CEO of Brighton EdTech in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, to Georgia Tech.
The language learning startup was founded in 2011 to help facilitate, in an interactive way, mastery of English. Altangerel is exploring how the model can be replicated beyond her home country of 3.3 million people.
“We have a very small population, so for startups, we have no choice but to go global so that they can scale,” she said. Being at Georgia Tech is also giving her and the other GIST-hosted entrepreneurs opportunities to be fully immersed in a successful startup ecosystem.
“In our country, the startup ecosystem is at the seed level. It's growing faster and faster, but still, there are fewer opportunities for us to get an investment,” she said. “I just see this as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for us to dive into this ecosystem and learn as much as possible.”
Nevindaree Premarathne is the founder and CEO of The Makers in Sri Lanka, a company that aims to inculcate innovation habits in children through hands-on STEM activities and community building. The Makers has partnered with educational institutions, non-governmental organizations, and private enterprises to reach underprivileged schools and empower female students in STEM.
“We are getting a lot of knowledge from Georgia Tech,” Premarathne said, noting her company ships its activity boxes to 10 countries and is looking to scale.
“As a country, we have a small ecosystem,” she said. “We want to improve our network here, and seek investment opportunities and partnerships. It's really important for us, because of the space that we are working on in education.”
Learning how to crack the U.S. market is what Vlad Popov sought to achieve for his company, Platma, a two-year-old, no-code software development platform based in Kyiv.
“Our goal specifically is to find investors there and make a partnership that will help us in the U.S. market,” said Vlad Popov, who serves as Platma’s marketing director.
The war in Ukraine is driving some of those growth plans. “The war even accelerated us in this case, because we understand that every day can be the last day, so we work as hard as possible,” he said, adding that the team mostly works remotely but workdays are often interrupted by warning sirens, electricity disruptions, and missile strikes.
“Starting a business is good because you provide jobs for people, you pay taxes, you help the economy become strong — it’s important to start a business, even if it's hard.”
Péralte C. Paul
404.316.1210
peralte@gatech.edu
Nanowires Create Elite Warriors to Enhance T-Cell Therapy
Jun 12, 2024 —
![Ankur Singh](/sites/default/files/styles/news_first_image/public/news-images/ankur1.jpg?itok=u9H7DZbK)
Ankur Singh has developed a new way of programming T cells that retains their naïve state, making them better fighters. — Photo by Jerry Grillo
Adoptive T-cell therapy has revolutionized medicine. A patient’s T-cells — a type of white blood cell that is part of the body’s immune system — are extracted and modified in a lab and then infused back into the body, to seek and destroy infection, or cancer cells.
Now Georgia Tech bioengineer Ankur Singh and his research team have developed a method to improve this pioneering immunotherapy.
Their solution involves using nanowires to deliver therapeutic miRNA to T-cells. This new modification process retains the cells’ naïve state, which means they’ll be even better disease fighters when they’re infused back into a patient.
“By delivering miRNA in naïve T cells, we have basically prepared an infantry, ready to deploy,” Singh said. “And when these naïve cells are stimulated and activated in the presence of disease, it’s like they’ve been converted into samurais.”
Lean and Mean
Currently in adoptive T-cell therapy, the cells become stimulated and preactivated in the lab when they are modified, losing their naïve state. Singh’s new technique overcomes this limitation. The approach is described in a new study published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.
“Naïve T-cells are more useful for immunotherapy because they have not yet been preactivated, which means they can be more easily manipulated to adopt desired therapeutic functions,” said Singh, the Carl Ring Family Professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering.
The raw recruits of the immune system, naïve T-cells are white blood cells that haven’t been tested in battle yet. But these cellular recruits are robust, impressionable, and adaptable — ready and eager for programming.
“This process creates a well-programmed naïve T-cell ideal for enhancing immune responses against specific targets, such as tumors or pathogens,” said Singh.
The precise programming naïve T-cells receive sets the foundational stage for a more successful disease fighting future, as compared to preactivated cells.
Giving Fighter Cells a Boost
Within the body, naïve T-cells become activated when they receive a danger signal from antigens, which are part of disease-causing pathogens, but they send a signal to T-cells that activate the immune system.
Adoptive T-cell therapy is used against aggressive diseases that overwhelm the body’s defense system. Scientists give the patient’s T-cells a therapeutic boost in the lab, loading them up with additional medicine and chemically preactivating them.
