tech today winter 09 10

7/27/2019 Tech Today Winter 09 10

1/6

10

engineering

ne

w

s

T T y

One of humankinds oldest fantasies is being able to control the external world by

thought. That fantasy is now moving toward reality. In St. Louis, where a teenaged

epilepsy patient had an electronic interface placed in his skull to monitor seizures,researchers found that the boy could use the interface to play the video game SpaceInvaders just by thinking about the moves he wanted to make. In a laboratory at the

University of Pittsburgh, a similarly wired monkey moved a robotic arm to reach for food

and feed itself, just by thinking about it.

The research eld is called BCI (for brain-computer interfaces) and one can easily

think of practical uses. Most obviously, people with spinal cord injuries or disabling dis-

eases could someday be tted with systems that give them vastly more capability and

freedom. For many such people, says Carnegie Mellon Professor Jeyanandh Paramesh,

the area of the brain that controls the movement of limbs is still working the brain

is able to say okay, move this hand but the link is broken. The general aim of the

research is to replace that broken pathway.

Paramesh, of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is one of a dozen CIT faculty

afliated with Carnegie Mellons new Center for Implantable Medical Microsystems

(CIMM). The center is already perhaps the largest of its kind at a university without amedical school. CIMM faculty collaborate with medical researchers across Pittsburgh

at Pitt, at West Penn and Allegheny General hospitals and with other researchers at

Carnegie Mellon (for instance, the universitys Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition

is world-renowned in cognitive science).

A key focus area at CIMM is developing the hardware and software needed to

build next-generation brain-computer interfaces and make them more useful. This

research is urgently needed, according to ECE Professor Gary Fedder, who is director of

both CIMM and its parent entity ICES, the Institute for Complex Engineered Systems.

A lot of good work is being done in understanding how the brain and body operate,

Fedder says. Now there have to be more people doing the engineered systems part of

the work, to complement that.

Fedder can draw from top-ight talent and hes been recruiting as well. The stories

of two faculty members, one new and one already on board, illustrate the scope of the

engineering challenges.

Gttig Ito (ad Out o) O HadBrains are much more complex than computers but they are electrical, with specic

neurons ring for specic tasks and neurons for motor activity are in the outer layer,

the cortex. Direct interaction between brains and computer-based machines is thus

possible by capturing and processing the relevant signals. But to do this one must make

sense of the morass of activity generated by a brain, guring out which signals mean

what. That is where Byron Yu comes in.

Yu has joined the ECE faculty after postdoctoral research at Stanford. He explains

that most current studies of brain activity, in both human and animal subjects, are done

by recording from one neuron at a time, using a single electrode in the cortex. You

THInk Of THe

POssIbIlITIesMedical micro-implants

could work wonders.IMM, a new research center,tackles the engineering work.

B y M I V


2/6

can learn some things that way, he goes on. Say you have the subject reach to the

right twenty times, then to the left twenty times. Just by looking at one neuron at a

time you can get the equivalent of yes-no answers: right or left?

In recent years, says Yu, experimenters have begun to use multi-electrode arrays

to monitor tens to hundreds of neurons simultaneously. Now they can look for pat-

terns of neural activity that drive more complex tasks like grasping and manipulating

objects. But the signal-to-noise quality is not as good with the arrays, he notes. And

now we are collecting humongous data sets every day that can be leveraged for fur-

thering our understanding of the brain and ultimately helping human patients. We could

be doing much more with the data than we are; we dont have the mathematical tools

that we had for studying one neuron at a time.

Yus specialty is developing and applying mathematical algorithms for studying

large-scale neural activity. As for why he has come to Carnegie Mellon, he says, This

work is interdisciplinary. It involves neuroscience, signal processing, statistics, machine

learning and other elds. I dont know of any place that has as many experts in each.Brain-computer work will require new hardware, too. Typical electrode arrays have

tiny needles that penetrate into the cortex. Though not directly harmful, they are inva-

sive, and eventually the brain forms scar tissue around them so the signals die out,

says Jeyanandh Paramesh. Thats okay for short-term experiments but not for long-

term therapeutic use. When you put something into a persons skull you want to leave it

there and know its functioning.

