Whether they know it or not, most city dwellers have probably been inside a so-called “green” building. Plaques boasting various types of environmental or energy certifications — known as ecolabels — often hang prominently in their lobbies. They’re visible, but how can we know if ecolabels have a real impact or are mostly about showing off?

Daniel Matisoff, professor of public policy at Georgia Tech, illuminates the role and impact of green building ecolabels in his book, Ecolabels, Innovation, and Green Market Transformation: Learning to LEED, which traces the curve of ecolabel adoption in the building market, revealing how ecolabels have transformed the economy and construction industry to achieve green market transformation. Co-authored by Douglas Noonan, professor of public policy at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, it is the first book to comprehensively assess the green building movement. The book was published by Cambridge University Press in October 2022.

Green building ecolabels, simply stated, are marks or designations that indicate environmental performance and sustainability certifications. Matisoff and Noonan investigated prominent ecolabels, such as LEED, and examined how they work, exploring the theory and economics behind them. They also studied factors and initiatives that drive the adoption of green building ecolabels, breaking down the green building movement step-by-step.

“A central premise of the book is that early adopters, whether they are creating a demonstration project — such as Georgia Tech’s own Kendeda Building — or adopting an ecolabel early on produce positive information spillovers that help accelerate adoption of green technologies,” Matisoff said.

According to the authors, early adopters do this by moving both supply and demand curves for new energy and environmental technologies. When early adopters employ and experiment with new green building technologies, they help build supply chains, lowering costs for others interested in adopting the technologies. Undertaking green building projects also proves the market performance of new energy and environmental technologies, thereby reducing uncertainty and increasing demand by making them more visible and widely available.

“Early adopters often build pilot and demonstration projects largely for a marketing or reputational benefit, but then that provides positive information spillover to the market,” Matisoff said. “For example, once contractors become familiar with new energy and environmental technologies, they can recommend them to clients for new building projects.”

By looking at data, Matisoff found that there has been a rapid uptake of buildings using the LEED label. But the question that remained was, what does it ultimately accomplish? To answer that question, Matisoff and Noonan looked at several case studies. One such case study is The Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design, a certified “Living Building,” at Georgia Tech.

The Kendeda Building: Tossing a Pebble in a Pond

The goal of The Kendeda Building was to create a facility that would transform the building and construction industry in the Southeast. Matisoff considered that a testable hypothesis. The Kendeda building inspired Matisoff and his collaborators to dig into 30 years of LEED data to look at the effect of pilot and demonstration projects. They found that if you have a demonstration project in a particular geographic location, it doubles the probability that another green building is going to be built that has similar technologies.

For example, an electrical contracting company working on Kendeda noted that being forced to work with high density poly-ethylene (HDPE) piping — a sustainable alternative to using PVC piping for electrical conduit — led them to realize that HDPE was cheaper and easier to work with, in addition to being a more ecofriendly alternative. The contractor intends to switch to HDPE piping in future projects.

“We at Georgia Tech, by building the Living Building, are providing all this information to the marketplace,” Matisoff said. “And the hope is that other universities or institutions may see this building and say, ‘Hey, we want one of those.’”

Moving Forward

Lessons in Matisoff’s book include how to harness information spillover in addition to more traditional price tools such as subsidies, taxes, and cap-and-trade emissions policies. The authors highlight the importance of leveraging private actors to provide information to the market and suggest that policymakers think carefully about how to incentivize early adopters into the green building market, beyond just prices.

While recent legislation has created a lot of price incentives, subsidies, and tax breaks designed to encourage people to make greener choices, Matisoff’s work emphasizes that, especially at early stages, prices probably aren't enough.

“It's unlikely that there's enough momentum in the policy space to get to where we need to be to address climate change,” Matisoff said. “We hope the book will help us think more carefully about how we leverage information and learning to accelerate the uptake of advanced energy and environmental technologies to facilitate green market transformation.”

Matisoff also hopes the comprehensive study will show the roughly 100,000 certified green building professionals around the world that their efforts have been worth it. 

“We wanted to tell a story, especially to green building professionals, about what they’ve accomplished over the past few decades, and the impact their work will have for years to come.”

Artificial intelligence is already making headlines in the new year with the box office success of the movie M3GAN. Along with a TikTok dance craze and lots of laughs, the over-the-top horror movie/dark comedy about an AI-powered robot that runs amok is also inspiring discussion about the growing presence and impact of artificial intelligence in everyday life.

