Robots for port security, crowd safety

The research newsletter of Stevens Institute of Technology Spring 2017

IMPACT

Imagine a killer hurricane bearing down on a coastal city with only a few days of advance warning: how should residents prepare? Or imagine a canister of toxic substances, released in a major city by accident — or by a terrorist. Which way will winds take the poison?

Stevens ocean engineering professor Julie Pullen can assist.

A leading expert on fluids, winds, oceans and weather — and the ways in which those systems continuously interact with one another — Pullen has received a Fulbright scholarship to travel, educate and perform research abroad. Beginning next January, she will spend five months teaching at the University of the Philippines Diliman and refining models that will help save lives.

Modeling the winds that fuel killer stormsTyphoons and heavy rains are common in the Philippines, creating floods and landslides and necessitating frequent evacuations. The national government has begun building an early-warning system to predict floods and warn residents. But there’s more to be done.

Pullen was drawn both by the urgency of the threat and by scientific curiosity.

“Island environments are really interesting focal points for coastal urban sustainability challenges,” she notes.

During previous research with the U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) in the region, Pullen had already unlocked a key dynamic: the shapes of the islands of the Philippines significantly influence the weather that swirls around them. Wind jets passing through the islands, shaped by mountains, send huge, deep whirlpool-type systems swirling out to sea, driving ocean currents and affecting everything from local rainfall to regional fisheries and global weather.

“You get these strong-weak-strong-weak patterns, and the ocean responds really strongly to that type of forcing,” she discovered, creating large-scale eddies.

It was a remarkable insight. Forecasters, taking into account these new findings, can now more accurately predict downpours in the region by applying integrated models that account for air temperature, river flow, ocean salinity and other variables. Water pouring into rivers during storms, for example, empties into the South China Sea, lowering its salinity, stratifying the near-shore water and preventing heat from being generated. This, in turn, triggers additional dynamics.

“Putting that whole picture together is a really exciting aspect of this work,” notes Pullen.

Following her Fulbright, Pullen will perform an ONR field research trip, continuing ongoing Stevens collaborations with the Navy as it maps oceanographic conditions and collects data in the region. The ONR project, assisted by NASA, helps scientists worldwide build better local models to predict extreme weather in their own regions.

“All of these models have extraordinary fidelity,” she says, “but they have to be connected. [International researchers] have to exchange the information, and I think that’s the biggest challenge of the field right now.”

Linking Air/Sea Models to Save Lives Stevens’ newest Fulbright recipient deciphers the extreme-weather code

Self-driving cars: the cascade effect

Cleaner, energy-efficient military facilities

INSIDE HIGHLIGHTS: stevens.edu/research

Wind-created ocean eddies (left), a research focus of Dr. Julie Pullen (right)

Stevens Research Quantifies Ease In Skewing Online RankingsAmazon, TripAdvisor, Yelp: these and other consumer services depend upon accurate, crowd-sourced content to guide users.

But what if those posted reviews aren’t all truthful? Can fake, planted positive reviews — or negative reviews fraudulently posted in competitors’ entries — change rankings and influence consumers’ choices?

Yes, says Stevens School of Business professor Ted Lappas, who has completed a sweeping survey of online review sites published in the journal Information Systems Research.

Researchers estimate 15 to 30 percent of all online reviews may be falsified and planted for positive or negative purposes. Lappas, who has been following research in false online content for a decade, set out to discover whether these efforts make any difference — and, if so, how to combat them.

To analyze the phenomenon, Lappas, with a graduate student and an associate faculty member, studied roughly 2.3 million online reviews of nearly 5,000 hotels in 17 U.S. cities. The team was surprised by how little effort is required to trick the rankings services.

“Just 50 or so additional positive reviews planted on a site are sometimes enough, we found, to tip the scales and drive a particular property to the number-one ranking in their market,” he notes.

And it takes even fewer if a business is also simultaneously ‘spamming’ its main competitors with fake negative reviews.

The most effective fraud strategy, Lappas’ team found, was a mixed strategy — planting false positive content while also seeding higher-ranked competitors’ entries with falsely negative reviews.