That’s when the cells lose their naïve state. When infused back into the patient, these modified T-cells are an effective infantry against disease — but they are prone to becoming exhausted. They aren’t samurai. Naïve T-cells, though, being the young, programmable recruits that they are, could be.
The question for Singh and his team was: How do we give cells that therapeutic boost without preactivating them, thereby losing that pristine, highly suggestable naïve state? Their answer: Nanowires.
NanoPrecision: The Pointed Solution
Singh wanted to enhance naïve T-cells with a dose of miRNA, a molecule that, when used as a therapeutic, works as a kind of volume knob for genes, turning their activity up or down to keep infection and cancer in check. The miRNA for this study was developed in part by the study’s co-author, Andrew Grimson of Cornell University.
“If we could find a way to forcibly enter the cells without damaging them, we could achieve our goal to deliver the miRNA into naïve T cells without preactivating them,” Singh explained.
Traditional modification in the lab involves binding immune receptors to T-cells, enabling the uptake of miRNA or any genetic material (which results in loss of the naïve state). “But nanowires do not engage receptors and thus do not activate cells, so they retain their naïve state,” Singh said.
The nanowires, silicon wafers made with specialized tools at Georgia Tech’s Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology, form a fine needle bed. Cells are placed on the nanowires, which easily penetrate the cells and deliver their miRNA over several hours. Then the cells with miRNA are flushed out from the tops of the nanowires, activated, eventually infused back into the patient. These programmed cells can kill enemies efficiently over an extended time period.
“We believe this approach will be a real gamechanger for adoptive immunotherapies, because we now have the ability to produce T-cells with predictable fates,” says Brian Rudd, a professor of immunology at Cornell University, and co-senior author of the study with Singh.
The researchers tested their work in two separate infectious disease animal models at Cornell for this study, and Singh described the results as “a robust performance in infection control.”
In the next phase of study, the researchers will up the ante, moving from infectious disease to test their cellular super soldiers against cancer and move toward translation to the clinical setting. New funding from the Georgia Clinical & Translational Science Alliance is supporting Singh’s research.
CITATION: Kristel J. Yee Mon, Sungwoong Kim, Zhonghao Dai, Jessica D. West, Hongya Zhu5, Ritika Jain, Andrew Grimson, Brian D. Rudd, Ankur Singh. “Functionalized nanowires for miRNA-mediated therapeutic programming of naïve T cells,” Nature Nanotechnology.
FUNDING: Curci Foundation, NSF (EEC-1648035, ECCS-2025462, ECCS-1542081), NIH (5R01AI132738-06, 1R01CA266052-01, 1R01CA238745-01A1, U01CA280984-01, R01AI110613 and U01AI131348).
![Nanowires and cell](/sites/default/files/news-images/nanowire%20cell.jpg)
This is an image of a T cell on a nanowire array. The arrow indicates where a nanowire has penetrated the cell, delivering therapeutic miRNA.
Jerry Grillo
Researchers Help Maritime Industry Navigate Toward Sustainability
Jun 11, 2024 —
![A cargo ship filled to the brim with colorful containers sails across a blue ocean](/sites/default/files/styles/news_first_image/public/news-images/Cargo%20ship.png?itok=WD2whn3O)
Ocean shipping, the backbone of international trade, is significantly more energy efficient than air or land transport. However, cutting down on ocean freight carbon emissions will require a great deal of collaboration and effort. (Credit: Getty Images)
When people think of greenhouse gas emissions from transportation, what often comes to mind are airplanes and land vehicles like cars or trucks. But as efforts to slow climate change are ramping up, the spotlight is on another form of transport: ships.
The U.N.’s International Maritime Organization (IMO) has set targets to reduce shipping greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030 and 70% by 2040, aiming for net-zero by 2050. Shipping currently accounts for about 3% of global annual greenhouse gas emissions, and the pressure is on shipping companies to meet these ambitious goals.
Across Georgia Tech, researchers are working toward a sustainable future for ocean shipping. This includes Valerie Thomas, the Anderson-Interface Chair of Natural Systems Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and in the School of Public Policy. She is scholar of energy systems, sustainability, assessment, and low-carbon transportation fuels, and her work touches many aspects of the maritime industry.