From the movie house to the warehouse to your house, AI seems like it's everywhere. That's because with a steady stream of new research and innovative applications reaching into nearly every industry and business sector, it is everywhere. Nevertheless, AI still holds enormous potential as the field continues to evolve.

To get a sense of what this evolution could look like in 2023, we turned to a small group of Ph.D. students from the College of Computing community that are currently pushing foundational and applied AI research forward in a broad spectrum of disciplines and fields.

The students shared their opinions on where AI might be headed in the new year, what some of the big tech stories could be, and why ethics in AI are so critically important.

Where will artificial intelligence and machine learning have the most impact in 2023?

"Artificial intelligence and machine learning will continue to have a huge impact on manufacturing and warehouses with labor shortages and worker turnover continuing to be a concern as more manufacturing and operations jobs are brought back to the United States from overseas. Additionally, AI/ML will continue to help ensure that manufacturing and warehouse facilities are operating as efficiently as possible from energy and material savings to worker safety and parts quality." – Zoe Klesmith Alexander, computational science and engineering Ph.D. student

"Right now, deep learning is on a trajectory to transform the creation space. Artwork and images, videos, data representation and storytelling, co-authoring, and summarizing documents... It's gotten really good." – Ben Hoover, machine learning Ph.D. student

"I think machine learning and AI will keep playing a huge role in how the world and society will be shaped over the next decade in many ways. It will make many other fields more efficient through ML and AI tools we are developing. In 2023, I think ML and AI will have the most impact on social media platforms, helping reduce hate speech, rumor spread, etc." – Agam A. Shah, machine learning Ph.D. student

"One of the big impacts this year may be driverless cars being in your neighborhood. Otherwise, it will be a slow steady drip of GPT3 and other OpenAI models suffusing all applications, making programmers much faster, making journalists faster, making academic articles and lit reviews much faster. We're at a 4th grader level, and I hope by the end of this year we'll be at the 6th grader level. Also, indoor turn-by-turn navigation will be everywhere in 2023 as well." – Brandon Biggs, human-centered computing Ph.D. student

What will be some of the big tech stories in 2023?

"ChatGPT and the GitHub Copilot lawsuit will keep making it into the news and cause more controversies. In general, AI ethics will become more important and get more focus as the technology keeps advancing." – Fabian Fleischer, cybersecurity, and privacy Ph.D. student

"Driverless car fleets will be coming to a city near you. A new battery technology will allow phones to keep their charge for a week. Meta realizes virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays are for a limited market and uses headphones and phones to provide VR experiences." – Brandon Biggs

What’s an issue or industry that you think could benefit from a computing solution?

"Our reinterpretation of modern deep learning as energy-based associative memories has the potential to transform any industry that relies on foundation models -- giant architectures that require models that are "self-supervised" (learn on their own from data)." – Ben Hoover

"Inclusion in everything. Over 90 percent of websites on the internet have elements that are inaccessible to 25 percent of the world's population who have disabilities. Inclusive design will be the most important area where technology can be redesigned and created to have multiple sensory modalities and be properly programmed." – Brandon Biggs

"Currently, financial markets are far from efficient because they do not fully incorporate information available in large unstructured text data. With the latest development in natural language processing techniques, we can better understand the economy and therefore price financial markets better." – Agam A. Shah

There’s been increasing recognition of the vital role ethics should play in artificial intelligence. How do you see this issue evolving in the next year?

"Specifically in my research, I think explainable AI (XAI) is very important, especially if non-experts in ML will be using black-box ML solutions in a factory. It will be important for humans to trust and to understand the models especially if the models are being using to monitor quality on a safety-critical part.