Paramesh is working with scientists at Pitt who have a planar array that would

go under the skull, but sit on the surface of the brain. He is developing the hardware

to go with it. The challenges are many, he says, because for long-term use the whole

implanted unit has to run wirelessly: You dont want wires sticking through your head.

Power is one problem, since onboard batteries would run down. So the implant will use

a method called resonant inductive coupling. On the outside of the patients head, a

tiny power unit would carry the primary coil of a micro-transformer. The secondary coil

(which picks up induced voltage from the primary) would reside on the implant.Then comes transmitting the neural signals gathered by the electrodes. Short-

range wireless transmission may seem no big deal. But here again the amount of signal

data is huge, and as Paramesh notes, you cant simply pump it all out to be processed

externally. It would take too much bandwidth. It would consume too much power and

create heat; the temperature rise would damage brain tissue. Circuitry is needed to

compress and condition data before sending, Paramesh says. He has now designed

a system that can sample and process data from any four of the arrays 32 electrodes

at once. Hes trying to push that limit while balancing a host of further design problems,

from keeping the overall form-factor tight to dealing with fabrication issues.

Work of this type is incredibly complex. It will tax many skills, such as Carnegie

Mellons well-known strengths in MEMS (micro-electro-mechanical systems, the manu-

facture of innitesimal on-chip components) and yet, the work is moving forward.

What li AhadGary Fedder says that all biomedical engineering at CIMM has three goals: Make

things small. Make them near-zero-invasive. And focus on modular engineering so we

have pieces we can re-use and dont have to build a custom solution for every medical

need.

Looking ahead he sees myriad benets owing from CIMMs research. Some of

the brain-computer work, for instance, could also be applied for inputting signals to the

brain: to suppress tremors and seizures in people with neural disorders to improve the

now-primitive retinal implant systems for giving sight to the blind.

Or someday, maybe I could just think about this story and a computer would

write it, Fedder smiles. But these things are far down the road. We are in seed stage,

and were building.

L, L-TIMN BIBL

mong the coolest items in development at

IMM is a temperature sensor the size of

a grain of uncooked rice. Its for use with

crosurger, the injection of a super-cold

uid such as liquid nitrogen to kill tumors or

unwanted tissue.

Prostate cancer is often treated b crosur-

ger. It has been successful, but there can

be ver bad outcomes if ou freeze more

tissue than ou wanted, or freeze the wrong

tissue. educing that risk is the goal, sas

IMM irector ar Fedder, a co-PI on the

project. urrentl, surgeons insert croprobe

needles and appl the coolant with the aid of

ultrasound imaging. What could help, Fedder

sas, is a sstem for more precise feedback

on the spread of the freeze front.

Mech Professor yoed abin, an expert in

croengineering, came up with the idea

of the mini-sensors. Twent or so would

be implanted in and around the prostate

before surger. The would then sense and

wirelessl transmit the temperatures of

nearb tissue, to help assure that tumors are

eliminated while vital functions are not.

fter surger the sensors would biodegrade,

leaving just harmless traces of micro-electronic components. In fact, research on

biodegradable implants is a eld of its own

at IMM. The work here is led b Lee Weiss

and Phil ampbell, both of Biomedical ngi-

neering and omputer Science; one applica-

tion there pursuing is an implant to induce

bone regeneration after severe injuries.

Meanwhile, research scientist lan

osenbloom is looking into other tpes of

micro-sensing. If ou are a patient in a

critical care unit, some of our vital signs,

such as heart rate, can and will be monitored

constantl. But others can onl be checkedb drawing periodic samples notabl

glucose level in the blood, which must be in

the normal range to avoid glcemic shock.

So osenbloom is working on a real-time

sensing device (technicall, a microdial-

sis device) that can be inserted into the

bloodstream on a needlepoint. The ultimate

vision is having such sensors implanted

long term in outpatients, to monitor not onl

blood sugar but the immune agents called

ctokines. Which might pa big dividends:

ctokine levels can be earl markers of

cancer.