Finding Sustainable Solutions
“Today, we ship a lot of goods by ocean freight, and there is certainly an environmental impact with shipping,” Thomas said. “But the emissions from shipping a product from East Asia to the U.S. on a bulk carrier vessel are significantly lower than trucking a product across the U.S. When ships are filled to the brim with cargo and are moving slowly across oceans, this is energy efficient, fuel efficient, and even cost efficient per ton of ‘stuff’ transported.”
While ocean shipping is significantly more energy efficient than air or land transport and contributes far fewer emissions, Thomas says cutting down on ocean freight emissions will require a great deal more effort. One way is to find more eco-friendly fuels.
“I look at big systems, and one of those areas is investigating alternative fuels,” Thomas said. “I’m often trying to figure out how much greenhouse gas various fuels emit, what other types of emissions or matter are coming out, and how to compare different fuel options.”
Thomas is a leading expert in life-cycle assessment. It is a method used to evaluate a fuel or technology's environmental impact throughout its entire cycle — from raw materials extraction, processing, manufacturing, distribution, and ultimately, use. Right now, basically all ships use petroleum fuels, which emit carbon dioxide and particulate matter into the air.
Finding fuel alternatives is not a simple task: Just because a fuel might initially seem like a promising low-carbon option, that is not always the case in the end. Thomas’s expertise in life-cycle assessments helps her figure out whether these possible fuels are truly environmentally friendly.
“One such example is hydrogen: It doesn’t emit carbon dioxide when burned,” Thomas said. “But the manufacturing of hydrogen can emit carbon dioxide, and therefore, hydrogen is not always a low-carbon fuel on a lifecycle basis.”
Helping the Shipping Industry Cut Carbon
Patricia Stathatou, a researcher at Georgia Tech’s Renewable Bioproducts Institute, specializes in sustainability assessment of chemical engineering processes and products, which includes lifecycle assessments and techno-economic assessments, evaluating both the environmental impacts and the economic viability of products and processes. Stathatou, who will join the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering as an assistant professor in January 2025, also conducts experiments to support these assessments and guide the development of new technologies.
“My contribution to the lifecycle assessment field is that I support assessments with in-field emission monitoring, taking samples, and performing chemical analyses,” Stathatou said. “This helps identify specific pollutants that might be emitted into the air or be present in water, wastewater, or solid waste streams.”
But as maritime shipping companies rise to the challenge of cutting emissions, they often do not know where to start. This is where Stathatou’s experience comes in.
During her postdoctoral research at MIT, a major shipping company reached out to Stathatou and her colleagues asking for help in cutting emissions. They wanted to increase the energy efficiency of their fleet and investigate different strategies and technologies to eventually reach the IMO’s emissions goals.
Because of Stathatou’s expertise in alternative fuels, biofuels, and sustainable energy sources, she investigated potential solutions for the company, which included a six-day research trip monitoring emissions aboard one of the company’s bulk carrier vessels in East Asia. Her work involves designing experiments, measuring emissions, and evaluating the environmental impact of different fuels onboard bulk carrier vessels.
“Ten years ago, there weren't rigorous goals or guidelines for reducing emissions in the shipping industry — and not much scientific collaboration in the process,” Stathatou said. “If we are to make a difference in the industry in regard to climate, we need partnerships with shipping companies to help guide their efforts.”
Stathatou plans to continue her collaborations with shipping companies and expects to carry out more on-ship evaluations soon.
The Big Picture
According to Thomas, a holistic approach is needed to make shipping more sustainable. "It's not just about the fuels we use; it's about optimizing supply chains, reducing empty freight, and leveraging multimodal transportation options," Thomas said. "By embracing net-zero freight initiatives and maximizing efficiency in logistics, we can achieve meaningful reductions in emissions while meeting the demands of global trade."
Encouraging shifts to ocean freight is another means of reducing emissions. For example, if a company wants to transport goods from Miami to Baltimore, they don’t need to go by road or rail. “You can ship your freight on the ocean along the coast, and that could be more environmentally efficient,” Thomas said.
The work Thomas and Stathatou do is part of a broad portfolio of shipping sustainability research at Georgia Tech, which also includes the Georgia Tech Supply Chain and Logistics Institute, the Panama Logistics and Innovation Research Center, and the Net Zero Freight Systems Program, which Thomas co-leads. These partnerships aim to enhance the efficiency and sustainability of global supply chains, leveraging innovative research and practical applications.
