about stevens impact · manufacturing and supply chains. remixing ideas into innovations his work...

Office of the Vice Provost of Research1 Castle Point on HudsonHoboken, NJ 07030

NON-PROFITUS POSTAGE

PAIDSOUTH HACKENSACK, NJ

PERMIT 981 IMPACT

STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY • stevens.edu/research

Is sharing ideas good for innovation? Given the opportunity, will people intelligently recombine others’ discoveries with their own insights? Can experts and novices work together productively?

If Stevens business professor and Associate Dean of Research Jeff Nickerson’s investigations are correct, the answer to all three questions may be yes — and may have a profound effect on the future of design, manufacturing and supply chains.

Remixing ideas into innovations

His work — supported by several National Science Foundation (NSF) awards — explores the synergy that can occur when experts and creative non-professionals collaborate to solve problems in more powerful ways.

It’s a relationship that increasing numbers of corporate entities are turning toward in their efforts to innovate and succeed.

“We’re interested in what happens when you collect a number of creative people, participating in something together, that aren’t necessarily part of one company and perhaps don’t even know each other.”

Surprising insights, he discovered, frequently arise from combinations of experts and less-experienced participants with novel perspectives. And much in the way the openness of open-source software has transformed IT and devices, open innovation could be the next explosive trend in business thinking.

For one study, Nickerson and colleagues examined Thingiverse, an open-source sharing platform for designs used to 3D-print objects. Thingiverse’s introduction of metamodels —

interfaces that allow users to modify shape parameters — led to an explosion of new designs. Nickerson wanted to know why.

After analyzing a 40,000-by-40,000-item distance matrix of Thingiverse objects, Nickerson’s team concluded that significant modification, remixing and recombination of ideas was taking place — collective innovation emerging from the actions of individuals.

That research could have profound implications for corporate R&D.

“Instead of just building a larger R&D division, companies are beginning to understand that by involving people outside the organization with different perspectives, the novelty of ideas can be increased,” explains Nickerson. “And companies can keep their own R&D leaner, focused on inventions and methods that are mission-critical. This research supports and strengthens that notion by suggesting ways to involve a range of experts and novices.”

Collaboration with MIT, CMU

Nickerson also spent a recent sabbatical at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he drew similar conclusions about the power of sharing ideas.

At MIT, Nickerson collaborated on an NSF-funded project led by Thomas Malone that included a team of investigators from MIT, Carnegie Mellon University and Stevens. An online community was encouraged to address a large-scale societal problem: energy sustainability. The contest’s rules were designed to reward not only the best overall solutions, but also those creators whose ideas were used in the construction of winning solutions.

“These contests demonstrate you can use online communities to recombine texts,” he notes, “the same way the studies of 3D printing show communities can recombine shapes.”

ABOUT STEVENSStevens Institute of Technology, The Innovation University®, is a premier,

private research university situated in Hoboken, N.J. overlooking the

Manhattan skyline. Founded in 1870, technological innovation has been

the hallmark and legacy of Stevens’ education and research programs for

more than 145 years. Within the university’s three schools and one college,

more than 6,600 undergraduate and graduate students collaborate with

more than 300 full-time faculty members in an interdisciplinary, student-

centric, entrepreneurial environment to advance the frontiers of science

and leverage technology to confront global challenges. Stevens is home

to three national research centers of excellence, as well as joint research

programs focused on critical industries such as healthcare, energy, finance,

defense, maritime security, STEM education and coastal sustainability.

A newly emerging technology holds promise for imaging and diagnosing skin-cancer tissues earlier and more accurately than ever — and Stevens is at the forefront.

“Skin cancer is the most common and fastest-growing of all cancer types, with approximately 3.5 million new cases and billions of dollars of treatment cost in the U.S. occurring annually,” explains Stevens electrical and computer engineering professor Negar Tavassolian. “It is usually diagnosed through visual inspection by a dermatologist, but visual inspection is subjective and can be susceptible to error.”

Tavassolian, who trained at Sharif University of Technology, McGill University and Georgia Tech and did postdoctoral work at MIT, says new imaging technologies can help doctors improve the odds of early detection. She is the recipient of a recent National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award to develop just such an innovative medical application of millimeter-wave technology.

