Science and Technology in the Workplace

research at the university of Virginia School of engineering and Applied Science

engineering Advances

in

Engineering the

Information Age

Advances in technology can utterly transform societies. The printing press

ushered in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The steam engine

powered the Industrial Revolution. And the computer has turned our era

into the Information Age.

Today, information technology is pervasive. It has made possible dramatic

gains in productivity that have fueled our standard of living. It has enabled us

to circle the Earth with vast financial, telecommunication and transportation

networks. And it has made possible advances in medicine and science that

were unimaginable half a century ago.

Though impressive, these developments give us only an inkling of what

is to come. Right now faculty members in the School of Engineering and

Applied Science are creating new applications and new ways to make

existing applications more responsive. They are devising fresh approaches

to overcoming the physical constraints on components and novel architectures for managing the complexity and

vulnerability of the networks we depend on.

In this issue of IMPACT, we explore just a selection of their research, highlight the achievements of our faculty,

and describe our plans to enhance facilities for engineering research and education in information technology at

the University of Virginia.

Thanks to the talent and dedication of our faculty, we have placed our School and our students at the center of the

discoveries that will continue to define our age. It is an exciting time for engineers and applied scientists at U.Va.

sustainable energy

Writer and Editor Charlie Feigenoff Contributing Editors Andrea Arco Morgan Estabrook Josie Loyd

Barry W. Johnson

Associate Dean for Research

U.Va. School of Engineering and Applied Science

Faculty and graduate student research

IMPACT is published by the University of Virginia School of Engineering

and Applied Science. An online version of the magazine is available at

www.seas.virginia.edu/impact.

Address corrections should be sent to the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science, P.O. Box 400259, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4259, or call 434.924.3072.

Graphic Design

William J. Green & Associates Photography Tom Cogill

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Critical Mass in Computer Science

Wireless Medical Monitoring

At the Intersection of People

and Computers

It may seem paradoxical, but advances in computer science depend on the curiosity, creativity and determination of human beings. That’s why the U.Va. Department of Computer Science has placed a priority on assembling an outstanding group of faculty. The numbers tell the story. The department, comprising 25 tenured and tenure-track faculty members, includes two members of the National Academy of Engineering, four ACM Fellows, three IEEE Fellows, four editors-in-chief of scholarly publications and 22 associate editors. Nine of the faculty have received NSF CAREER Awards.

Members of the faculty have served the nation and the profession in myriad capacities and are nationally recognized for their contributions to the field. Perhaps most notably, William A. Wulf served as president of the National Academy of Engineering and Anita K. Jones as director of defense research and engineering at the U.S. Department of Defense. Last year alone, Jones received the IEEE Founder’s Medal, John C. Knight the IEEE Harlan Mills Award, Mary Lou Soffa the Computing Research Association’s A. Nico Habermann Award and John A. (“Jack”) Stankovic the IEEE Technical

Committee on Distributed Processing Distinguished Achievement Award.

The department is known as much for its collaborative spirit as for the individual achievements of its members. “In a field as broad and complex as computer science, collaboration is essential,” says Soffa, the department’s chair. For instance, Knight received a highly coveted MURI award from the Department of Defense because of the expertise in network security he assembled from universities across the nation. The department also has extensive collaborations with University faculty at the School of Medicine and the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences.

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Rice Hall, the planned centerpiece for engineering research and education in information technology at U.Va., is being designed for the future. In addition to incorporating the latest educational technology available, it will feature laboratories, classrooms, offices and collaborative meeting space that can be dynamically reconfigured to support new ideas and new projects.

The Next Great Stride in Information

Technology Engineering at U.Va.

According to Computer Science Department Chair Mary Lou Soffa, human capital is the key to advances in computer science.

“ In a field as broad

and complex as

computer science,

collaboration

is essential.”

Wireless Medical Monitoring

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Wireless networks can deliver a constant stream of information about

ourselves and our environment in ways that were unimaginable just a

decade ago. To realize their full promise, however, we can’t just adapt

concepts from wired networks. researchers in the engineering School are

exploring wireless networks from a variety of perspectives, rethinking and

reinventing everything from individual sensors to network architecture.

