Dutton-Ducoffe Endowed Professor Kyriakos G. Vamvoudakis
Vamvoudakis received $400,000 from the National Science Foundation for his proposal, “Improving Safety by Synthesizing Interacting Model-based and Model-free Learning Approaches.” This is the first grant on Safe Learning-enabled Systems (SLES) awarded to Georgia Tech from NSF. He and his team will establish a framework that leads to the design and implementation of SLES in which safety is ensured with high confidence levels. The framework will leverage tools from control theory, multi-agent autonomy, and formal methods for rigorously probabilistic reasoning to create safe learning-enabled systems. Before anyone releases an autonomous machine, the public expects it to be safe for those around it. For example, sensors in drones and other machines are sensitive to infiltration, malfunction, and the environment. If the wind is strong, the drone would need to be able to adjust to the environment, stay on course, and perhaps change altitude. If the drone encounters a telephone pole or even a person in its path, it would be able to adjust accordingly without waiting for human control.
His research approach will take elements from various theories and combine them to improve the safety of these LES within the machine.
“Our approach algorithmically combines model-based and model-free reinforcement learning for enhancing safety by using the learned model to predict how well a safe policy will behave and then update the resulting actions,” Vamvoudakis explained. “As a result, our approach does not rely on improving the model and does not require an infinite amount of time for convergence. Instead, our plan optimally enhances safety and combines the predefined time-convergent actions generated to achieve high performance in the specified task.”
The fundamental knowledge created in his research could inform how future-assured autonomous systems with embodied intelligence can be built. Their results could inform the design of key enablers of the global economy, including smart and connected cities, networked actions of smart and autonomous systems by enabling system flexibility, efficiency, and capacity, and automated financial trading, such as creating automated news digests around finance.
Autonomous machines are changing the way that the military operates. Uncrewed battles between autonomous systems require the systems to learn and adapt to unknown environments and to distinguish allies from enemies. Learning-enabled systems are trained to take the circumstances at hand and give recommendations for the desired response.
When humans have control over these machines, this is considered humans in the loop. When humans move further into the background and give the machines decision-making autonomy, it is called humans on the loop. Humans would still have oversight, but the machine could ultimately decide without human approval.
Through his newly awarded $480,000 project “Embodied and Secure Physical Intelligence with Possible Humans-on-the Loop in Complex Adaptive Systems” with the Army Research Office (ARO), Vamvoudakis and his team are developing decision-making algorithms to assist during conflict in adversarial environments. This is needed because military maneuvers can be unpredictable, and autonomous machines need to be able to adapt accordingly. He will use game-theoretic strategies to inform his work.
Vamvoudakis’ team has created algorithms in the context of games, where a “defender” wants to regulate a cyber-physical system around a trimming point, but an “attacker” intends to disrupt this regulation as much as possible.
They also employed level-k thinking to capture the behavior of the attacker. Particularly, instead of assuming that the attacker can reason perfectly about the behavior of the defender, the employed level-k thinking model imposed that the attacker can only make finitely-many (though arbitrarily many) steps of reasoning about what the defender might do, how the attacker can best respond to that, how the defender can then best respond.
The project is a continuation of his ARO YIP award that developed a way to understand different types of attackers in a unified framework. Attackers who think a little ahead are called low-level, while those who think more strategically, like those near a Nash equilibrium, are called high-level. This understanding helps create better defense strategies without assuming that attackers always act perfectly.
To demonstrate how this model works in real military situations, he and his students looked at it through the lens of a pursuit-evasion game. They found that using level-k thinking to understand and respond to attackers is more effective than assuming attackers always optimize their strategies perfectly.
Current methods for protecting closed-loop reinforcement learning systems (artificial intelligence where the system continuously learns and adapts based on feedback from the environment) don't work well against potential threats. These existing methods often rely on guesswork, need a deep understanding of the system, and require a lot of training time. They also fail to guarantee safety when facing adversaries.
Vamvoudakis’ MathWorks gift, “Adversarial Reinforcement Learning” aims to create a new generation of smart, flexible, autonomous systems that can learn and adapt. This is the first-ever gift from MathWorks made to Georgia Tech.
