OrthoPreserve, a startup founded by Georgia Tech alumnus Jonathan Schwartz, is striving to make debilitating meniscus injuries a thing of the past and to address the long-term complications associated with meniscus tears, a common issue among athletes and aging adults.

The meniscus is a C-shaped structure that acts as a shock absorber and stabilizer in the knee, distributing impact and protecting bone cartilage from deteriorating. Meniscus injuries are frequent in sports — aggressive movements from running or rapidly adjusting leg positions can cause the meniscus to overextend and tear. The risk of injury also increases with age. Over time, degeneration in the knee can wear down the meniscus, making it weaker and easier to tear, even during normal daily activities. 

“Right now, the main treatment for meniscus injuries is surgery to cut out the damaged part of the meniscus to relieve pain and impairment, but pain often returns within a few years due to degradation,” Schwartz said. “Once the meniscus is cut, the only treatments are pain medication, injections, physical therapy, and even knee replacement.” 

According to Schwartz, over half of meniscus surgery patients, regardless of age, get early-onset arthritis because a severed meniscus can no longer cushion the knee as effectively.

“Patients don’t like hearing that the only treatment available is to cut out their meniscus — which will accelerate arthritis development,” Schwartz said. “Our mission is to use our meniscus implant to help people return to activity quickly and avoid the long-term consequences of surgery.” 

From Academia to Industry

Schwartz’s journey to entrepreneurship began at Georgia Tech, where he enrolled as a bioengineering Ph.D. student and joined the Biofluids and Medical Device Research Group, led by David Ku, Regents’ Professor and Lawrence P. Huang Endowed Chair for Engineering Entrepreneurship. There, Schwartz and Ku discussed potential areas of need in the medical device field. Growing up in a family that experienced numerous knee and meniscus issues and having a longstanding interest in orthopedics, Schwartz decided to design an implant that could mimic the properties of the natural meniscus. 

After two years in the program developing a prototype, Schwartz left Georgia Tech with a master’s degree to work in the biopharmaceutical industry. In 2021, he co-founded OrthoPreserve with orthopedic clinicians Cyrus Kump, M.D., and Max Guillot, PA-C.

While working full-time, Schwartz both improved upon his prototype and developed his company on the side. But when he secured a National Institutes of Health research grant for his implant in 2023, he left his job to pursue OrthoPreserve exclusively.

An Innovative Implant 

Made from a biocompatible hydrogel material reinforced with high-strength fibers, the implant mimics the shape, structure, and biomechanical properties of the meniscus. It is designed to restore normal joint mechanics and provide long-term protection and stability to the knee joint.

The company has also developed a minimally invasive surgical technique, allowing patients to recover quickly after a short surgery entailing just four or five small incisions. During surgery, the natural meniscus is removed, and the meniscus implant is attached to the knee joint similarly to the natural meniscus. 

OrthoPreserve recently completed its first animal study in sheep, with promising results. 

"All the sheep were able to walk normally within two or three weeks, and the implants held up without breaking down,” Schwartz said. “The cartilage was protected at the same level as the natural meniscus on the sheep’s other knees.”

This year, Schwartz met with the FDA and laid out a testing plan that will allow the company to start trials in humans within two years. The next animal study will last six to 12 months and will assess the long-term protective capabilities of the implant. After testing, the next steps will be to start human clinical trials and refine manufacturing techniques.

A Campus Community 

OrthoPreserve’s home base is BioSpark Labs, a life sciences incubator space in Georgia Tech’s Science Square district. It is a collaborative startup environment that provides office space, shared laboratories, and equipment.

“We built BioSpark Labs because there was a need for more wet lab space and cleanroom space in the Atlanta area, and we wanted to keep biotech research coming out of Atlanta, and especially Georgia Tech,” said Noriko Walker, associate director of Portfolio Management in Georgia Tech’s Real Estate Office. “We kept hearing researchers say they have companies in Boston or San Francisco, and we wanted to provide a place where they could stay, do their research, and grow their companies here instead.”

For Schwartz, one of the most valuable benefits of BioSpark is access to Georgia Tech’s core facilities. 

“It is a great atmosphere that comes with the vast resources available for research at Georgia Tech,” he said. “We also plan to take advantage of our location and look to Georgia Tech talent when we start hiring.”

Schwartz has several goals for OrthoPreserve. He wants to address the significant clinical need to help meniscus injury patients recover quickly, remain symptom-free, and avoid getting arthritis or a knee replacement. He wants to reduce the high costs associated with ongoing pain treatment and invasive surgeries. Improving patients’ quality of life is also on the list. 

“With serious meniscus injuries, you can't get the joy you used to from being active, and often you just have to sit on the sidelines and watch. We hope our implant can help these patients resume their normal activities and do the things they love.”

A new data visualization tool designed by a Georgia Tech Ph.D. student is helping a team of microbial ecologists, geobiologists, and oceanographers gain more insight into how deep-sea microorganisms interact within their environment.

What began as an internship at NASA turned into a unique opportunity for fourth-year Ph.D. student Adam Coscia. Coscia worked under the supervision of an interdisciplinary team of collaborative researchers from Caltech, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Caltech manages for NASA and the ArtCenter College of Design.

Coscia’s mentors recommended him to a Caltech research team led by Victoria Orphan, a renowned microbial ecologist who studies microbial communities in the ocean and how they function within habitats in deep seafloor sediments. 

Orphan and her team, the Orphan Lab at Caltech, have conducted their research since 2004. They recently decided to take a data visualization approach to record their findings and plan future expeditions.

“Historically, our data sets have been discrete and have lived in separate Excel spreadsheets,” Orphan said. “Maybe at the end, we’ll do some statistical analysis to find correlations in that data. Then we compare those to our maps. We didn’t have a way of consolidating everything under one umbrella that allows us to learn more about these ecosystems.”

