Studying the complex motility patterns of cells and microorganisms is key to understanding their behaviors and biomechanics. However, many conventional microscopes are constrained by fixed lenses and the lack of ability to track organisms over extended periods without manual intervention.

But researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have overcome these limitations through the development of an inexpensive, easy-to-assemble, modular, autonomous tracking microscope.

Costing $400 in parts with DIY assembly instructions available, Trackoscope is a frugal-science innovation accessible to a wide range of users, from high school laboratories to resource-constrained research environments.

Read the full story on the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering website.

The federally funded IAC program provides small to mid-sized industrial facilities in the region with free assessments for energy, productivity, and waste, while also supporting workforce development, recruitment, and training.

“This IAC is a great example of the ways in which Georgia Tech is serving all of Georgia and the Southeast,” said Tim Lieuwen, executive director of Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) and Regents’ Professor and holder of the David S. Lewis, Jr. Chair in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering.

“We support numerous small and medium-sized enterprises in rural, suburban, and urban areas, bringing the technical expertise of Georgia Tech to bear in solving real-world problems faced by our small businesses.”

Georgia Tech’s IAC, which serves Georgia, South Carolina, and North Florida, is administered jointly by the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership (GaMEP), part of the Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2). The organization has performed thousands of assessments since its inception in the 1980s – usually at rate of 15 to 20 per year – and typically identifies upwards of 10% in energy savings for clients.

The assessment team, overseen by IAC associate director Kelly Grissom, comprises faculty and student engineers from Georgia Tech and the Florida A&M University/Florida State University College of Engineering.

In addition, Georgia Tech leads the Southeastern IACs Center of Excellence, which partners the institution with fellow University System of Georgia (USG) entity Kennesaw State University, local HBCU Clark Atlanta University, and neighboring state capital HBCU Florida A&M University.

Although mechanical engineering has historically been the chief area of concentration for IAC’s interns, the program currently accepts students across a range of disciplines. “Increased diversity from that standpoint enriches the potential of the recommendations we can make,” said Grissom.

Students are integral to the program, as is Grissom’s role in facilitating their experiences with client engagement and technical recommendations.

“Kelly is the reason our program has been recognized,” said Randy Green, energy and sustainability services group manager at GaMEP. “He works tirelessly to ensure that assessments are accomplished with success for our manufacturers and students.”

“We also recognize our partnership with the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and with IAC program lead Comas Haynes, Ph.D., who works diligently to keep us on track and connected with our sponsors at the U.S. Department of Energy,” Green added.

The DoE accolade represents “a ‘one Georgia Tech’ win,” symbolic of the synergistic relationships forged across the Institute, said Haynes, who also serves as the Hydrogen Initiative Lead at Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) and Energy branch head in the Intelligent Sustainable Technologies Division at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. Haynes specifically cited Green’s “technical prowess and managerial oversight” as another key to the IAC program’s success.

Said Devesh Ranjan, Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair and professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, “It is truly an honor for Georgia Tech to be named the Department of Energy Industrial (Training and) Assessment Center of the Year. Clean energy and manufacturing have been a focus for the Institute and the Woodruff School for a long time, and GTRI, EI2, and SEI have collaboratively done phenomenal work in helping manufacturers save energy, improve productivity, and reduce waste.”

To check eligibility and apply for assistance from Georgia Tech’s IAC, click here.

A research group is calling for internet and social media moderators to strengthen their detection and intervention protocols for violent speech. 

Their study of language detection software found that algorithms struggle to differentiate anti-Asian violence-provoking speech from general hate speech. Left unchecked, threats of violence online can go unnoticed and turn into real-world attacks. 

Researchers from Georgia Tech and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) teamed together in the study. They made their discovery while testing natural language processing (NLP) models trained on data they crowdsourced from Asian communities. 

“The Covid-19 pandemic brought attention to how dangerous violence-provoking speech can be. There was a clear increase in reports of anti-Asian violence and hate crimes,” said Gaurav Verma, a Georgia Tech Ph.D. candidate who led the study. 

“Such speech is often amplified on social platforms, which in turn fuels anti-Asian sentiments and attacks.”

Violence-provoking speech differs from more commonly studied forms of harmful speech, like hate speech. While hate speech denigrates or insults a group, violence-provoking speech implicitly or explicitly encourages violence against targeted communities.

