Tag: Lyle School of Engineering

StarTribune: Bitcoin has more staying power than other digital currencies

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date June 14, 2013

Said one Minnesota fan of the digital money: “Right now I wouldn’t call it investing, I would call it gambling.”

Business writer Jennifer Bjorhus with the Minneapolis Star Tribune newspaper covered the Bitcoin research of SMU cybersecurity expert Tyler W. Moore, an assistant professor of computer science in the Lyle School of Engineering.

Moore’s research found that online exchanges that trade hard currency for the rapidly emerging cyber money known as Bitcoin have a 45 percent chance of failing — often taking their customers’ money with them.

The finding is from a new computer science study that applied survival analysis to examine the factors that prompt Bitcoin currency exchanges to close. Moore carried out the research with Nicolas Christin, with the Information Networking Institute and Carnegie Mellon CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University.

The coverage by Bjorhus, “Bitcoin has more staying power than other digital currencies,” was published online June 8.

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Jennifer Bjorhus
StarTribune
Bitcoin has shot up and crashed at least twice now.

Exchanges where the fast-rising new digital currency trades have been hacked, and so have individual accounts. It’s been linked to illegal activity in underground cyber haunts such as Silk Road, and sparked a move by the U.S. government to halt unregulated use.

And Bitcoin persists.

Heck, CNBC has a Bitcoin ticker on its website.

In its fourth year of circulation now, the decentralized online-only form of money has evolved from a libertarian-styled geek curiosity to a contender for becoming the first digital currency to go truly mainstream. There are now more than 11 million “coins” created worth more than $1 billion. Lumpy and volatile as it is, the math-based cash is one of the fastest rising alternative currencies in a world filled with them.

Tyler Moore, who studies alternative currencies, said he still isn’t sure why.

“It’s one part luck, one part decentralization and one part this design that carries appeal for people that don’t like inflation,” said Moore, an assistant professor of computer science and engineering at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “The timing of it was really good.”

Bitcoin slipped onto the scene in 2009, as trust in established banks crumbled and inflation fears rose. It’s not managed by anyone. There’s no central bank. It’s based on open-source encryption technology.

In fact, the digital cash can be created by anyone with the hefty computer power required to solve specified algorithms that secure the network. Bitcoins are rewards for effort. The system takes banks out of the picture completely as individuals pay each other directly. Transactions are private but because there’s a public ledger of them it’s unlikely they are perfectly anonymous.

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SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Tyler W. Moore

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Yahoo! News: Study shows 45% of Bitcoin exchanges end up failing

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date April 26, 2013

Technology reporter Brad Reed with BGR News covered the Bitcoin research of SMU cybersecurity expert Tyler W. Moore, an assistant professor of computer science in the Lyle School of Engineering.

The finding is from a new computer science study that applied survival analysis to examine the factors that prompt Bitcoin currency exchanges to close.

Moore carried out the research with Nicolas Christin, with the Information Networking Institute and Carnegie Mellon CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University.

Reed’s coverage, “ Study shows 45% of Bitcoin exchanges end up failing,” was published online April 26.

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Brad Reed
Yahoo! News
Imagine a world where the Nasdaq, the Nikkei and the FTSE all failed within the span of a week and you have an idea how crazy the world of virtual currency trading has become. Wired reports that a new study from computer scientists Tyler Moore of the Southern Methodist University in Dallas and Nicolas Christin of Carnegie Mellon University has found that 45% of Bitcoin exchanges end up shutting their virtual doors while leaving their users’ money in limbo. However, this doesn’t mean that the Bitcoin exchanges that have survived so far are safe havens, since the study also shows that they’re under constant assault from cybercriminals who are working around the clock to hack users’ transactions.

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Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Tyler W. Moore

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Wired: Study — 45 percent of Bitcoin exchanges end up closing

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date April 26, 2013

Technology writer Ian Steadman with Wired in the United Kingdom covered the Bitcoin research of SMU cybersecurity expert Tyler W. Moore, an assistant professor of computer science in the Lyle School of Engineering.

The finding is from a new computer science study that applied survival analysis to examine the factors that prompt Bitcoin currency exchanges to close.

Moore carried out the research with Nicolas Christin, with the Information Networking Institute and Carnegie Mellon CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University.

Steadman’s coverage, “Study: 45 percent of Bitcoin exchanges end up closing,” was published online April 26.

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Ian Steadman
Wired
A study of the Bitcoin exchange industry has found that 45 percent of exchanges fail, taking their users’ money with them. Those that survive are the ones that handle the most traffic — but they are also the exchanges that suffer the greatest number of cyber attacks.

Computer scientists Tyler Moore (from the Southern Methodist University, Dallas) and Nicolas Christin (of Carnegie Mellon University) found 40 exchanges on the web which offered a service of changing bitcoins into other fiat currencies or back again. Of those 40, 18 have gone out of business — 13 closing without warning, and five closing after suffering security breaches that forced them to close. Four other exchanges have suffered serious attacks but remain open.

One of those is Mt Gox, the largest Bitcoin exchange, with Moore and Christin stating that at its peak it handles more than 40,000 Bitcoin transactions a day, compared to a mean average of 1,716. It has been the victim of a huge number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks over the past month during the peak of the Bitcoin bubble (and its subsequent bursting — though the price now appears to be rising again). Its latest statement, dealing with the attack it suffered on 21 April, is long and comprehensive, seeking to assuage the fears of Bitcoin users who feel that Mt Gox is becoming a weak chain in Bitcoin’s infrastructure.

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redOrbit: Economists Question Bitcoin Stability Despite Meteoric Rise In Value

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date April 25, 2013

Technology reporter Peter Suciu with redOrbit covered the Bitcoin research of SMU cybersecurity expert Tyler W. Moore, an assistant professor of computer science in the Lyle School of Engineering.

The finding is from a new computer science study that applied survival analysis to examine the factors that prompt Bitcoin currency exchanges to close.

Moore carried out the research with Nicolas Christin, with the Information Networking Institute and Carnegie Mellon CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University.

Suciu’s coverage, “Economists Question Bitcoin Stability Despite Meteoric Rise In Value,” was published online April 25.

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Peter Suciu
redOrbit
The bank failures that resulted from the 1929 stock market crash took many people’s life savings with it, and some say the same thing could happen – a albeit on a much smaller scale at least – to those who invest heavily in Bitcoins.

According to a new study from Southern Methodist University in Dallas and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, the virtual cyber currency known as Bitcoin could have as much as a 45 percent chance of failing. This could occur if an exchange center that held the currency – much as a bank holds real money – closed, losing customers their Bitcoins and any hard money paid for them.

Bitcoin received a boost in interest this week when PayPal president David Marcus noted that the online payment center would consider making Bitcoin a funding instrument. Many still believe that the sophisticated cyber currency still holds promise for becoming a major international medium of exchange.

Moreover the SMU-CMU study also found that currency exchanges that buy and sell a higher volume of Bitcoins are less likely to shut down. That’s the good news. The bad news is that these transactions are more likely to suffer a security breach.

The encrypted digital currency has been in the spotlight this week, as 87 percent of the nation’s top economists think that the Bitcoin only has “limited usefulness,” reported TechCrunch. This is according to a recent University of Chicago Initiative on Global Markets (IGM) poll of the 38 of the world’s top economists.

“A bitcoin’s value derives solely from the belief that others will want to use it for trade, which implies that its purchasing power is likely to fluctuate over time to a degree that will limit its usefulness,” the IGM findings noted – a general statement that, though intended to downplay the stability of Bitcoin, is actually true of all forms of currency.

Bitcoin exchanges work two ways. In the first, purchasers can go through an online exchange and pay for the virtual currency with hard currency, typically with a credit card. The exchange then transfers the purchased Bitcoins to the buyer’s account. The second way is for Bitcoins to be purchased from local dealers, where the parties meet in person and the buyer pays in cash.

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Study: High-volume Bitcoin exchanges less likely to fail, but more likely to suffer breach

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date April 24, 2013

Empirical computer science study finds consumers face risk of losing money on Bitcoin currency exchanges, many of which close

Online exchanges that trade hard currency for the rapidly emerging cyber money known as Bitcoin have a 45 percent chance of failing — often taking their customers’ money with them.

The finding is from a new computer science study that applied survival analysis to examine the factors that prompt Bitcoin currency exchanges to close.

Results showed also that currency exchanges that buy and sell a higher volume of Bitcoins are less likely to shut down, but more likely to suffer a security breach.

The study analyzed 40 exchanges that buy and sell the virtual Bitcoin to identify factors that trigger or stave off closure, said the study’s authors, computer scientists Tyler W. Moore, in the Lyle School of Engineering, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and Nicolas Christin, with the Information Networking Institute and Carnegie Mellon CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University.

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As of April 2013, Bitcoin’s market capitalization had soared to more than $1 billion, making it a frequent target of fraudsters. Bitcoins are encrypted virtual money created by computer programmers and not backed by any country or government.

A traceable form of cyber money, Bitcoins can be purchased and used much like hard currency to pay for goods and services, mostly over the Internet. Part of Bitcoins’ attraction is its potential to reduce transaction fees for online purchases, as well as its mathematically-enforced protections against inflation.

Study authors Moore and Christin identified 40 Bitcoin exchanges worldwide that convert the cyber money into 33 hard currencies. Of those 40, 18 have gone out of business. Nine of the 40 experienced security breaches from hackers or other criminal activity, forcing five of them to subsequently close. Another 13 closed without any publicly announced breach, according to Moore and Christin.

From their study, the researchers found the failure rate of Bitcoin exchanges is 45 percent. The median lifetime of an exchange is just over one year, 381 days.

Of the 18 Bitcoin exchanges that closed, in 11 of those cases the authors were able to find evidence of whether or not the customers were reimbursed their money. Five exchanges didn’t reimburse their customers. Six claim to have done so.

“The risk of losing funds stored at exchanges is real but uncertain,” write Moore and Christin in “Beware the Middleman: Empirical Analysis of Bitcoin-Exchange Risk,” which was invited for presentation at the 17th International Financial Cryptography and Data Security Conference held in Okinawa, Japan, April 1-5.

While various so-called crypto-currencies have been introduced in the past few years, Bitcoin is the first to be so widely adopted. Besides being open source, Bitcoin’s attraction includes real-time peer-to-peer transactions, worldwide acceptance and low or no processing fees.

Crypto-currencies are intended to eliminate reliance on brick-and-mortar middlemen such as banks, exchanges, credit card conglomerates and other financial intermediaries. Despite that, and as a result of Bitcoin’s booming popularity, a wide variety of middlemen have sprung up around the cyber currency. Those range from currency exchanges and online wallets to mining pools and legitimate or Ponzi scheme investment services, the authors said.