“The work of evaluating different fuels, technologies, and strategies is not trivial, and figuring out these new methods does not happen quickly,” Thomas said. “These are difficult technologies, and it takes a long time to put them in place. That is why we need to do this work now.”
Stathatou envisions that, with more shipping companies now looking to curb their emissions, there will be significant adoption of new fuels and technologies within the next decade.
“Ocean shipping is a transportation sector that we cannot go without, and so decarbonizing it is very important,” Stathatou said. “I believe the ability to perform these assessments and guide the development of future solutions will have a tremendous impact on humanity.”
![A headshot of a woman with cropped gray hair and glasses who is smiling at the camera](/sites/default/files/news-images/thomas-valerie.png)
Valerie Thomas, the Anderson-Interface Chair of Natural Systems Professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and in the School of Public Policy. (Credit: Camille C. Henriquez)
![Six people in dark blue boiler suits standing in the control room of a ship](/sites/default/files/news-images/Patrisia%20with%20the%20crew_0%20%281%29.jpg)
Patricia Stathatou (third from right), a researcher at the Renewable Bioproducts Institute, with the carrier vessel's crew members. (Credit: Patricia Stathatou)
![A woman in a lab coat sits at a desk in a ship cabin. She is surrounded by bottles and scientific measurema](/sites/default/files/news-images/pat%20water%20samples.png)
Stathatou preserving water and washwater samples from the vessel's scrubber so they can be stored and analyzed later in the lab. (Credit: Patricia Stathatou)
![A woman sits in the funnel of a ship, taking particulate measurements.](/sites/default/files/news-images/Pat%20funnel.jpg)
Stathatou prepares to measure particulate matter emissions in the vessel's funnel — a very windy area of the ship. (Credit: Patricia Stathatou)
Catherine Barzler, Senior Research Writer/Editor
Ph.D. Student Wins Best Paper at Robotics Conference
Jun 06, 2024 —
![Three students kneeling around a spot robot](/sites/default/files/styles/news_first_image/public/news-images/208A9469.jpg?itok=WriHcCyt)
Ask a person to find a frying pan, and they will most likely go to the kitchen. Ask a robot to do the same, and you may get numerous responses, depending on how the robot is trained.
Since humans often associate objects in a home with the room they are in, Naoki Yokoyama thinks robots that navigate human environments to perform assistive tasks should mimic that reasoning.
Roboticists have employed natural language models to help robots mimic human reasoning over the past few years. However, Yokoyama, a Ph.D. student in robotics, said these models create a “bottleneck” that prevents agents from picking up on visual cues such as room type, size, décor, and lighting.
Yokoyama presented a new framework for semantic reasoning at the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) last month in Yokohama, Japan. ICRA is the world’s largest robotics conference.
Yokoyama earned a best paper award in the Cognitive Robotics category with his Vision-Language Frontier Maps (VLFM) proposal.
Assistant Professor Sehoon Ha and Associate Professor Dhruv Batra from the School of Interactive Computing advised Yokoyama on the paper. Yokoyama authored the paper while interning at the Boston Dynamics’ AI Institute.
“I think the cognitive robotic category represents a significant portion of submissions to ICRA nowadays,” said Yokoyama, whose family is from Japan. “I’m grateful that our work is being recognized among the best in this field.”
Instead of natural language models, Yokoyama used a renowned vision-language model called BLIP-2 and tested it on a Boston Dynamics “Spot” robot in home and office environments.
“We rely on models that have been trained on vast amounts of data collected from the web,” Yokoyama said. “That allows us to use models with common sense reasoning and world knowledge. It’s not limited to a typical robot learning environment.”
What is Blip-2?
BLIP-2 matches images to text by assigning a score that evaluates how well the user input text describes the content of an image. The model removes the need for the robot to use object detectors and language models.
Instead, the robot uses BLIP-2 to extract semantic values from RGB images with a text prompt that includes the target object.
BLIP-2 then teaches the robot to recognize the room type, distinguishing the living room from the bathroom and the kitchen. The robot learns to associate certain objects with specific rooms where it will likely find them.
From here, the robot creates a value map to determine the most likely locations for a target object, Yokoyama said.
Yokoyama said this is a step forward for intelligent home assistive robots, enabling users to find objects — like missing keys — in their homes without knowing an item’s location.