"Additionally, using XAI for human interaction with robots that utilize deep learning to make decisions will be increasingly important as technologies like collaborative robots (cobots) are integrated into factories. I think in my area of research that it is always important to use automation to aid humans in jobs that are safe for humans to do and not to replace them." – Zoe Klesmith Alexander

"Big data is pretty much at its peak. Deep data, where your Alexa knows everything about you, or your phone knows everything about you, and rather than saying 'other people who watched this show liked this show,' it's going to say, 'I know you liked these shows, I think you'll like this show because of these reasons, one of which is because other people who liked all these other shows liked this show.' The ethical element will be how much of this data should these models use, and are people going to build a personal dataset that they can share with other apps, or is each app going to need to build their own dataset? The ethical question is who owns this data." – Brandon Biggs

"I think ethics will become more and more important going forward. We are making huge breakthroughs in machine learning and artificial intelligence, but the systems we are creating are producing racist, sexist, and stereotypical results. For example, a recent system, Galactica, developed by Facebook (Meta) is powerful. It can produce research articles by just simply providing it with the title. It comes with some serious ethical concerns, in some cases, it produces racist, sexist text. So, as we will keep developing better models and making success in parallel, we need to always keep in mind the ethical implications of these models." – Agam A. Shah

What research are you working on that you think people should know about or will have impact in 2023?

"Part of my research focuses on data-driven modeling of additive manufacturing processes to better control dimensional quality of the final part. Another part of my research focuses on detecting anomalies in real-time using computer vision and machine learning for both warehouses and manufacturing processes." – Zoe Klesmith Alexander

"Right now, deep learning is built on feed-forward mathematical operations that have little resemblance to the brain. I am working on a physics inspired approach to deep learning built around recurrent networks and energy functions. These architectures have the same mathematical foundation as the famous, biologically plausible Hopfield Network." – Ben Hoover

"I am currently working on two projects which, in my opinion, will have an impact in 2023. In one project, we are measuring the exposure of public firms to ongoing inflation. We are also understanding how inflation affects different firms differently based on the pricing power of the firm. As inflation is the highest in the last 40 years, our study is highly relevant now and in the coming years till we get inflation back in control.

"The second work is related to the first work in some ways. As inflation is rising, to control the inflation Federal Reserve Bank is tightening its monetary policy. In our second work, we are measuring the stance of monetary policy (measuring hawkish vs dovish stance) of the Fed using state-of-the-art NLP models to see its impact in various financial markets (Treasury market, Stock market, Crypto market, etc.)" – Agam A. Shah

For marine scientist, climate activist, and Tech alumnus Albert George (MS HSTS 2009), the fight against climate change is also a fight for home. 

Now, what started as a citizen science initiative led by George has turned into a $2.6 million National Fish and Wildlife Association effort to restore degraded salt marshes in Charleston, South Carolina. As part of the project, Joel Kostka, professor and associate chair of Research in the School of Biological Sciences, will lead a team of researchers to not only monitor these restoration efforts, but gain insights into why the marshes degraded in the first place — and how to prevent it from happening in the future.

Over the past three years, Kostka, who has a joint appointment in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, has worked with SCDNR and Robinson Design Engineers, a local firm co-led by Tech alum Joshua Robinson (CEE 2005), to develop engineering and design plans for the restoration of the salt marshes.

“That project went really well,” shared Kostka, “and now we have developed engineering and design plans for the actual restoration as we are moving forward with the next phase.”

Work for the current phase of the project is set to begin soon. Over the next four years, community volunteers will work to plant marsh grasses, restore oyster reefs, and excavate the tidal creeks that supply the marsh with sea water. 

“Because if we don't do this work,” George shared, “then basically it means a place that I grew up in and a place that I call home will no longer exist.”

Read more about the collaborative effort and the community that started it all in the College of Sciences newsroom.

Banning scooters may reduce sidewalk congestion and keep would-be riders and pedestrians safer, but it comes at a cost, according to new research from Georgia Tech’s School of Public Policy.

In a study examining the impact of Atlanta's 2019 ban on e-scooters and e-bikes in the city, researchers found that average commute times increased by about 10%. Travel to stadium events such as soccer games increased by almost 12 minutes per trip or 37% increase in travel times while the ban was in effect.

For Atlantans, that adds up to 784,000 extra hours sitting in traffic each year — and that’s just between 9 p.m. and 4 a.m. when the ban was in effect. A moratorium during peak rush hour would cause even more congestion, the study’s principal investigator, Omar Asensio confirmed. Expanding the scope of their study, Asensio and his team in Georgia Tech’s Data Science and Policy Lab estimate that e-scooters, e-bikes, and other micro-mobility options can save an average of 17.4% in travel time for drivers nationally.

“These are fairly significant congestion effects that most travelers will feel and as an unintended consequence of the safety regulation,” said Asensio.