“Early detection of skin cancers is critical, and millimeter-wave technologies and devices have now evolved to the point where low-cost, in-depth views of skin are on the horizon,” Tavassolian notes. “Most of the problems, such as safety and power supply, have been solved.

“Now we propose to solve a key remaining challenge: high, useful resolution of the images.”

Achieving ultra-wide bandwidths by splitting channels

Microwave-band (frequency 1 GHz to 30 GHz) imaging technology is currently used to diagnose breast cancer, lung cancer, stroke and other diseases, but millimeter-wave technology (frequency 30 GHz to 300 GHz) is relatively new and under-deployed — largely

confined to military and security applications such as body-scanning in airports and a few industrial uses. The radars that aid automobile collision-avoidance and automatic braking systems utilize millimeter waves, for instance.

Because millimeter waves can’t penetrate deeply into the body, they can’t be used for purposes such as imaging internal organs.

But millimeter-wave imaging is cheaper, safer, less power-intensive and much more portable than other types of body imaging, making it especially attractive for potential medical uses where superficial imaging is the goal.

Tavassolian’s innovation takes the technology to a new, more powerful level: By splitting millimeter-wave bandwidths into subcarriers (channels), and then processing and recombining the slices, detailed medical images can be created for proactive diagnostic purposes.

“This has not been done before, to our knowledge, in medical imaging,” she explains.

During the first stages of their research, Tavassolian and graduate assistant Amir Mirbeik are testing a dielectric probe inserted into skin tissue to determine how accurately it detects contrasts and electrical differences that can help differentiate between healthy and tumorous skin.

“Because forming tumors contain higher water content than healthy skin, this contrast should be viewable on a millimeter-wave-created image,” Tavassolian says.

Her team is also designing specially configured sub-band antennas, each micro-fabricated in Stevens’ own

Stevens researcher proposes a novel way to spot forming skin cancers using applications of millimeter-wave technology

THE BIG SCREEN

Stevens works with DARPA on next-gen artificial intelligence

Tackling Parkinson’s and OCD

Networking’s next leap: microchip quantum processing

continued inside

INSIDE HIGHLIGHTS: stevens.edu/research

4stevens.edu/research

With no known causes or cures, both obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and Parkinson’s disease afflict millions worldwide.

The right therapies, however, can significantly ease the discomfort of living with OCD or Parkinson’s. Now, Stevens is pitching in with timely research that may lead to better treatment options.

“This is a serious health concern,” says George McConnell, a Stevens assistant professor of biomedical engineering who is an expert on an emerging non-pharmacological therapy for OCD, Parkinson’s and related neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Electrical pulses that improve symptoms

Parkinson’s afflicts 1 million patients in the U.S. and at least 7 million to 10 million worldwide (possibly many more), progressively attacking neurons, motor functions, muscular movements and, eventually, emotions and behavior. Although quality of life for individuals with Parkinson’s can be improved with medications or surgery,

symptoms worsen as the disease progresses.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is estimated to affect 2 million to 5 million in the U.S. and tens of millions worldwide. It can cause irrational thinking, anxiety, depression and self-harming behaviors; treatment is usually through a combination of antidepressant medicines and psychotherapy.

Half of OCD patients do not respond to medications, but a promising newer treatment for the disorder was approved by the FDA in 2009, after more than a decade of use as an alternative Parkinson’s treatment: deep-brain stimulation (DBS).

In DBS, very brief pulses of electricity are delivered to the brain by implanted electrodes. These disrupt the abnormal firing of the neurons — “a sort of brain pacemaker,” explains McConnell — in the region of the electrodes, often immediately.

Some Parkinson’s tremors have been shown to dissipate within a few seconds of the treatment. OCD relief can take longer, on the order of weeks or months, yet DBS also appears to be effective in treating this disorder.

The reason these microsecond-long bursts of energy to the deep brain alleviate Parkinson’s and OCD, however, remains unclear.

“Researchers still don’t know the precise mechanism of why DBS works in motor diseases, much less for psychiatric diseases,” explains McConnell.

Enhanced therapies, improved devices

Programming the optimal frequency, spacing, duration and strength of pulses is a time-consuming trial-and-error process. A better understanding could revolutionize the way clinicians administer the therapy.

