Georgia Tech researchers in computing and industrial design are planning a series of workshops with artists, designers, scientists and engineers to spark innovation at the intersection of technology and soft goods such as apparel. The initiative is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts in the largest grant awarded to Georgia Tech by the organization within the last five years.

The workshops will be centered on a futuristic textile swatch book that looks and acts similar to traditional swatch books, a staple in fashion and design studios. Georgia Tech’s Clint Zeagler and Thad Starner’s version is connected to a notebook computer via USB, with material swatches that incorporate conductive thread, sensors and controllers. As the swatches are exchanged in the binder, the appropriate interface appears on the computer screen.

“The Electronic Textile Interface Swatch Book functions as a guide book for an inspiration and ideation session in the first part of the workshop, driving the design process and helping participants understand the technology and then dream up ideas,” said Zeagler. “We’re especially curious to see how scientists, traditional fashion designers and craftspeople can be inspired to apply on-body interactive textiles within their fields.”

Participants get to make prototypes of their designs in the second part of the workshop using the enhanced fabric.

A pilot workshop was held at Parsons the New School for Design this fall; subsequent workshops will be held at Georgia Tech and Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta.

Zeagler, an instructor in the School of Industrial Design, and Starner, an associate professor in the School of Interactive Computing, have forged new paths in the futuristic wearable computing field. Leveraging Georgia Tech’s strengths in networked products and connectivity, the researchers hope the workshops will advance new ideas in traditional design fields in fashion, interiors and textiles.

The swatch book and supporting research presentations have made numerous appearances in exhibitions and international conferences. This April, the team will present the work at the Smart Fabrics Conference in Miami.

Two Georgia Tech grad students landed on Forbes Magazine’s lists of “30 under 30” in Technology and Entertainment. Healthy-eating advocate Eugene Medynskiy (Interactive Computing) and gaming guru Chris DeLeon (Digital Media) share the spotlight with the CEOs of Spotify and Dropbox among other big names.

Source: Forbes Magazine

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Arguably one of Jill Dimond’s strengths is her aptitude to learn and develop for a variety of mobile computing platforms, which have become a ubiquitous part of modern society in less than a decade since the emergence of the smartphone. From the early days of the PDA and smartphone boom with Palm OS and Blackberry, to the current landscape of iOS and Android dominance, Dimond has been researching and developing for mobile technology since she was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan.

At 20, she created a spelling application interface for elementary school kids on Palm OS. Making use of the Palm image library and built-in camera - when camera phones were still a novelty - her interface allowed students to capture photos of objects to spell. In early 2009 in Mount View, Calif., Dimond found herself at the center of Google’s development strategy of its soon-to-be monstrous hit Android. She was a Georgia Tech graduate student interning as a software engineer and researcher on the Android team. In her four months at Google she helped develop the user interface for App Inventor, a visual programming language for the Android platform.

Dimond has taken her experiences in mobile computing development and her passion for serving others - particularly marginalized groups - to apply it to her primary studies as a Ph.D. student in Human-Computer Interaction in the GVU Center and School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech.

Her current research, under advisor Dr. Amy Bruckman, examines how the design of technology can impact participation in social movements. Dimond is designing, building and evaluating technology to support a social justice organization called Hollaback, a group that uses technology in order to combat street harassment and violence. Her efforts have yielded an Android app and web infrastructure that allows users to blog about their experiences and post pictures of public harassment on the Hollaback network of 40 geographic-specific websites in 13 countries.

The genesis of her research stems from her volunteer work and general interest in social issues and technology.

“I started volunteering at a women’s domestic violence shelter and saw many issues with the women who had to live there and the technology they used,” Dimond said.

Based on the experience, she started a research study that examined how technology is intertwined in the lives of domestic violence survivors - how it both helps them move on but also how it can be potentially dangerous.

“Technologies such as social network sites and mobile phones connect us in different and new ways that we cannot sometimes control,” she said.