New data settle an old debate

The study, conducted in Georgia Tech’s Data Science and Policy Lab and published in Nature Energy, is the first to definitively show that investing in micro-mobility infrastructure such as e-bikes, e-scooters, and bike lanes can reduce traffic congestion and carbon emissions in cities. The research accounted for the rise in popularity of ride-sharing services and other sources of traffic.

Previous studies on micromobility were controversial and contradictory because they relied on travel surveys, which can be unreliable and are subject to biases resulting from self-reported data, Asensio said. This motivated his search for a more rigorous, data-driven approach to answering the question.

The opportunity arose when Atlanta banned scooters with a geo-fencing policy in 2019. The ban was done with a remote shutdown on all scooters within a certain perimeter, which ensured compliance across the city. Previous moratoriums in other places relied on people to choose to cooperate and follow the rules, so this 100% compliance rate was unique to Atlanta.

“I thought, okay, that's interesting because now we have near-perfect behavioral compliance in response to a policy intervention, which turns out to be extremely rare,” Asensio said. “All of a sudden, if you're without the use of the scooter, what do you do? This created a great natural experiment, to be able to precisely measure the traffic times before and after this policy intervention and in doing so, test behavioral theories of mode substitution.”

In addition, Asensio and his team received early access to the then-new Uber Movement Dataset, which gave them detailed information about commute times across the city that previously had to be collected by surveys as well. In short, the stars aligned in 2019 for the debate over the true impact of micro-mobility on city traffic to finally be settled.

Mary Feeney, program director for the Science of Science Program at the National Science Foundation, which supported the research, said “Asensio and his team are using newly available ‘big data’ sources to tackle practical questions with real policy implications. Bringing the appropriate data and analytical approaches to these problems helps empower decision-makers to enact evidence-based policy.”

Public safety vs. congestion and emissions

The regulation in Atlanta was one of many that U.S. cities put in place in response to increased accidents and hospitalizations from micro-mobility devices.

Reducing congestion also reduces emissions, noted Camila Apablaza, who worked on Asensio’s team along with Savannah Horner, Cade Lawson, and Edward Chen. “I thought this was an important question because the impact of certain modes of transportation, such as scooters, is sometimes overlooked,” she said. “We know that electric mobility will be the main contributor to decarbonizing the passenger transportation sector, therefore we need to understand the interactions between different modes of electric transportation.”

But, “the point of this paper is to present the idea that it’s not just as simple as ‘we should ban the scooters,’ right?” said Chen. “We have found that there are, in fact, trade-offs between banning them for public safety versus allowing them to relieve traffic congestion, and whether or not city governments make the decision does ultimately have an impact on people's daily lives.”

Economic impact

The researchers found that e-scooters and e-bikes do, in fact, reduce congestion on the road by substituting some personal vehicle or ridesharing use rather than only public transit or walking. When the estimated saved time for drivers nationwide is translated into monetary value, Asensio approximates that it adds up to $536 million a year.

“This is also just a personal thing,” Chen added. “I’ve lived around here my whole life. I start seeing these scooters around, and this kind of answers that fundamental question: are people actually using these, and are these actually replacing trips and inherently reducing all these carbon emissions?”

What’s Next?

The Data Science and Policy Lab partners with the private sector and city governments on data innovations in policy analysis and impact evaluation. Follow-up research to this project could dig deeper into the specific transit substitutions people choose and why, Asensio said.

“I think modeling the emissions impacts for those will continue to be an ongoing kind of investigation,” he said. “When it comes to electrification, micro-mobility is just one of many strategies that are aggressively being invested in by both the public and the private sector. It's a really exciting opportunity to meaningfully reduce emissions and to benefit from the public health co-benefit of reduced air pollution.”

The paper, “Impacts of Micromobility on Car Displacement With Evidence From a Natural Experiment and Geofencing Policy” was funded by Asensio’s 2020 NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) (Award No. 1945532). It is available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41560-022-01135-1.

Joel Kostka will soon receive $3.2 million from the Department of Energy (DOE) to build upon research that has ranged from northern Minnesota peat bogs to coastal Georgia wetlands, all to learn how climate change impacts soils and plants that trap greenhouse gasses — and whether some of those plants could end up as eco-friendly biofuels.

Kostka, a professor and associate chair of research in the School of Biological Sciences with a joint appointment in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, will receive funding as part of a wider $178 million dollar DOE effort to advance sustainable technology breakthroughs that can improve public health, help address climate change, improve food and agricultural production, and create more resilient supply chains. The 37 new projects also include efforts to engineer plants and microbes into bioenergy and improve carbon storage. 