“If you’re looking for a pair of scissors, the robot can automatically figure out it should head to the kitchen or the office,” he said. “Even if the scissors are in an unusual place, it uses semantic reasoning to work through each room from most probable location to least likely.”
He added that the benefit of using a VLM instead of an object detector is that the robot will include visual cues in its reasoning.
“You can look at a room in an apartment, and there are so many things an object detector wouldn’t tell you about that room that would be informative,” he said. “You don’t want to limit yourself to a textual description or a list of object classes because you’re missing many semantic visual cues.”
While other VLMs exist, Yokoyama chose BLIP-2 because the model:
- Accepts any text length and isn’t limited to a small set of objects or categories.
- Allows the robot to be pre-trained on vast amounts of data collected from the internet.
- Has proven results that enable accurate image-to-text matching.
Home, Office, and Beyond
Yokoyama also tested the Spot robot to navigate a more challenging office environment. Office spaces tend to be more homogenous and harder to distinguish from one another than rooms in a home.
“We showed a few cases in which the robot will still work,” Yokoyama said. “We tell it to find a microwave, and it searches for the kitchen. We tell it to find a potted plant, and it moves toward an area with windows because, based on what it knows from BLIP-2, that’s the most likely place to find the plant.”
Yokoyama said as VLM models continue to improve, so will robot navigation. The increase in the number of VLM models has caused robot navigation to steer away from traditional physical simulations.
“It shows how important it is to keep an eye on the work being done in computer vision and natural language processing for getting robots to perform tasks more efficiently,” he said. “The current research direction in robot learning is moving toward more intelligent and higher-level reasoning. These foundation models are going to play a key role in that.”
Top photo by Kevin Beasley/College of Computing.
Nathan Deen
Communications Officer
School of Interactive Computing
Unraveling the Physics of Knitting
Jun 03, 2024 —
![A woman wearing glasses and short sleeve pink sweater sit nexts to a commercial knitting machine.](/sites/default/files/styles/news_first_image/public/news-images/krishma%20machine%202.png?itok=GDA4SyqW)
Krishma Singal operates the knitting machine she used to create fabric samples for the study. Singal, the first author of the study, recently graduated from Georgia Tech with her Ph.D. Credit: Allison Carter.
Knitting, the age-old craft of looping and stitching natural fibers into fabrics, has received renewed attention for its potential applications in advanced manufacturing. Far beyond their use for garments, knitted textiles are ideal for designing and fabricating emerging technologies like wearable electronics or soft robotics — structures that need to move and bend.
Knitting transforms one-dimensional yarn into two-dimensional fabrics that are flexible, durable, and highly customizable in shape and elasticity. But to create smart textile design techniques that engineers can use, understanding the mechanics behind knitted materials is crucial.
Physicists from the Georgia Institute of Technology have taken the technical know-how of knitting and added mathematical backing to it. In a study led by Elisabetta Matsumoto, associate professor in the School of Physics, and Krishma Singal, a graduate researcher in Matsumoto’s lab, the team used experiments and simulations to quantify and predict how knit fabric response can be programmed. By establishing a mathematical theory of knitted materials, the researchers hope that knitting — and textiles in general — can be incorporated into more engineering applications.
Their research paper, “Programming Mechanics in Knitted Materials, Stitch by Stitch,” was published in the journal Nature Communications.
“For centuries, hand knitters have used different types of stitches and stitch combinations to specify the geometry and ‘stretchiness’ of garments, and much of the technical knowledge surrounding knitting has been handed down by word of mouth,” said Matsumoto.
But while knitting has often been dismissed as unskilled, poorly paid “women’s work,” the properties of knits can be more complex than traditional engineering materials like rubbers or metals.
For this project, the team wanted to decode the underlying principles that direct the elastic behavior of knitted fabrics. These principles are governed by the nuanced interplay of stitch patterns, geometry, and yarn topology — the undercrossings or overcrossings in a knot or stitch. "A lot of yarn isn’t very stretchy, yet once knit into a fabric, the fabric exhibits emergent elastic behavior," Singal said.
“Experienced knitters can identify which fabrics are stretchier than others and have an intuition for its best application,” she added. “But by understanding how these fabrics can be programmed and how they behave, we can expand knitting’s application into a variety of fields beyond clothing.”