As Facebook and other websites court users to create online social connections, Dimond has focused her energy on using technology to create awareness of social issues. Her research is helping to make technology more accessible and easy to use especially for disenfranchised groups or those who are discriminated against.

With her Android app Hollaback, users can snap a photo or text a message on mobile phones and use the devices – or the website – to send the stories of harassment and violence directed towards them in public. The content is then published and mapped on the various local Hollaback websites. Fellow master's student Daphne LaRose helped by building a new version of the app to let bystanders report harassment as well.

Originating in New York, Hollaback expanded from one blog in the city that never sleeps to other U.S. states, Asia, Europe and South America, thanks in no small part to Dimond’s mobile computing and web expertise.

Dimond said that whether people see or experience harassment, they now have an outlet to help impact the problem and help others within their communities. She also believes her research can be applied to those who want to engage in social change and use technology to do so.

“I hope to add to the conversation and provide an example where technology does not necessarily make people ‘slacktivists,” Dimond said.

Her research has expanded from looking at technology and violence to how technology can play a role in organizing and activism. After finishing her doctorate, Dimond plans to start a technology cooperative to develop and design technologies for social change as well as contribute back to the research community by writing up the findings and designs.

She is compelled to share her knowledge and be an agent for change - helping those who sometimes cannot help themselves - and that, along with her mobile computing acumen, is another of Dimond’s strengths.

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Ian Bogost (Literature, Communications and Culture) doesn't feel the success of Zynga, the company behind popular Facebook games such as Farmville and Cityville, is cause for celebration. Bogost thinks Zynga's games are mindless, designed to suck money out of players' pockets. Source: NPR

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A seismic shift in the way people use computing technology could come in the very near future and Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer and a Georgia Tech alumnus, hinted at what that future might look like when he spoke on campus Oct. 27. (Webcast Available)

GVU and its researchers are pioneering a part of that future, where the integration of computing devices into peoples’ daily lives will take on a whole new level of importance.

While on campus, Mundie toured the GVU Center at the Technology Square Research Building and met some of the people and research helping shape a new era of computing.

Professor Irfan Essa, School of Interactive Computing, and Matthias Grundmann, Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science, demonstrated examples of the ongoing work to make video a first-class citizen in terms of consumption and sharing, building on GVU research that includes areas of video content extraction and video stabilization. Essa also discussed examples of what role media and video will have in Civic Computing and Journalism of the Future.

Distinguished Professor Gregory Abowd and Professor Jim Rehg, School of Interactive Computing, showed Mundie developing technologies for Behavior Imaging, a new research field centered on social and communicative behaviors collected from sensor data. They are analyzing social interactions between children and adults, with a particular focus on characterizing developmental disorders such as autism.

The Microsoft executive next experienced LiquidText, an example of the future he talked about while on campus. Craig Tashman, Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science and creator of LiquidText, showcased the technology and how its innovative multitouch-based system for text manipulation helps people read and make sense of complex documents. LiquidText, expected to be released on the iPad this year, gives a highly flexible, fluid text representation allowing readers the control they need in navigation, document visualization, and annotation.

GVU’s last demonstration spotlighted Georgia Tech’s efforts to rethink computing education. Professor Mark Guzdial, School of Interactive Computing, and Barbara Ericson, Director of Computing Outreach for the Institute for Computing Education, discussed their NSF-funded projects. "Georgia Computes!" has been a five-year project focusing on improving computing education statewide, from working with the Department of Education on teacher certification and high school curriculum issues to training teachers at the high school and undergraduate level. "CSLearning4U" is a new project to teach working high school teachers about computer science by creating new kinds of distance media and a new pedagogy for teaching programming.

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Online communities are growing exponentially, dwarfing even the largest population centers on the planet and redefining the concept of community. Facebook has 800 million users, more than 20 times the size of the world’s largest metro population in Tokyo of 32.5 million people. Countless other online groups - Twitter, LinkedIn, Meetup.com - routinely draw network traffic that surpasses most major metropolitan areas.