“We will develop the next generation of agile, highly adaptive autonomous systems that use mechanisms from cognition and learning to process information from distributed sensors. In particular, looking to autonomous systems appearing in nature for inspiration,” he said. Specifically, behavioral scientists have validated the need for intermittent data sharing in learning tasks. They have shown that the central nervous system in human beings minimizes effort and sorts through impulses and stimuli by maintaining intermittent signaling. Specifically, the spinal cord transmits a channel of information and effectively exploits its neural resources via intermittent strategies to produce a sequence of muscle-bone interactions that induce movement.”
By looking to such ideas, they will develop safe and strong reinforcement learning methods to handle teamwork, assign tasks, and manage resources effectively. They will also collaborate with MathWorks to create useful toolboxes and provide internship opportunities.
Reinforcement Learning Embedded Agent
Monique Waddell
monique.waddell@gatech.edu
A pair of Smarticle robots from the lab of Prof. Dan Goldman. Earlier research from his group observed the arise of order in active matter from the physics of low rattling. (Photo Credit: Christa M. Ernst)
If you’ve ever watched a large flock of birds on the wing, moving across the sky like a cloud with various shapes and directional changes appearing from seeming chaos, or the maneuvers of an ant colony forming bridges and rafts to escape floods, you’ve been observing what scientists call self-organization. What may not be as obvious is that self-organization occurs throughout the natural world, including bacterial colonies, protein complexes, and hybrid materials. Understanding and predicting self-organization, especially in systems that are out of equilibrium, like living things, is an enduring goal of statistical physics.
This goal is the motivation behind a recently introduced principle of physics called rattling, which posits that systems with sufficiently “messy” dynamics organize into what researchers refer to as low rattling states. Although the principle has proved accurate for systems of robot swarms, it has been too vague to be more broadly tested, and it has been unclear exactly why it works and to what other systems it should apply.
Dana Randall, a professor in the School of Computer Science, and Jacob Calvert, a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Data Engineering and Science, have formulated a theory of rattling that answers these fundamental questions. Their paper, “A Local-Global Principle for Nonequilibrium Steady States,” published last week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, characterizes how rattling is related to the amount of time that a system spends in a state. Their theory further identifies the classes of systems for which rattling explains self-organization.
When we first heard about rattling from physicists, it was very hard to believe it could be true. Our work grew out of a desire to understand it ourselves. We found that the idea at its core is surprisingly simple and holds even more broadly than the physicists guessed.
Beyond its basic scientific importance, the work can be put to immediate use to analyze models of phenomena across scientific domains. Additionally, experimentalists seeking organization within a nonequilibrium system may be able to induce low rattling states to achieve their desired goal. The duo thinks the work will be valuable in designing microparticles, robotic swarms, and new materials. It may also provide new ways to analyze and predict collective behaviors in biological systems at the micro and nanoscale.
From election forecasts and pandemic dashboards to stock market charts and scientific figures, many people trust data visualizations as objective truths and neutral representations of reality.
However, a study led by Georgia Tech and University of California, Berkeley researchers shows that annotations can lead people to draw different conclusions from the same visualizations. Their findings suggest readers should look beyond the presented data to make informed decisions.
“People question things less if they see something that’s visualized, and they think this is a reliable, trustworthy source they can use to form an opinion or persuade others,” said Cindy Xiong, an assistant professor in the School of Interactive Computing. “People don’t realize the persuasive power of visualization, and they’re not as vigilant to critically think about the data they interact with.”
For example, people tend to trust the information in an election data visualization. That makes them susceptible to narratives that visualization designers may use to obtain a certain outcome.
Working with Chase Stokes, a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley’s School of Information, Xiong investigated how text position, semantic content, and biased wording impact viewers’ perception of visualizations.
They found people often reach the same conclusions suggested by titles and annotations on a chart.
“Visual changes have a great deal of impact on how people interpret a chart,” Stokes said. “Titles, captions, and annotations strongly affect people’s conclusions.”
Xiong and Stokes created a study centered around two hypothetical political parties — a blue party and a green party. They used a bar chart to show how many votes each party has received over the past three years. The data shows the blue party received more votes year after year than the green party, but the gap has closed each year.
The researchers surveyed participants to predict which party would win in the fourth year. Responses were split nearly 50-50 before leveraging highlights and annotations.
When the researchers highlighted the green party’s increasing voter support year after year, the prediction responses overwhelmingly favored the green party. Predictions favored the blue party when the researchers highlighted blue had won every year.
