Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science

Impressive photography

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landscape gove

We at @VTResearch are continually impressed by the panoramic “slider” photos on the Virginia governor’s website.

This hit home when browsing through the site news and coming across a fantastic shot from the Let’s Fly Wisely event, where Virginia Tech oversaw some important unmanned aircraft research flights. Virginia Tech President Timothy D. Sands was in the midst of what amounts to a gigantic media flash mob at the normally sedate Lonesome Pine airport. Scroll through and you can see it.

This is the best image yet to capture the scene. We can’t really do it justice here with our screen grab.

Most of us who have to freshen Web pages know that art can be a big challenge. But the state site makes it look easy.

How @GovernorVA are you nailing these shots?

Advancing Artificial Intelligence through cartoons?

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Parikh_ADI_2014_AI

The other day when I picked my three year old son up from daycare, I noticed his teacher had taped an image from a kid’s magazine up on the wall. Beneath it were all of these cute little musings and observations made by the daycare students. “This picture shows a boy and a girl.  The boy is sitting on a ball.  The girl is being silly.”

When I got to my son’s write-up, it was nearly a page long and he had something to say about everything. 

“I think the girl is laughing because the boy has shark teeth on the bottom of his shoes.” (He did!) “The girl has curly hair and the boy likes that her shoes are pink. He likes playing ball games and wants her to be his friend. His skin is a little bit lighter than hers and he has a sweater on…”

The son of a scientist and a writer; he is both observant and prolific.

Devi Parikh, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Virginia Tech, has recently won a Google Faculty Award to take a very similar idea and use it to teach computers a little bit of common sense.  Although, instead of using toddlers and magazines to generate data, she is using Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers (“Turkers”) and clip art. Through this visual-outsourcing, hundreds of thousands of vetted users from all over the world can create abstract scenes to teach computers object recognition, properties, relationships and poses. These extremely rich scenes touch on something that has never been done before — turning semantic visual features into language.

We all know that (most) kids are afraid of bears. A scene depicting a scared child next to a large, snarling bear would surely make sense to us, but to a computer this is a real head-scratcher.  Parikh hopes to use these user-created clip art scenes and depictions to teach computers much of the information we as humans take for granted. In doing so, she will advance computer vision and enhance a variety of machine learning applications, such as autonomous driving.

And as a mother of two young children and oftentimes distracted minivan driver, anything that brings autonomous driving closer to reality definitely gets the green light.

 

 

 

A picture is worth a thousand words…

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The human mind can only hold so much information at a given time. 

Most of us have played the memory game where the host brings out a tray of assorted knick-knacks and gives us a few moments to stare at it before it is whisked away and we are asked to recall as many items as we can.

Generally speaking, this number falls within the “seven plus or minus two” range. One of the most highly cited papers in psychology, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” speaks to this phenomenon.

Recent advances in Big Data have great promise for solving some of society’s most challenging problems, but how does the human mind handle staring at over a thousand different data points?

Big Data Analytics methods typically require the expertise of a highly skilled analyst. The “human in the loop” method of analysis allows the user to change the outcome of an event or process by modeling different scenarios. Analysts sort through large, complex collections of data sets by employing different models and running simulations. However, most researchers do not possess this level of analytics expertise, and although companies are investing large sums of money to gain insight from the surplus of publically streaming information, they often do not have employees on staff who are able to make much sense of it.

A recent grant award from the National Science Foundation aims to change all of that. Chris North, a professor of computer science and associate director of the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science’s Discovery Analytics Center and his well-seasoned team of researchers have won a $1 million grant award to make Big Data Analytics more user-friendly.

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The team is using a spatial metaphor system, known as Andromeda, to bring large data clouds down to manageable working sets.

In this system, similar objects are placed in closer proximity. When the user changes the layout of the items, the system updates and learns which data features make those items similar. When people re-organize the data, the data responds and the user is able to learn what features are responsible for that change.

Think back to the aforementioned memory game. Imagine how many more items you could remember if you were able to manipulate the tray and group like objects together to create patterns of similarity. Andromeda allows users to visually interact with the data and glean more meaning from the data points. And using it doesn’t require a Ph.D.

North is excited about the fact that people can apply their own knowledge on the subject area and recognize interesting, new patterns when they arise. The visualization is then tailored to how a person thinks about the data, and the tasks of organization and discovery can occur simultaneously.

By making Big Data a “meaningful picture that users can manipulate,” North and his team are bringing Big Data Analytics to the masses.