As people become socialized as digital citizens, Kurt Luther, a Ph.D. candidate in Human-Centered Computing at Georgia Tech, is using his research in online collaborative communities to help define how its members can successfully work together in this brave new world.

With online collaborative successes like Wikipedia and open-source software, such as Linux and Firefox, the possibilities for online collaboration extend far. But widespread sustainable collaborative communities are few and far between or have gained little attention, a phenomenon that Luther has studied for the better part of a decade.

As a computer graphics technology undergrad at Purdue, he ventured into the collaborative space by developing a website that matched filmmakers with different talents in order to facilitate film projects. As a Georgia Tech Ph.D. candidate, Luther’s internships at YouTube, IBM and Microsoft have informed his work in his research area and the study of group dynamics in cyberspace.

Luther is now tackling one of the most elusive components of successful collaboration in the real or digital world - leadership.

“It quickly became clear that leadership was perhaps the biggest reason why these projects succeeded or failed,” Luther says referring to the work of animators he interviewed and who had worked together online.

Part of his dissertation is a software platform called Pipeline, which is free and open-source, and helps collaborators organize creative projects like movies over the web. Luther is currently testing instances of Pipeline in several creative communities to study the effect of different leadership styles on the process and outcome of online collaboration. Users can tweak the source code to match their own leadership approach and set of circumstances.

“My hope is that sharing Pipeline in this way will lead to even more exciting projects and research results in domains I would have never imagined,” Luther says.

He is betting Pipeline will create insights into how creativity works, especially online, and what leaders should do to foster successful creative projects. A leader in his own right, Luther was named a GVU 2011 Foley Scholar, the highest distinction in GVU for graduate-level and Ph.D. students, for his dissertation work.

Success is a measure more easily defined than leadership and Luther researched the topic in a paper he co-authored, “Why It Works (When It Works): Success Factors in Online Creative Collaboration,” with advisor Amy Bruckman, Kevin Ziegler and Kelly Caine.

The research compared and contrasted online, collaborative animated movies, called collabs, with open-source software (OSS) projects. Successful collabs were those that saw their projects to completion, and of the nearly 900 sampled, less than 20 percent reached that benchmark.

Leadership was a key factor in the collabs that did succeed. These collabs used leaders with technical expertise, collab experience, and soft skills; frequent communication between leaders and members; and early planning and structure.

The entertainment domain has been an early trendsetter in creating successful online collaborative communities, Luther noted. Movies, music and art lead the way with crowd-sourced content on the Internet and in pop culture.

“I hope to continue to explore the vast potential of online creative collaboration by studying interesting examples of it in the wild, building tools to enable new forms of it, and designing experiments to understand what makes it tick,” Luther says.

He envisions a future where online collaboration helps people to contribute meaningfully to almost any type of creative project in a way that matches their available time, interests, and abilities.

One community at a time, Luther plans to be a part of that effort in order to create a better online world for us all.

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The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded $6 million to fund three projects involving researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Each four-year, $2 million grant was awarded through the NSF's Division of Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation (EFRI).

"The EFRI research teams will probe some profound aspects of the interface of biology and engineering," said Sohi Rastegar, director of EFRI. "If they are successful, the principles and theories uncovered in their investigations could unlock many technological opportunities."

This year, 14 transformative, fundamental research projects were awarded EFRI grants in two emerging areas: technologies that build on understanding of biological signaling, and machines that can interact and cooperate with humans.

The three Georgia Tech projects include:

Developing a "therapeutic robot" to help rehabilitate and improve motor skills in people with mobility problems;
Creating wearable sensors that allow blind people to "see" with their hands, bodies or faces;
Generating and rigorously testing quantitative models that describe spatial and temporal regulation of cell differentiation in tissues.