Orphan said her team typically takes one or two research expeditions off the California coast annually. They spend three weeks using remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to collect sediment samples from the ocean floor. Because time is at a premium, identifying the locations of the best samples is crucial.

Orphan is also an adjunct scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and works with the Seafloor Mapping Lab. The lab uses an ROV-mounted low-altitude survey system to produce detailed maps of seafloor topography. 

To help the Orphan Lab work effectively with topographic and photographic data, Coscia designed DeepSee, an interactive web browser that can annotate and chart data using 3D visualization models and environmental maps.

“The idea is once you have the samples, and you’re interested in a specific area with prior samples, you can go in and annotate on the map where to collect samples next with our drawing tool,” Coscia said.

“We focused on the exploration and notetaking process with maps and data and having new ways of visualizing it. Scientists can draw and map out all their samples in real time. They can reference specific data much easier and determine where the team should go to get the best samples.”

The Orphan Lab has taken DeepSee live onboard its ship for its two most recent expeditions. Orphan has noticed an increased efficiency in expedition planning.

“The infrastructure put in place by Adam will make this an enabling tool not only for my group but for other oceanographers and scientists in other fields — anywhere there is a spatial distribution of information you want to connect to other metadata,” she said.

Orphan brings new researchers into her lab at Caltech every year, and DeepSee has accelerated the process of getting newcomers up to speed.

“We can onboard them much easier and give them a sense of what data is available and where we’ve collected information in a way that’s much clearer than having them refer to an Excel spreadsheet,” she said.

DeepSee also creates 3D data models under the sea floor using data interpolation, which estimates new data points based on the range of a set of known data points. Using the known data points, DeepSee fills in the blanks of the estimated data quality the researchers may find in nearby locations or further underneath the surface where samples were collected.

“You would never see anything visually below the sea floor,” Coscia said. “You’d have to go dig. But our 3D models show you that you might have data suggesting a hotspot just a few feet below the floor. That tells you where to sample next.”

Coscia aims to incorporate machine learning (ML) models into a future version of DeepSee that will use collected data to predict future sites for sampling. However, ML model accuracy requires significantly more data.

Coscia hopes the current version of the tool catches on so researchers can more easily incorporate machine learning into their work.

For now, the current version has plenty of uses, he said.

“Being able to organize and see your data, especially with maps, is always valuable,” he said. “My passion is helping researchers and scientists see their data in new and valuable ways.”

Coscia authored a paper on developing DeepSee, which he presented in May at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Honolulu, Hawaii.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over 90% of the U.S. population has internet access. 

However, many households, particularly those of low socioeconomic status, are “smartphone-dependent,” meaning they rely purely on their smartphone for internet access. As a result, their connection may be unstable or slow, and they may be constrained by data caps that limit how much they can use the internet. This puts them at a disadvantage compared to households with internet access through smartphones and other broadband connections at home and work, perpetuating digital inequality between disadvantaged and advantaged households. 

The smartphone dependence of many disadvantaged households begs the question: If mobile internet service was better – e.g. if it was faster, more reliable, and/or didn’t come with data constraints – could that reduce digital inequality and level the playing field? Researchers from the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business and Southern Methodist University Cox School of Business studied this question and found the answer is “yes.”

Karthik Kannan, assistant professor of IT and Operations Management at the Cox School of Business and Georgia Tech Ph.D. graduate, led the project. “I was interested in the effect of data caps. For example, when you have 10GB of data per month and use more, you are charged extra, or your connection is throttled,” said Kannan. “So, I partnered with a large telecommunications provider to study what happens when their subscribers switched from capped to unlimited data plans. I was particularly interested in differences between high-income and low-income households.”

Kannan, along with Eric Overby, Catherine and Edwin Wahlen Professor of Information Technology Management, and Sri Narasimhan, Gregory J. Owens Professor of Information Technology Management, at the Scheller College of Business, found that while all households increased their data use after switching to an unlimited plan, the increase was significantly larger for families of low socioeconomic status.

“That was our initial finding: that improving mobile internet service by removing the data cap had disproportionately large benefits for disadvantaged households,” said Overby. “But that didn’t mean much in and of itself. If those households weren’t using the additional data for ‘enriching’ purposes like accessing educational, health care, or career-related data, the additional data consumption wouldn’t translate into positive social benefits. Indeed, years of research on digital inequality have consistently shown a ‘usage gap’ in which advantaged households take fuller advantage of internet access improvements than disadvantaged households. The result is that internet improvements often exacerbate inequality. So, we dug deeper.”

Specifically, the researchers leveraged the telecommunication provider’s data categorization system to study changes in the consumption of educational data. They found that disadvantaged households experienced disproportionate increases in education data consumption (as well as in overall data consumption) after switching to unlimited mobile data. Although advantaged households increased their education data consumption by approximately 15MB (or about three digital textbooks) per month after switching to unlimited data, disadvantaged households increased their education data consumption by approximately 24MB (or about five digital textbooks) per month.

 “We can’t be sure that these disproportionate increases in education data consumption will help disadvantaged households narrow gaps in educational outcomes. However, this is clearly a step in the right direction,” said Kannan. 

 The research is directly relevant to the Federal Communications Commission’s 2023 inquiry into the effects of data caps on disadvantaged households. Narasimhan explains, “Let’s say that based on their inquiry, the FCC decides to limit the use of data caps. A logical question is: will that do any good? In other words, will disadvantaged households take advantage of their improved mobile internet service in a way that can reduce digital inequality? Prior to our research, we didn’t really know. But based on our research, the answer is yes.”

 The research paper is forthcoming in Management Science and available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4173558.

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.

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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