Moore and Christin focused their study on currency exchanges to examine the risk Bitcoin holders face from exchange failures.

Middlemen rise up in a system specifically meant to avoid middlemen
“Bitcoin is expressly designed to be completely decentralized with no single points of control,” Moore said. “Yet currency exchanges have become de facto central authorities, and their success or failure drives Bitcoin’s success or failure.”

Recent wild fluctuations in the exchange rate of Bitcoins can be traced in part to the role of digital middlemen, he said, including the emergence of the currency exchanges that buy and sell Bitcoins.

Bitcoin’s trading value at the start of the year was around $10 per Bitcoin. But its price soared as high as $260 earlier in April, then recently took a nosedive and is now hovering around $68, explained Moore.

“Much of that can be attributed to the Mt. Gox exchange temporarily shutting down because of heavy trading that overwhelmed the exchange,” Moore said. “Studying why these exchanges fail helps us better understand the risks of Bitcoin.”

Mt. Gox, https://mtgox.com/, based in Tokyo, is the most popular of the exchanges, with average daily transactions totaling more than 50,000 Bitcoins. Other high-volume exchanges include btc-e.com and Intersango.

Of the 40 exchanges Moore and Christin studied, the median for daily transactions carried out is 290. The mean is 1,716. Some 25 percent of exchanges process under 25 Bitcoins each day on average.

The findings of the study leave Bitcoin buyers in a dilemma: According to the study’s empirical analysis, “Mt. Gox and Intersango are less likely to close than other exchanges” because of their high volume, the authors write.

But the study’s logistic regression model yielded the result that the higher the transaction volume, the more likely a security breach by hackers. “More than 43,000 Bitcoins were stolen from the Bitcoinica trading platform in March 2012,” the authors write, and “in September 2012, $250,000 worth of Bitcoins were pilfered from the Bitfloor currency exchange.” Moreover, Mt. Gox has been breached multiple times.

Holding money at Bitcoin exchanges is risky
There are two ways to buy Bitcoins. Purchasers go online through an exchange such as Mt. Gox. They pay hard currency such as U.S. dollars at the market exchange rate, typically funded by a credit card. The exchange transfers the purchased Bitcoins to the buyer’s Bitcoin address or the money remains in an online account maintained by the exchange.

“In the latter case, customers are at risk of losing their Bitcoins if the exchange suddenly closes,” Moore said. “Believe it or not, many people — if not most —choose to leave the Bitcoins in the exchange account, thinking that their Bitcoins are better protected there and with faster access to convert back to hard currencies.”

Bitcoins also can be purchased from local dealers found on web sites such as https://localbitcoins.com/. Buyers meet up with the dealer online or in person and pay cash for the Bitcoins, which are then transferred to the Bitcoin address provided.

Data for the study included daily trade volumes, average weighted daily price for conversions to other currencies, the lifetime of each exchange, whether investors were repaid following an exchange’s closure, and whether the country where the exchange is based complies with the World Bank’s regulations for Anti-Money-Laundering and Combating the Financing of Terrorism. — Margaret Allen

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SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Tyler W. Moore

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New Scientist: Bitcoin hits $200 but swapping for real money is risky

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date April 15, 2013

Technology reporter Jacob Aron with New Scientist covered the Bitcoin research of SMU cybersecurity expert Tyler W. Moore, an assistant professor of computer science in the Lyle School of Engineering.

The finding is from a new computer science study that applied survival analysis to examine the factors that prompt Bitcoin currency exchanges to close.

Moore carried out the research with Nicolas Christin, with the Information Networking Institute and Carnegie Mellon CyLab at Carnegie Mellon University.

Aron’s coverage, “Bitcoin hits $200 but swapping for real money is risky,” was published online April 9.

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Jacob Aron
New Scientist
Online currency Bitcoin hit yet another record high today as it smashed through the $200 barrier, but a new analysis of Bitcoin exchanges shows that swapping real-world cash for its virtual equivalent can be a risky business.

The stratospheric rise of Bitcoin in recent days – it was at $70 just two weeks ago and less than $10 when we first wrote about it – has left many wishing they had got in on the currency when it was much cheaper. But it is easy to forget that Bitcoin exchanges, where many users store their cash, have a history of being hacked or even folding altogether.

Tracking the fortunes of 40 such exchanges over the past three years, Tyler Moore of Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and Nicolas Christin of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, discovered that 18 have closed. Of these, five failed to reimburse their customers, while six claimed they did. The pair were unable to confirm either way for the remaining seven exchanges.

The pair also used mathematical modelling to predict the general behaviour of Bitcoin exchanges, and found that there is a 30 per cent chance of an exchange folding within one year of opening, increasing to nearly 80 per cent after two years.

Unsurprisingly, the larger exchanges such as Mt.Gox are much less likely to implode, but the findings suggest these popular money-swappers are also at greater risk of hack attacks. “The continued operation of an exchange depends on running a high transaction volume, which makes the exchange a more valuable target to thieves,” say the pair in a paper presented at the Financial Cryptography conference in Okinawa, Japan, last week.

So, jump on the Bitcoin bandwagon by all means – but as with all investments, don’t risk anything you aren’t prepared to lose.

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SMU News: 2012 Research Day at Southern Methodist University

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date February 14, 2012

SMU News covered the annual 2012 Research Day on Feb. 10 where SMU graduate and undergraduate students presented results of their research studies.

Sponsored by SMU’s Office of Research and Graduate Studies, the event sought to foster communication between students in different programs, give students the opportunity to present their work in formats they will use as professionals, and to share with the SMU community and others the outstanding research being done at the University.

The students presented their studies on posters, and were available to discuss their findings and the significance of the research.

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Among the projects at the event were:

Psychology student Vanessa Rae Stevens (under Professor Alicia Meuret) is studying whether people with tattoos and body piercings are also prone to intentional self injury by cutting, scratching, burning, etc.

Psychology student Grant Holland (under Professor George Holden) is studying recordings of interactions between mothers and their children with an eye toward better understanding the effects of tone-of-voice on behavior at bedtime.

Statistics student Holly Stovall (under Professor Lynne Stokes) is examining how to more precisely measure success in teaching programs for No Child Left Behind.

Earth sciences student Mary Milleson (under Professor Neil Tabor) is using core samples taken from Dallas’s White Rock Lake to gain a better understanding of how the growing urbanization of the area over the last 100 years is affecting the lake.

Computer science student Ruili Geng (under Professors Jeff Tian and Liguo Huang) is researching how to make the performance of the web and cloud computing more dependable.

Physics students Bedile Karabuga and Mayisha Zeb Nakib (under Professor Jodi Cooley-Sekula) are examining a specific technique for identifying dark matter.
For more information, contact the Office of Research and Graduate Studies at 214-768-4345 or smugrad@smu.edu.

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Tags Alicia E. Meuret, George W. Holden, Grant Holland, Holly Stovall, Jeff Tian, Liguo Huang, Lyle School of Engineering, Lynne Stokes, Mary Milleson, Neil Tabor, Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Ruili Geng, SMU Department of Psychology, SMU Department of Statistical Science, Vanessa Rae Stevens

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NSF: New forecasting algorithm helps predict hurricane intensity and wind speed

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date December 8, 2011

The National Science Foundation has covered the hurricane modeling research of SMU engineers Yu Su, Michael Hahsler and Margaret Dunham in a Dec. 5 “Discoveries” article on its web site.

Su, Hahsler and Dunham have written a white paper on their method for predicting hurricanes: “Learning a Prediction Interval Model for Hurricane Intensities.” The three scientists are in the SMU Lyle School‘s Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

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National Science Foundation
Each year, hurricanes cause tremendous destruction across the globe. It is not a coincidence that the word “hurricane” derives from Huracán, Hunraken or Jurakan, the evil god of winds and destruction in Mayan civilizations of Central America and the Tainos of the Caribbean.

But what makes them so menacing and powerful to deserve such mythos?

“A hurricane’s destructive power is directly related to the hurricane’s intensity–its maximum sustained wind speed,” said Yu Su, a Ph.D. student at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Lyle School of Engineering, at Southern Methodist University (SMU).

Yet, predicting the intensity of hurricanes is a difficult challenge.

A team of National Science Foundation- (NSF) funded scientists at SMU’s Intelligent Data Analysis Lab (IDA) developed a new forecasting algorithm called the Prediction Intensity Interval model for Hurricanes (PIIH), to help better predict hurricane intensity.

PIIH also predicts the potential ranges, from high to low, of maximum hurricane wind speeds, specifying the likelihood of wind speeds in varying ranges.

“Accurately predicting intensity means vastly improving hurricane readiness and reducing the risk to property and human life,” said Michael Hahsler, visiting assistant professor for Computer Science and Engineering at SMU. “With more accurate predicting of intensity, governments and the communities they serve will be able to make better decisions on the extent of an evacuation and when to evacuate. This will result in real dollar savings as well as saving lives.”

The PIIH algorithm is based on an aggregate hurricane model that uses previous data, including current maximum intensity, potential for increase in intensity, time of year, various temperature measurements, direction of storm movement and wind shear–the difference in wind speed and direction over a relatively short distance in the atmosphere. PIIH applies this model of past hurricane behavior to predict the intensity of current hurricanes up to five days from any given time point.

“When a future intensity is to be predicted for a current storm, similar states in the life cycle model are found,” said Margaret Dunham, Computer Science and Engineering professor at SMU. “A forecast is created by constructing a weighted average of forecasts from similar storm states found in previous storms. Confidence bands are constructed based upon observing the frequency distributions of intensity values found in previous storms. Based on these and the current intensity value, confidence intervals for future predictions are created.”

By analyzing 2011 storms, through Hurricane Nate, which struck in September 2011, researchers observed that just over 96 percent of the PIIH observations fell within the 95 percent confidence band, which is a very high probability that the PIIH prediction confidence bands were accurate.

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SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To book an interview in the SMU studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Margaret Dunham, Michael Hahsler, Yu Su

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Wired: Lasers Power Pentagon’s Next-Gen Artificial Limbs

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date November 4, 2011
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Reporter Katie Drummond with Wired magazine has covered the research of SMU engineers Marc Christensen and Volkan Otugen who are working as part of a consortium with industry and other universities to develop technology that will someday help amputees have “feeling” in their artificial limbs.