While the scenario created by Xiong and Stokes reflects an ideal world of neutrality, the researchers concede that existing beliefs about political parties play a strong role in determining real-world bias. Participants consistently reported charts that supported one of the two parties were biased, and that perception intensified if the participants disagreed with the text provided.
“If I supported the green party, and I saw this chart, I would think blue party supporters made it because it’s supporting the side that I don’t agree with,” Stokes said.
“If the chart represented Republicans and Democrats, many people would perceive the data in a way that reinforces what they already think. If they disagreed with the party’s ideologies, they would likely see the visualization as biased regardless of its portrayal.”
Xiong and Stokes found that although textually annotated data patterns do not strongly sway people’s predictions to favor one party over another, they make people suspicious of the designer’s beliefs.
“It’s easy to make a chart that alienates half the people you’re trying to reach,” Stokes said. “Figuring out a way to make data accessible, understandable, and interesting to people who may not agree with your story is critical to mending that trust between designer and consumer.”
For example, someone who trusts the information presented to them on Fox News may not trust what they see in The New York Times. Designers must account for the distrust between the public and information sources when creating their visualizations.
“The solution to reaching the widest possible audience is to provide both sides of the story, even if the designer wants to persuade people toward a certain perspective,” Xiong said.
“If you are making visualizations for a political candidate, it’s difficult to persuade people that you’re not biased. You could visually highlight your key takeaways. But adding textual annotations to your chart will make people think you’re pushing hard for some narrative.”
Voters, meanwhile, should be aware that most visualizations contain bias. The researchers agreed voters should gather information from various sources, including those that don’t align with their opinions.
“Voters should look for visualizations that talk about both sides and give you those different perspectives so you can make informed decisions about your future,” Stokes said. “If you see a visualization that highlights one story, you should respond by finding the other side. There’s never just one interpretation of a visualization.”
Xiong and Stokes published their findings in a paper that is being presented this week during the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ Visualization and Visual Analytics (VIS) Conference.
Nathan Deen
Communications Officer
School of Interactive Computing
A new surgery planning tool powered by augmented reality (AR) is in development for doctors who need closer collaboration when planning heart operations. Promising results from a recent usability test have moved the platform one step closer to everyday use in hospitals worldwide.
Georgia Tech researchers partnered with medical experts from Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta (CHOA) to develop and test ARCollab. The iOS-based app leverages advanced AR technologies to let doctors collaborate together and interact with a patient’s 3D heart model when planning surgeries.
The usability evaluation demonstrates the app’s effectiveness, finding that ARCollab is easy to use and understand, fosters collaboration, and improves surgical planning.
“This tool is a step toward easier collaborative surgical planning. ARCollab could reduce the reliance on physical heart models, saving hours and even days of time while maintaining the collaborative nature of surgical planning,” said M.S. student Pratham Mehta, the app’s lead researcher.
“Not only can it benefit doctors when planning for surgery, it may also serve as a teaching tool to explain heart deformities and problems to patients.”
Two cardiologists and three cardiothoracic surgeons from CHOA tested ARCollab. The two-day study ended with the doctors taking a 14-question survey assessing the app’s usability. The survey also solicited general feedback and top features.
The Georgia Tech group determined from the open-ended feedback that:
Users rated each of the 14 questions on a 7-point Likert scale, with one being “strongly disagree” and seven being “strongly agree.” The 14 questions were organized into five categories: overall, multi-user, model viewing, model slicing, and saving and loading models.
The multi-user category attained the highest rating with an average of 6.65. This included a unanimous 7.0 rating that it was easy to identify who was controlling the heart model in ARCollab. The scores also showed it was easy for users to connect with devices, switch between viewing and slicing, and view other users’ interactions.
The model slicing category received the lowest, but formidable, average of 5.5. These questions assessed ease of use and understanding of finger gestures and usefulness to toggle slice direction.
Based on feedback, the researchers will explore adding support for remote collaboration. This would assist doctors in collaborating when not in a shared physical space. Another improvement is extending the save feature to support multiple states.
“The surgeons and cardiologists found it extremely beneficial for multiple people to be able to view the model and collaboratively interact with it in real-time,” Mehta said.
The user study took place in a CHOA classroom. CHOA also provided a 3D heart model for the test using anonymous medical imaging data. Georgia Tech’s Institutional Review Board (IRB) approved the study and the group collected data in accordance with Institute policies.