The Stevens team will begin by studying different types of DBS on genetically modified mice predisposed to OCD. Collaborating with researchers at Duke University, they will implant electrodes in mouse brains that monitor and report aberrations and changes in neural activity, down to the single-neuron level, during DBS sessions.

The team’s results, notes McConnell, could one day inform quicker, less expensive relief for severe-OCD sufferers; fewer side effects of administered therapies; longer battery life in implanted devices; and more effective surgical treatments for Parkinson’s symptoms, among other advances.

New Avenues in Parkinson’s, OCD Research

Stevens research team collaborates with Duke to study, improve ‘brain pacemaker’ therapies for neurodegenerative diseases

Stevens professor George McConnell (right), with biomedical engineering Ph.D. student Hanyan Li, precisely implanting electrodes in brain areas using a stereotaxic instrument

Exploring the problem-solving power of combining experts with crowdsOpen-Sourced Ideas: The Next Innovation

The research newsletter of Stevens Institute of Technology Fall 2016

To support tissue imaging and cancer diagnostics, Stevens professor Negar Tavassolian’s team has developed sub-band millimeter-wave antennas.

Stevens researcher Kelland Thomas is helping design the artificial intelligence of the future — with the assistance of world-renowned musicians.

Thomas, dean of Stevens’ College of Arts and Letters, heads a five-year DARPA-sponsored project with collaborators from the University of Illinois, the University of Arizona and Southern Methodist University. The project aims to teach computers to study tendencies in human creation and improvisation, communicate with us and anticipate and create original new responses.

“We’re building information systems that can model human-computer communication and can improvise,” explains Thomas. “The system has to be able to do inference based on what it’s hearing, then update its ‘mental model’ and make a statement back — a decision — based on what it thinks is being said.”

Wanted: more creative, communicative computers

The project — MUSical Improvising Collaborative Agent, or MUSICA — is supported by a $2 million award from DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Thomas’ team will first analyze musical data, feeding thousands of existing musical phrases into a transcription engine while hand-transcribing hundreds of additional highly regarded solos from famed jazz players.

MUSICA’s software will then mine patterns and themes from that data, create a database, make probabilistic models and improvise new music in real time, predicting and reacting to live jazz musicians.

“This is classic AI [artificial intelligence], classic knowledge

engineering,” notes Thomas. “We’re trying to achieve a recipe of statistical techniques to extract relevant patterns that inform the model.”

If successful, MUSICA has wide implications for defense, industry and an increasingly digital society.

“The system’s ability to anticipate and create chord changes and new, never-tried melodic riffs will go far

beyond current computers’ ability,” he explains.

That’s important, because researchers worldwide are working to design and test new AI systems that not only accept human instructions and data sets but also proactively anticipate instructions — or even reach out with questions, concerns and suggestions. This concept, known as computational creativity, requires AI systems to build knowledge, learn on the fly and interact with people in ways that are cognitively similar to the ways we interact with them.

Creative computing would enable much more useful human interactions with devices, automobiles, homes and intelligent services such as Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana. Other potential applications may exist in healthcare and medicine — intelligent software, for example, could detect patterns in medical data and communicate those in new ways to physicians, researchers and the public.

MUSICA, Thomas says, could be a step in this direction.

“We chose jazz as the language and the data for this investigation,” says Thomas, “but we are really addressing basic questions about building the next level of computing and artificial intelligence.”

Stevens faculty have received significant new research funding support from federal agencies to investigate challenges in the analysis of medical data; the deployment of green technology; the safety of borders, ports and harbors; and the cybersecurity of financial and government data, among other areas of inquiry.

Center for Environmental Systems director and professor Christos Christodoulatos received an additional $2.6 million from the U.S. Army to serve as primary investigator on a complex project to develop net-zero technologies for Army industrial munitions bases. To date, the project has received a total of $8 million in funding.

College of Arts and Letters Dean Kelland Thomas received renewed support from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for his collaborative work to develop an intelligent software platform that will improvise music with human performers (see story, inside). The $2 million award will enable continued research on the project, an important step forward in the capabilities of artificial intelligence.