Humans can define and characterize violent speech as a subset of hateful speech. However, computer models struggle to tell the difference due to subtle cues and implications in language.

The researchers tested five different NLP classifiers and analyzed their F1 score, which measures a model's performance. The classifiers reported a 0.89 score for detecting hate speech, while detecting violence-provoking speech was only 0.69. This contrast highlights the notable gap between these tools and their accuracy and reliability. 

The study stresses the importance of developing more refined methods for detecting violence-provoking speech. Internet misinformation and inflammatory rhetoric escalate tensions that lead to real-world violence. 

The Covid-19 pandemic exemplified how public health crises intensify this behavior, helping inspire the study. The group cited that anti-Asian crime across the U.S. increased by 339% in 2021 due to malicious content blaming Asians for the virus. 

The researchers believe their findings show the effectiveness of community-centric approaches to problems dealing with harmful speech. These approaches would enable informed decision-making between policymakers, targeted communities, and developers of online platforms.

Along with stronger models for detecting violence-provoking speech, the group discusses a direct solution: a tiered penalty system on online platforms. Tiered systems align penalties with severity of offenses, acting as both deterrent and intervention to different levels of harmful speech. 

“We believe that we cannot tackle a problem that affects a community without involving people who are directly impacted,” said Jiawei Zhou, a Ph.D. student who studies human-centered computing at Georgia Tech. 

“By collaborating with experts and community members, we ensure our research builds on front-line efforts to combat violence-provoking speech while remaining rooted in real experiences and needs of the targeted community.”

The researchers trained their tested NLP classifiers on a dataset crowdsourced from a survey of 120 participants who self-identified as Asian community members. In the survey, the participants labeled 1,000 posts from X (formerly Twitter) as containing either violence-provoking speech, hateful speech, or neither.

Since characterizing violence-provoking speech is not universal, the researchers created a specialized codebook for survey participants. The participants studied the codebook before their survey and used an abridged version while labeling. 

To create the codebook, the group used an initial set of anti-Asian keywords to scan posts on X from January 2020 to February 2023. This tactic yielded 420,000 posts containing harmful, anti-Asian language. 

The researchers then filtered the batch through new keywords and phrases. This refined the sample to 4,000 posts that potentially contained violence-provoking content. Keywords and phrases were added to the codebook while the filtered posts were used in the labeling survey.

The team used discussion and pilot testing to validate its codebook. During trial testing, pilots labeled 100 Twitter posts to ensure the sound design of the Asian community survey. The group also sent the codebook to the ADL for review and incorporated the organization’s feedback. 

“One of the major challenges in studying violence-provoking content online is effective data collection and funneling down because most platforms actively moderate and remove overtly hateful and violent material,” said Tech alumnus Rynaa Grover (M.S. CS 2024).

“To address the complexities of this data, we developed an innovative pipeline that deals with the scale of this data in a community-aware manner.”

Emphasis on community input extended into collaboration within Georgia Tech’s College of Computing. Faculty members Srijan Kumar and Munmun De Choudhury oversaw the research that their students spearheaded.

Kumar, an assistant professor in the School of Computational Science and Engineering, advises Verma and Grover. His expertise is in artificial intelligence, data mining, and online safety.

De Choudhury is an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing and advises Zhou. Their research connects societal mental health and social media interactions.

The Georgia Tech researchers partnered with the ADL, a leading non-governmental organization that combats real-world hate and extremism. ADL researchers Binny Mathew and Jordan Kraemer co-authored the paper.

The group will present its paper at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024), which takes place in Bangkok, Thailand, Aug. 11-16 

ACL 2024 accepted 40 papers written by Georgia Tech researchers. Of the 12 Georgia Tech faculty who authored papers accepted at the conference, nine are from the College of Computing, including Kumar and De Choudhury.

“It is great to see that the peers and research community recognize the importance of community-centric work that provides grounded insights about the capabilities of leading language models,” Verma said. 

“We hope the platform encourages more work that presents community-centered perspectives on important societal problems.” 

Visit https://sites.gatech.edu/research/acl-2024/ for news and coverage of Georgia Tech research presented at ACL 2024.

Christine Conwell has been named interim executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI), effective Sept. 10. 