“Using this strategy, you can make a big difference with a surprisingly small number of reviews,” he notes.

The team also suggests some effective fraud-detection strategies for operators of review websites, including avoiding an overemphasis on new reviews — a common practice in the industry – by creating a delay before new reviews appear online. “Our simulations provide strong evidence that this would be effective,” notes Lappas.

Self-driving cars and other connected and automated vehicle technologies have the potential to significantly change transportation. How they will do so, however, remains to be seen and modeled.

With support from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), Stevens systems researcher and transportation system expert

Yeganeh M. Hayeri is exploring this very question in greater detail.

Hayeri, who develops models to study the impacts of technology on systems, notes that traffic flows, air quality, greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption will all be affected as automated vehicles are deployed in greater numbers — and these changes will cascade, in turn, to impact additional systems and institutions.

“Given that transportation system is the backbone of U.S. society, higher levels of autonomous technologies will impact our economy, law enforcement, public health, even our real estate market,” she explains. “The challenge right now is that this is such new technology, we don’t have a lot of data to determine the short-term and long-term impacts.”

To tackle those issues, Hayeri and Stevens have joined a major new research initiative with Leidos, a leading security, health and infrastructure solutions firm recently awarded a five-year, $75 million contract by the FHWA to study areas including automation and connected vehicles.

Autonomous TransitSystems In Focus

3D-PRINTED SCAFFOLDFOR SPINAL SURGERYStevens Ph.D. candidate Constance Maglaras, principal designer of a patent-pending medical device technology, was recently awarded top prize in the graduate-poster division at Johnson & Johnson’s 2017 Engineering Showcase. The 3D-printed spinal scaffold Maglaras engineered could help enable personalized spinal implants for patients, crafted from those patients’ own stem cells.

STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY • stevens.edu/research

As the weather warms and the spring semester moves toward a close, I would like to welcome new, first-time readers to IMPACT, and welcome back our regular readers. Stevens research continues to evolve and grow this year, creating many new and positive outcomes:

• Faculty awards for highly competitive grants continue to soar. During the four years that elapsed from FY13 to FY16, in fact, I am pleased to report the university nearly doubled its total funding granted from NIH and NSF sources.

• We have significantly increased our own internal support for doctoral-student fellowships. For beginning Ph.D. students, for example, we have added $1.5 million to this vital resource in order to continue recruiting the best and brightest minds to the growing Stevens research enterprise.

• We have rolled out several new leading-edge laboratories and research facilities in recent months including the ABS Engineering Center, the Hanlon Laboratory for Financial Analytics and Data Visualization, and a renovated virtual reality lab. You will learn more about these exciting facilities, and the research they are enabling here at Stevens, in our next issue.

• The Stevens Venture Center continues to grow since its formal launch last year. The SVC now maintains a network of 31

entrepreneurs-in-residence and is creating a Board of Advisors, enthusiastically supporting our efforts and helping start up multiple new businesses, leveraging key Stevens research and intellectual property and accelerating that research toward commercialization.

• And we have received a great deal of positive faculty recognition and news during the months since last fall, including two new NSF CAREER awards and the selection of one faculty member as a highly distinguished Fulbright Scholar to perform important research on weather systems in the Philippines — research that will likely help save lives in flood-prone areas of that nation.

Please visit our research website at stevens.edu/research to learn more about the remarkably talented faculty and student research that powers this university, addresses the pressing technical and scientific challenges of our time, and helps to create new products, services and solutions. Stevens faculty continue to push the envelope of the impossible to create the possible, and I am proud to highlight some of their latest accomplishments in this issue of IMPACT.

My very best regards—

Mo Dehghani, Ph.D.Vice Provost of Research, Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Stevens Research Is Moving Forward with Recognition, Support

STEVENS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY • stevens.edu/research

Radar has been used since World War II to fly, detect enemy aircraft, enforce speed limits and even to forecast weather.

But radar isn’t perfect. Large bodies of water, buildings, mountains and

other static surfaces can send interference, known as clutter, back to the receiver — and these echoes, stronger than the target, can obscure the desired images.