Ali Hemyari is helping to build a model catheter

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A Wearable Network

When John C. Lach thinks about a wireless network, he envisions the human body. Lach, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at U.Va., specializes in developing wearable wireless sensors for health care applications. He has partnered with faculty in U.Va.’s Department of Neurosurgery to improve the evaluation of deep brain stimulation, a technique for treating Parkinson’s disease that uses implanted electrodes. During follow-up visits, patients don a wearable sensor network, which captures their movements. Thanks to data processing techniques

One challenge, according to Lach, is power management. “Our sensor nodes are larger than we would like because of the size of their battery,” he says. To address this issue, he is developing an adaptive communication protocol that takes advantage of the changes in the relationship among sensor nodes produced by human motion. Lach is also starting to focus on reducing the size of the circuit board that is at the heart of his sensors. “The goal is to reduce the size of the nodes to smart dust,” he says. developed by Lach and his students

that distinguish the characteristic signal of a Parkinson’s tremor from deliberate movement, surgeons can objectively evaluate the effects of different kinds of stimulation. “Before this, surgeons had to rely on observation and self-reporting,” Lach says. Lach is pushing forward on a number of fronts to realize his goal of an unobtrusive network of wearable wireless sensors. Smaller sensors would enable patients to wear the network at home for the purposes of remote monitoring and longitudinal data collection.

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John A. (“Jack”) Stankovic, BP America Professor in the Computer Science Department, is also interested in the application of wireless networks for health care, but he approaches the problem from a slightly more distant perspective. While John Lach focuses on adapting sensors to the human body, Stankovic is interested in the issues that arise when you network a person’s immediate environment. Stankovic is collaborating with Robin A. Felder in the U.Va. School of Medicine and researchers at other institutions to develop a smart living

space that would make it possible for seniors to age in place safely. This home would be outfitted with a range of sensors — some in the environment, others wearable.

This network could serve a number of purposes. It could, for instance, act as a passive medical alert system, setting off an alarm at a central office if a senior’s daily round of activities is interrupted. It could also be used as a diagnostic system. Sensors could identify changes in a senior’s physiological condition — such as difficulty breathing or an increase in

blood pressure — that might warrant intervention. “Physicians will obtain a full picture of the patient’s condition, rather than the snapshot they get from an office visit,” Stankovic observes. There are a variety of issues, however, that must be resolved before such a network becomes a reality. To encourage research in this area, Stankovic is establishing the Center for Technology in Medicine at U.Va. “We have a critical mass of researchers who are interested in these problems and who have the expertise to help solve them,” he says. Charlie H. Smith III is taking old

technology and making it new. Waveguides,

which channel electromagnetic energy at specific frequencies, have been in use for 100 years —

lithography for 200. Conventional waveguides, cut individually from a block of metal by machines, are subject to the kind of defects that mechanical processes produce and therefore cannot be used for terahertz waveguide circuits.

Smith, a doctoral candidate in the Charles L. Brown Department

of Electrical and Computer Engineering, is using photolithography techniques to produce terahertz waveguides from SU-8, a polymer used in such miniature devices as MEMS and microfluidics. The advantage: he can produce more complex waveguide circuits that will enable the use of the terahertz for numerous applications, including biometrics and skin cancer detection.

Smith was introduced to research as an undergraduate at U.Va. by Associate Professor N. Scott Barker, who is now his dissertation adviser. “I like problem solving and the freedom of doing research,” Smith says. “It is up to me to figure out how to get SU-8 to do what I want it to do.” Once he perfects his process for making the waveguide, Smith is interested in applying his technology to other established devices.

New Devices from Old Technology

to more complex waveguide circuits.

Jack Stankovic is excited by the potential of in-home monitoring systems for seniors.

“ I like problem

solving and

the freedom of

doing research.”

At the Intersection of People and Computers

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At times, the Information Age can seem like too much of a good thing. Too

much data can be as damaging to performance as too little. Faculty in the

Systems and Information engineering Department are conducting research that

will help us better understand how we process information, identify pertinent

information for a given task and render that information more readily apparent.