 

Written by Emily Kathleen Alberts

Join us for the 2nd Annual ICTAS Program Review

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cover collage

Today kicks off the 2nd Annual Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science (ICTAS) Program Review.

Join us at the Holtzman Assembly Hall near the Inn with opening remarks by Director Roop Mahajan, followed by Presidential remarks by Timothy D. Sands.

Highly diverse research topics including nanoscale science and engineering, the nano-bio interface, sustainable energy, renewable materials, sustainable water, cognitive systems, and national security are being explored in this two-day event (October 2nd-3rd).

Come find out about our latest research endeavors and hear how we are addressing society’s most challenging needs by transcending traditional academic boundaries.

ICTAS is a premier institute with a mission to advance transformative, interdisciplinary research for a sustainable future.

We hope to see you there!

A Horse of a Not So Different Color

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Latvia

Back from his Fulbright travels to Latvia, Daniel Youngstrom’s cells have been enriched.

ICTAS Doctoral Scholar Daniel Youngstrom, a Ph.D. candidate in biomedical and veterinary sciences at the Virginia-Maryland Regional College of Veterinary Medicine, attests that although the culture is very different in Latvia, “once you step foot in the lab, things are surprisingly the same.”  It was through this common language of science – paired with the fact that he has familial roots in Latvia and is familiar with the native tongue – that Youngstrom’s research on human stem cells was able to flourish at the Cell Transplantation Center in Riga.

001_horse_skeleSpeaking of flourish, that is exactly what the stem cells that Youngstrom studied happened to do. One focus of regenerative medicine is to transplant adult stem cells into the site of a degenerative injury to improve tissue healing.  Although he studies horse stem cells at the Virginia Tech Equine Medical Center, the human cells he characterized in Latvia can be manipulated in similar ways.  By taking tissue samples from human total hip replacement surgeries, he was able to study adult stem cell behavior and potentially improve cell therapies currently used to regenerate diseased cartilage in osteoarthritis. One facet of this research is the interaction between cells and their surrounding proteins.  “Cells produce a complex extracellular matrix, and use it to send and receive information about its environment,” said Youngstrom.  “This information is critical in maintaining proper cell behavior.” Using cell culture techniques incorporating a biomimetic three-dimensional environment, researchers can improve in vitro cell growth and preserve therapeutic properties versus traditional techniques.

The major theme of Youngstrom’s work is how stem cells sense their environment, and how to use this information to improve emerging regenerative therapies.  Obtaining a sufficient quantity of stem cells for cell therapy is difficult because of the relative rarity of stem cells in adults.  Cells are often grown in a laboratory to generate sufficient numbers, but traditional cell culture plates may alter cell phenotype and behavior. In order to reproduce a native-like 3D environment, Youngstrom used a special hydrogel system.  This work will help researchers deliver the next generation of therapies.

Youngstrom has integrated his experience in Latvia back to his research in Leesburg.  He notes that there are similarities in the Leesburg and Riga laboratories because they are both academic labs that offer clinical services.

Upon graduation, he hopes to continue his academic research career in musculoskeletal biology and regenerative medicine.

 

Did you know?

Forests account for 56% of the total land area in Latvia

Latvia has over 12,500 rivers, and is only half the size of Virginia!

An International Environmental Performance Index ranked Latvia 1st out of 132 countries

4-D Printing, let’s ride the next wave…

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4th dimension

The Fourth Dimension

Technology is constantly evolving, adapting and transforming. Now there exists a technology that is able to evolve, adapt and transform all by itself.

Known as Programmable Matter (PM), this technology builds upon the notion of 3-D printing by adding another dimension, change. PM refers to “the ability for material objects to change form and function after they are produced,” says Dr. Tom Campbell, a research associate professor at ICTAS specializing in future trends and advanced materials. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) had a program on PM in 2007. The U.S. Army Research Office recently awarded $855,000 to three universities to make advances in 4-D printing.

A Bit of History

Ushering in a new era of customization and creativity, 3-D printing removed manufacturing restrictions and enabled a single machine to “print” material into virtually any shape by simply reading a design file. However, with 3-D printing, the end product is always something static and fixed. Engineers began tinkering with the idea of creating something that could do more. Much more.

By programming the material to be printed, researchers realized they could design objects that could actually change form and function in different conditions. Sometimes, all that is needed to see the change is water, sometimes it is heat. Or in the case of Dr. Christopher Williams – associate professor, director of the DREAMS Lab at Virginia Tech, and co-director of the Center for Innovation-based Manufacturing – all that is needed for his 4-D printed airplane wing flaps to change position mid-air is electrical current, thus allowing planes to achieve an enhanced flight performance.