Now Stevens aims to attack this challenge with a new approach.

Supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Stevens professor and Signal

Processing and Communications (SPAC) Lab director Hongbin Li will test his theory about a novel way to correct for clutter and improve the information produced by radar equipment.

Li’s goal is to develop new mathematical techniques, using what is already known about ground clutter and sources of interference. His team will attempt to create algorithms and processes that can detect and reject obvious errors such as clutter, while still retaining useful target-image data.

“My research is focused on mathematical issues,” he explains. “The same weak-signal, strong-interference problem is encountered in a wealth of other applications,

from wireless communications, bioinformatics, hyperspectral imaging to radio astronomy,” points out Li. “I am hoping my research can have impacts in those fields, as well.”

The AFOSR project will extend through May 2019.

ON THE RADAR: Better ImagesNew research aims for more accurate, sensitive radar for military and civilian applications

Weapons manufacture is a costly, environmentally destructive business. One federal report has estimated that 15 million acres of U.S. land are contaminated by munitions operations and that cleaning up these sites completely would cost anywhere from $8 billion to $35 billion.

Now Stevens will play a role in a new effort to retrofit munitions plants with more environmentally friendly and safer processes. Under a series of recent Department of Defense-issued contracts and awards, the university is taking the lead in an exciting new area: the greening, or “net-zeroing,” of America’s munitions-production bases.

The $8 million project involves multiple Stevens departments, faculty and initiatives and is led by professor Christos Christodoulatos, director of the university’s Center for Environmental Systems (CES) and principal investigator for the project.

Wastewater recovery, energy from super-algaeIn January 2014, the Secretary of the Army distributed a new directive known as the Net Zero Installations Policy. That policy established a goal of “net zero” in energy, water and solid waste at munitions plants and other U.S. defense facilities, building on existing sustainability efforts.

Stevens turned out to be perfectly positioned to assist in that goal.

Sustainable SecurityDoD project to develop safer, greener, more energy-efficient military facilities

“We have maintained a close working relationship with the Department of Defense going back decades,” notes Christodoulatos. “In munitions alone, we have been working together since 1989. It was a natural fit.”

For DoD, faculty, student and postdoctoral researchers are developing technologies for a pilot project at the Holston Army Ammunition Plant, a 6,000-acre facility in northeastern Tennessee where explosives and other munitions are developed, tested and manufactured. That facility currently produces approximately 5 million pounds of waste annually — 50 tons per week — primarily corrosive nitric acids and environmentally undesirable nitrate salts.

The Stevens project has several research components. One involves the breakdown of hazardous or desirable wastes into harmless substances. DNAN (2,4-dinitroanisole, or C7H6N2O5), a synthetic explosive developed as a safer alternative to TNT, is one; moderately toxic, it tints water bodies with an unsightly yellow color. A Stevens team has developed a process of treating wastewater containing DNAN with a combination of ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide. A moderate level of peroxide, the team found, degrades DNAN to relatively harmless nitrate, carbon dioxide and water. Fuel of the futureIn collaboration with the University of New Haven, the Stevens team is also designing

a process to produce biomass energy from munitions-plant wastewater streams. Organic material and nitrates can be used to rapidly cultivate colonies of tiny microalgae in nitrogen-rich environments; the microalgae, cultivated in quantity, can then be processed to produce relatively high yields of oil and biogas energy.

“Although we began researching on a microscale, we have scaled up several times already,” he points out. “We now believe there is no reason the same technologies can’t be used in a baseball field-sized pond, or a large tub or other container that produces energy for a portion of a facility, or even for an entire one.”

In Stevens’ labs, algae samples are grown in special bioreactor tubs that gently agitate the colonies in enriched water, stirring them with pinwheel-like paddles. Researchers experiment with different species of saltwater and freshwater algae in various liquid media, at different light and dark exposure levels, in search of better yields.

Another team — led by chemical engineering and materials science professor Adeniyi Lawal — harvests the algae-rich water in a collection tube, whirls it in a centrifuge to collect the solids and mixes the algae with solvents to purify power-packed algal oil.