3/6

12

engineering

ne

w

s

There is a growing consensus that the weak-

est link in computer and Internet security is not

vulnerable software, but user behavior. Every year,

according to various surveys, surprising numbers

of users still fall for phishing scams. Others down-

load things they shouldnt or disregard the most

basic good practices, often wreaking havoc across their employers networks.

Where Lorrie Cranor differs from many experts is in refusing to believe that user

lapses are inevitable by-products of the ignorance of the masses. Most security

breaches can be attributed to human error, she says, then quickly adds the punch line:

which means they come from the failure of systems designers to meet human needs

and accommodate human capacities and limitations.

Cranor is one of the founders of an emerging research eld called usable privacy

and security. At Carnegie Mellon where she holds cross-appointments in Computer

science and Engineering and Public Policy she directs one of the few comprehensiveresearch centers in the eld, CUPS: the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory.

Now she and her colleagues are building the worlds rst usable privacy and security

Ph.D. program.

The CUPS Doctoral Training Program is being launched with a ve-year, $3 million

grant from the National Science Foundation. A charter class of six students enrolled in

the fall of 09 and the program will take about 10 more each year. To grasp what stu-

dents learn and do in this little-known eld, lets join Lorrie Cranor for a whirlwind intro.

Ua Priva ad surit 101Privacy and security are related but distinct issues. Clearly a website or computer must

be secure (safe from malicious hackers) in order to give you privacy (control over what

others can learn about you). On the other hand, Cranor points out, a site that you visit

may have good security yet offer little privacy. The sites owners might be selling cus-

tomer data to telemarketers, for instance.Research has shown that most users want privacy and security but arent sure

how to get either. The goal of usability work, in a nutshell, is to maximize their chances.

Cranor says there are three main strategies for doing so, one being to take obvious

DOnT blAMeTHe UseRs

Instead lets make computer securitmore usable, sas the head of a newPh.. program.

B y M I V

T T y

A Ph.D. STUDENT STAKES OUT THE HOME FRONT

In the newly launched Ph.D. program or usable privacy

and security, Michelle Mazurek is the Home Storage

Student. She is working with partners including her

aculty advisors, ECE proessors Lujo Bauer and Greg

Ganger, on new systems or managing digital storagein households.

That is a growing problem. As Mazurek notes, many o

us have text and multimedia fles scattered across a

multitude o devices at home: desktop PCs and laptops, video

and music players and more. The project assumes that all de-

vices can be wirelessly linked, and one nity eature, Mazurek

says, is a fle-tagging system or seeing that all fles go where

theyre supposed to be, regardless o where theyre created.

For instance, you can speciy that all my work fles go on the

laptop in addition to the desktop.

In a distributed environment o this type, privacy and security

concerns loom large. Mazureks role is to address these, help-

ing to develop methods to let each user in the home speciy

who can have access to what, under which conditions. As a

frst step, she and team members interviewed sample house-

holds to learn about needs and desires. Among the fndings,

Mazurek says, are that presence matters: people eel morecomortable with others seeing their fles i they can be pres-

ent to monitor it. And people want the ability to make ad-hoc

access decisions instead o just setting policies a priori.

Mazurek also learned that some people have strange habits.

For instance, they try to hide sensitive fles by giving them

unny flenames; burying them in sub-olders. Its like burying

valuables in the bottom o a drawer. The downside, o course,

is that you can orget where you hid the gold watch and a per-

sistent thie can still fnd it. But to Mazurek such things are

more than amusing tidbits. What were seeing are unmet

needs, or imperectly met needs, or privacy and security,

she says. Our job is to fnd better ways.

2

engineeringne

w

s


4/6

decisions out of peoples hands by automating them. As she noted in a research paper,

early antivirus programs prompted users to make a decision about every detected

virus, whereas today the common default mode is to just delete or quarantine infected

les. But many choices arent so conducive to automation. That leaves the other two

approaches: designing features so theyre intuitive and easy to use and educating the

users.