So how do they do it? The answer is simple. Geometry. Much like our bodies function as a result of our genetic code, 4-D printed objects function based on their geometric code. The code teaches the object how to unfold, curl and form specific angles when confronted with outside forces.   It is one thing to make a material that expands by 150% when immersed in water, but it is quite another to dictate the precise manner in which it expands, unfolding at certain angles instead of just swelling up like a bloated sponge. Perhaps real-life Transformers are not too far off?

What’s Next?

One can imagine tires that adapt to road conditions, tools that disassemble when they’re no longer needed, micro-scale robots that morph into military machines, even buildings that erect themselves. Of course, one can also imagine airplane wing codes being hacked to cause a crash. If a code can be programmed that means it can be cracked. National security heavyweights such as the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security of the Atlantic Council, a think tank with advisors such as Henry Kissinger on its board of directors, are taking a strong interest in this new technology (Businessweek).

Campbell and fellow researchers Mr. Skylar Tibbits, director of the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT, and Dr. Banning Garrett, senior fellow for innovation and global trends for the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative, published a report[1] on 4-D printing with the Atlantic Council that outlines potential benefits as well as caveats. The report was reviewed by DARPA as well as faculty experts at Cornell. The message is clear: as engineers begin to develop objects made by PM, they will want to ensure that security is not an afterthought. Protective measures should be “baked in” to PM rather than being recognized after the fact.

In the words of Greek philosopher Heraclitus, “The only constant is change.” In a world where we must constantly adapt to new technologies and figure out how to integrate them into our daily lives, it only makes sense that our new technologies start figuring out how to adapt, too.

[1] Thomas A. Campbell, Skylar Tibbits, Banning Garrett (2014), “The Next Wave: 4D Printing – Programming the Material World,” Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security, Atlantic Council, http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/images/publications/The_Next_Wave_4D_Printing_Programming_the_Material_World.pdf

Why the cap? Why the gown? And which way does the tassel go again?

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hat

It is that time of year when graduating seniors start to wonder what they’re going to wear to those upcoming job interviews, or for those ahead of the game, what they’re going to wear to work. But at least our dear graduates won’t have to worry about finding that perfect outfit for commencement. Tomorrow our VT students will be a sea of black robes, with only the color of a dangling tassel to set them apart.

The origin of the goofy garments

The cap and gown custom started during the 12th century when early universities were still forming in Europe. At that time, no sufficient heating system was provided and students were forced to improvise to keep warm. The scholars, who were usually aspiring clerics or already clerics, started the practice of wearing a long robe with a hood for heat. Later that century, gowns were made the official dress of academics to prevent people from piling on layers and looking “frumpy” on their big day. It is quite ironic how nowadays, most of us are burning up in these robes!

Now for the hat. Commonly called a “mortarboard” due to its funny shape and similarity to what masons used to hold mortar, the graduation cap was based on the birettas worn by scholarly clergies to signify their superiority and intelligence. These hats became popular in the 14th and 15th centuries and were worn only by artists, humanists, students, and all those learned. They usually came in the color red signifying blood and life, hence, power more than life and death. We know them now as the hats worn primarily by religious cardinals.

Cap and Gown etiquette

Okay, so maybe our grads do have to worry a little…

Men: It is recommended that men wear dark trousers or khakis, dark socks, shoes, and a neatly-pressed, light-colored dress shirt with dark tie underneath an academic gown. Jeans and shorts, sandals and tennis shoes should be avoided. The cap is worn flat on the head. Men should remove their caps during the school song and the National Anthem.

Women: Graduates should wear dark slacks, dress, or skirt, and a light-colored dress blouse with dark shoes. High heels are not recommended for reasons of safety and comfort, flats or pumps are suggested. Sandals and tennis shoes should not be worn. Women are allowed to keep their caps on during the National Anthem.

Left to right? Right to left?

You’ve made it through college and are ready to graduate into the real world, but there is one more question you need answered. Where does the tassel go? Tassels are usually worn on the right side and shifted to the left when graduates receive their diplomas. Now whether or not you want to toss your cap into the air at the end is entirely up to you.

Finding jobs in the 21st Century

With all of the technological breakthroughs we’ve made in this Information Age, it is safe to say that there is still no magic bullet for finding a job. Hard work, good communication skills, and yes, etiquette are still just as important today they were decades ago. Of course using the web to do research on a company, find an internship, or see when the next career fair is being held doesn’t hurt either. Good luck out there, graduates!

 

Written by Emily Kale

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