Kostka’s wetlands research will continue in the salt marshes off Georgia’s coast, where his team has already conducted studies on the microbial life that benefits Spartina cordgrass in those areas, helping to strengthen resilience of the plant to sea level rise and catastrophic storms.

The DOE’s funding initiative is split into four groups. Kostka’s studies will focus on the role of microbiomes — all the microorganisms living in a particular environment — in the biogeochemical cycling of carbon in terrestrial soils and wetlands by using genomics-based and systems biology. 

Other research areas involve renewable bioenergy and biomaterials production; quantum-enabled bioimaging and sensing for bioenergy, and research to characterize gene function in bioenergy crop plants.

“Our project seeks to understand the controls of soil organic matter degradation and the release of greenhouse gasses, both of which are largely mediated by microbes” Kostka said. “And then also, as we've been studying for many years now, how climate drivers — principally the warming of ecosystems and carbon dioxide enrichment in the atmosphere — limit greenhouse gas release to the atmosphere. How might changes in plant and microbial communities lead to climate feedbacks, thereby accelerating the release of greenhouse gasses from soil carbon stores?”

That question has driven much of Kostka’s research team in the past as they focused on how soil microbes break down biomasses like woody plants and peat mosses, at an Oak Ridge National Laboratory facility in northern Minnesota called Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments (SPRUCE). Kostka’s team is using genomics to study all the genes that code for microbial enzymes that decompose biomass in soil and how plants, which are also changing with climate, impact microbiomes by providing carbon sources that fuel microbial activities. In particular, the work is focused on lignocellulose or lignin, which gives plants their rigidity or structure and arguably comprises the most abundant renewable carbon source on the planet.

“We're just at the point now where we finally have the tools to unlock the black box of soil microbiology and chemistry,” Kostka said. “Recent advances in sophisticated analytical chemistry methods used to quantify microbial metabolites along with improved metagenome sequencing approaches enable us to better uncover metabolic pathways.”

Kostka will serve as principal investigator of the research team for the grant. That team includes School of Biological Sciences researchers Caitlin Petro, research scientist, and Katherine Duchesneau, a third-year Ph.D. student; co-principal investigator Kostas Konstantinidis, Richard C. Tucker Professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Rachel Wilson, research scientist, Florida State University; Malak Tfaily, associate professor, University of Arizona; and Chris Schadt, senior staff scientist, Oak Ridge National Laboratory. 

Unlocking the “enzyme latch” hypothesis

As part of his new research, Kostka will revisit what scientists call the “enzyme latch” hypothesis. This could help uncover the mechanisms by which soils and plants capture harmful greenhouse gasses, and what prompts their release into the atmosphere.

The idea behind this hypothesis is that when soils are wet, they lack oxygen, which suppresses a specific class of enzymes, oxidases, that catalyze the beginning steps in the microbial breakdown of organic compounds produced by plants in soil. When oxidases are suppressed, the breakdown products of lignin, phenolic compounds, accumulate and poison the rest of the microbial carbon cycle.  Thus a single class of enzymes may be responsible for keeping greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide and methane captured within the soil.

“The climate linkage here is that it's thought that as the climate warms, we'll get more greenhouse gas production, because simply it'll be warmer, and microbial enzymes work faster at higher temperature. But then also, in wetlands in particular, the hypothesis is that as wetlands warm, they're going to dry out. And so when a wetland dries out, you're going to get more injection of oxygen-rich air into the soil, which would then accelerate the breakdown of organic matter.”

When that happens, it could also mean different plants having an impact on carbon storage and the breakdown of biomass. “As wetlands dry out, plant communities in northern peatlands where most of Earth’s soil carbon is stored, are expected to shift from a dominance of mosses, which do better when it's wet — to woody plants, shrubs, and trees that do better with less water, when it's drier. That would in turn potentially spark the release of more reactive carbon compounds from plant roots — mosses don’t have roots — which would likely accelerate organic matter decomposition and the production of more greenhouse gas in a feedback loop with climate.”

Kostka’s research may also help to develop new approaches for converting woody biomass into potential alternative energy sources. “To make our society more sustainable, we have to basically recycle everything, or reuse as much as we can. And that includes the biomass from plants that can be grown on more arid lands that are less suitable for food crops,” he said, referring to plant-based materials that can be used to produce biofuels and bioenergy. “And so the DOE is leading research efforts to understand the controls of biomass degradation in plants such as switchgrass and poplar.” 