The research is funded through a $5.6 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense and industry for a center led by SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering. The goal is to develop revolutionary technology for advanced prosthetic limbs that will help amputees returning from war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Two-way fiber optic communication between prosthetic limbs and peripheral nerves will be key to operating realistic robotic arms, legs and hands that not only move like the real thing, but also “feel” sensations like pressure and heat.

Wired’s coverage published Nov. 3 in Drummond’s “Danger Room” column.

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By Katie Drummond
Wired
The Pentagon’s already got brain-controlled prosthetics, and they are a major improvement over old-school artificial limbs. The devices are far from perfect, however. They rely on metal implants, which aren’t compatible with the body’s tissues, and they can only transmit a few signals at a time — turning what should be a simple movement into a Herculean task.

Now, Darpa-funded researchers are convinced they’ve found a way to make prosthetics truly life-like: laser beams.

A team led by experts at Southern Methodist University is making swift progress towards prosthetic devices that rely on fiber-optics, and would offer a wearer the kind of seamless movement and sensation experienced with a flesh-and-blood limb.

“Already, we’re tantalizingly close,” Dr. Marc Christensen, the program’s leader, tells Danger Room. “We haven’t seen anything that’s been a deal-breaker yet.”

It all started in 2005, when researchers at Vanderbilt realized they could trigger a nerve using infrared light. The finding catalyzed a handful of research projects investigating the prospect of laser-powered prostheses, and Darpa last year doled out $5.6 million for the creation of the Neurophotonics Research Center, led by SMU, for the development of prosthetic devices powered by infrared lasers.

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Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Marc Christensen, SMU Department of Electrical Engineering, SMU Department of Mechanical Engineering, Volkan Otugen

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SMU faculty, students to help UNHCR clean up refugee camp water

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date October 19, 2011
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The search for solutions to dangerous water quality issues in refugee camps is driving an SMU lab group’s partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. SMU faculty and students will work in the lab and on the ground in Kenya, Uganda, Liberia and Bangladesh.

The group will integrate information from other sources to develop a database that will help UNHCR planners provide safer drinking water in existing and future refugee camps.

Supported by a $270,000 grant from UNHCR and additional SMU funds, faculty member Andrew Quicksall and his graduate students in SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering are collecting water samples in UNHCR camps, bringing samples back to SMU for analysis and also training workers in and around the refugee camps to test water supplies.

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“They’ve asked us to build out a whole picture, truly worldwide, for what’s in the drinking water in refugee camps,” said Quicksall, the J. Lindsay Embrey Trustee Assistant Professor in the Lyle School of Engineering. “So we’re going to go on-site, collect water, analyze some in the field and bring quite a bit of water back to our SMU laboratories and get a full picture.”

Database to identify contaminants in camps with half a million people
The database developed by Quicksall’s group will identify contaminants in drinking water and allow UNHCR officials to track water quality in the camps over time. Some water quality problems are indigenous to the regions where the camps are situated, some develop over time, and some are the nearly instant consequence of thousands of people collecting in unsuitable locations to escape war and famine faster than sanitary infrastructure can be built.

For example, the agreement with UNHCR commits Quicksall’s team to investigate critical water issues in Dadaab, Kenya ̵ home to the largest refugee complex in the world. Nearly half a million people are concentrated in three camps there, many living in makeshift shelters of twigs, reeds and scraps. Refugees pouring across the border to escape war and famine in Somalia continue to face shortages of food, water, shelter and sanitation hazards there.

“The technical challenges of supporting refugee populations of this size will require that our teams stay engaged with the UNHCR for years to come,” said Geoffrey Orsak, dean of the SMU Lyle School of Engineering. “Fortunately, our new Hunt Institute for Engineering and Humanity makes it possible to lead efforts of this magnitude nearly anywhere on the globe.”

Research to investigate solutions to safe but unpalatable drinking water
Some camps have safe drinking water available, but the taste is so off-putting that residents seek out other sources. In Nakivale, Uganda, for example, the high iron content in well water drives refugees to drink surface water that is frequently contaminated with coliform bacteria. Quicksall’s group also will investigate methods of improving the taste of such safe, but unpalatable, drinking water.

Preliminary research results have revealed problematic concentrations of iodide in drinking water at Dadaab and fluoride in both Southern Uganda and Kakukma, Kenya. Some types of contaminants may not create problems short-term, Quicksall explains, but create severe health issues for people over the long term — particularly children and the elderly. His study group will have the opportunity to both recommend and implement remediation methods for those problem water sources, he said.

“To work with the science in the lab and see it applied internationally — I don’t think there is an opportunity like this anywhere else,” said graduate student Drew Aleto, a member of Quicksall’s study team.

UNHCR and the Hunt Institute for Engineering and Humanity at SMU have signed an agreement establishing a framework for increasing the role of engineering and innovation in support of refugee camp operations. This agreement calls for the engagement of universities, government-run research institutes and corporations to address technical and infrastructure issues faced by UNHCR in helping refugees in relation to water, sanitation, shelter, communications and health care. — Kimberly Cobb

Tags Andrew Quicksall, Drew Aleto, Geoffrey Orsak, Lyle School of Engineering, SMU Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

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The Guardian: Weatherwatch — Can the intensity of a hurricane be predicted?

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date October 14, 2011

Science journalist David Hambling has covered the hurricane modeling research of SMU engineers Yu Su, Michael Hahsler and Margaret Dunham in the U.K. daily newspaper The Guardian. The article published in Hambling’s Oct. 12 column “Weatherwatch.”

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By David Hambling
The Guardian
It is possible to predict the track of a hurricane with a reasonable degree of accuracy several days in advance. Unfortunately predicting intensity is less certain, and potential victims don’t know whether to expect a rather heavy thunderstorm or something truly apocalyptic. Evacuation may be a wise precautionary measure, but when the promised devastation does not occur it looks like crying wolf.

Researchers at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas are developing a new modelling technique to predict the speed of hurricane winds. Known as the Learning Prediction Intensity Interval model, it is based on data mining using an advanced machine learning process. The computer itself works out the pattern of intensity development from a large pool of raw data, unlike existing methods where humans cherry-pick the most relevant historical data for a regression model to fit the current situation.

Read the full story.

Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Margaret Dunham, Michael Hahsler, SMU Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Yu Su

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KERA: Engineering Hope: Research To Aid Injured Troops

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date October 10, 2011

Reporter B.J. Austin with Dallas area Public Radio station KERA has interviewed SMU engineers Marc Christensen and Volkan Otugen who are working as part of a consortium with industry and other universities to develop technology that will someday help amputees have “feeling” in their artificial limbs.

KERA’s coverage aired Oct. 10 as part of a larger series on “Engineering Hope: Groundbreaking Research That Could Change Our Lives..”

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EXCERPT:

KERA News
This week, KERA 90.1 is airing a series of reports: “Engineering Hope: Groundbreaking Research That Could Change Our Lives.” In today’s report KERA’s BJ Austin visits a lab where researchers from North Texas universities are developing the next generation of prosthetic limbs for injured soldiers. It’s cutting-edge research that could allow amputees to move more naturally and sense feeling with their artificial limbs.

In a busy Starbucks, two things make 28 year old Clint Barkley stand out in the crowd: his clean cut good looks and his walk.

Barkley: We were just south of Fallujah in 2005. We ran over a land mine. I lost my left leg. Our gunner lost both of his feet below his knee.

The former Marine from Bedford walks unevenly, slightly stiff, but full of confidence. He wears a ten pound, titanium leg. It attaches mid-thigh and has a computerized knee.

Barkley: It reads your body weight, how you’re moving and it reacts accordingly. I put my heel down then as I go and put all the pressure in my toe it knows I’m taking a step so it releases and kicks the foot back forward for me.

But what it doesn’t do is allow a smooth, natural gait. And the leg does not allow him to feel the gravel in a driveway or the heat of an asphalt parking lot in August. But that could be in his future.

A consortium of scientists and engineers in North Texas and elsewhere are working on a way for the brain, the body’s nerve impulses and an artificial limb to “talk” to each other. That could allow an amputee to “think” about moving an artificial arm or leg and the limb would respond immediately and more naturally. Conversely, the artificial limb would talk to the brain, giving it sensory input, thereby allowing the amputee to “feel.” The research is being led by Marc Christensen, Professor of Engineering Innovation at Southern Methodist University. But, part of the project is taking place in a noisy, unassuming lab at the University of North Texas. That’s where Christensen talked about the research, being funded initially by a 5.5 million dollar grant from the Department of Defense.

Read the full story and watch the video.

Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Marc Christensen, SMU Department of Electrical Engineering, SMU Department of Mechanical Engineering, Volkan Otugen

Health & Medicine Mind & Brain Researcher news SMU In The News Technology

Popular Science: A New Interface For Bionic Limbs

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date February 23, 2011

Light bridges the communication gap between man and machine

The monthly science magazine Popular Science covered the research of SMU engineers Marc Christensen and Volkan Otugen who are working to develop technology that will someday help amputees have “feeling” in their artificial limbs.

Popular Science’s coverage is in the March issue: “Talk to the hand: A new interface for bionic limbs.”

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Morgen Peck
Popular Science
The Six Million Dollar Man’s robotic arm worked as seamlessly as his natural one. But in the real world, robotic limbs have limited motions and the user can’t feel what he or she is “touching.” a new approach using optical fibers implanted around nerves could transmit more data and let prosthetics speak to the brain.

Previously, scientists surgically connected electrodes to the nervous system, but they seemed to harm the body’s tissues, making the implant fail within months. In 2005, scientists discovered that they could stimulate a neuron to send a message by shining infrared light on it. Last September, DARPA, the Pentagon’s R&D branch, awarded $4 million to a project led by Southern Methodist University engineers to attempt to connect nerves to artificial limbs using fiber optics.

The team suspects that flexible glass or polymer fiber optics will be more flesh-friendly than rigid electrodes. In addition, optical fibers transmit several signals at once, carrying 10 times as much data as their electrical counterparts. “Our goal is to do for neural interfaces what fiber optics did for the telecom industry,” says electrical engineer Marc Christensen, who is leading the SMU group. Transmitting more information faster should give bionic limbs more lifelike movements.

Talk to the hand: A new interface for bionic limbs.

Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Marc Christensen, SMU Department of Electrical Engineering, SMU Department of Mechanical Engineering, Volkan Otugen

Events Researcher news

SMU rises in Carnegie Foundation research classification to ‘high research activity’

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 26, 2011

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has raised SMU’s classification among institutions of higher education, reflecting dramatic growth in the University’s research activity since it was last measured in 2005.

SMU is now categorized as a research university with “high research activity,” a significant step up from its last assessment in 2005 as a doctoral/research university. The Carnegie Foundation assigns doctorate-granting institutions to categories based on a measure of research activity occurring at a particular period in time, basing these latest classifications on data from 2008-2009.

