Since June, Lalith Polepeddi and Akhil Chavan have been using their skills in computer science and machine learning to help study biodiversity in Georgia Tech’s new EcoCommons.
Both research staff at the Georgia Tech Global Change Program, Polepeddi and Chavan teamed up to apply for a micro research grant from the Kendeda Living Building last summer. The grants empower research and innovation at a student, staff, and faculty level through small, accessible, amounts of seed funding.
The world’s dependence on semiconductors came into sharp focus in 2021, when automotive manufacturing ground to a halt because of massive computer chip shortages – as Asian suppliers couldn’t keep up with demand for microelectronics – miniaturized electronic circuits and components that drive everything from smartphones to new vehicle components to hypersonics weapons systems.
The culprit was global supply chain disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The crisis has highlighted the pressing need for the U.S. to bolster its domestic semiconductor supply chains and industrial capacity, after three decades of decline as a semiconductor producer. The U.S. share of global semiconductor fabrication has dropped to 12% today, compared to 37% in 1990, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). In addition, the semiconductor industry today only accounts for 250,000 direct U.S. jobs.
As the country rebuilds its semiconductor infrastructure at home, Georgia Tech serves as a vital partner – to train the microelectronics workforce, drive future microelectronics advances, and provide unique fabrication and packaging facilities for industry, academic and government partners to develop and test new solutions.
“We’re one of the only universities that can support the whole microelectronics stack – from new materials and devices to packaging and systems,” said Madhavan Swaminathan, the John Pippin Chair in Microsystems Packaging in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the 3D Systems Packaging Research Center.
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By Frida Carrera
After almost a year since the completion of the 2021 InVenture Prize Competition, we caught up with Matt McMullen and Emma Bivings who competed as finalists on the SPOT Harness team, a harness that uses sensors and vibrators to help blind dogs navigate. Their experience in the competition exposed them to multiple experiences, environments, and demands necessary for startups for the first time. As a result, they were able to distinguish their areas of growth, gain valuable insights, and make potential changes in the direction of their product.
Today, Matt is currently a graduate student seeking a master’s in music technology and Emma is a full-time operations management trainee at McMaster-Carr. The team is still developing the SPOT Harness and has even grown its team to five members. Through funding and participating in Georgia Tech’s CREATE-X Startup Launch program, they have been able to launch their company Saving Grace Pet Solutions LLC. They plan to launch SPOT Harness under this company as well as develop other future products.
To future InVenture participants, Matt advises, “Don’t give up on your idea! The most important part of making it the distance is having a team with a passion for your product.”
The SPOT Harness team will be launching a kick-starter soon for preorders ahead of the official market launch of the SPOT Harness for blind dogs. They also advise anyone who has or knows someone who has a dog suffering from vision loss to visit their website to sign up for their newly refined prototype!
Visit their website here: www.savinggrace.tech
To learn more about the upcoming InVenture Prize Competition visit https://inventureprize.gatech.edu/ . Registration closes on Jan. 19.
By Frida Carrera
Several months after the completion of the 2021 InVenture Prize Competition, we caught up with John Wooten to see what he’s been up to! In 2021’s competition, John’s innovation Block Transfer, a decentralized stock transfer agent protocol for global financial markets, placed as a finalist.
Today, John Wooten has been actively working to grow Block Transfer by securing final SEC approval, acquiring funding by US Bank, and submitting utility patents. He believes that by combining blockchain tech with traditional financial markets, we can fundamentally change the world. John describes his experience as a finalist in the competition as being invaluable and advises, “We didn't know we could partake given prior admission to CX. Biggest advice is to just TRY!”
You can learn more about Block Transfer here: https://www.blocktransfer.io/consult
To learn more about the upcoming InVenture Prize Competition visit https://inventureprize.gatech.edu/ . Registration closes on Jan. 19.
By Frida Carrera
After almost a year since the completion of the 2021 InVenture Prize Competition, we caught up with finalist Sammie Hasen to see what she’s been up to over the past couple of months! For 2021’s competition, Sammie’s invention, BCase, placed as a finalist for its accessible, discreet, and secure birth control storage that attaches directly to the back of your phone.
Today, Sammie successfully launched BCase in New York City on World Contraception Day as one of five brands featured by Medsur Inc, the consumer goods company founded by Sammie. On September 26th, Medsur was even invited by The Pill Club, a leading contraceptive company, to participate in the launch of their uterus-shaped vending machines in New York. Medsur now continues to garner the attention from many leading health companies in the birth control space and this is just the beginning for Sammie.
“I plan to keep growing Medsur and follow our vision of creating a suite of innovative products for uterus owners. I am slowly growing the team, and I have now added the incredible Alexa Graham as COO. She is a rockstar, and she will help me grow Medsur to be all that we envision it to be!”, she explained.