Kostka and Konstantinidis will develop a database of genes that code for the breakdown of lignocellulose and lignin, compounds that largely make up plant biomass and for which metabolic pathways of degradation have been elusive. Kostka and his colleagues will also have access to the extensive resources of the DOE Genomic Sciences program, including a collaboration with the agency’s Joint Genome Institute.

“We hope that information generated from our project can be used to improve methods for breaking down woody biomass so that it can be used in a sustainable way to produce biofuels,” Kostka said. 

Public abstract of Department of Energy grant DE-SC0023297

About Georgia Tech

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 44,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

Advancement in technology brings about plenty of benefits for everyday life, but it also provides cyber criminals and other potential adversaries with new opportunities to cause chaos for their own benefit.

As researchers begin to shape the future of artificial intelligence in manufacturing, Georgia Tech recognizes the potential risks to this technology once it is implemented on an industrial scale. That’s why Associate Professor Saman Zonouz will begin researching ways to protect the nation’s newest investment in manufacturing.

The project is part of the $65 million grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration to develop the Georgia AI Manufacturing (GA-AIM) Technology Corridor. While main purpose of the grant is to develop ways of integrating artificial intelligence into manufacturing, it will also help advance cybersecurity research, educational outreach, and workforce development in the subject as well.   

“When introducing new capabilities, we don’t know about its cybersecurity weaknesses and landscape,” said Zonouz. “In the IT world, the potential cybersecurity vulnerabilities and corresponding mitigation are clear, but when it comes to artificial intelligence in manufacturing, the best practices are uncertain. We don’t know what all could go wrong.”

Zonouz will work alongside other Georgia Tech researchers in the new Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility (AMPF) to pinpoint where those inevitable attacks will come from and how they can be repelled. Along with a team of Ph.D. students, Zonouz will create a roadmap for future researchers, educators, and industry professionals to use when detecting and responding to cyberattacks.

“As we increasingly rely on computing and artificial intelligence systems to drive innovation and competitiveness, there is a growing recognition that the security of these systems is of paramount importance if we are to realize the anticipated gains,” said Michael Bailey, Inaugural Chair of the School of Cybersecurity and Privacy (SCP). “Professor Zonouz is an expert in the security of industrial control systems and will be a vital member of the new coalition as it seeks to provide leadership in manufacturing automation.”

Before coming to Georgia Tech, Zonouz worked with the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the College of Engineering on protecting and studying the cyber-physical systems of manufacturing. He worked with Raheem Beyah, Dean of the College of Engineering and ECE professor, on several research papers including two that were published at the 26th USENIX Security Symposium, and the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium.

“As Georgia Tech continues to position itself as a leader in artificial intelligence manufacturing, interdisciplinarity collaboration is not only an added benefit, it is fundamental,” said Arijit Raychowdhury, Steve W. Chaddick School Chair and Professor of ECE. “Saman’s cybersecurity expertise will play a crucial role in the overall protection and success of GA-AIM and AMPF. ECE is proud to have him representing the school on this important project.”

The research is expected to take five years, which is typical for a project of this scale. Apart from research, there will be a workforce development and educational outreach portion of the GA-AIM program. The cyber testbed developed by Zonouz, and his team will live in the 24,000 square-foot AMPF facility.

Aaron Stebner outlined an aggressive plan for artificial intelligence and manufacturing when he applied for a faculty position in 2019. In his cover letter, he promised “to establish the Georgia Institute of Technology as a world leader in additive manufacturing of solid materials (ceramics & metals) R&D, especially in the fusion of data sciences and AI to create new, world-leading technologies.”

Stebner thought it would take 10-15 years of incremental steps and funding to achieve the goal. He was wrong.

Thanks to a new $65 million grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration, announced by President Joe Biden, Stebner’s plan will begin to become a reality — and include the entire state of Georgia and all of its manufacturing sectors from agriculture to airplanes — two years after arriving on campus.