“SMU’s rise in the Carnegie classification system is further evidence of the growing quality and research productivity of our faculty. We are building a community of scholars asking and answering important research questions and making an impact on societal issues with their findings,” said SMU President R. Gerald Turner. “In addition to our dedication to outstanding teaching, SMU is becoming increasingly recognized as a vital resource for research in a variety of fields.”

Increased research activity in step with other SMU advances
“The designation of SMU as a ‘high research activity’ university by the Carnegie Foundation is an important step in SMU’s evolution as a strong national university,” said Paul Ludden, provost and vice president for academic affairs. “The faculty, staff, and students at SMU can be proud of this, particularly when paired with our rise in national rankings. The Carnegie Classification recognizes the tremendous efforts by the entire faculty at SMU to expand our research portfolio and address the many questions facing North Texas and the world. Recognition should go to Associate Vice President for Research James Quick and his office for their efforts to support the research activities of our faculty and staff.”

The foundation’s assessment of SMU’s increased research activity occurs as the University is making dramatic advances in other measures of academic progress: U.S. News and World Report magazine gave SMU its highest ranking ever for 2011, placing SMU 56th among 260 “best national universities” — up from 68th in 2010.

Additionally, SMU’s Cox School of Business is one of only a few schools in the nation to have all three of its MBA programs ranked among the top 15, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. Applications to SMU continue to rise, as have average SAT scores for admitted students.

Carnegie finds SMU research activity recorded an increase
The Carnegie Foundation analyzed SMU’s research activity in a category of universities that awarded at least 20 research doctorates in 2008-2009, excluding professional degrees such as those leading to the practice of medicine and law. The analysis examined research and development expenditures in science and engineering as well as in non-science and non-engineering fields; science and engineering research staff (postdoctoral appointees and other non-faculty research staff with doctorates); doctoral conferrals in the humanities, in the social sciences, in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields, and in other areas such as, business, education, public policy and social work.

The Carnegie Foundation classification of U.S. accredited colleges and universities uses nationally available data from the U.S. Office of Postsecondary Education, the National Center for Education Statistics’ Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the National Science Foundation, and the College Board.

“SMU’s rise in academic rankings and research productivity is a strong return on the investment of our alumni and other donors who provide support for research, endowed chairs, and graduate programs and fellowships,” said SMU Board of Trustees Chair Caren Prothro. “SMU students at all levels are the beneficiaries of this distinction as their faculty enliven the classroom with their research and engage students in the tradition of academic inquiry.”

About the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Founded by industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1905 and chartered the following year by an Act of Congress, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is an independent policy and research center. Its current mission is to support needed transformations in American education. — Kim Cobb

Tags Cox School of Business, Dedman College, James E. Quick, Lyle School of Engineering

Health & Medicine Mind & Brain Researcher news SMU In The News Technology

CBS 11 DFW: Doctors using fiber optics for prosthetic limbs

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date December 1, 2010

CBS Channel 11 in Dallas-Fort Worth covered the research of SMU engineers Marc Christensen and Volkan Otugen who are working to develop technology that will someday help amputees have “feeling” in their artificial limbs.

CBS Channel 11’s coverage aired Nov. 30: “Doctors Using Fiber Optics For Prosthetic Limbs.”

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Keith Garvin
CBSDFW.COM
Imagine not being able to pick up a drink, a pen, or even hold a spouse’s hand. For thousands of North Texans living as amputees, that is reality. But, some local engineers are teaming up with medical science to help transform that reality and change lives.

Bernie Diamond of Fort Worth is the picture of health. The former fitness model turned hairdresser was on top of his game. But, three years ago, everything changed in a split second when he was randomly shot while standing outside a home in Dallas.

“I got shot at such a perfect angle that it shot through the wrist and blew out the entire back of my hand,” Diamond said.

After many surgeries and attempts to rehabilitate his left hand, Diamond and his doctors made the decision to amputate his hand just above the wrist.

“I remember I was crying the entire time saying please don’t take my hand, please don’t take my hand,” Diamond said.

He had to learn to function with a prosthetic replacement, which doesn’t allow for much movement. But, that’s what researchers at Southern Methodist University and the University of North Texas are trying to change.

“Today we have very sophisticated robotic arms,” explained Marc Christensen, chair of the electrical engineering department at SMU. “What we’re lacking is a good interface to control them.”

Dr. Gunter Gross at UNT, and Doctors Christensen and Volkan Otugen at SMU are working to create a system of fiber-optic wires and sensors that can replace the vast network of nerves inside a limb.

“It’s a link to send and receive information between the brain and the limb,” explained Dr. Otugen, chair of the mechanical engineering department at SMU.

Read the full story.

Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Marc Christensen, SMU Department of Electrical Engineering, SMU Department of Mechanical Engineering, Volkan Otugen

Health & Medicine Mind & Brain Researcher news SMU In The News Technology

New Scientist: Robot limbs to plug into the brain with light

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date October 22, 2010

A new $5.6 million center funded by the U.S. Department of Defense and industry is led by SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering to develop revolutionary technology for advanced prosthetic limbs that will help amputees returning from war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Journalist David Hambling in New Scientist magazine reported on the technology and the research center in the Oct. 17 article “Robot limbs to plug into the brain with light.”

The center is led by Marc Christensen, chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering in SMU’s Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering.

Read the full story.

Excerpt:

By David Hambling
New Scientist
Imagine a bionic arm that plugs directly into the nervous system, so that the brain can control its motion, and the owner can feel pressure and heat through their robotic hand. This prospect has come a step closer with the development of photonic sensors that could improve connections between nerves and prosthetic limbs.

Existing neural interfaces are electronic, using metal components that may be rejected by the body. Now Marc Christensen at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas, and colleagues are building sensors to pick up nerve signals using light instead. They employ optical fibres and polymers that are less likely than metal to trigger an immune response, and which will not corrode.

The sensors are currently in the prototype stage and too big to put in the body, but smaller versions should work in biological tissue, according to the team.

Whisper light
The sensors are based on spherical shells of a polymer that changes shape in an electric field. The shells are coupled with an optical fibre, which sends a beam of light travelling around inside them.

The way that the light travels around the inside of the sphere is called a “whispering gallery mode”, named after the Whispering Gallery in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, where sound travels further than usual because it reflects along a concave wall.

The idea is that the electric field associated with a nerve impulse could affect the shape of the sphere, which will in turn change the resonance of the light on the inside of the shell; the nerve effectively becomes part of a photonic circuit. In theory, the change in resonance of the light travelling through the optical fibre could tell a robotic arm that the brain wants to move a finger, for instance.

Signals could be carried in the other direction by shining infrared light directly onto a nerve — this is known to stimulate nerves — guided by a reflector at the tip of the optical fibre.

Read the full story.

Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Marc Christensen, SMU Department of Electrical Engineering, SMU Department of Mechanical Engineering, Volkan Otugen

Health & Medicine Mind & Brain Researcher news SMU In The News Technology

Dallas Observer: SMU, DOD Partner Again, This Time on Prosthetics That Feel

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date September 24, 2010

The Dallas Observer on its Unfair Park blog took note of the SMU-led Neurophotonics Research Center being funded by the Department of Defense and industry with a $5.6 million grant.

In the Sept. 13 entry, Journalist Robert Wilonsky explained details of the project to Observer readers and quoted Marc Christensen, electrical engineering chair in SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering.

“Enhancing human performance with modern digital technologies is one of the great frontiers in engineering. Providing this kind of port to the nervous system will enable not only realistic prosthetic limbs, but also can be applied to treat spinal cord injuries and an array of neurological disorders,” Christensen is quoted.

EXCERPT:
By Robert Wilonsky
SMU and the Department of Defense are already partners on that paper-thin camera straight outta 1984 by way of Minority Report. Now the Hilltop sends word of its latest DOD partnership — a $5.6-mil Neurophotonics Research Center that’ll be run by Marc Christensen, electrical engineering chair in SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering. Its charge: to develop prosthetic limbs using fiber optics that actually feel things like pressure and temperature. Says SMU: “Lightning-fast connections between robotic limbs and the human brain may be within reach for injured soldiers and other amputees.”

Read the full story.

Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Marc Christensen, SMU Department of Electrical Engineering, SMU Department of Mechanical Engineering, Volkan Otugen

Health & Medicine Mind & Brain Researcher news Technology

SMU leads $5.6M research center for fiber optic interface to link robotic limbs, human brain

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date September 8, 2010

DOD, industry fund $5.6 million SMU-led research center; Lyle School technology drives development of advanced prosthetics

Lightning-fast connections between robotic limbs and the human brain may be within reach for injured soldiers and other amputees with the establishment of a multimillion-dollar research center led by SMU engineers.

Funded by a Department of Defense initiative dedicated to audacious challenges and intense time schedules, the Neurophotonics Research Center will develop two-way fiber optic communication between prosthetic limbs and peripheral nerves.

This connection will be key to operating realistic robotic arms, legs and hands that not only move like the real thing, but also “feel” sensations like pressure and heat.

Successful completion of the fiber optic link will allow for sending signals seamlessly back and forth between the brain and artificial limbs, allowing amputees revolutionary freedom of movement and agility.

Potential to patch injured spinal cord

Partners in the Neurophotonics Research Center also envision man-to-machine applications that extend far beyond prosthetics, leading to medical breakthroughs like brain implants for the control of tremors, neuro-modulators for chronic pain management and implants for patients with spinal cord injuries.

The researchers believe their new technologies can ultimately provide the solution to the kind of injury that left actor Christopher Reeve paralyzed after a horse riding accident. “This technology has the potential to patch the spinal cord above and below a spinal injury,” said Marc Christensen, center director and electrical engineering chair in SMU’s Lyle School of Engineering. “Someday, we will get there.”

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding the $5.6 million center with industry partners as part of its Centers in Integrated Photonics Engineering Research (CIPhER) project, which aims to dramatically improve the lives of the large numbers of military amputees returning from war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Currently available prosthetic devices commonly rely on cables to connect them to other parts of the body for operation — for example, requiring an amputee to clench a healthy muscle in the chest to manipulate a prosthetic hand. The movement is typically deliberate, cumbersome, and far from lifelike.

A link compatible with living tissue
The goal of the Neurophotonics Research Center is to develop a link compatible with living tissue that will connect powerful computer technologies to the human nervous system through hundreds or even thousands of sensors embedded in a single fiber.

Unlike experimental electronic nerve interfaces made of metal, fiber optic technology would not be rejected or destroyed by the body’s immune system.