Sammie adds that Medsur is always looking for new ambassadors to join the team and encourages anyone passionate about the femtech space and building innovative products to consider signing up!
You can learn more about Medsur and BCase on their website here: https://www.medsurinc.com/
To learn more about the upcoming InVenture Prize Competition visit https://inventureprize.gatech.edu/ . Registration closes on Jan. 19.
The Goldia Mae Burchfield Memorial Scholarship is open for contributions again this year. It was established last year to support students in pursuit of their undergraduate degree. Ms. Burchfield, mother to Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems Financial Manager, Gay Burchfield, died of COVID-19 on June 8th, 2020, at the age of 80, in Starkville, Mississippi. She lived a life of service to those in her community, with a particular emphasis on education.
The Burchfield family selected sophomore Catherine Shamanski in the College of Psychology to receive a $200 scholarship. Shamanski will serve as a Team Leader in a section of the GT-1000 class, helping incoming first year students to find their footing on campus.
Ms. Goldia was years ahead of her time. During the segregation era, her family moved from rural Mississippi to a larger town where she could pursue her high school education, which she completed in 1958. She wanted to join the military only to discover that women of color were not eligible to serve. She worked as a part-time custodian in a local bank for 35 years, as well as numerous odd jobs to care for her family and her community. She and her husband had several small businesses in their hometown, one of which was “Burchfield Recreation,” aka “The Pool Hall.” The pool hall also served as an ad-hoc after-school care for many families with working parents. Ms. Goldia provided meals, advice, and discipline, sometimes working extra odd jobs to finance those additional expenses. She would also put together care packages with stipends for the young people of her community who were college bound. If asked what her greatest achievements were, she would say that she was a great mom, provided free meals to many, greeted everyone with a heartfelt smile, and genuinely cared for everyone she encountered.
Donations by check should be made payable to the Georgia Tech Foundation, Inc., with "Goldia Mae Burchfield Memorial Scholarship" noted on the check or in a separate note, and should be mailed to: Georgia Tech Foundation, Inc., 760 Spring Street, NW, Suite 400, Atlanta, GA 30308.
On-line gifts can be made at https://development.gatech.edu, using the ‘GIVE NOW’ button and following directions provided. In the ‘Other Designation’ box, enter “Goldia Mae Burchfield Memorial Scholarship.” Each donor will be acknowledged by the Georgia Tech Foundation, and a list of all donors will be shared with the Burchfield family.
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Brent Verrill, Research Communications Program Manager, BBISS
Adolfo Rocco, a graduate student assistant studying under SCL faculty members Alan Erera and Alejandro Toriello, recently earned his PhD after successfully defending his thesis "Service Network Design for Parcel Trucking". Adolfo's research focuses on applications and technologies that use optimization techniques to solve complex real-world problems. Its relevance to supply chain and logistics revolves around last-mile logistics, an essential part of the economy involving the transportation of goods from producers to end-consumers. As a result of the explosive growth of e-commerce in the past decade, e-commerce sales ratios have nearly tripled globally and demand for last-mile delivery is expected to grow 78% globally by 2030. One of the main objectives of last-mile delivery logistics is to deliver packages as affordably, quickly, and efficiently as possible.
Adolfo’s dissertation research involved a large-scale package express service network design in collaboration with one of the largest courier companies in China. The objective of the project was to support the growth and evolution of the intercity logistics network (expanding coverage, offering tighter service levels, and improving efficiency). The challenge was to build flat network models given large problem size, time requirements for package movement, and consideration for relevant operational constraints. The first phase of the project focused on a detailed intracity scheduling service network design problem for megacities and developing a simple rated-based model to design shuttle and commodity paths. The next project phase focused on linehaul consolidation planning, and specifically, determining the most cost-effective hubs for cross-docking activities through developing decomposition greedy approaches that employ smaller tractable integer programming problems. In the final project phase, the focus was on a freight flow plan that conforms generalized in-tree structure and which basically generalize the in-tree concept. A main goal of the project was to build a large-scale plan when hub selection is not a concern, time requirements are relevant, and conformity and enforcement of a generalized in-tree structure that enhances operational realism is accomplished.
When asked why Rocco was interested in this specific research area, he commented, "I am passionate about employing operations research techniques to solve challenging real-world problems. I strongly believe that city logistics plays a major role in the economy because of the growth in world population and e-commerce in past years. City logistics directly impacts the lives of people and, if not addressed correctly, can have a negative impact on quality of life. Advances in scientific methodologies and computer capabilities permit us to employ enabling cutting-edge technology to tackle these challenges appropriately. This is an exciting field that I yearn more people get involved with."