“You can make a lot of oil from these algae,” explains Christodoulatos.

Indeed, algal oils are a hot new area of alternative energy research thanks to a number of beneficial properties. Unlike petroleum fuels, oil distilled from algae is unlikely to ignite suddenly. It’s possible to produce up to 60 times more oil from an acre-sized algae farm as ethanol from an acre of Midwestern corn.

“You’ve started with a quantity of wastewater that was not really safe or useful to do anything with,” concludes Christodoulatos, “and you’ve done something novel with it to render it not only harmless but actually beneficial. Then you’ve used this treated water to grow biomass, which is then converted to biofuel, and that is powering your plant. It’s a win-win.”

NEWS & NOTES

THROUGH COLLABORATION…IMPACT • Spring 2017

Cybersecurity Expert Wetzel Appointed NSF Program Director

In March, Stevens computer science professor and cybersecurity expert Susanne Wetzel was selected to serve as a program director for the National Science Foundation’s SaTC

(Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace) program for a period of one year. Wetzel, who currently serves as head of Stevens’ undergraduate cybersecurity degree program, will assist in long-range planning and budget development for the program, among other objectives.

Englot, Sabau Secure NSF CAREER AwardsTwo more Stevens researchers have secured prestigious NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards. Mechanical engineering professor Brendan Englot received an award to investigate the use of reinforcement learning techniques to accelerate underwater robots’ modeling, maneuvering and learning in complex subsea environments. Electrical and computer engineering professor Serban Sabau will investigate the manner in which tiny disturbances become amplified through the dynamics of large networks and propagate into larger-scale, detrimental disruptions.

Stevens AI Expert Participates in SXSW Tech Panel

In March, College of Arts & Letters Dean Kelland Thomas participated in a panel discussion on the intersection of artificial intelligence and music at the annual South by Southwest technology and entrepreneurship

conference in Austin, Texas. Thomas spoke as a guest in the conference’s “Intelligent Future” track alongside representatives from cloud platform provider Acquia, design and innovation firm Uniform and marketing firm Urban Socialista.

Stevens Hosts Bio-Inspired Technologies ConferenceStevens hosted the International Conference on Bio-inspired Information and Communications Technologies (BICT 2017) in mid-March to discuss key principles,

processes and mechanisms in biological systems that may be leveraged to develop novel information and communications technologies. Keynote speaker Jane Hillston of the University of Edinburgh, a fellow of the Royal Society (UK) and an expert in formal approaches to modeling the dynamic behavior of systems, delivered the keynote address.

Stevens Aircraft-Detection Technology Patented, LicensedIn February, Stevens received a patent allowance for its proprietary sensor system used to detect low-flying aircraft along borders. The technology uses custom-built microphone arrays and signal processing software to instantly detect, track and classify low-flying aircraft not typically detected by conventional aviation radar systems. Stevens developed the system in 2015 and has entered into a licensing agreement with Bridgenet International, a California airport consultancy.

Internet of Things Journal Attracting AccoladesThe IEEE’s Internet of Things Journal, co-founded and directed by Stevens business professor Mahmoud Daneshmand, has received more than 1,300 submissions to date from authors in 49 nations. Its publications have been cited nearly 3,000 times, and the journal is now ranked in the top 3 percent among all global journals of its kind by SJR (the SCImago Journal & Country Rank).

Publication in Advanced MaterialsStevens mechanical engineering professor and nanomaterials expert E.H. Yang published an article in Advanced Materials, one of the world’s leading materials journals. The article,

“Graphene-Assisted Antioxidation of Tungsten Disulfide Monolayers: Substrate and Electric-Field Effect,” discusses the discovery that tungsten disulfide epitaxially grown on suspended graphene is resistant to oxidation, likely due to the screening effects of a surface electric field. Lead author Kyungnam Kang, a postdoctoral associate of Yang’s, led the effort under his advisement.

q Complex Fluids / Soft Matter ConferenceOn January 13, Stevens graduate students joined 80 peers and researchers from

Columbia University, New Jersey Institute of Technology and other leading research institutions for the Northeast Complex Fluids & Soft Matter Workshop. Participants discussed topics including polymer-grafted nanoparticles in ionic liquids; colloidal machines; advances in microrheology; and nanoparticle-stabilized foam transport in porous media.

