We would like to congratulate two ISyE Senior Design teams for their outstanding performance in the Capstone Design competition organized by the Material Handling Industry (MHI) and College Industry Council on Material Handling Education (CICMHE).
Team "Tiffany and Co. Diamonds and Distribution: Improving the Order Fulfillment Process" won 1st place, which also comes with a monetary award of $2,000 split among the students on the team. The team worked on a project to improve Tiffany's domestic and international order fulfillment goals. After the students identified a cause for delays in the value-added services station of warehouses, they created an optimization model and a heuristic to dynamically find the most efficient location for each item. The student team also created an application that the client can utilize themselves to run the models annually.
Students: Shreya Desai | Ozashwee Ghimire | Fares Hasan | Saman Muhammad | Neha Srivatsa | William Reich | Asli Yucebilgin
Client Sponsor: Stephanie Brumby
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Gunter Sharp
Team "SAIA. SAIA-ZING UP: Evaluation of Terminal Expansion", a senior design technical competition finalist, was recognized with an Honorable Mention. The team worked with the Industrial Engineering team at Saia LTL Freight to aid in their terminal expansion implication process. Saia has set out an aggressive growth goal of opening 10-15 terminals in the next year. The model simulated a quantification of network changes as a result of additions to Saia’s network, including operational, freight flow, and cost. The system model provides Saia with proactive, data-driven insight to the impacts on their network during their terminal expansion.
Team Members: Joey Abi-Sarkis | Abhishek Mattipalli | Maya Menon | Jay Patel | Santhosh Saravanan | Abhinav Sehgal | Pooja Sharma | Yashovarman Singh
Client Contact: Ryan Madura
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Anton Kleywegt
Congratulations to both teams, their clients, and their faculty advisors.
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The second class of Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS) Graduate Fellows has been selected. The BBISS Graduate Fellows Program provides graduate students with enhanced training in sustainability, team science, and leadership in addition to their usual programs of study. Each two-year fellowship is funded by a generous gift from Brook and Shawn Byers and is additionally guided by a Faculty Advisory Board. The students apply their skills and talents, working directly with their peers, faculty, and external partners on long-term, large team, sustainability relevant projects. They are also afforded opportunities to organize and host seminar series, develop their professional networks, publish papers and draft proposals, and develop additional skills critical to their professional success and future careers leading research teams.
The 2022 class of Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems Graduate Fellows are:
- Oliver Chapman - Ph.D. student, School of Public Policy, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts
- Megan Conville - Ph.D. student, School of City and Regional Planning, College of Design
- Carlos Fernandez - Ph.D. student, George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering
- Sarah Roney - Ph.D. student, School of Biological Sciences
- Olianike Olaomo - Ph.D. student, School of History and Sociology, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts
- Vishal Sharma - Ph.D. student, School of Interactive Computing, College of Computing
The Faculty Advisory Board for the BBISS Graduate Fellows is composed of the faculty who submitted the students' nominations. Nominations for Class III of the BBISS Graduate Fellows program will open in the Spring 2023. It is expected that 6 to 8 scholars will be selected for next year’s group.
The Faculty Advisory Board for the inaugural class are:
Updates and outcomes will be posted to the BBISS website as the project progresses. Additional information is available at https://research.gatech.edu/sustainability/grad-fellows-program.
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Brent Verrill, Research Communications Program Manager
Multiple members of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) contributed to the four-year project.
Georgia Institute of Technology has been named the EcoCAR Mobility Challenge Year Four champion by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Tech’s award-winning interdisciplinary team consists of approximately 60 undergraduate and graduate students from the College of Engineering, College of Computing, Scheller College of Business, and Georgia State University.
Eleven North American university EcoCAR teams gathered for the final challenge in Arizona from May 9-20, 2022. The event marked the culmination of the competition, which tasked the universities with applying propulsion system electrification, autonomous driving control, and vehicle-to-infrastructure connectivity, to improve the energy efficiency of a 2019 Chevrolet Blazer while maintaining safety, utility, and consumer acceptability.
Over the four-year competition — sponsored by the DOE, General Motors (GM) and MathWorks — each team transformed its vehicle from a design concept into a reality. The final year of competition challenged teams to test, prove, and refine their work from the previous three years, mimicking a real-world automotive product development cycle.
ECE professor David Taylor is a faculty advisor for Georgia Tech’s EcoCAR team, along with professors Michael Leamy in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering (ME), and Thomas Fuller in the School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE).
“The role of ECE in this competition is significant, ranging from powertrain electrification to driving automation. Our team’s vehicle excelled in these areas, winning the events concerned with energy consumption and autonomous operation,” said Taylor. “The EcoCAR program provides valuable experiences for ECE students because the real-world challenges of the project effectively supplement classroom learning.”
Georgia Tech’s EcoCAR team is a $1 million research program housed under Georgia Tech’s Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) Program. VIP allows undergraduate and graduate students to participate in ambitious, long-term, multidisciplinary project teams that are led by faculty. The VIP program originated in ECE under the leadership of professor Edward Coyle.
ECE graduate research assistant (GRA) Nicholas Hummel played a key leadership role on the team along with fellow GRA Nishan Nekoo in ME. Both Hummel and Nekoo received their master’s degrees this spring. Hummel also gave the first-place presentation on Connected and Automated Vehicle Systems with recent ECE bachelor’s degree graduate Joyce Zhao.