The five test participants regularly perform cardiovascular surgical procedures and are employed by CHOA.
The Georgia Tech group provided each participant with an iPad Pro with the latest iOS version and the ARCollab app installed. Using commercial devices and software meets the group’s intentions to make the tool universally available and deployable.
“We plan to continue iterating ARCollab based on the feedback from the users,” Mehta said.
“The participants suggested the addition of a ‘distance collaboration’ mode, enabling doctors to collaborate even if they are not in the same physical environment. This allows them to facilitate surgical planning sessions from home or otherwise.”
The Georgia Tech researchers are presenting ARCollab and the user study results at IEEE VIS 2024, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) visualization conference.
IEEE VIS is the world’s most prestigious conference for visualization research and the second-highest rated conference for computer graphics. It takes place virtually Oct. 13-18, moved from its venue in St. Pete Beach, Florida, due to Hurricane Milton.
The ARCollab research group's presentation at IEEE VIS comes months after they shared their work at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2024).
Undergraduate student Rahul Narayanan and alumni Harsha Karanth (M.S. CS 2024) and Haoyang (Alex) Yang (CS 2022, M.S. CS 2023) co-authored the paper with Mehta. They study under Polo Chau, a professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering.
The Georgia Tech group partnered with Dr. Timothy Slesnick and Dr. Fawwaz Shaw from CHOA on ARCollab’s development and user testing.
"I'm grateful for these opportunities since I get to showcase the team's hard work," Mehta said.
“I can meet other like-minded researchers and students who share these interests in visualization and human-computer interaction. There is no better form of learning.”
Bryant Wine, Communications Officer
bryant.wine@cc.gatech.edu
Legal cannabis access has a complex impact on prescription fill rates for mental health medications, new research from the School of Public Policy shows.
Researchers have long known about the relationship between cannabis use and mental health. But how that practice has affected prescriptions for drugs to treat mental health disorders has been less clear, until now.
A new study from Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy, recently published in JAMA Network Open, shows that commercially insured patients living in states with legal cannabis sales filled fewer prescriptions for benzodiazepine-class anti-anxiety drugs, but turned in scripts for antipsychotic and antidepressants at rates higher than residents of states without legal cannabis access.
In one way, the news could be good: benzodiazepines are commonly misused, with sometimes fatal results. But the increase in antipsychotic and antidepressant prescriptions is uncharted territory, said Ashley Bradford, the lead researcher on the study and an assistant professor in the School of Public Policy.
“Does this reflect a social benefit with fewer people feeling anxious, or a social harm with fewer people treating their anxiety effectively and more people experiencing psychosis and depression?” Bradford said. “We can’t say. What we can say is that physicians and patients seem to be responding to cannabis access in clinically meaningful ways.”
The researchers analyzed prescription data from more than 10 million commercially insured patients and five classes of psychotropic drugs – benzodiazepines, antidepressants, antipsychotics, barbiturates, and sleep medications. They then used a synthetic control method to compare prescription fill rates in states with medical and recreational cannabis laws to those without.
They found that in states where medical cannabis laws were in place, the prescription fill rate for benzodiazepines fell by 12.4% compared to states that did not allow any form of legal marijuana. Legal recreational marijuana caused a bigger drop: 15.2%.
However, in states with medical cannabis laws, the antidepressant prescriptions fill rate increased by 3.8% while fill rates for antipsychotics rose by 2.5%. Recreational cannabis availability resulted in an 8.8% increase in the antidepressant prescription fill rate, according to the study.
The impact of legal cannabis on barbiturates and sleeping medications was insignificant.
"This study suggests that cannabis laws may be significantly associated with the population-level use of prescription drugs to treat mental health disorders, although the associations vary by drug class and state,” the authors wrote in the paper. "Our results suggest that additional research is needed to assess whether changes in dispensing of (mental health drugs) are associated with differences in health care outcomes."
Previous studies focused primarily on the impact of medical and, to a lesser extent, recreational laws on prescription dispensing in the Medicaid and Medicare populations. This work reveals that commercially insured patients seem to respond to legal cannabis access in similar ways to those on Medicare and Medicaid.
The study also demonstrates the impact of different state laws, Bradford said. She said that the results suggest that researchers could identify which aspects of cannabis policies lead to socially optimal outcomes and help policymakers in each state tailor their laws to the outcomes they most care about.