A principal research scientist, Conwell has served as SEI’s director of planning and operations since 2020. In this role, she oversaw strategic and annual planning within SEI and partnered with campus researchers and units to create and execute strategic programs and events. Most recently, she led the development of a new five-year action plan and launched a signature initiative to build energy-focused research partnerships with historically Black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions.  

Before her role at SEI, Conwell was managing director of the $40 million NSF-NASA Center for Chemical Evolution (CCE) in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, where she oversaw daily operations, fostered collaborations between 12 universities and other partners, and developed outreach and educational programs. Annually, she worked with more than 80 faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and students and advised on key opportunities to maximize the center's impact. She served as a key leader within CCE’s management team and, in 2020, she was awarded Georgia Tech’s prestigious Outstanding Achievement in the Research Enterprise Award for her leadership.

“Christine has been instrumental in the growth and expansion of the Strategic Energy Institute,” said Julia Kubanek, vice president of Interdisciplinary Research at Georgia Tech. “The strong research ties she has built as a long-standing member of the Georgia Tech research community, along with her outstanding leadership during the past few years, makes her the natural choice for SEI’s interim executive director.”

Conwell holds a B.S. in molecular biology and chemistry from Westminster College in Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Georgia Tech. She has authored several peer-reviewed manuscripts, book chapters, and grants on her research in DNA biophysics and non-viral gene delivery, and was a postdoctoral recipient of the NIH Ruth Kirschstein National Research Service Award. During her time at Georgia Tech, Conwell has served as a member of the Research Faculty Senate and the Faculty Executive Board, and she was selected as a member of the fifth Leading Women at Georgia Tech cohort.

“I am honored to serve as the interim executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute during this pivotal moment for energy research,” she said. “As we navigate an exciting period of innovation at the local, regional, and national levels, I am eager to build on our current momentum and deepen collaborations with our exceptional researchers, faculty, and staff to further advance our energy community and drive progress in the field.”

From airplanes to soda cans, aluminum is a crucial — not to mention, an incredibly sustainable — material in manufacturing. Since 2019, Georgia Tech has partnered with Novelis, a global leader in aluminum rolling and recycling, through the Novelis Innovation Hub to advance research and business opportunities in aluminum manufacturing.

Novelis and the Georgia Institute of Technology recently co-hosted the 19th International Conference on Aluminum Alloys (ICAA19). Held on Georgia Tech's campus, this event brought together the brightest minds in aluminum technology for four days of intensive learning and networking.

Since its inception in 1986, ICAA has been the premier global forum for aluminum manufacturing innovations. This year, the conference attracted over 300 participants from 19 countries, including representatives from academia, research organizations, and industry leaders.

“The diverse mix of attendees created a rich tapestry of knowledge and experience, fostering a robust exchange of ideas,” said Naresh Thadhani, conference co-chair and professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering

ICAA19 featured 12 symposia topics and over 250 technical presentations, delving into critical themes such as sustainability, future mobility, and next-generation manufacturing. Keynote addresses from leaders at the Aluminum Association, Airbus, and Coca-Cola set the stage for insightful discussions. Novelis Chief Technology Officer Philippe Meyer and Georgia Tech Executive Vice President for Research Chaouki Abdallah headlined the event, underscoring the importance of Novelis’ partnership with Georgia Tech.

Marking the fifth anniversary of the Novelis Innovation Hub at Georgia Tech, Hub Executive Director Shreyes Melkote says that “ICAA19 represents a prime example of the close collaboration between Novelis and the Institute, enabled by the Novelis Innovation Hub.” Melkote, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, also serves as the associate director of the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute.

“This unique center for research, development, and technology has been instrumental in advancing aluminum innovations, exemplifying the power of partnerships in driving industry progress,” says Meyer. “As we reflect on the success of ICAA19, we remain committed to strengthening our existing partnerships and forging new alliances to accelerate innovation. The collaborative spirit showcased at the conference is a testament to our dedication to leading the aluminum industry into a more sustainable future.”

Timothy Lieuwen has been appointed interim executive vice president for Research (EVPR) by Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera, effective September 10. 

Lieuwen is a Regents’ Professor, the David S. Lewis, Jr. Chair in the Daniel Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering, and executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute. His research interests range from clean energy and propulsion systems to energy policy, national security, and regional economic development. He works closely with industry and government to address fundamental problems and identify solutions in the development of clean energy systems and alternative fuels. 