“I've been on the team for the past two years, and have seen it come from a nearly fully virtual format at the beginning of the pandemic to the success we've achieved this year,” said Hummel, who led the team’s driving automation efforts. “If I had not joined this team, I would never have had the opportunity to grow so much as a leader and increase my passion for automation and robotics.”
Additionally, recent ECE bachelor’s degree graduate Braeden Dickson, along with recent ME bachelor’s degree graduate Anna Cobb, gave the first-place presentation on Propulsion Controls and Modeling. Braeden worked on powertrain controls to convert the conventional Chevy Blazer to a hybrid electric vehicle architecture. With his efforts, Georgia Tech vehicle was the only vehicle of the competition to improve energy consumption over the stock Blazer.
Read more about the award-winning team, view pictures from the finale, and learn about future plans.
News Contact
Dan Watson
dwatson@ece.gatech.edu
The Georgia Tech student team, "English Avenue Yellow Jackets", is the 2022 Design Challenge Residential Division Grand Winner for the Department of Energy's Solar Decathlon. They also took home first place in the contest's new Retrofit Housing division. Their winning entry retrofitted a 102-year-old house in Atlanta's English Avenue neighborhood.
"The target was to retrofit an existing house to net zero," Aayushi Mody, the team lead said. "And, well, we exceeded the target by making it net positive. The house basically generates more energy than it utilizes." But, Mody explained, that's just the beginning.
In addition to a net positive retrofit, the English Avenue Yellow Jackets provided solutions for rainwater harvesting and graywater reuse, a financial model that included land trust subsidies, and an additional 60 years' worth of projected weather data that proved the house would stay net positive even in cases of extreme weather.
Full Story...
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Ann Hoevel, Director of Communications, College of Design
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.
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
WHEN: June 7-9, 2017
WHERE: UN City, Copenhagen
WHAT: Panels and interactive sessions focusing on topics such as:
- Global Health Emergencies
- Innovation and Influencing Markets
- Strengthening Health Supply Chains
TO REGISTER ONLINE please visit chhs.gatech.edu/conference/2017/registration.
*As the 2017 conference will be hosted at the United Nations City, it will be free of charge. All attendees must be registered online prior to the event and must present an official form of government-issued photo ID to enter the UN City conference venue.
OVERVIEW:
The HHL Conference is pleased to announce the opening Keynote address from Dr. Richard Brennan, Director of Emergency Operations, Emergencies Programme, World Health Organization (WHO) in geneva, who led the Ebola Response from October 2014 to January 2016 as the Director at the WHO HQ. Dr. Brennan now oversees WHO’s response to health emergencies globally as part of the new Emergencies Programme which brings together several departments to streamline WHO’s role in emergencies globally, from prevention and preparedness to response, and from humanitarian emergencies to disease outbreaks. See full bio here.
Each year the Conference on Health & Humanitarian Logistics (HHL) provides an open forum for the discussion of challenges and new solutions in disaster preparedness and response, long-term development and humanitarian aid, and global health delivery. This neutral platform encourages learning and collaboration within and across institutions; promotes system-wide improvements in organizations and the sector as a whole; identifies important research issues; and establishes priorities in terms of strategies, policies and investments.
Speakers and participants in the event come from across global health and humanitarian sectors, from governments, NGOs, foundations, private industry, and academia, and share diverse perspectives in health and humanitarian challenges. The agenda features keynote addresses, panel discussions, focused interactive workshops, oral presentations, lunchtime group discussions, and interactive poster sessions covering a broad set of research topics and applications.
Submissions were accepted for 3 categories this year: interactive workshops, oral presentations, and posters, which explore challenges and solutions for building efficient and effective supply chains for health and humanitarian challenges. Particular topics of interest include public private partnerships, innovative uses of data or technology, and creating sustainable supply chain systems.More information about these sessions is available here. The final list of presentation, workshop sessions, and posters will be online at the links here as they are confirmed.
2017 Conference Co-organizers:
- Özlem Ergun, Northeastern University
- Jarrod Goentzel, Humanitarian Response Lab, MIT
- Etleva Kadilli, UNICEF Supply Division, Copenhagen
- Pinar Keskinocak, CHHS, Georgia Tech
- Julie Swann, CHHS, Georgia Tech
- Luk Van Wassenhove, Humanitarian Research Group, INSEAD
2017 Speakers and presenters include representatives from:
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, (CDC), Central Medical Stores Trust of Malawi, Chemonics International, DHL, Earthquake Reconstruction & Rehabilitation Authority (ERRA) Pakistan, GS1 Nigeria, Global Scientific Solutions for health, Imperial Health Sciences, John Snow Inc., Laerdal Global Health, Logistimo India, Medecins Sans Frontieres, National Medical Stores Uganda, National Primary Health Care Development Agency of Nigeria, Nexleaf Analytics, North Star Alliance, Partnership for Supply Chain Management, UCLA, Vienna University of Economics and Business, UNICEF Supply Division, UN World Food Programme, UPS, World Health Organization, USAID, and more.
News Contact
Meghan Smithgall
Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems (CHHS)