“Enhancing human performance with modern digital technologies is one of the great frontiers in engineering,” said Christensen. “Providing this kind of port to the nervous system will enable not only realistic prosthetic limbs, but also can be applied to treat spinal cord injuries and an array of neurological disorders.”

The center brings together researchers from SMU, Vanderbilt University, Case Western Reserve University, the University of Texas at Dallas and the University of North Texas.

The Neurophotonics Research Center’s industrial partners include Lockheed Martin (Aculight), Plexon, Texas Instruments, National Instruments and MRRA.

Integrated system at cellular level
Together, this group of university and industry researchers will develop and demonstrate new increasingly sophisticated two-way communication connections to the nervous system.

Every movement or sensation a human being is capable of has a nerve signal at its root. “The reason we feel heat is because a nerve is stimulated, telling the brain there’s heat there,” Christensen said.

The center formed around a challenge from the industrial partners to build a fiber optic sensor scaled for individual nerve signals: “Team members have been developing the individual pieces of the solution over the past few years, but with this new federal funding we are able to push the technology forward into an integrated system that works at the cellular level,” Christensen said.

The research builds on partner universities’ recent advances in light stimulation of individual nerve cells and new, extraordinarily sensitive optical sensors being developed at SMU. Volkan Otugen, SMU site director for the center and Lyle School mechanical engineering chair, has pioneered research on tiny spherical devices that sense the smallest of signals utilizing a concept known as “whispering gallery modes.” A whispering gallery is an enclosed circular or elliptical area, like that found beneath an architectural dome, in which whispers can be heard clearly on the other side of the space.

Ultimate combination for two-way interface
The ultimate combination of advanced optical nerve stimulation and nerve-sensing technologies will create a complete, two-way interface that does not currently exist. “It will revolutionize the field of brain interfaces,” Christensen said.

“Science fiction writers have long imagined the day when the understanding and intuition of the human brain could be enhanced by the lightning speed of computing technologies,” said Geoffrey Orsak, dean of the SMU Lyle School of Engineering. “With this remarkable research initiative, we are truly beginning a journey into the future that will provide immeasurable benefits to humanity.”

A private university located in the heart of Dallas, SMU is building on the vision of its founders, who in 1911 imagined a distinguished center for learning emerging from the spirit of the city. Today, nearly 11,000 students benefit from the national opportunities and international reach afforded by the quality of SMU’s seven degree-granting schools. — Kimberly Cobb

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with Marc Christensen or to book a live or taped interview in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Marc Christensen, SMU Department of Electrical Engineering, SMU Department of Mechanical Engineering, Volkan Otugen

Health & Medicine Researcher news Student researchers Technology

Research could change course of treatment for cancer that spreads to bones

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date August 11, 2010

New research holds promise for the thousands of people whose cancer has spread to their bones.

A common treatment for such patients is radiation surgery &#8212 even though very little is known about radiosurgery’s impact on bone strength, says Edmond Richer, associate professor of engineering at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Researchers now hope to conclusively establish the effects of radiation on human bone under a $596,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health. The 15-month grant will look at cervical fractures that sometimes occur six to eight months after stereotactic radiosurgery, called SRS, in patients with vertebral metastases.

SMU and UT Southwestern partnership
The researchers include Richer, the Robert C. Womack Endowed Chair of mechanical engineering and founder of the Biomedical Instrumentation and Robotics Laboratory in SMU’s Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering, and Paul Medin, John Anderson and Joseph Zerwekh, professors at UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.

The grant from NIH’s Neurological Disorders and Stroke Institute could transform treatment for patients with cancer metastases in the bone, as well as for millions with other bone diseases, such as osteoporosis, Richer says. According to the American Osteoporosis Foundation, an estimated 10 million Americans have the disease and 34 million more are at risk of developing it.

High fracture rate post-radiosurgery
Vertebral metastases occur in approximately 100,000 cancer patients annually, most of whom have major lung, breast, prostate, renal and myeloma malignancies, Richer says. SRS, considered a noninvasive procedure for treating spinal tumors, requires highly sophisticated instruments that deliver a precise amount of radiation to the targeted lesion.

A fracture rate of up to 39 percent has been reported in post-radiosurgery patients who receive high doses of radiation. The potentially devastating consequences of fractures include disabling pain, limited mobility and incontinence, Richer says.

“It’s a growing concern for radiology oncologists because there’s not much that can be done medically to reverse those problems,” he says, noting that advances in SRS technology outpace the research on its complex effects on bone.

“We began looking at the history of radiosurgery, and as algorithms and instruments have become more refined in the computation of doses and the delivery of radiation, the number of required treatments has decreased to a single procedure,” he says. “The issue of what happens to bone strength when the treatment goes from six lower-grade doses, each a month apart, to a single high-grade dose is an area practically void of research over the past 30 years.”

Gauging mechanical strength of bone
Richer’s focus for the project is on gauging the mechanical strength of bone and how it is affected. Assisting him is Julie Pollard, an SMU engineering graduate student, and Jessica Steinmann-Hermsen, a senior majoring in mechanical engineering and math.

“We’re looking at nondestructive modalities to determine bone strength,” specifically ultrasound technology, says Richer. While a bone mineral density test provides an accurate picture of calcium and other minerals in a segment of bone, it doesn’t measure the actual strength of the bone, he says.

Builds on earlier ultrasound instrument research
The project builds on Richer’s previous research to develop an ultrasound instrument that determines the elasticity of human bone. The instrument is under review by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

An abstract of the research by Richer and his collaborators has been accepted by the Acoustical Society of America, an international scientific society for sound-related fields, including biomedical ultrasound, for presentation at its biannual meeting in November. “Reduction of Ultrasound Propagation Velocity in Porcine Vertebrae Following Stereotactic Radiosurgery” was also selected for oral presentation at the meeting.

Richer supports interdisciplinary collaboration on research in medical robotics and advanced imaging techniques.

“Successful research is the result of free communication and thinking,” he says. “When engineers and physicians come together to discuss seemingly crazy ideas, frequently it turns out they’re not. And bringing them to fruition can help people in ways that neither the engineers nor the physicians imagined by themselves.” &#8212 Patricia Ward

Tags Edmond Richer, Jessica Steinmann-Hermsen, Julie Pollard, Lyle School of Engineering

Technology

DOD funds tiny cave camera, iris recognition technology for military, homeland security

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date March 17, 2010

Researchers are expanding new miniature camera technology for military and security uses so soldiers can track combatants in dark caves or urban alleys, and security officials can unobtrusively identify a subject from an iris scan.

The two new surveillance applications both build on “Panoptes,” a platform technology developed under a project led by Marc Christensen at Southern Methodist University in Dallas and funded by the Department of Defense.

Panoptes is a compact, lightweight, high-resolution smart camera that is named for the Greek mythological character Argos Panoptes, the giant sentry with a hundred eyes.

DOD is funding development of the technology’s first two extension applications with a $1.6 million grant to SMU.

Wired: DARPA’s Beady-Eyed Camera Spots the ‘Non-Cooperative’

Both the tiny cave camera and the iris recognition application will aid the military, border patrol, intelligence officials and airport security, according to Christensen and Delores Etter, a leading researcher in biometric identification.

Both are electrical engineers in SMU’s Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering. The new applications may be ready for fielded demonstrations as soon as late 2011, said Christensen.

The Panoptes imaging system has been field-tested in tactical environment simulations by defense contractor Northrop Grumman and is currently in an independent test with Draper Laboratory.

“The Panoptes technology is sufficiently mature that it can now leave our lab, and we’re finding lots of applications for it,” said Christensen, an expert in computational imaging and optical interconnections. “This new money will allow us to explore Panoptes’ use for non-cooperative iris recognition systems for Homeland Security and other defense applications. And it will allow us to enhance the camera system to make it capable of active illumination so it can travel into dark places — like caves and urban areas.”

The new grant brings total DOD funding of Panoptes — short for “Processing Arrays of Nyquist-limited Observations to Produce a Thin Electro-optic Sensor” — to $5.5 million. The new applications have been dubbed AIM-CAMS, for “Active Illumination with Micro-mirror-arrays for Computational Adaptive Multi-resolution Sensing,” and Smart-Iris, for “SMU’s Multi-resolution Adaptive Roving Task-specific Iris Recognition Imaging System.”

Hi-rez “eyes” in caves, urban alleys

Panoptes initially was designed for military aerial drones and combat helmet cameras for use in daylight environments. The technology produces sharp, clear images without the size and weight of a conventional camera system because it doesn’t rely on a large, bulky, curved lens for high-resolution images.

Instead, arrays of agile and precisely controlled microelectromechanical system (MEMS) mirrors are integrated with low-resolution sub-imagers on a silicon base for the purpose of sampling a wide field of view. The analog steerable MEMS mirrors adaptively redirect plexiglas sub-imagers to zoom in on regions of interest. The captured images are stored in an onboard computer and restored to high-resolution by an information theory-based super-resolution algorithm.

The sub-imagers are tiny off-axis-shaped paraboloids, fabricated using injection molding. At 8 millimeters by 5.7 millimeters by 4 millimeters, the sub-imagers have an effective focal length of 4 millimeters and are tiny enough to fit on the surface of a small coin.

The honeycomb-shaped micro mirror array comprises 61 hexagonal mirrors, each with three actuators to mechanically move and control the mirrors. The usable circular aperture, the opening through which light travels, is 3.9 millimeters in diameter. The end result — a digitally restored image — while not super-resolution, approaches optical limit, the researchers say.

The flat sub-imagers can be tiled unobtrusively almost anywhere, from the underside of a small drone to the outside of a soldier’s helmet to the walls of a hallway.

The Panoptes architecture is unique in its ability to adapt its field of view to steer to a region of interest, capturing only images of value, Christensen said. That preserves computing power by eliminating uniform allocation of imaging resources, which is wasteful, he said.

Smart-Iris narrows from wide field-of-view to narrow field-of-view

To develop the biometric Smart-Iris, the adaptive resolution of Panoptes will be paired with iris recognition technology.

“It’s very challenging to get the resolution with a wide field-of-view camera, but with a zoom camera, it’s hard to find the iris because it’s like looking through a soda straw,” Christensen said.

Every iris is unique

Iris recognition — currently used worldwide by airports, prisons, laboratories, fitness clubs, hotels and other institutions — is the most accurate biometric available because no two irises are alike, said Etter, a former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense who leads SMU’s Biometrics Engineering Research Group. The technology is challenged, however, by interference when the iris is being scanned, she said. Problems can include glare, eyelashes, eyelids or dim lighting.