Through a combination of experiments and simulations, Matsumoto and Singal explored the relationships among yarn manipulation, stitch patterns, and fabric elasticity, and how these factors work together to affect bulk fabric behavior. They began with physical yarn and fabric stretching experiments to identify main parameters, such as how bendable or fluffy the yarn is, and the length and radius of yarn in a given stitch.
They then used the experiment results to design simulations to examine the yarn inside a stitch, similar to an X-ray. It is difficult to see inside stitches during the physical measurements, so the simulations are used to see what parts of the yarn have interacted with other parts. The simulations are used to recreate the physical measurements as accurately as possible.
Through these experiments and simulations, Singal and Matsumoto showed the profound impact that design variations can have on fabric response and uncovered the remarkable programmability of knitting. "We discovered that by using simple adjustments in how you design a fabric pattern, you can change how stretchy or stiff the bulk fabric is," Singal said. "How the yarn is manipulated, what stitches are formed, and how the stitches are patterned completely alter the response of the final fabric."
Matsumoto envisions that the insights gleaned from their research will enable knitted textile design to become more commonly used in manufacturing and product design. Their discovery that simple stitch patterning can alter a fabric’s elasticity points to knitting’s potential for cutting-edge interactive technologies like soft robotics, wearables, and haptics.
“We think of knitting as an additive manufacturing technique — like 3D printing, and you can change the material properties just by picking the right stitch pattern,” Singal said.
Matsumoto and Singal plan to push the boundaries of knitted fabric science even further, as there are still numerous questions about knitted fabrics to be answered.
"Textiles are ubiquitous and we use them everywhere in our lives," Matsumoto said. "Right now, the hard part is that designing them for specific properties relies on having a lot of experience and technical intuition. We hope our research helps make textiles a versatile tool for engineers and scientists too."
Note: Sarah Gonzalez (Georgia Tech) and Michael Dimitriyev (Texas A&M) are also co-first authors of the study.
Citation: Singal, K., Dimitriyev, M.S., Gonzalez, S.E. et al. Programming mechanics in knitted materials, stitch by stitch. Nat Commun 15, 2622 (2024).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-46498-z
Funding: Research Corporation for Science Advancement, National Science Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
![Four small samples of white fabric on a black background.](/sites/default/files/news-images/fabric%20samples.png)
The team created their own fabric samples using a variety of stitch patterns. From left to right, the fabrics are stockinette, garter, rib, and seed. Each sample has the same number of stitch rows and columns, showing how stitch patterns can profoundly impact behavior, elasticity, and shape. Credit: Allison Carter
![Hands stretching a small piece of white knit fabric to show its elasticity](/sites/default/files/news-images/singal%20stretch.png)
Many types of yarn are not very stretchy, yet once knit into a fabric, the fabric exhibits emergent elastic behavior. Credit: Allison Carter
![A woman wearing glasses and short sleeve pink sweater sit nexts to a commercial knitting machine.](/sites/default/files/news-images/krishma%20singal%20machine.png)
Krishma Singal with the knitting machine she used to create fabric samples for the study. Credit: Allison Carter.
Catherine Barzler, Senior Research Writer/Editor
Institute Communications
Loan Liability: Negative Associations With an Auditor Can Affect Loan Chances
Jun 03, 2024 —
![Arnold Schneider](/sites/default/files/styles/news_first_image/public/news-images/Arnold%20Schneider%20headshot.jpg?itok=rM5m-UCj)
How much does a loan officer’s familiarity with an auditor affect their client’s ability to receive a commercial loan? New research from Georgia Tech suggests that while knowing an auditor doesn’t guarantee a commercial loan, loan officers are more likely to deny loans to companies that have auditors with poor reputations.
Arnold Schneider, a professor in the Scheller College of Business, found that loan officers who knew the borrower’s audit firm were reassured the loan wasn’t high-risk. However, familiarity with an audit firm didn’t guarantee an approved loan. If anything, an audit firm’s negative reputation for association with a defaulting client or a client needing regulatory enforcement meant a new client is more likely to lose out on a loan.
The research was presented in “Do Familiarity With a Loan Applicant’s Auditor and the Auditor’s Associations With Past Borrowers Impact Lending Judgments?” in the 2023 issue of Advances in Accounting Behavioral Research.