Samantha Kleinberg, a professor of computer science, received $1.5 million from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to continue work on big-data analysis of neurological intensive-care unit (NICU) data streams for four years. Kleinberg’s work aims to detect patterns in data and make predictions that may aid interventions in stroke-patient care, particularly the prevention of nonconvulsive seizure, a more gradual brain injury that sometimes occurs undetected after a stroke.

Physics and engineering professors Yuping Huang and Stefan Strauf received $765,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to participate in investigations to develop a new platform for single-chip-based quantum communication and computing (see story, inside). Huang and Strauf will collaborate with Columbia University and The Johns Hopkins University on the four-year project.

Computer science professor Susanne Wetzel received two NSF awards totaling approximately $625,0000: one to provide more robust cybersecurity for aspects of maritime transport such as navigation, security and cargo scanning and another to explore the use of multi-party computing protocols in organ donation processes. Wetzel will collaborate with Rutgers University and Texas Southern University on the cybersecurity research.

The Office of Naval Research (ONR) awarded Stevens nearly $500,000 to support research into the protection of the federal government’s dedicated networks against security breaches. The

project will be directed by computer science professor Georgios Portokalidis, who will work to create solutions that ward off attacks on the complex, vulnerable software typically deployed by government and production systems.

Professor Stephanie Lee has been awarded nearly $400,000 by the NSF to investigate improved fabrication of polymer nanocomposite materials with enhanced optoelectronic properties. Lee will study processes utilized during the deposition and fabrication of solar cells in an effort to improve their efficiency. Dilhan Kalyon, director of Stevens’ Highly Filled Materials Institute, will collaborate on the research.

Hongbin Li, professor of electrical and computer engineering, received $350,000 from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) to perform research in adaptive signal radar detection. Li’s research aims to reduce interference and improve accuracy in radar images.

The NSF awarded computer science professor Philippos Mordohai approximately $290,000 to investigate the development of small, autonomous quad-rotor drones that can inspect and three-dimensionally model infrastructure such as bridges, power plants and refineries using onboard sensors.

Julie Pullen, professor of ocean engineering and former director of Stevens’ Maritime Security Center, received nearly $200,000 from the ONR for a project that explores interactions between meteorology, hydrology and oceanography in Southeast Asia.

Somayeh Moazeni, a professor in the School of Systems & Enterprises, received approximately $148,000 from the NSF to support a two-year project to investigate power grids and energy markets. Her research will explore market models that encourage the large-scale deployment of distributed flexible energy resources and work toward the development of algorithmic strategies for energy markets. She will collaborate with Lehigh University in the research.

For more on Stevens research awards, honors and publications, visit stevens.edu/research.

Army, Navy, NIH, NSF Support New Stevens Research

Exploring the Intersection of AI and Creativity

Disciplines include cybersecurity, medical data, green technologyDoD-supported computing project has implications for IT, industry, defenseHealthcare is not only a critical societal need and

a prime research opportunity, it is also a business — with the associated management and operations challenges. As the director of Stevens’ Center for Healthcare Innovation (CHI), Dr. Peter Tolias, is fond of noting, medical care and research is already a $3 trillion sector in the U.S. alone, and growing rapidly. Tremendous resources and legislative efforts will have been brought to bear on healthcare R&D, technology, operations and delivery.

Yet a number of challenges remain — or, should I say, a number of new opportunities have opened up before us, chiefly due to the explosively rapid development of medical and analytic technology during the past decade. Today we are able to form and answer questions about patient care, prevention and disease that clinicians could not have dreamed about investigating even a few years ago.

At Stevens, we have entered this societal and global challenge at full throttle. We bring decades of expertise and historical strength in engineering, medical device design, computing and analytics, which we are now combining with emerging technologies in the hands of new faculty experts in disciplines that touch upon biomedical and healthcare arenas. For example:

• We are using big data captured from intensive care units to help physicians treat stroke patients better and prevent recurrence.

• We are searching for the next great wonder drugs, using computational chemistry techniques to save years and millions of dollars in the drug-discovery pipeline.

• We are collaborating with one of the New York metropolitan area’s top hospitals to investigate multiple myeloma and other cancers, infection detection and other important clinical questions.

• We are investigating new materials for implants and transplants that can resist infection.