With Panoptes, the camera can start with a wide field-of-view at low resolution, find a face, then narrow to the area of interest — the iris. At the same time, Smart-Iris will extend the range of iris acquisition. Instead of one person cooperatively standing motionless with their eye pressed to a scanner, Smart-Iris will make it possible for people to pass through a standard doorway, each one getting their iris scanned — without so much as even pausing — by equipment mounted on walls or door frames. At the same time, the camera would maintain high resolution and more than 150 pixels across the iris.

Easier Smart-Iris scan is unobtrusive, but accurate

That could benefit the Department of Homeland Security. More than 600 million people pass through security to fly aboard commercial airlines each year, according to the agency. Homeland Security relies on the latest technology to monitor more than 700 security checkpoints and 7,000 baggage screening areas.

“Our goal is to develop an iris recognition system that is unobtrusive and accurate. We want to ensure that the right people have access, and that potential intruders are identified, all without impacting flow in high-traffic areas,” said Etter, who directs the Lyle School’s Caruth Institute for Engineering Education.

Into caves and dark alleys

To develop AIM-CAMS, Panoptes is being paired with new off-the-shelf pocket projector technology known as Pico. Pico projectors, often compared in size to a candy bar, make it possible to project digital pictures taken by cell phones and other portable devices onto any wall for large-format viewing.

Combining Pico with Panoptes will allow the low-resolution camera to be used in dark places, such as caves and urban alleys, providing troops with situational awareness, said Christensen, who is chair of the SMU Department of Electrical Engineering and an associate professor.

SMU is collaborating on the research with Santa Clara University in California, Northrop Grumman and Draper Laboratory. Funding came from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Office of Naval Research and Army Research Laboratory.

Watch a news video about the Panoptes research

Tags Delores Etter, Lyle School of Engineering, Marc Christensen, SMU Department of Electrical Engineering

Technology

Will high-density PICs be the next big thing?

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 5, 2010

Gary Evans in SMU’s Photonics Lab.

Lasers have the potential to improve and revolutionize human lives in many ways, from consumer electronics and communications to medical equipment and homeland security. Helping unlock the barriers to these advancements is the research of SMU Electrical Engineering Professor Gary Evans.

Evans has been recognized by his peers for his contributions to the development, design and fabrication of semiconductor lasers, microscopic manufactured devices that can amplify subatomic light particles called photons.

This technology, in turn, can lead to applications that transmit data, energy, pictures or sound.

The field of photonics already has many claims to fame: Laser pulses deliver information through glass fibers to create the high-speed Internet; certain wavelengths of laser light are used in cancer therapy; lasers read CDs and DVDs; and at industrial plants, lasers cut materials with precision.

New Paluxysaurus mount

3D dinosaur track

Hunt for Higgs boson

But future development of high-power applications requires research advancements of the kind Evans is tackling in his laboratory: He is looking for a way to fit billions of lasers and other optical components atop a microscopic chip.

The challenge is similar to the one faced in the late 1950s by the engineers who developed the electronic integrated circuit. The revolutionary high-density electronic integrated circuit paved the way for powerful hand-held calculators, laptop computers and myriad microelectronic devices and technology that have transformed the world.

Evans and other researchers believe photonic integrated circuits (PICs) may have that same vast potential, but there are technical problems to resolve. One key to manufacturing high-density PICs, which can hold billions of optical devices, is an “isolator.” An isolator would allow photons to flow unrestricted in the forward direction, but would prevent any reflected light from traveling backward. Without an isolator, unavoidable reflections would cause instabilities and chaos in the PIC.

“An isolator allows integration of large numbers of lasers and other optical components to produce stable, robust photonic circuits,” Evans says. Since 1994 he and Jacob Hammer, a retired colleague from RCA Labs, have been working along with graduate students to develop an isolator.

“We have a good understanding of the theory and we realize what problems need to be solved to make an integrated isolator in a semiconductor,” Evans says. “But more theory needs to be done to understand the materials that need to be developed. The materials just don’t exist yet.”

He is seeking federal funding to continue collaborations with Hammer, the University of California, Santa Barbara and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory to develop those materials.

Since 2001 the team has received $250,000 in federal funding for isolator research. Some funding for Evans’ research also has been awarded to Photodigm Inc., a company he co-founded. Photodigm specializes in photonics technology for communications, digital imaging, defense and medical device applications. The Richardson-based company has contracts with the U.S. Department of Defense, among others.

Evans joined SMU in 1992, the year he also received one of electrical engineering’s top honors: election as a Fellow of IEEE, the technology industry’s professional association. The association cited Evans for contributions he has made to the industry’s development, fabrication and understanding of semiconductor lasers.

Over the years, Evans’ research has been conducted in conjunction with others, including the larger SMU photonics team: Jerome Butler, University Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering; Jay Kirk, SMU electrical engineering laboratory manager and a co-founder of Photodigm; and Marc Christensen, chair and associate professor of the Electrical Engineering Department and a member of Photodigm’s technical advisory board. — Margaret Allen

Tags Gary Evans, Jay Kirk, Jerome Butler, Lyle School of Engineering, Marc Christensen, SMU Department of Electrical Engineering

Researcher news Technology

The 33 news: SMU developing micro camera for front-line soldiers

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 9, 2009

Southern Methodist University researchers are taking a different approach to producing photo and video images for military surveillance cameras outfitted on unmanned aerial vehicles and helmets. Walt Maciborski of The 33 news broadcast in Dallas reported July 8 on research in the lab of Electrical Engineering Associate Professor Marc Christensen.

Watch the video

Excerpt:

By Walt Maciborski
KDAF: The 33
DALLAS — Cutting edge micro cameras are being developed in a basement lab at Southern Methodist University. The project is code-named Panoptes, more on its name later.

Associate Professor Marc Christensen says his undergraduate and graduate researchers at SMU’s Photonic Architectures Lab are about to take a giant leap into the future of photography.

“What we’re working on here is trying to develop the next generation of cameras,” Christensen says.

Christensen’s team is creating video and still cameras that are as thin as about two credit cards, covered with tiny mirrored lenses.

“The original program was driven by the department of defense, (because) they have a need to have tactical imagery, and they don’t want to only have it on platforms that are as large as a Predator UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), ” Christensen says. “They would like to fit this camera on something the size of a model airplane or something that could fit in the palm of your hand.”

Read the full story.

Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Marc Christensen, SMU Department of Electrical Engineering

Researcher news Technology

Wired: DARPA’s smart, flat camera packed with beady eyes

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date July 1, 2009

Southern Methodist University researchers are taking a different approach to producing photo and video images for military surveillance cameras outfitted on unmanned aerial vehicles and helmets. David Hambling of Wired magazine reported July 1 on research in the lab of Electrical Engineering Associate Professor Marc Christensen.

Christensen, chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering in SMU’s Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering, has built a nationally recognized research group in photonics and computational imaging. His work with imaging sensors and micro-mirror arrays has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, among others. In 2007 he received the DARPA Young Faculty Award.

Excerpt:

By David Hambling
Wired.com
Troops and unmanned aircraft could be the first to benefit from a new smart, ultra-slim camera technology which combines the images from many low-resolution sensors to create a high-resolution picture. Known as Panoptes, it promises lightweight, flat cameras with the power of a big lens in a device just five millimeters thick. It’s being developed by Professor Marc Christensen at Southern Methodist University, with funding from Darpa. Planned applications include sensors for miniature drones and helmet-cams for soldiers.

A key feature of the system is that it’s made up of a large number of tiny imagers. These are small, simple cameras, each directed independently by a MEMS-controlled micro-mirror. Because there is no large lens, Pantoptes can be made flat, unlike other cameras.

A central processor combines the images into a single picture, producing a higher resolution than the individual imagers. The intelligence is in the way that the system identifies areas of interest and concentrates the sub-imagers on the relevant part of the scene. Christensen gives the example of the Panoptes system looking at a building in a field.

“After a first frame or two was collected, the system could identify that certain areas, like the open field, had nothing of interest, whereas other areas, like the license plate of a car parked outside or peering in the windows, had details that were not sufficiently resolved,” he tells Danger Room. “In the next frame, subimagers that had been interrogating the field would be steered to aid in the imaging of the license plate and windows, thereby extracting the additional information.”

Read the full story.

Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Marc Christensen, Panoptes

Researcher news Technology

Defense News: Sharper image for military surveillance

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date June 12, 2009

Southern Methodist University researchers are taking a different approach to producing photo and video images for military surveillance cameras outfitted on unmanned aerial vehicles and helmets. William Matthews of Defense News reported June 8 on research in the lab of Electrical Engineering Associate Professor Marc Christensen.

Excerpt:

By William Matthews
Defense News
When the U.S. military gets into a fight, it wants to see everything that’s going on, so it relies on a plethora of optical sensors.

Cameras on UAVs are increasingly numerous. So are cameras on vehicles and cameras on soldiers’ helmets. And cameras on satellites have been around for a long time.

But traditional cameras have a drawback. They’re bulky and relatively heavy.

Read the full story.

Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Marc Christensen

Technology

Icons of industry align with Texas universities to supercharge technology

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date March 12, 2009

SMU is a partner in a newly designated National Science Foundation research consortium aimed at building both military and commercial superiority by making technology faster, better and smarter.

The Net-Centric Software and Systems Industry/University Cooperative Research Center, which also includes two other universities and 11 companies, will focus on improving how complicated information is gathered, shared and used, from the battlefield to the boardroom.

battlefield-afghanistan.ashx.jpeg

For example, FedEx’s package tracking system, which links employees, customers, suppliers and partners, is an example of a commercial application of net-centric technology. And on the battlefield, where information superiority already translates to combat power, future net-centric systems will connect ground and air combat, linking shooters, decision makers and sensors toward a common goal.

“This opens a lot of doors,” said Jeff Tian, associate professor of computer science in SMU’s Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering. “We envision this consortium becoming a leading research alliance in the United States. Because we can cooperate with the expertise of academic institutions and high-tech companies, we have much greater research capabilities than any one institution working alone.”

Academic partners in the consortium are Southern Methodist University, the University of North Texas and the University of Texas at Dallas. The center’s industry partners are Boeing, Cisco, Codekko Software, EDS/HP, Fujitsu, GlobeRanger, Hall Financial Group, Lockheed-Martin Aero, Raytheon, Texas Instruments and T-System.

“Net-centric” describes a continuously evolving, complex community of people, devices, information and services interconnected by a communications network that can instantaneously measure and apply all available resources to a particular challenge. It is becoming increasingly important for the realization of important defense, commercial, healthcare, education, communication, social networking and entertainment applications.