Research by Cranor et al has shown that a great deal of confusion reigns. Many

people conate privacy and security. Some claim to be militant about privacy rights

(theyre known as privacy fundamentalists), yet in experiments they will enter more

personal data than needed for an online transaction. We all judge by appearances,

and many judge a website to be trustworthy if it looks professionally done. The list

goes on; solutions are needed.

fih stori ad nutritio la

Solution-wise, the CUPS research group has made perhaps its biggest splash thusfar in user education. Have you seen Anti-Phishing Phil? Hes a cartoon character, a

young sh, who was created by recent EPP Ph.D. graduate Steve Sheng and former

Communication Design student Bryant Magnien.

Phil and an older and wiser sh named PhishGuru star in an interactive, online

game that teaches players how to recognize phishy emails and avoid getting hooked.

Better still, Phil and PhishGuru are now being bundled into training programs for rms

and organizations. Some organizations like to warn their members about phishing by the

use of simulated phishing scams. (In one case, the U.S. Military Academy sent cadets

an email signed by a ctitious colonel, asking for sensitive information. About 80 percent

dutifully took the bait.) So Cranor and other CUPS faculty through a spinout company

called Wombat Security Technologies are offering an added wrinkle: theyll write the

simulated email, and rig it so that if you click on the baited link, you get an instant lesson

from PhishGuru.

Its taking advantage of a teachable moment, Cranor says. People are more likelyto be receptive to teaching when they realize they just fell for an attack.

Other projects now in the works at CUPS have to do with usable design. A survey

of location-sharing services, with which you can use your GPS cell phone or Wi-Fi laptop

to let people know where you are, found that systems on the market tend to lack good

privacy-preference settings. Some leave you open to anyone who comes looking while

others are confusing or dont give meaningful control. CUPS is piloting a system called

Locaccino which, Cranor says, makes it easy to set up privacy rules. For instance, my

students can access my location only while Im on campus on weekdays, but close

friends and family any time, anywhere. (This too looks to be the basis of a spinout

company.)

And speaking of confusion: most public websites have privacy policies but its often

hard to nd them or gure out what they really mean. Thus Cranor and the CUPS team

hope to create the equivalent of a nutrition label for privacy. Just as the labels on food

products list the key ingredients in a standard format to help you comparison shop, theenvisioned system would link with search engines to display various websites privacy

policies in a uniform fashion. The CUPS team operates a search engine called Privacy

Finder, which demonstrates the privacy nutrition label concept.

The unifying theme in all CUPS projects is enabling people to make more informed

choices more easily. This has been done in other areas; Cranor sees no reason it cant

be done in online privacy and security. Weve already had faculty and students from

many disciplines doing research, she says, and the students in the new Ph.D. program

are going to help us develop new methodologies. Visit the CUPS website for more

information about the CUPS Ph.D. program and CUPS research projects and to try out

Anti-Phishing Phil, Locaccino and Privacy Finder, http://cups.cs.cmu.edu.


5/6

14

engineering

ne

w

s

T T y

Most people dont know how to reduce energy costs in their homes. Sure, you canreplace traditional light bulbs with energy-efcient ones or adjust the thermostat a

few degrees, but it is difcult to quantify how these changes will reduce your power

bill. However, in the not-too-distant future this may no longer be the case. A team of

Carnegie Mellon researchers, lead by professors Lucio Soibelman, H. Scott Matthews

and Jos M. F. Moura, received a $1.5 million grant from the National Science Founda-

tion to track energy consumption in buildings.

Soibelman says that their research relies on inexpensive sensor technology to

track and quantify power consumption and it will ultimately teach people how to be

more intelligent when they try to save energy. He compares energy consumption to

grocery shopping. He explains that when you buy groceries, you get a receipt listing

each item purchased. To save money the next time you shop, you can review the re-

ceipt and make decisions on how to cut expenses. Perhaps youll buy more chicken and

less beef or substitute an off-brand cereal for a name brand. With electricity, we dont

have that option. At the end of the month, the utility company sends a bill listing thetotal amount of power used and thats it. Consumers have no way of knowing how their

energy habits or appliances impact their bills.

Around four years ago, Soibelman, Matthews and Mario Berges, a Ph.D. student,

set out to track energy consumption in buildings. Their rst experiments took place in

Porter Hall. They put sensors on all the buildings circuit breakers to collect data. The

team realized this would be too expensive for home use. In a house, you have ap-

proximately 30 breakers. You would have to wire the sensors and do circuit tracing to

determine what is feeding what, says Soibelman. It would cost approximately $10,000

to wire a typical house. If your power bill is $100 a month, it would be illogical to spend

$10,000 to save $120 to $240 a year on electricity.