• We are helping design novel spinal implants, stents, pacemakers, dental drills and other medical devices.

• And a startup company formed at Stevens by a trio of students only two years ago now offers a leading diabetes-management software platform used by thousands of patients nationwide.

In this issue of IMPACT, you will read two of the many exciting stories here in medical research. We explore a remarkable new NSF-supported project that may soon help physicians use a new imaging technique to locate nascent skin cancers before they spread. And we discuss another Stevens researcher’s work to refine a type of ‘’brain pacemaker’’ therapy that may soon provide significant relief for some sufferers of Parkinson’s disease and other neurological and psychiatric disorders.

Stevens also continues to push the research frontiers in disciplines as far-ranging as artificial intelligence, quantum computing and collective innovation — all of which are also covered in this issue of IMPACT. Please read about our work and give me your feedback, your ideas, your thoughts about ways to expand upon our work or to work together. Through collaboration, we can all have greater impact.

Mo DehghaniVice Provost of Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Stevens Moves Determinedly into Healthcare Research

STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY • stevens.edu/research THROUGH COLLABORATION…IMPACT • Fall 2016

clean room and each uniquely tuned to the unique bandwidth at which it will operate. These antennas will transmit signals and record backscattered responses during the experimental imaging process.

Next, Tavassolian will begin receiving excised skin samples — of normal, healthy skin and also of confirmed tumors — several times weekly from Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey. The samples will be transported to Stevens frozen, imaged over a period of a few hours each, then compared against each other.

A low-cost, portable imaging system for medical centers

If the system proves the concept is viable, Tavassolian and her team will then begin developing hardware and software prototypes for a portable, low-cost imaging system that can be deployed in medical centers.

She will also create a public display on the project for New Jersey’s largest interactive science museum, Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, and develop new Stevens curriculum offerings in the biomedical applications of electromagnetics.

“It’s all about greater impact,” she says of her decision to focus on medical applications during her career as an electrical engineer. “I have always gravitated toward medical problems.”

In addition to her NSF-supported work on imaging, Tavassolian performs additional Stevens research on radio frequency and microwave technologies, bio-electromagnetics and micro-electromechanical systems with biomedical applications, including a project to develop a heart-rate and blood-pressure monitoring system utilizing acoustic signals, radar and accelerometer data.

NSF-EFRI supports Stevens research to develop microchip quantum processingQuantum Networking Closer to Reality

Remarkable advances have been made in the race to create and refine quantum networks, networks that transport information instantly between physically separate systems and would help enable the first quantum computers.

Now, a Stevens team has joined the search, researching an exciting new technology that, if successful, would fabricate individual microchips that could enable widespread industrialization of quantum communications for the first time.

“To satisfy the scaling, robustness and cost considerations that will be required for practical, widespread implementation of quantum technologies, the use of an easily scalable platform will be essential,” explains Yuping Huang, Stevens professor of physics and co-investigator in a newly funded National Science Foundation (NSF) project to investigate quantum chip technologies.

“Yet it’s also becoming clear that there is no one material that can provide all the functionalities needed to build out quantum networks,”

he says. “Our team hopes to pioneer a solution by integrating both CMOS and non-CMOS materials on a single chip.”

Working closely with an interdisciplinary team of researchers from Columbia University and The Johns Hopkins University, Huang and fellow physics professor Stefan Strauf will grow and fabricate lithium-niobate nanostructures for quantum frequency conversions, nonlinear Bell-state measurements and other critical processes in the encoding and reconstruction of quantum-teleported data. These structures will then be vertically integrated with other CMOS layers to form a single, fully functional chip. This combination could help the team achieve the holy grail of distributed quantum computing in prototype: a single microchip capable of encoding and decoding quantum data routed through a fiber.

“We believe this platform will prove optimal,” notes Huang, “and help us realize a high-performance, fully integrated quantum photonic chip that we can use to perform a quantum-communication demonstration.”

THE BIG SCREENcontinued from cover

PERMIT 981 IMPACT

THE BIG SCREEN

continued inside

PERMIT 981 IMPACT

THE BIG SCREEN

continued inside

about stevens impact · manufacturing and supply chains. remixing ideas into innovations his work...

Documents