The consortium is one of approximately 40 such centers nationwide that develop long-term partnerships between industry, academia and government. The National Science Foundation makes an initial investment in these centers, but each one is primarily supported by center members. Their focus is on research recommended by industrial advisory boards. — Kim Cobb

Tags Jeff Tian, Lyle School of Engineering

Technology

Lockheed Skunk Works® chief to lead-off SMU lecture series

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date March 11, 2009

Innovation is a tough concept to define and even harder to teach. But Lockheed Martin’s legendary Skunk Works®, where the fastest military jets are born in secret, is sharing its name and formula for innovation with Southern Methodist University’s Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering.
frank-cappuccio-sm.ashx.jpeg

Frank Cappuccio, Lockheed Martin executive vice president and Skunk Works® director, will deliver the program’s inaugural lecture at 3:30 p.m. March 18 in the Hughes Trigg Student Center Theater on the SMU campus. Cappuccio will be speaking on “Creating an Environment for Innovation” to mark the beginning of this unique partnership.

The SMU/Lockheed Martin Skunk Works® Program is the first university program anywhere to teach the storied approach to problem solving behind aviation marvels like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. SMU students will not design airplanes — but they will learn the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works® method of tackling daunting problems in small teams under high-pressure deadlines. The program is part of Lyle School’s Caruth Institute for Engineering Education.

Every SMU engineering graduate will experience the Skunk Works® program, starting with the incorporation of philosophy and case studies in undergraduate coursework. Lockheed Martin will rotate Skunk Works® engineers through the SMU program as visiting mentors and lecturers.

The best student opportunities for learning engineering innovation will come from varying degrees of immersion into Skunk Works® lab research. Those projects will last anywhere from a week or two between terms to an intensive, semester-long assignment for senior-level students working on a challenging problem.

As part of its ongoing mission to strengthen American engineering education at every level, the Lyle School will develop curriculum from the Skunk Works® experience that can be applied at other universities.

The Caruth Institute for Engineering Education, under the leadership of former Assistant Secretary of the Navy Delores Etter, already is home to nationally recognized programs to prepare middle school and high school students for engineering education and careers.

“We are committed to improving American engineering education,” Etter said. “You don’t do this with little steps — you do this with big steps.”

Lockheed targets 50 percent of its philanthropic work and outreach to support education, and Cappuccio is bullish on attracting the brightest students back to the industry that was perceived as so glamorous during the early space race. As a group, he says, engineers need to be less wedded to process and structure.

“What we want to do is apply the philosophy of the Skunk Works®, which is imbedded in founder Kelly Johnson’s 14 different principles,” said Geoffrey Orsak, dean of the Lyle School. “The key is doing things quickly. In today’s world doing things quickly is very important. If you take too long, you lose out.”

SMU’s Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering, founded in 1925, is one of the oldest engineering schools in the Southwest. The school offers eight undergraduate and 29 graduate programs, including both master’s and doctoral levels. — Kim Cobb

Tags Delores Etter, Geoffrey Orsak, Lyle School of Engineering, SMU/Lockheed Martin Skunk Works&#174 Program

Technology

Hi-tech lens sharpens military surveillance

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date March 10, 2009

In Greek mythology, Argos Panoptes was a giant sentry with a hundred eyes. But in the lab of Electrical Engineering Associate Professor Marc Christensen, Panoptes is a type of camera technology. The technology is being developed with funding from the U.S. military for surveillance by small aircraft at low altitudes.

The research should eventually provide helmet-mounted surveillance equipment for soldiers on the ground. Lens performance tends to improve with size, which is why a small cell phone camera can’t produce a very good image.

But the Panoptes technology uses the power of a computer to combine overlapping images of dozens of tiny lenses — producing a clear picture without the size and weight of a large lens.

Christensen, chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering in SMU’s Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering, has built a nationally recognized research group in photonics and computational imaging.

His work with imaging sensors and micro-mirror arrays has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, among others. In 2007 he received the DARPA Young Faculty Award.

Christensen also leads a project with researchers from the University of Delaware, UT-Dallas and Sandia National Laboratory.

Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Marc Christensen

Earth & Climate Energy & Matter Health & Medicine Technology

Barnett gas-drilling boom pollutes Dallas-Fort Worth air

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date February 11, 2009

The first comprehensive analysis of air emissions associated with natural gas and oil production in the Barnett Shale finds that those emissions might be a significant contributor to smog formation in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

The emissions are comparable to the combined emissions in the Dallas-Fort Worth area from all cars and trucks. State regulators for years have targeted cars and trucks as a major source of smog in the D-FW area.

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The study, “Emissions from Natural Gas Production in the Barnett Shale Area and Opportunities for Cost-Effective Improvements,” was written by Al Armendariz. He is a research associate professor in the department of environmental and civil engineering in the Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering at Southern Methodist University.

The report takes into consideration the emissions of smog-forming compounds, such as nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds. In addition, it also looks at air-toxic chemicals and greenhouse gases.

The study found that emissions of carbon dioxide and two other major greenhouse gases underlying climate change were estimated to be roughly equivalent to the impact of two 750-megawatt coal plants.

“It’s true that Barnett Shale oil and gas activities are producing significant air emissions, but there’s good news as well,” Armendariz said. “There are off-the-shelf technologies that can greatly reduce these emissions and improve the D-FW area’s air quality.”

Experts say cost-effective control strategies are readily available and can substantially reduce emissions from production in the massive Barnett Shale, a 5,000-square-mile geologic formation.

“These controls can in many cases, reduce costs for oil and gas operators after short payback periods,” said Ramon Alvarez, senior scientist with Environmental Defense Fund, which commissioned the study. “Such controls are already used by some producers, but not universally.”

The City of Fort Worth recently adopted an ordinance requiring the use of “green completions” to capture the greenhouse gas methane and volatile organic compounds during well completions. That is one of the controls recommended in the report for areas throughout the Barnett Shale area.

Natural gas production in the Barnett Shale region of Texas has increased rapidly since 1999, where as of June 2008 there are now more than 7,700 oil and gas wells producing and permits issued to drill another 4,700.

In 2008, the Barnett Shale was responsible for 21 percent of the state’s natural gas production. Unlike most historical drilling for oil in Texas, this activity is taking place in and around a heavily developed and populated area.

Natural gas is a critical feedstock to many chemical production processes. It has many environmental benefits over coal as a fuel for electricity generation, including lower emissions of sulfur, metal compounds and carbon dioxide. Nevertheless, oil and gas production from the Barnett Shale can impact local air quality and release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, according to the Armendariz study.

The report examines each step of the gas production process, from well drilling and completion, to gas processing and transmission. It concludes that peak summertime emissions of smog-forming emissions from production activities in the Barnett Shale are about the same as the emissions from all the cars and trucks on the road in the D-FW area. Barnett Shale emissions total 307 tons per day, while cars and trucks total 273 tons per day.

Tags Al Armendariz, Lyle School of Engineering

Researcher news Technology

SMU engineering to collaborate on US DOD research

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 27, 2009

The Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering at Southern Methodist University will serve as a designated research collaborator in the Systems Engineering Research Center, or SERC, the first University Affiliated Research Center funded by the Department of Defense to focus on challenging systems engineering issues facing the defense department and related defense industries.

SMU Lyle School of Engineering, with Jerrell Stracener as lead senior researcher, will participate as part of a prestigious consortium of 18-leading collaborator universities and research centers throughout the United States, led by Stevens Institute of Technology, with the University of Southern California serving as its principal collaborator.

“This award is a major recognition of Stevens Institute of Technology’s leadership, consolidated during the last decade, in the field of Complex Systems Engineering,” said Dinesh Verma, dean of Stevens’ School of Systems & Enterprises, and executive director of the Systems Engineering Research Center.

SERC will be responsible for systems engineering research that supports the development, integration, testing and sustainability of complex defense systems, enterprises and services. SERC will serve as the systems engineering research engine for the Department of Defense and intelligence community. It will also offer systems engineering programs and workshops for Department of Defense and intelligence community employees and contractors.

“As a key partner in this national consortium, we are pleased to have the opportunity to expand our contributions to this country in systems engineering education and research through the linkage of the Lyle Systems Engineering Program with SMU’s Caruth Institute for Engineering Education and its one of a kind Lockheed Martin Skunk Works&reg Lab,” said Geoffrey Orsak, dean of the Lyle School of Engineering.

SMU Lyle School of Engineering’s Systems Engineering Program has long been recognized for providing work-place relevant education and research to the nation’s aerospace and defense community, both industry and government.

The SEP was developed and continues to evolve under the leadership of Stracener, SEP founding director, in partnership with government agencies and aerospace and defense companies.

The Lyle School of Engineering’s system engineering research program is being driven by needs of aerospace and defense systems developers, including Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Bell Helicopter, Elbit Systems and L-3 Communications. A doctoral program is being expanded in response to needs of the United States aerospace and defense sector, both industry and government.

Tags Geoffrey Orsak, Jerrell Stracener, Lyle School of Engineering

Health & Medicine Technology

Titanium-alloy technology simplifies dental implants

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date December 20, 2008

The Christmas tree that adorns the SMU Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering holiday card is more than a colorfully lit symbol of the season. It’s a unique and festive embodiment of the capabilities of the School’s cutting-edge laboratories.

Designed and built in the Lyle School’s Research Center for Advanced Manufacturing, called RCAM, the tree features a 3-dimensional lattice structure, known for its strength and versatility in a variety of manufacturing applications. With an actual height and width of about 5 inches, the tree was “grown” in a vacuum chamber from thin layers of titanium-alloy powder and shaped by the controlled melting of an electron beam.

In the holiday card photo by SMU photographer Hillsman S. Jackson, a high-power fiber laser stands in for a treetop star.

The RCAM refined the techniques used to construct the tree during a collaboration with Dallas’ Baylor College of Dentistry, says Radovan Kovacevic, Herman Brown Chair Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of the RCAM and the Center for Laser Aided Manufacturing, CLAM. Working with Baylor researchers, the RCAM has developed a way to manufacture a dental implant typically assembled from three pieces as a single component. The unitary construction results in devices with fewer weak points at which breaks can occur.

The technology has many other potential applications in industries ranging from medicine to aviation, Kovacevic says. In the meantime, he says, the Lyle Christmas tree “is a good example of the complexity we can achieve.” – Kathleen Tibbetts

Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Radovan Kovacevic, SMU Research Center for Advanced Manufacturing

Energy & Matter Health & Medicine Student researchers Technology

Skeptics aside, “computing with light” will replace silicon chip

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date June 30, 2008

Gary Evans

SMU Professor of Electrical Engineering Gary Evans recently received some good news: Journal reviewers said they thought his proposal for solving one of the most perplexing problems in the emerging field of integrated photonics sounded impossible.