In his study, Schneider conducted an experiment with 64 loan officers from 49 banks across the eastern U.S. He examined two main variables: whether the loan officer was familiar or unfamiliar with an auditor and whether an auditor had a history with regulatory enforcement of a client or a defaulting client.
Each questionnaire used the same case scenario: a client applying for a $4 million commercial loan at a hypothetical loan company, along with their financial statements. Participants were asked to assess risk on a 10-point scale and provide the probability that they would extend the credit at a reasonable rate of interest. Then they rated the importance of the factors that helped them make their decisions.
“I found that the lenders did assess the risk higher in the case where the auditors were not familiar to them,” Schneider said. “But to my surprise, that did not translate into a lower probability of granting credit to these borrowers.”
Rather, if the loan officer only knew of an auditor because of their poor history with defaulting clients or clients having regulatory enforcement, this negative association would inhibit a loan.
Understanding the role of auditors in loan decisions is crucial for borrowers. While familiarity with a loan provider can reduce perceived risk, loan approval remains a complex process.
Tess Malone, Senior Research Writer/Editor
tess.malone@gatech.edu
Researchers Create Winning Strategy to Combat Vaccine Misinformation on X
May 31, 2024 —
![An Adobe Stock graphic depicts people working together to counter misinformation](/sites/default/files/styles/news_first_image/public/news-images/Misinfo%20Stock%20%281%29.jpg?itok=CltPn9Oh)
A new in-depth analysis shows that users who reply to misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccine on X, formerly known as Twitter, with a positive attitude, politeness, and strong evidence are more likely to encourage others to disbelieve the incorrect information.
Researchers from three Georgia Tech schools found the most effective way to confront vaccine misinformation on the X platform.
They also created a predictive tool to show users whether their reply will succeed in changing minds or backfire and reinforce the misinformation. It can also pinpoint well-meaning replies meant to contradict misinformation but that interfere with social correction.
A research paper with the full findings will be presented this week at the ACM Web Science Conference in Stuttgart, Germany.
Like white blood cells attacking a virus, social media users have been known to band together and debunk online misinformation being spread online in a phenomenon researchers call social correction.
The success rate of social correction on most social media sites has not been determined. However, researchers now have a clearer picture of how successful user input can be on X.
Their method uses a blend of artificial intelligence with a dataset of 1.5 million tweets containing misinformation about the Covid-19 vaccine. The researchers then studied user replies to misinformation as well as the consequences of those replies.
In the paper, the researchers write that their data set pre-dates the rollout of X’s community notes feature, which allows users to submit corrections to posts on the platform. They point out that this system restricts users from responding to fact-checking text and labels and does not reflect the large flow of information on the site.
As one of the first taxonomies of user social correction on the X platform, the researchers hope will aid future fact-checking efforts. While the paper only focused on text posts in the English language, it is a framework that can be expanded to address the growing threat of misinformation online.
Corrective or Backfire: Characterizing and Predicting User Response to Social Correction was co-authored by Ph.D. students Bing He and Yingchen (Eric) Ma and their advisors Regents’ Entrepreneur Mustaque Ahamad, a professor with joint appointments in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy and the School of Computer Science, and School of Computational Science and Engineering Assistant Professor Srijan Kumar.
JP Popham, Communications Officer
Georgia Tech
School of Cybersecurity and Privacy
john.popham@cc.gatech.edu
Nakia Melecio to Lead Innovation Lab Effort at Enterprise Innovation Institute
May 29, 2024 —
![Headshot of Nakia Melecio](/sites/default/files/styles/news_first_image/public/news-images/Nakia-Melecio.jpg?itok=QvbWuWwe)
Nakia Melecio head's Innovation Lab at Georgia Tech's Enterprise Innovation Institute. (PHOTO: Péralte Paul)
Melecio, who has also served as the deep tech catalyst in the Enterprise Innovation Institute’s ATDC startup incubator, will lead Innovation Lab, which encompasses new business development efforts in life sciences and biosciences. The Innovation Lab initiative centers on three core activities:
- Grow healthcare research, innovation, and workforce development practice.
- Expand EI2 Global's international footprint.
- Support VentureLab's National Science Foundation I-Corps activities.
“Nakia has been instrumental in helping to expand Georgia’s life sciences community and ecosystem,” said David Bridges, vice president of the Enterprise Innovation Institute, Georgia Tech’s chief economic development arm. “Leading Innovation Lab already builds on a foundation he created since joining us in 2019 and further supports our broad economic development mission.”