Determined to nd a cheaper way to track power usage, the team decided to apply

non-intrusive load monitoring technology. The idea here is to have one sensor in the

house that traces energy consumption. This sensor would monitor a matrix of data, i.e.

watts, current, etc., as it passes through the wire and feed the data into complex com-puter algorithms for analysis. Soibelman explains that when you turn a light on or off,

you get a bump in the graph or a transient that indicates a change from one state to

another. We want to nd specic characteristics in those transients that you could call

signatures for each appliance, he says. Our long-term goal is to have a system in the

house that could learn the patterns of how people use electricity and how to optimize

electricity use.

neW ReseARcHWIll HelPcOnsUMeRsTRAck HOMe

eneRGycOnsUMPTIOn

B y S y S T S


6/6

He envisions a system that relies on human-computer interaction. For example,

a person would tell the power tracking system that they want to spend $100 a month

for electricity. A couple of days later, the system would send back a message, predicting

that the bill will be $150 if the consumer does not change his behavior. The system

analyzes one or two days worth of energy usage in the home and then extrapolates

data for the rest of the month. By understanding the homeowners behavior and having

quantitative data on the amount of power each appliance uses, the system could then

offer the consumer suggestions on how to cut costs.

In 2007 the team consulted with researchers from Bosch Research and Technology

Center North America, and together, with Bosch funding, they built the rst prototype.

The prototype proved feasible, and the team applied for a patent, but there were short-

comings. It takes a great deal of signal processing to accurately detect transients. We

have 100% accuracy detecting heavy appliances and light loads. With medium usage,

its hard to detect if a light is on in the bathroom or bedroom, says Soibelman. When

Carnegie Mellon and Bosch applied for the NSF grant, CITs Jos Moura and YuanweiJin from University of Maryland Eastern Shore, both experts in signal processing, were

added to the team.

While the team is in place, Soibelman explains, It is not enough to have over-

whelming amounts of data. We have to change how consumers use electricity. The

role of human-computer interaction cannot be understated in this work, and that is

why the Pittsburgh-based team is working with researchers from the Carnegie Mellon-

Portugal Information and Communication Technologies Institute (ICTI), and in particular

researchers from the University of Madeira. We are planning to install prototypes in 100

houses in Madeira, and the Portuguese team will track user behavior, says Soibelman.

Mario Berges, who has worked on this project since its inception, explains, We

know the technology, we know how to desegregate the data, and we even know what

is consuming the energy in your house. But our Portuguese counterparts have the

challenge of getting the data to the users and making users change their behavior. The

Portuguese team will design an interface with the intention of changing user behaviorfor the long term. (This part of the research is not funded by the NSF. Instead, it is part of

a project called SINAIS that is sponsored by the Portuguese National Science Foundation

under the framework of the Carnegie Mellon Portugal Program.)

While work is planned for Portugal, here in the Pittsburgh area, the sensor

technology that CIT and Bosch developed is being tested for other purposes as well. In

the city of McKeesport, Blueroof Technologies has built a number of high-tech cottages

for elderly and disabled people. These homes are outtted with advanced robotic and

electronic devices, which have been designed by local universities and this includes CITs

sensor technology.

We have ideas that go beyond saving energy, says Soibelman.

He and Berges explain that while it is not yet part of the plan,

tracking systems could be developed to diagnose problems

with appliances. Expanding on commercial applications,

energy suppliers could benet from tracking systems, as well.Surprisingly, utility companies dont have a lot of granular data

on consumer behavior. These systems and the data they

provide could help utility companies determine on- and off-

peak rates, which could thwart blackouts. In turn, consumers

could benet because tracking systems would tell them

the cheapest time of day to run major appliances. Financial

incentives would certainly hasten the development of tracking

technology, but understanding how we use energy and

learning how to change our long-term behavior is critical if

we are to someday achieve sustainable energy.

tech today winter 09 10

Documents