A proud Georgia Tech alumnus, Lieuwen (M.S. ME 1997, Ph.D. ME 1999) has had a remarkable academic career. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the American Physical Society, the Combustion Institute, and the Indian National Academy of Engineering (foreign fellow). He has received numerous awards, including the ASME George Westinghouse Gold Medal and the AIAA Pendray Award. He serves on governing or advisory boards of three Department of Energy national labs: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and was appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Energy to the National Petroleum Council. 

Lieuwen has authored or edited four books on combustion and over 400 scientific publications. He also holds nine patents, several of which are licensed to industry, and is founder of an energy analytics company, Turbine Logic, where he acts as chief technology officer.

In Lieuwen’s appointment announcement, President Cabrera said, “Tim’s extensive experience and knowledge of Georgia Tech makes him uniquely suited to lead our research enterprise as we search for a permanent EVPR. I am grateful for his willingness to serve the Institute during this period of remarkable growth, and I look forward to working with him and the rest of the team.”

When it comes to manufacturing innovation, the “valley of death” — the gap between the lab and the industry floor where even the best discoveries often get lost — looms large.

“An individual faculty’s lab focuses on showing the innovation or the new science that they discovered,” said Aaron Stebner, professor and Eugene C. Gwaltney Jr. Chair in Manufacturing in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “At that point, the business case hasn't been made for the technology yet — there's no testing on an industrial system to know if it breaks or if it scales up. A lot of innovation and scientific discovery dies there.”

The Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute (GTMI) launched the Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility (AMPF) in 2017 to help bridge that gap. 

Now, GTMI is breaking ground on an extensive expansion to bring new capabilities in automation, artificial intelligence, and data management to the facility. 

“This will be the first facility of this size that's being intentionally designed to enable AI to perform research and development in materials and manufacturing at the same time,” said Stebner, “setting up GTMI as not just a leader in Georgia, but a leader in automation and AI in manufacturing across the country.”

AMPF: A Catalyst for Collaboration

Located just north of Georgia Tech’s main campus, APMF is a 20,000-square-foot facility serving as a teaching laboratory, technology test bed, and workforce development space for manufacturing innovations.

“The pilot facility,” says Stebner, “is meant to be a place where stakeholders in academic research, government, industry, and workforce development can come together and develop both the workforce that is needed for future technologies, as well as mature, de-risk, and develop business cases for new technologies — proving them out to the point where it makes sense for industry to pick them up.”

In addition to serving as the flagship facility for GTMI research and the state’s Georgia AIM (Artificial Intelligence in Manufacturing) project, the AMPF is a user facility accessible to Georgia Tech’s industry partners as well as the Institute’s faculty, staff, and students.

“We have all kinds of great capabilities and technologies, plus staff that can train students, postdocs, and faculty on how to use them,” said Stebner, who also serves as co-director of the GTMI-affiliated Georgia AIM project. “It creates a unique asset for Georgia Tech faculty, staff, and students.”

Bringing AI and Automation to the Forefront

The renovation of APMF is a key component of the $65 million grant, awarded to Georgia Tech by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration in 2022, which gave rise to the Georgia AIM project. With over $23 million in support from Georgia AIM, the improved facility will feature new workforce training programs, personnel, and equipment. 

Set to complete in Spring 2026, the Institute’s investment of $16 million supports construction that will roughly triple the size of the facility — and work to address a major roadblock for incorporating AI and automation into manufacturing practices: data.

“There’s a lot of work going on across the world in using machine learning in engineering problems, including manufacturing, but it's limited in scale-up and commercial adoption,” explained Stebner. 

Machine learning algorithms have the potential to make manufacturing more efficient, but they need a lot of reliable, repeatable data about the processes and materials involved to be effective. Collecting that data manually is monotonous, costly, and time-consuming.

“The idea is to automate those functions that we need to enable AI and machine learning” in manufacturing, says Stebner. “Let it be a facility where you can imagine new things and push new boundaries and not just be stuck in demonstrating concepts over and over again.”

To make that possible, the expanded facility will couple AI and data management with robotic automation.

“We're going to be able to demonstrate automation from the very beginning of our process all the way through the entire ecosystem of manufacturing,” said Steven Sheffield, GTMI’s senior assistant director of research operations.