Before being accepted into the PhD program, Adolfo worked for five years at an operations research consulting firm in Chile building optimization models for a Workforce Management technology system. In the summer of 2019 he interned at Delta, developing an approach to increase revenue through routing optimization. In the summer of 2020, Rocco interned with the worldwide capacity planning operations research group at Amazon, enhancing scheduling models for customer service agents. After earning his PhD, Adolfo will join Amazon as a Research Scientist working with the team he previously interned with.
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web@scl.gatech.edu
Dr. Christine Ries has been invited to serve on a Review Panel for the New NSF Future Manufacturing Program on Eco-Manufacturing.
This new multidisciplinary NSF program supports fundamental research and education of a future workforce that would enable the types of manufacturing that are not existent yet or are at such early stages of development they are not yet viable (Future Manufacturing). Reviews considered impacts on the economy, workforce, human behavior, and society at large.
News Contact
Professor Christine Ries
christine.ries@econ.gatech.edu
IDEaS recently awarded a series of grants to stimulate the research efforts of Georgia Tech’s brightest minds in data science and related disciplines. Faculty and student research programs targeted for IDEaS awards must demonstrate research goals that will be highly cross-disciplinary and emphasize how data science can assist in related research areas.
The Data Science Research Scholarships program will support scholarships for the Spring 2020 semester and focus on Ph.D. student research that enables new collaborative research or adds a data science dimension to established research projects. Each scholarship will fund 50% of the cost of a GRA appointment, with the project PI funding the remaining 50%.
Data Science Research Scholarships 2020 Awards
- JC Gumbart (Physics) & David Sherrill (Chemistry): Force-field Development to Enable Simulations of Xeno-nucleic Acids
- Xiuwei Zhang (CSE) & Haesun Park (CSE): Development of an Integrative Clustering Method for Single Cells
- Vince Calhoun (ECE) & Audrey Duarte (Psych): The Chronnectomics of Memory
- Annalisa Bracco (EAS), Jie He (EAS) & Matt J. Kusner (University College London): Machine-learning Techniques for Cloud Modeling
- Toyya Pujol-Mitchell (ISYE), Nicoleta Serban (ISyE) & Constantine Dovrolis (CS): Network Weight Prediction Using Node Attributes
- Xiaofan Liang (City & Reg Planning), Clio Andris (City & Reg Planning) & Diyi Yang (IC): Advancing Metrics for Spatial Social Networks in the Era of Big Data
- Omar Asensio (Public Policy): Do Micromobility Options Reduce Traffic Congestion? Quasi-experimental Evidence from Uber Movement Data
- Constantine Dovrolis (CS) & Kelly F. Ethun (Emory/Yerkes): Connections Between Social Behavior and Food Intake in Rhesus Macaques
- Diyi Yang (IC) & Mai ElSherief (IC): Defining, Characterizing, and Detecting Implicit Discriminatory Speech Online
- Umakishore Ramachandran (CS) & Zhuangdi Xu (CS): Generating Labeled Vehicle Tracking Dataset for Large-scale Geo-Distributed Camera Networks
- Surya R. Kalidindi (ME/CSE/MSE) & Christopher Saldana (ME): Advanced Materials-Manufacturing Data Curation
- Agata Rozga (IC), Thomas Ploetz (IC) & external: Annotation of Datasets from Severe Behavior Treatment Program at the Marcus Autism Center
Data Science Partnership 2020 Awards
- Diyi Yang (IC): Allen Institute for AI and University of Washington
- Josh Kacher (MSE): Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
- Rachel Cummings (ISyE): Georgetown University and U.S. Census Bureau
Data Science Speaker Travel Awards supports visits to the Georgia Tech campus by external experts in the areas of data science foundations or data-driven discovery in any discipline. Funds may be used to host a guest speaker for the IDEaS seminar series, or to participate in another on-campus event, conference, or seminar series. Awardees’ invited guests are experts in either mathematical data science or data science engineering.
Data Science Speaker Travel 2020 Awards
- Betsy DiSalvo (IC): Data Work Civic Engagement Panel
- Diyi Yang (IC): Natural Language Processing/Computational Social Science Seminar
Georgia Tech Arts is still seeking projects for the 2021 ACCelerate: ACC Smithsonian
Creativity and Innovation Festival in Washington, DC. All Georgia Tech students, faculty, and staff are invited to apply by May 1, 2020.
Even if you do not have a finished project exploring the intersection of science,
engineering, art, design, and technology, we encourage you to speak with Es
Famojure at esther.famojure@arts.gatech.edu about your concepts.
Learn about Georgia Tech's 2019 participants for some inspiration.
The festival brings together all institutions included in the Atlantic Coast Conference to
celebrate creativity and innovation with a specific focus on science, engineering, arts, and
design. It will be held April 9 -11, 2021 at the Smithsonian National Museum of American
History.
Submit your project for consideration by May 1, 2020 to be considered.
News Contact
Es Famojure
esther.famojure@arts.gatech.edu