He's already leading in the healthcare research practice expansion with his work in the MedTech Center and running the ScaleUp Lab Program for deep tech innovation.
Under Melecio’s leadership as founding director, the MedTech Center, which has the Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership and Global Center for Medical Innovation as partners, has worked with and evaluated the innovations of more than 200 companies. Since launching in 2021, the MedTech Center’s 66 active startups have raised $13.1 million in investment capital and an additional $6.4 million in federal, non-dilutive funding grants.
In 2023, the MedTech Center was selected to join the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health’s ARPA-H Investor Catalyst Hub to accelerate the commercialization of practical, accessible biomedical solutions.
He is supporting Georgia Tech’s efforts to collaborate with Atlanta University Center schools — Spelman College, Clark-Atlanta University, Morehouse College, and the Morehouse School of Medicine — to collaborate with those minority-serving institutions as they build out capacity for their scientists and researchers to create more life sciences technology companies, following an award from the Economic Development Administration.
Similarly, Melecio is working with the University of Alabama at Birmingham on a collaborative project in biologics and medical devices to move more of its researchers’ innovations out of the lab and into commercial markets.
As Innovation Lab lead, Melecio, who has secured more than $5.76 million in federal grants and awards to Georgia Tech, will also work to develop biomanufacturing partnerships for Georgia Tech.
With EI2 Global, the Enterprise Innovation Institute’s program that fosters economic opportunity through collaborations with universities, innovators, governments, and nonprofit organizations worldwide, Melecio will serve as an instructor on Lab-to-Market and CREATE-X programming for entrepreneurs. He will also create and provide educational content for EI2 Global’s university and ecosystem partners.
Closer to home, his Innovation Lab work includes ongoing projects as a principal in VentureLab, a program of Georgia Tech’s Office of Commercialization. In that capacity, he will work on VentureLab’s National Science Foundation-related Innovation Corps (I-Corps) programming. Those efforts, overseen by Commercialization Vice President Raghupathy "Siva" Sivakumar, include the NSF I-Corps Hub Academy, where Melecio will serve as director.
“Our efforts with Innovation Lab are centered around finding new opportunities, new markets, and new industries by leveraging our areas of expertise at the Enterprise Innovation Institute and Georgia Tech to build economic development capacity in the life sciences and biosciences space,” Melecio said.
“We’re looking to take a broader perspective, away from being hyper-focused in one or two niche areas in life sciences, to ensure that we maximize opportunities to support new ideas, build stronger practice areas in this space, and secure funding to bring those innovations to scale.”
Péralte C. Paul
peralte@gatech.edu
404.316.1210
Georgia Tech Joins Global Industrial Technology Cooperation Center to Advance Semiconductor Electronics Research
May 29, 2024 —
![Electronics packaging at Georgia Tech](/sites/default/files/styles/news_first_image/public/news-images/14C10042-P1-097_web.jpg?itok=et-TlovZ)
Georgia Tech has been selected as one of six universities globally to receive funding for the newly established Global Industrial Technology Cooperation Center. The announcement was made by the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Energy in South Korea during the Global Open Innovation Strategy Meeting in April.
The KIAT-Georgia Tech Semiconductor Electronics Center will receive $1.8 million to establish a sustainable semiconductor electronics research partnership between Korean companies, researchers, and Georgia Tech.
“I am thrilled to announce that we have secured funding to launch a groundbreaking collaboration between Georgia Tech’s world-class researchers and Korean companies,” said Hong Yeo, associate professor and Woodruff Faculty Fellow in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering. “This initiative will drive the development of cutting-edge technologies to advance semiconductor, sensors, and electronics research.”
Yeo will lead the center, and Michael Filler, interim executive director for the Institute of Electronics and Nanotechnology, and Muhannad Bakir, director of the 3D Advanced Packaging Research Center, will serve as co-PIs.
The center will focus on advancing semiconductor research, a critical area of technology that forms the backbone of modern electronics.
The Cooperation Center is a global technology collaboration platform designed to facilitate international joint research and development planning, partner matching, and local support for domestic researchers. The selection of Georgia Tech underscores the Institute’s leadership and expertise in the field of semiconductors.
Amelia Neumeister
Research Communications Program Manager