“It’s important to remember that these results don’t tell us anything about the mental health outcomes of people who may be using cannabis instead of anxiety medications, or why prescriptions for these other drugs are increasing,” she said. “So, there’s room for a lot of future research here.”.
The study, published Sept. 5, 2024, in JAMA Network Open, is available at https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.32021.
Michael Pearson
Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts
Ant hill cast in molten aluminum to show intricate underground structure of tunnels and chambers, much like the branches of coral.
- Written by Benjamin Wright -
Nature doesn’t waste energy, and nature finds ways to adapt to a changing world. Understanding those two principles led David Frost to his interest in bio-inspired design. Frost, the Elizabeth and Bill Higginbotham Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has spent the last dozen years searching for ways to use nature’s efficiency and ingenuity to improve the civil engineering field. His efforts are paying off. In the last year alone, research from his lab has resulted in multiple patent filings, licensing agreements, and product launches — all of which take their inspiration from the biological world.
Many of those research projects have been the subjects of doctoral research by Frost’s students, with support and advisement from Michael Helms, co-director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Biologically Inspired Design (CBID) and the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems lead for biologically inspired design. The CBID mandate is to encourage researchers to find inspiration in the biological world, where design solutions have been in development for three-and-a-half billion years as life has on Earth has evolved. Building on the concept that nature isn’t wasteful, one of the goals of bio-inspired design is to develop products that are both energy and materially efficient, and therefore more sustainable.
As the subsurface exploration and excavation thrust leader for the National Science Foundation (NSF) Center for Bio-mediated and Bio-inspired Geotechnics (CBBG), Frost focuses on what’s going on below the planet’s surface. His inspiration comes from things like tree roots, earthworms, spider webs, and ant colonies. In fact, ants are what first got him interested in bio-inspired design.
“There are many organism systems that have not been thought of as necessarily the most intelligent systems. But in fact, they are following a set of rules, approaches, or guidelines and are producing things that, in the end, are both energy- and resource-efficient and adaptive,” said Frost. “One of these is ant colonies. We see the hills above ground, but what’s going on below the ground, with the tunnels and chambers, is fascinating.”
Early in his time with CBBG, Frost came across a Florida artist who made metal castings of ant colony structures. Frost acquired some, made more castings of his own, and then built digital models of ant colonies to understand how the structures maintain their strength. He also studied exactly how ants build such complex structures so efficiently.
“They take advantage of capillarity, arching effects, and the strength of spirals,” explained Frost.
Ants dig by carefully and quickly probing each grain of sand or dirt, in the same way a human might test a Jenga piece, before deciding whether it can be safely removed without damaging the tunnel. As a result, ants are extremely energy efficient as they dig, continually removing the least encumbered pieces of material. Based on this information, Frost and his team are exploring ways to improve the effectiveness and energy usage of tunnel-boring machines.
Other bio-inspired projects from Frost’s research that are further along in the development process include building anchors inspired by tree roots, a ground heat-exchange system based on spirals and plant xylem, a geogrid (or stabilization mesh) design based on spiderwebs, a worm-inspired soil probe, and another probe design influenced by a vortex and centipedes that would displace a minimum amount of soil.
“I'm convinced that just about any system in nature we look at will help us think about analogs for things that, as human engineers, we’d like to do — and do better,” said Frost. “The opportunities for inspiration and improvement are endless.”
Take the Root-Inspired Ground Anchor (RIGA), for example. Anchors are an essential element in construction, stabilizing retaining walls and other foundation structures. Traditionally, anchors are straight poles inserted into the ground. Looking at tree roots, Frost wondered if there was a better way. That thought led him to inventing an anchor that can be driven into the ground and then expanded under the surface, similar to the structure of tree roots. The expandable anchor improves load capacity by up to 75% and is about two-thirds as long as a conventional anchor. After years of refinement, the device has been patented, licensed, and is the basis of a startup founded by Ph.D. student John Huntoon.
Frost takes the most pride in the real-world impact of his bio-inspired designs. Since 2023, Georgia Tech has filed, or is in the process of filing, utility patents for five of them. Like the RIGA system, those patents will be available for licensing for commercial use. Companies have already contacted Frost about his heat-exchange and geogrid concepts.
“Civil engineering doesn’t traditionally have a culture of patent-producing research,” noted Frost. “It’s exciting to see these filings and how they can generate energy and enthusiasm for studying natural systems and using what we learn to improve the world. Practical application has always been very important to me.”