The therapeutic robot could enhance, assist and improve motor skills in humans with varying motor capabilities and deficits. The goal of the project is to program a humanoid rehabilitation robot to perform a "partnered box step," which is a defined pattern of weight shifts and directional changes, solely based on interpreting movement cues from subtle changes in forces between the hands and arms of the robot and the person.

To do this, researchers at Georgia Tech and Emory University will study how humans use their muscles to walk, balance and generate force signals with the hands for guidance when moving in cooperation with another person. They will also study "rehabilitative partnered dance," which has been specifically adapted to help improve gait and balance in individuals with motor impairments.

"Our vision is to develop robots that will interact with humans as both assistants and movement therapists," explained principal investigator Lena Ting, an associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. "We expect our project to have a long-term impact on quality of life of individuals with movement difficulties, such as those caused by Parkinson's disease, stroke and injury by improving fitness, motor skills and social engagement."

Working with Ting on the project are Emory University School of Medicine (geriatrics) assistant professor Madeleine Hackney, Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering assistant professor Charlie Kemp and Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing assistant professor Karen Liu.

For the second project, researchers at Georgia Tech and The City College of New York will investigate devices for "alternative perception" and the principles underlying the human-machine interaction. Alternative perception combines electronics and the other senses to emulate vision. In addition to aiding the visually impaired, the findings are expected to have other applications, such as the development of intelligent robots.

The researchers plan to untangle how humans learn to coordinate input from their senses -- e.g. vision, touch -- with movements, like reaching for a glass or moving through a crowded room. They will then map out how machines, such as robots and computers, learn similar tasks, to model devices that can assist humans.

The team envisions a multifunctional array of sensors on the body and has already developed prototypes for some of the devices. The full complement of wearable sensors would help a sightless person navigate by conveying information about his or her surroundings.

The researchers hope their findings on perception, and the prototypes they develop, will spawn a raft of wearable electronic devices to help blind people "see" their environment at a distance through touch, hearing and other senses. The technology would also benefit sighted individuals who must navigate in poor visibility, such as firefighters and pilots.

Principal investigator Zhigang Zhu, professor of computer science and computer engineering in City College's Grove School of Engineering, will collaborate with City College professor of psychology and director of the Program in Cognitive Neuroscience Tony Ro, City College professor of electrical engineering Ying Li Tian, Georgia Tech Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering professor Kok-Meng Lee, and Georgia Tech School of Applied Physiology associate professor Boris Prilutsky.

The third project will address a fundamental question of developmental biology: what controls the spatial and temporal patterns of cell differentiation? Answering this question will lead to a better understanding of the basic principles of embryogenesis, explain origins of developmental disorders, and provide guidelines for tissue engineering and regenerative medicine.

The research will be conducted by principal investigator and Princeton University Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering associate professor Stanislav Shvartsman, Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering associate professor Hang Lu, New York University Department of Biology professor Christine Rushlow, and University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Department of Computer Science associate professor Saurabh Sinha.

Scientists know that among an embryo's first major developments is the establishment of its dorsoventral axis, which runs from its back to its belly. The researchers plan to study how this axis development unfolds -- specifically the presence and location of proteins during the process, which give rise to muscle, nerve and skin tissues.

To enable large-scale quantitative analyses of protein positional information along the dorsoventral axis, Lu and Shvartsman will further develop a microfluidic device they previously designed to reliably and robustly orient several hundred embryos in just a few minutes.

"By understanding this system at a deeper, quantitative level, we will elucidate general principles underlying the operation of genetic and multicellular networks that drive development," said Lu.