Medical education is undergoing a revolution. The amount of knowledge physicians and nurses in training must master is growing exponentially — as are expectations for their performance — yet the amount of time they can devote to their studies is not. Knowledge that formerly was gained through trial and error must be taught more efficiently. In the past, doctors typically acquired skills in palpating tumors, the first line of defense against an assortment of cancers, through experience with patients. Increasingly, medical schools now turn to simulators that mimic the symptoms of the disease, enabling students to practice these

skills before encountering a patient. “Unfortunately, the current generation of simulators provides neither lifelike tactile feel nor realistic anatomical structure,” notes Assistant Professor Gregory J. Gerling. “Most importantly, they reproduce only a limited number of fairly obvious scenarios and provide little feedback on performance.” Working with Dr. Marcus L. Martin in the School of Medicine, Reba M. Childress in the School of Nursing and graduate student Sarah Rigsbee (SE ’08), Gerling has developed a simulator for prostate cancer that is capable of realistically reproducing 96 different disease states and — since it is

electronically wired — of providing an objective evaluation of technique and performance.

A key issue for Gerling is determining how to build his simulators so that they provide information that students interpret as realistic. To do this, he concurrently is studying how our sense of touch works. He applies solid mechanics, control theory and statistical models to understand how the skin microstructure and mechanoreceptors generate neural responses that inform our sense of touch. The intention is to integrate touch into the next generation of artificial prosthetic hands that are controlled by thought.

Information at Our Fingertips

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To build a prosthetic device with a sense of touch, you have to understand how touch works in the first place, and as doctoral student Daine R. Lesniak (SE ’09) has discovered, touch is still poorly understood.

Working with Gregory Gerling, Lesniak is taking a systems approach, articulating the process into

interconnected skin, transduction and neural modules. This integrated approach allows him to follow the process by which deformation at the skin is translated into neural spikes at the brain.

An Engineer’s

Sense of Touch

In order to reproduce touch accurately, Greg Gerling and graduate student Daine Lesniak are developing more robust models of how it works.

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Embedding Human Beings in Technology

Ellen Bass puts numbers on our complicated relationship with the electronic world.

The remarkable simulators that Gregory Gerling is constructing are, like many things in our lives today, made possible by a small circuit board linked to an array of sensors and actuators. In many cases, these ubiquitous electronic systems are created not to help us learn a new task but to assist us in performing a task more effectively. Our relationship to these automated systems is a complex one. For instance, we don’t simply set the cruise control on our cars at a particular speed and forget about it. On the contrary, we monitor it constantly, adjusting our speed to ensure a safe distance from the

vehicle ahead of us. Assistant Professor Ellen J. Bass constructs computational models that describe the factors that guide our relationship with these automated systems. Her goal is to provide interface designers with the critical insights they need to design displays in ways that maximize human performance. “By looking at the whole system — including human beings as well as information technology — we can determine the most important information to display and how to display it,” she says.

Solving these problems can be a matter of life and death. More than 30 percent of all fatal

accidents in commercial aviation occur when pilots inadvertently fly their aircraft into the ground. Bass conducted a study for NASA to help refine synthetic vision systems, computerized representations of terrain currently being added to cockpit navigation and primary flight displays. She helped determine the issues involved in representing three dimensions on a two-dimensional display so that pilots can accurately estimate their distance from the ground with just a glance. “My goal is to determine how to present IT systems so that people use them effectively,” she says.

“ By looking at the

whole system —

including human

beings as well

as information

technology — we

can determine the

most important

information to

display and how

to display it.”

Very Low-Energy Circuits

Whether it’s introducing the next generation of portable MP3 players or creating a wearable wireless network, the major stumbling block that electronics designers face is power. Engineers have been successful in dramatically shrinking just about every component that can be placed on a circuit board, but batteries have proved stubbornly resistant to change.

Benton H. Calhoun’s approach: sidestep the issue by developing very low-energy circuits that complete the same amount of work as conventional circuits while using much less energy. Calhoun, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering who did his graduate work at MIT, uses circuit-level techniques like lowering the operating voltage to the subthreshold region and using leakage current to perform a variety of tasks. “I want to push power consumption so low that these chips may be able to scavenge the power to operate from ambient sources such as vibrations or thermal gradients,” he says.

The applications for Calhoun’s super-high-efficiency chips are extensive. They could be used to operate tiny sensors to track the

condition of bridges and buildings, in military surveillance systems, or for medical monitoring, an idea that earned Calhoun a Fund for Excellence in Science and Technology (FEST) Distinguished Young Investigator Grant from the University. “When you implant a microsensor in someone, you can’t just replace the battery,” he notes.

This year, Calhoun was also among 24 faculty members identified as “rising stars in microsystems research” and selected to receive Young Faculty Awards from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). He will apply his low-voltage strategy to a class of semiconductor chips known as field programmable gate arrays.

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IMPACT

FALL 2007