“This expansion — no one else has done anything like it,” added Steven Ferguson, principal research scientist with GTMI and managing director of Georgia AIM. “We will have the leading facility for demonstrating what a hyperconnected and AI-driven manufacturing enterprise looks like. We’re setting the stage for Georgia Tech to continue to lead in the manufacturing space for the next decade and beyond.”

From keeping warm in the winter to doing laundry, heat is crucial to daily life. But as the world grapples with climate change, buildings’ increasing energy consumption is a critical problem. Currently, heat is produced by burning fossil fuels like coal, oil, and gas, but that will need to change as the world shifts to clean energy. 

Georgia Tech researchers in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering (ME) are developing more efficient heating systems that don’t rely on fossil fuels. They demonstrated that combining two commonly found salts could help store clean energy as heat; this can be used for heating buildings or integrated with a heat pump for cooling buildings.

The researchers presented their research in “Thermochemical Energy Storage Using Salt Mixtures With Improved Hydration Kinetics and Cycling Stability,” in the Journal of Energy Storage.

Reaction Redux 

The fundamental mechanics of heat storage are simple and can be achieved through many methods. A basic reversible chemical reaction is the foundation for their approach: A forward reaction absorbs heat and then stores it, while a reverse reaction releases the heat, enabling a building to use it.

ME Assistant Professor Akanksha Menon has been interested in thermal energy storage since she began working on her Ph.D.  When she arrived at Georgia Tech and started the Water-Energy Research Lab (WERL), she became involved in not only developing storage technology and materials but also figuring out how to integrate them within a building. She thought understanding the fundamental material challenges could translate into creating better storage.

“I realized there are so many things that we don't understand, at a scientific level, about how these thermo-chemical materials work between the forward and reverse reactions,” she said.

The Superior Salt

The reactions Menon works with use salt. Each salt molecule can hold a certain number of water molecules within its structure. To instigate the chemical reaction, the researchers dehydrate the salt with heat, so it expels water vapor as a gas. To reverse the reaction, they hydrate the salt with water, forcing the salt structure’s expansion to accommodate those water molecules. 

It sounds like a simple process, but as this expansion/contraction process happens, the salt gets more stressed and will eventually mechanically fail, the same way lithium-ion batteries only have so many charge-discharge cycles. 

“You can start with something that's a nice spherical particle, but after it goes through a few of these dehydration-hydration cycles, it just breaks apart into tiny particles and completely pulverizes or it overhydrates and agglomerates into a block,” Menon explained. 

These changes aren’t necessarily catastrophic, but they do make the salt ineffective for long-term heat storage as the storage capacity decreases over time. 

Menon and her student, Erik Barbosa, a Ph.D. student in ME, began combining salts that react with water in different ways. After testing six salts over two years, they found two that complemented each other well. Magnesium chloride often fails because it absorbs too much water, whereas strontium chloride is very slow to hydrate. Together, their respective limitations can mutually benefit each other and lead to improved heat storage.

“We didn't plan to mix salts; it was just one of the experiments we tried,” Menon said. “Then we saw this interactive behavior and spent a whole year trying to understand why this was happening and if it was something we could generalize to use for thermal energy storage.”

The Energy Storage of the Future

Menon is just beginning with this research, which was supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. Her next step is developing the structures capable of containing these salts for heat storage, which is the focus of an Energy Earthshots project funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Basic Energy Sciences.

A system-level demonstration is also planned, where one solution is filling a drum with salts in a packed bed reactor. Then hot air would flow across the salts, dehydrating them and effectively charging the drum like a battery. To release that stored energy, humid air would be blown over the salts to rehydrate the crystals. The subsequently released heat can be used in a building instead of fossil fuels. While initiating the reaction needs electricity, this could come from off-peak (excess renewable electricity) and the stored thermal energy could be deployed at peak times. This is the focus of another ongoing project in the lab that is funded by the DOE’s  Building Technologies Office.

Ultimately, this technology could lead to climate-friendly energy solutions. Plus, unlike many alternatives like lithium batteries, salt is a widely available and cost-effective material, meaning its implementation could be swift. Salt-based thermal energy storage can help reduce carbon emissions, a vital strategy in the fight against climate change.

“Our research spans the range from fundamental science to applied engineering thanks to funding from the NSF and DOE,” Menon said. “This positions Georgia Tech to make a significant impact toward decarbonizing heat and enabling a renewable future.”