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Shwetak Patel is a computer scientist who has invented a series of sensor technology systems for home environments with the goal of saving energy and improving daily life through a broad range of applications. Much of his work to date has focused on the development of low-cost and easy-to-deploy devices that can detect and measure household energy consumption without an elaborate network of expensive instruments. To allow residents to track their energy usage down to the level of individual appliances and fixtures, Patel's distinctive approach leverages existing infrastructure — such as gas lines, electrical wiring, plumbing, and ventilation ducts — and requires only a minimal number of small, wirelessly connected sensors attached to the central hookup of each of these utility sources. When coupled with a machine learning algorithm that analyzes patterns of activity and the signature noise produced by each appliance, the sensors enable users to measure and disaggregate their energy and water consumption and to detect inefficiencies more effectively. In addition to the resource conservation applications of his sensor systems, Patel is also exploring their potential for home security or elder care, as they serve the related function of sensing human activity and monitoring movement throughout a building's rooms. While envisioning cutting-edge new tools to address pressing social challenges and to make the buildings we live in more responsive to our needs, Patel devises elegant, simple solutions that dramatically reduce the cost of implementation. Shwetak Patel received a B.S. (2003) and a Ph.D. (2008) from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Since 2008, he has been an assistant professor in the Departments of Computer Science and Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the University of Washington.

The Georgia Institute of Technology is now a strategic partner with the World Economic Forum, a Geneva-based non-profit organization that focuses on the most pressing issues facing the world.

Georgia Tech is the only public U.S. institution invited to be part of the World Economic Forum’s Knowledge Advisory Board. The board includes 12 American universities that will advise the forum on how to engage with academic partners and the field of higher education.

“The World Economic Forum is the premier convener of thought leaders around the world,” said Steven McLaughlin, Georgia Tech’s vice provost of international initiatives. “Having Georgia Tech as the only public university in that group expands our global impact and influence, and connects us to an important international network of leaders.”

McLaughlin will be traveling to Geneva this fall to represent Georgia Tech on the Knowledge Advisory Board.

The partnership between Georgia Tech and the World Economic Forum has yielded other initiatives. Several Georgia Tech faculty members, for example, will be participating in the Annual Meeting of the New Champions in Dalian, China, Sept. 14-16.

Known as “Summer Davos,” the Annual Meeting of the New Champions is the foremost global business gathering in Asia and is designed to foster interaction, generate insight and achieve impact across more than 1,500 participants attending.

Four faculty members will be representing Georgia Tech at “Summer Davos” in Dalian.

Elizabeth Mynatt, interactive computing professor and executive director of Georgia Tech’s Institute for People and Technology (IPaT); Blair MacIntyre, interactive computing professor; Ian Bogost, literature, communication and culture professor; and Michael Best, associate professor of international affairs, will be presenting in the “IdeasLab with Georgia Tech: Connectivity and Social Interaction.”

They will discuss persuasive gaming to address societal issues; augmented reality in media, healthcare and politics; creative discovery to manage personal information; and social media in civic engagement and political development. The IdeasLab is a unique format during the meeting in which the world’s top academic institutions present their current thinking and the audience interacts on their ideas.

MacIntyre and Bogost will also be filming a short documentary at the meeting that profiles their research work, and Mynatt will be participating in an executive think tank on Innovation and Energy Technology hosted by NBC, Harvard Business Review, Caixin Media and Shell.

Besides holding meetings, the World Economic Forum produces a series of research reports and engages its members in sector-specific initiatives. Georgia Tech faculty members have been asked to be academic partners on three studies for the forum.

Renu Kulkarni, executive director of FutureMedia and principal research associate at Georgia Tech, will be leading a study on future media initiatives.

Mustaque Ahamad, director of the Georgia Tech Information Security Center and professor of computer science, will be directing a study on cyber security.

Donald Ratliff, executive director of the Georgia Tech Supply Chain and Logistics Institute, has been invited to become a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Logistics and Supply Chain for the 2011-2012 term. In this role, Ratliff will lead a global trade supply study.

In addition to Dalian, the World Economic Forum hosts an annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, which brings together top business leaders, international political leaders, selected intellectuals and journalists to discuss world issues.