ROBOT RESCUEcontinued from back cover

Electrical and computer engineering professor Yi Guo is working on another fascinating application of mobile robotics: the creation of systems that can aid in mass

evacuations during natural disasters, terrorist attacks or other emergencies.

“This project was primarily motivated by recent progress in the scientific community studying crowd disasters and biologically-inspired collective motion,” she explains, A New Year’s 2015 stampede tragedy in Shanghai, China was also fresh in her mind.

“I thought it would be useful if we could program a mobile robot to efficiently guide people during emergency evacuations,” she recalls.

Supported in the research by the NSF since 2015, she and her team design and instruct robots to algorithmically direct evacuees to the quickest, best-available exits at all times Guo also expects the work to be useful in planning for non-emergency crowds in malls, concerts, parades and other public spaces.

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Robots have come to play important roles in defense and manufacturing, but autonomous robots that learn in real time and apply that knowledge in the field remain a work in progress.

Now Stevens is poised to impact several fronts in this burgeoning field, including improving the ways in which robots can help perform dangerous and difficult tasks such as inspection of buildings, oil platforms and ships and the creation of robots to aid citizens during mass emergencies.

From sea lions to smart mapsMechanical engineering professor Brendan Englot is developing underwater drones (also known as remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs) to inspect ship hulls and monitor harbors. Teaching ROVs to navigate dimly lit waters, crafts and structures, however, is difficult.

“There’s lots of noise, the environment is pushing you around,” notes Englot. “Visibility is a problem. You don’t have access to the electromagnetic spectrum.”

To address those challenges, Englot formed a graduate-student team in his lab and acquired significant funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF). One experimental subject is a ground-scooting robot dubbed ‘The Jackal’ — a briefcase-sized beach buggy equipped with WiFi, transmitters, lasers and motion sensors.

The Jackal uses 3D volumetric scanning LIDAR technology: by pointing a pair of lasers as it moves and continually receiving, calculating and storing the resulting data, it can make sophisticated maps of ground terrain. Englot’s team works to make the robot’s maps ever more accurate, leveraging machine learning techniques to algorithmically build 3D maps that become progressively more descriptive as the robots operate in real time.

“Our hope is that with these algorithms,” Englot says, “we can produce occupancy maps that are more predictive.”

Another of Englot’s ROVs is deployed underwater, not only on campus but in the Hudson River and at a Long Island marine academy testing facility. During one trial, the robot made four sweeps on a nautilus-like trail beneath a murky pier. The resulting 3D map of the pier’s pilings, collected over about two minutes, was surprisingly accurate.

Stevens’ algorithms are attracting interest from fellow researchers. For now, however, basic research on the mapping problem — and related areas such as robotic planning and learning — will continue.

ABOUT STEVENSStevens Institute of Technology, The Innovation University®, is a premier, private research university situated in Hoboken, N.J. overlooking the Manhattan skyline. Founded in 1870, technological innovation has been the hallmark and legacy of Stevens’ education and research programs for 147 years. Within the university’s three schools and one college, 6,600 undergraduate and graduate students collaborate with more than 290 full-time faculty members in an interdisciplinary, student-centric, entrepreneurial environment to advance the frontiers of science and leverage technology to confront global challenges. Stevens is home to three national research centers of excellence, as well as joint research programs focused on critical industries such as healthcare, energy, finance, defense, maritime security, STEM education and coastal sustainability. The university is consistently ranked among the nation’s elite for return on investment for students, career services programs and mid-career salaries of alumni. Stevens is in the midst of a 10-year strategic plan, The Future. Ours to Create., designed to further extend the Stevens legacy to create a forward-looking and far-reaching institution with global impact.

ROBUST ROBOTICSDesigning systems to map, inspect, and aid in emergencies

4stevens.edu

continued inside

Dr. Brendan Englot demonstrates a Stevens underwater ROV on Pier 26 in New York City (top); sonar image and robot-created map of pier (bottom)