Frost is finding that practical application also appeals to the next generation of civil engineers — specifically K-12 students interested in the profession who tour the CBID affiliated labs on campus. The students study nature’s designs and figure out how to apply them, rather than learn traditional construction methods.
“Ants, spiders, and worms are immediately relatable for middle- and high-school students,” Frost said. “They think engineering is all math and science, and that doesn’t sound fun to them. Instead, we show them they can be inspired by anything and then use that to make it about conservation and adaptation and energy minimization. Those are things they are interested in.”
Frost is hopeful that the students of today and tomorrow will continue to take inspiration from nature, enabling humans to adapt to a changing world as effectively as nature has.
Brent Verrill, Research Communications Program Manager, BBISS
Screen readers, voice-to-text, and other accessibility features have enabled people with disabilities to use smartphones. Yet these same features make the phones more accessible to hackers, too.
Malware uses these accessibility tools to read screens and click on things it shouldn’t — with disastrous consequences, like transferring large sums of money from a banking app or even preventing the malware from being uninstalled. All it takes is a user clicking on a phishing link or downloading the wrong app on the Google Play Store to install malware on a phone. Then everything from cryptocurrency apps to rideshare apps that have credit cards stored in a virtual wallet become vulnerable.
Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a new tool, Detector of Victim-specific Accessibility (DVa), that can check for malware. DVa runs on the cloud to check the phone for this malware, then sends the user a report of its findings that shows which apps are malware and how to delete them. It will also tell them which victim apps the malware was targeting and how to contact those companies to check for damages. DVa also sends a report to Google, so the company can attempt to eradicate this malware from apps.
“As we continue to design systems that are more and more accessible, we also need security experts in the room,” said Brendan Saltaformaggio, an associate professor in the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP) and the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Because if we don't, they're going to get abused by hackers.”
Modeling Malware
To determine how vulnerable smartphones are to this type of hack, the team set up five Google Pixel phones and performed a malware analysis. The Georgia Tech researchers teamed up with Netskope — an industry leader in cloud, data, and network security — to help protect smartphones everywhere from this type of powerful malware. Then they installed some of the sample malware on each phone to see how it debilitated the system and used DVa to report this behavior.
While DVa can detect current attacks, the researchers note the challenge is ensuring that removing malware doesn’t remove accessibility.
“In the future, we need to look at how accessibility services work overall to figure out what's fundamentally different from a benign use and a malicious use,” said Haichuan (Ken) Xu, a Ph.D. student in SCP.
Tess Malone, Senior Research Writer/Editor
tess.malone@gatech.edu
An Adobe stock conceptual image of a lighted bulb in the dirt illustrating new technology that draws energy from dirt.
A newly designed soil-powered fuel cell that could provide a sustainable alternative to batteries was recognized as an honorable mention in the annual Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards.
Terracell is roughly the size of a paperback book and uses microbes found in soil to generate energy for low-power applications.
Previous designs for soil microbial fuel cells required water submergence or saturated soil. Terracell can function in soil with a volumetric water content of 42%
Terracell placed in Fast Company’s list of the best sustainability-focused designs of 2024.
Researchers at Northwestern University lead the multi-institution research team that designed Terracell.
Josiah Hester, an associate professor in Georgia Tech's School of Interactive Computing who previously worked at Northwestern, directs the Ka Moamoa Lab, where the project was conceived.
The team includes researchers from Northwestern, Georgia Tech, Stanford, the University of California-San Diego, and the University of California-Santa Cruz.
Their research was published in January in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies. The researchers will also present this work at the ACM international joint conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (Ubicomp), Oct. 5-9.
According to the Fast Company website, the Innovation by Design Awards recognize “designers and businesses solving the most crucial problems of today and anticipating the pressing issues of tomorrow.” Winners are published in Fast Company Magazine and are honored at the Fast Company Innovation Festival in the fall.
“Terracell could reduce e-waste and extend the useful lifetime of electronics deployed for agriculture, environmental monitoring, and smart cities,” Hester said. “We were honored to be recognized for the design innovation award. It is a testament to the promise of sustainable computing and our hope for a more sustainable world.”
For more information about Terracell, see the story featured on Northwestern Now, or visit the project’s website.
Nathan Deen, Communications Officer
Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing
nathan.deen@cc.gatech.edu