The largest of the nine projects within the larger Georgia AI Manufacturing (GA-AIM) technology corridor grant will allow Stebner and Georgia Tech to transform the Advanced Manufacturing Pilot Facility (AMPF) into the Artificial Intelligence Manufacturing Pilot Facility (AI-MPF). The 24,000 square-foot facility on 14th Street will more than double in size after Georgia Tech and statewide GA-AIM partners were selected as one of 21 Phase II awardees in the $1 billion Build Back Better Regional Challenge (BBB) competition, part of the Investing in America’s Communities initiative under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.

AMPF has been a shell waiting for a vision like Build Back Better to fill it out,” said Stebner, associate professor the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering. “Now we will transform the facility into one of the nation’s first manufacturing labs designed for autonomy with the goal of helping the state and the nation to be world AI manufacturing leaders.”

Read the entire story on the College of Engineering website. 

School of Industrial and Systems Engineering Professor Pinar Keskinocak was recognized at Georgia Tech’s annual 2022 Faculty and Staff Honors Luncheon with the Class of 1934 Outstanding Service Award. The award recognizes her long service both to the Institute and to her field.

Keskinocak has long served as a leader with the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). A fellow with the institute, she has served as president, vice president of membership and professional recognition, and is the co-founder and former president of the INFORMS Section on Public Programs, Service, and Needs, and the president of the INFORMS Health Applications Society.

At Georgia Tech she has also served as the College of Engineering Advance Professor for six years and was a leading voice over the past three years of the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to working with the Georgia Department of Public Health, she served on the Institute’s Covid task force helping to establish an institutional approach to the pandemic.

“It’s an honor, first of all, to have had the opportunity to serve,” she said. “Our communities at Georgia Tech and beyond are wonderful, so to be recognized among all of these outstanding contributors is a great honor.”

Keskinocak’s research focuses on the application of operations research and management science with society impact, particularly regarding health and humanitarian applications, supply chain management, and logistics. She is the director of ISyE’s Center for Health and Humanitarian Systems. Recent work has focused on infectious disease modeling in response to Covid-19.

Read more about Keskinocak’s latest research here: New Study Shows Hybrid Learning Led to Significant Reduction in Covid-19 Spread

A team of Georgia Tech students and faculty members has won the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) EcoCAR Mobility Challenge. The four-year competition tasked 11 universities with transforming a 2019 Chevrolet Blazer by adding advanced propulsion systems and automated vehicle technology. The goal was to improve the car’s energy efficiency while balancing emissions, safety, and consumer acceptability factors.

Originally a six-cylinder, the Georgia Tech team converted its Blazer to a four-cylinder hybrid vehicle with adaptive cruise control. Its vehicle-to infrastructure communication technology allows it to “talk” to stoplights and adjust its speed for optimization.

The team of approximately 60 graduate and undergraduate students represent six of the College of Engineering’s eight schools. The group also includes students from the College of Computing, Scheller College of Business, and Georgia State University.

Read the entire story on the College of Engineering website. 

By Frida Carrera

 

On Wednesday, April 13th 2022, the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) hosted the 16th annual Spring Undergraduate Research Symposium. UROP’s annual symposium is Georgia Tech’s largest undergraduate research colloquium and allows students to present their research and gain valuable skills and presentation experience. Each year the symposium also presents awards to the top poster and oral presentation from each college and honors the Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher (OUR) from each college. And with over 40 oral presentations and nearly 90 poster presentations, this year’s symposium proved to be another success for UROP and Georgia Tech.  

This year the symposium was held in Exhibition Hall and opened with an introduction and keynote address to students, faculty, and other non-presenters. Shortly after, the event moved into the poster presentations segment where undergraduate students displayed their research to judges, faculty, and other attendees. The oral presentations followed soon after and gave student researchers the opportunity to go more in-depth with their research and findings and answer any questions the judges and attendees had. To end the event, sponsoring colleges and departments recognized Outstanding Undergraduate Researchers from their respective colleges. Additionally, the symposium judges were tasked with selecting the top student researchers having exceptional poster and oral presentations. 

Any Georgia Tech undergraduate student interested in presenting their research is encouraged to apply for future symposiums and to build on research presentation skills, connect with other undergraduate researchers and faculty, and the chance to be recognized with awards by members of the Georgia Tech research community. UROP also hosts other research-related events and workshops throughout the school year to assist undergraduate students interested in research and build on their passions! 

To view the list of awardees and pictures from the event visit: https://symposium.urop.gatech.edu/awards/ 

To learn more about undergraduate research at Georgia Tech visit: https://urop.gatech.edu/