“To me, that’s extremely promising when the reviewers don’t think it’s possible,” Evans said. “When that’s happened, it’s been fun showing the reviewers that the conventional wisdom is incorrect.”

Photonics is the science of processing or transmitting information using light. Fiber-optic systems — perhaps the field’s best known application — transform telephone conversations into laser-generated signals that travel through thin glass wires to machines that decode the signals at the other end.

A photon is a light quantum, the smallest measurable unit of light. Integrated photonics researchers seek to create circuits that use photons to do what electrons do in electric integrated semiconductor circuits.

Evans and Jerome Butler, university distinguished professor of electrical engineering, think they have hit on a solution to the problem of integrating an optical isolator with other components in a photonic circuit. In electric semiconductor circuits, diodes act as isolators by letting electrons flow in only one direction.

“Isolation is crucial when you put about 1 billion devices on a single chip of silicon,” Evans says. The two researchers want to integrate an optical isolator with a tiny semiconductor laser that would let light travel in one direction within a photonic semiconductor circuit and keep it from reflecting back into the laser, where it could create instabilities in the laser’s output.

It is understandable that their peers might be skeptical, Evans says. Researchers around the world have been trying to create integrated photonic isolators since the 1970s and no one has overcome the problem of reflection in photonic circuits.

Evans had a similar experience when he worked with lasers at RCA Labs in Princeton, N.J., before joining SMU. In 1984 all semiconductor lasers were edge-emitting, meaning they generated light from the edge of the chip rather than the surface. Evans and his team proposed a surface-emitting laser to the U.S. Air Force.

“Their reviewers said we could never get light out, much less create a laser,” he recalls, adding that his team wrote a proposal and nevertheless received funding from the Air Force starting in 1985.

In only seven years, Evans’ group got light out of the system and demonstrated surface-emitting lasers with performance efficiencies as good as edge-emitting lasers. When he came to SMU in 1992, the Air Force continued to fund Evans’ work, which resulted in a spin-off company, Photodigm in Richardson, Texas.

Photodigm conducts research for the government and manufactures a range of lasers, most of them edge-emitting lasers that have been improved using processes developed for surface-emitting ones, says Evans. He is Photodigm’s co-founder, vice president and chief technology officer. Another co-founder is Jay Kirk, the Electrical Engineering Department’s lab manager and Evan’s former colleague at RCA. Electrical Engineering Chair and Associate Professor Marc P. Christensen is on the company’s technical advisory board, as is Butler, who worked closely with Evans when he was at RCA and helped lure him to SMU.

Evans has since expanded into medical photonics, working with SMU and Drexel University colleagues on a photodynamic therapy system to treat cancer of the esophagus.

Marc Christensen

Similar laser-based systems are used commercially, but they are large and water-cooled. The team hopes to create a machine that’s portable and cheap enough for use in every doctor’s office. Their design uses arrays of semiconductor lasers, each no bigger than a grain of sand, inserted into the esophagus via a balloon catheter. The patient is given a photosensitive drug that kills cancer cells during a chemical reaction triggered by the lasers.

Christensen says SMU’s photonics researchers — who include faculty members in electrical engineering, mathematics and physics, plus their graduate students — come together periodically for interdisciplinary meetings because so many fields are involved in creating and understanding photonic devices.

Christensen’s Photonic Architectures Laboratory has received more than $2 million in grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, for a project to make unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs, stealthier.

“Today we think of a Predator UAV as flying at 30,000 feet carrying a really nice camera with a long lens that can zoom into an area on the ground and look at it very carefully,” Christensen says. Ideally, the device would be tiny with a flat lens, like a cell phone camera; however, those cameras do not produce images of adequate resolution.

Christensen’s interdisciplinary team has devised a multi-step solution that starts with an array of hundreds of tiny, flat, square cameras and equally tiny, square mirrors placed in a grid pattern that can be mounted on the underside of an aircraft as small as a model airplane. Each camera will provide slightly different information about the subject because each takes a photograph from a slightly different angle.

Computational imaging is then used to combine the numerous low-resolution images to create a sharper image that is akin to one taken by a high-performance camera too heavy to fit on the small aircraft.

Computational imaging: Each hexagonal
face is a micro-mirror, individually
positioned to create an overall shape.

“Wouldn’t it be great if the camera could determine from its wide shot which objects in the field are most important and be able to zero in on them?” Christensen asks.

Such a camera is under development at SMU. Called an adaptive resolution camera, it would analyze the wide view and use mathematical formulas to identify objects of interest — such as aircraft on the ground.

Instead of simple mirrors, the adaptive resolution camera uses an array of micro-electric machines, called MEMs. Each MEM looks like a mirror that is hundreds of microns across, or about the width of a few human hairs, attached to three even smaller levers. The levers would reposition the mirrors in the desired direction to improve the information collected by the camera’s next photographs to create another, better image — all faster than the blink of an eye.

The smarter camera would automatically put more pixels in the areas of interest and less in those considered unimportant, he says, adding that the resulting picture may look strange by conventional standards, but it would provide more useful information.

The team from the Department of Electrical Engineering in the SMU Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering incorporates skills from physics, mathematics and computer science. Assistant Professor Dinesh Rajan, a specialist in information theory, finds the mathematical route to the best final image, a so-called “goodness value.” Associate Professor Scott Douglas, an adaptive algorithms expert, crafts the formulas to make the system home in on the important details within the big picture. And Professor Panos Papamichalis works on their robustness, making the system more tolerant of the adversities the camera will encounter in daily use.

Integrated circuits make the thousands of necessary computations, and “given the need for miniaturization, the best way to reduce the size of those circuits would make them fully photonic,” Christensen says. That step, however, is some time off. For semiconductor laser structures, Christensen works with Evans.

The two have just started a project, also for DARPA, in collaboration with the University of Texas at Dallas, Photodigm, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman. The goal: to develop signal processing with photons, instead of electrons; in other words, computing with light.

To achieve this they must create the photonic equivalent of a semiconductor chip. Most computer chips are made with silicon, which doesn’t emit light very well. A better choice is indium (In) phosphide (P), called a III-V semiconductor, Christensen says. The goal is to emit and control light, one photon at a time.

“At the quantum level you are literally controlling individual photons and providing gain (to amplify signals),” says Christensen. He compares the current state of photonic integrated circuits with the world’s first electronic integrated circuit, invented at Texas Instruments 50 years ago this summer by the late Jack Kilby when he linked a handful of transistors on a single silicon chip. Over the next 50 years, semiconductors evolved from a handful of components on that first chip to hundreds of millions of components on a single chip, he says.

“If you look at the state of photonics processing, it’s about 6 to 15 components,” he says. “It’s like we’re starting today where Jack Kilby was 50 years ago, and it will be interesting to see where a few decades takes the field of integrated photonics.” — Deborah Wormser

Tags Dinesh Rajan, Gary Evans, Jay Kirk, Jerome Butler, Lyle School of Engineering, Marc Christensen, Panos Papamichalis, Scott Douglas

Researcher news

Christensen named 2008 SMU Ford Research Fellow

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date May 30, 2008

Marc Christensen, in SMU’s Department of Electrical Engineering, has received an SMU 2008 Ford Research Fellowship.

Christensen, an associate professor and chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering in the Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering, has built a nationally recognized research group in photonics and computational imaging.

His work in applications such as imaging sensors and micro-mirror arrays has been funded by entities ranging from the National Science Foundation to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA.

In 2007, he became a member of the first class of researchers to receive the DARPA Young Faculty Award for his work in active illumination for adaptive multi-resolution sensing.

Currently, Christensen leads a research project that also involves senior faculty from the University of Delaware, University of Texas-Dallas, and Sandia National Laboratory.

Established in 2002 through a $1 million pledge from Gerald Ford, chair of SMU’s Board of Trustees, the fellowships help the University retain and reward outstanding scholars. Each recipient receives a cash prize for research support during the year.
The University’s new Ford Fellows were honored by the SMU Board of Trustees at its May meeting.

Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Marc Christensen, SMU Department of Electrical Engineering

Health & Medicine Plants & Animals Technology

Jellyfish, squid propulsion aid new “micro” vehicle research

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date June 1, 2005

The movement of aquatic life can appear inexplicable when viewed through the glass of an aquarium tank.
But Paul Krueger believes the mechanics that jellyfish and squid use to maneuver can be applied to technology in the emerging field of “micro” vehicles.

Krueger, associate professor in the SMU Bobby B. Lyle School of Engineering‘s Department of Mechanical Engineering, is studying a mechanical system similar to that used by jellyfish and squid to understand pulsatile propulsion and apply it to exotic engineering applications like micropropulsion. Krueger’s research results eventually might propel tiny vehicles — sizes of a centimeter, millimeter or smaller — used in microsurgery, create micro-submarines for undersea caverns exploration, or maneuver small aircraft for military surveillance.

“Small flight-capable or submersible vehicles are of great technological interest because their diminutive size permits increased portability and access to otherwise inaccessible locations,” Krueger says.

Creating new propulsion schemes is “paramount to the design of micro vehicles because traditional propulsion designs, such as propellers and steady jets, become too inefficient at small scales,” he says.

Krueger believes that pulsed jets, consisting of a series of jet pulses with no flow between them, is a promising approach to developing micropropulsion capability. He plans to develop a model system that propels itself using pulsed jets generated by a volume-displacement mechanism. The behavior of this representative vehicle will help reveal how to adapt pulsed jet propulsion for small-scale vehicles.

Krueger’s research is being supported through a five-year, $400,000 Faculty Early Career Development award from the National Science Foundation, partially because of its multidisciplinary nature and potential for educating pre-college students.

As part of the research, he is collaborating with a biologist who is an expert on squid biomechanics, enhancing cross-disciplinary efforts between the fields of biology and mechanical engineering.

Krueger also plans to incorporate the study of micropropulsion devices and its applications to biology, marine life, and medical applications into introductory material for mechanical engineering courses.

“Illustrating applications of mechanical engineering in different fields may be a key factor in attracting new students from various backgrounds to study mechanical engineering,” he says.

Krueger joined the SMU Lyle School of Engineering in 2002. He received his B.S. in mechanical engineering in 1997 from the University of California at Berkeley. Krueger received his Ph.D. in aeronautics in 2001 from the California Institute of Technology.

Tags Lyle School of Engineering, Paul Krueger

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