Wuyang Dai receives the College of Engineering 2015 Societal Impact Dissertation Award

June 12th, 2015 in Awards

Wuyang Dai, a 2015 graduate of NOC, received the College of Engineering 2015 Societal Impact Dissertation Award for his thesis “Detection and Prediction Problems with Applications in Personalized Health Care.”

The thesis developed algorithmic methods to support personalized preventive medicine. One of the problems addressed is the prediction of hospitalizations due to heart disease based on a patient’s Electronic Medical Record. Analyzing records of more than 45,000 Boston Medical Center patients, the new algorithms predict about 80% of hospitalizations with few false positives. Prediction enables prevention which can improve outcomes and reduce the more than $9B spent annually in the US on preventable heart-related hospitalizations.

Boston is Becoming a “Smart City” with ENG Support

December 18th, 2014 in Research

By Gabriella McNevin

Ushered in with the 21^st century, are challenges that require real technological innovations. The global population is growing and, like magnets, people are moving to cities. According to the UN, by 2030, 60% of the population will live in a city, and by 2050, 70% (source). City officials are taking measures to adapt to the steadily increasing population. Today, Boston is zeroing in on population sustainability issues that threaten driver safety and drain energy: Inadequate road infrastructure and an antiquated repair system.

As part of a multifaceted collaboration to create technology to solve urban problems, the City of Boston and a Boston University-led team of researchers have developed equipment to improve the local thoroughfare, called “Street Bump.”

IBM and IEEE has recognized “Street Bump” as a significant contribution to Boston, and have presented the developers the second place prize in “IBM Students for a Smarter Planet/IEEE Smarter Planet Challenge: Student Projects Changing the World.” The team’s project, entitled,“Street Bumps and Big Data Analytics: Crowdsourcing Our Way to Better Roads,” demonstrates engineering expertise and a commitment to improving the world.

The team of researchers includes graduate students Theodora Brisimi (ECE), Yue Zhang (SE), Wuyang Dai (ECE), Setareh Ariafar (SE) and Nicholas Baladis (MIT). Professor Christos Cassandras (ECE, SE) and Professor Ioannis Paschalidis (ECE, SE, BME) are team advisors. All BU researchers are affiliated with the Center for Information and Systems Engineering.

The project focuses on an iPhone app – “Street Bump” – developed by the City of Boston to collect data on road conditions. The app is used by city employees and many citizens and was designed to facilitate crowdsourcing in collecting relevant road condition data. It uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to detect “bumps” sensed during a trip. The app then transmits the data to the City of Boston. The information can be used to alert repair crews of road damage. The algorithms developed by the BU-led team analyze the data received by the City and classifies the detected bumps into  “actionable” and “non-actionable.” Severe bumps like potholes are actionable and can be prioritized in scheduling repairs.

In this work, the team collaborated with The City of Boston’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, which provided actual data from the City’s servers. Office Co-Chair Nigel Jacob and Chris Osgood have echoed the Office’s website saying, “there is a revolution going on in how cities are designed & built. This new focus on technology infrastructure and sustainable design links how a city is built with how it is managed and experienced.”

“Street Bump” is the second smart city application Professor Casssandras has advised that received national attention. The first app, Smart Parking, also won 2^nd place in the “IBM Students for a Smarter Planet/IEEE Smarter Planet Challenge: Student Projects Changing the World” competition in 2011.

BU Bringham & Women’s Hospital Partnership Celebrates First Year

September 15th, 2014 in Research

Joint Research Focused on Medical Imaging and Image-Guided Interventions

By Mark Dwortzan

Researchers from Boston University and Brigham & Women's Hospital are collaborating to improve medical imaging and image-guided interventions. (Images courtesy of Brigham & Women's Hospital)

Boston University College of Engineering Assistant Professor Darren Roblyer (BME) and Brigham & Women’s Hospital radiologist Srinivisan Mukundan are exploring a strategy that combines a new optical imaging device developed by Roblyer with emerging magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques to probe malignant brain tumors during chemotherapy treatment. Their research could enable clinicians to monitor the effectiveness of chemotherapy over the course of treatment and implement changes to chemotherapy drugs and dose levels as needed.

The project is one of five now receiving funding through an ongoing partnership between Boston University and Brigham & Women’s Hospital. On September 12 at the BU Photonics Center, Dean Kenneth R. Lutchen and Dr. Steven Seltzer, Chair of the BWH Department of Radiology, announced the second year of the partnership, which has already provided one year of seed funding to projects ranging from image-guided cancer drug delivery to early detection of heart disease.

“The goal is to leverage synergies between Brigham & Women’s Hospital’s Radiology Department in imaging and image-guided interventions with the College of Engineering’s strengths in developing new materials and technologies as well as novel techniques for processing images and large data sets,” said Associate Professor Tyrone Porter (ME, BME, MSE), who is coordinating the partnership. “The hope is to stimulate research collaborations between the two campuses and develop a National Institutes of Health training program in clinical imaging and image-guided interventions.”

The brainchild of Lutchen and Seltzer, the BU-BWH partnership brings together world-class expertise and equipment from Boston University entities such as the BU Photonics Center and the BU Center for Nanoscience & Nanobiotechnology, and from the BWH Department of Radiology, home to the National Institutes of Health’s National Center for Image-Guided Therapy and the Advanced Multimodality Image Guided Operating Suite (AMIGO). Joint research between the two campuses could result in less invasive, more accurate medical imaging and image-guided interventions.

“There’s no question that in so many dimensions, imaging is at the foundation of a tremendous amount of potential breakthroughs in medical discoveries and practice, but there are huge challenges from a scientific and technical point of view,” said Lutchen. “We’ve got tons of interested students and faculty here that need and want to use imaging technologies to address interesting and important questions.”

First-round projects include the engineering of a new “molecular imaging” MRI contrast agent for detecting early calcification of the aortic valve; the combination of ultrasound and MR data to evaluate the elastic properties of tissues, which are associated with pathological indicators of disease; a clinical decision support system for patient-specific cancer diagnosis and management; and ultrasound-guided delivery of chemotherapy drug-laden nanoparticles to metastasized lung cancer cells in the brain. Applications for second-round projects are now underway.

All projects involve at least one principal investigator from each of the partnering institutions, who jointly advise a doctoral student on a project that could positively impact clinical practice. Participating ENG faculty include Professors Joyce Wong (BME, MSE), Paul Barbone (ME, MSE), Venkatesh Saligrama (ECE, SE) and Yannis Paschalidis (ECE, SE); Associate Professor Porter; and Assistant Professor Roblyer.

“The fields of biomedical imaging and bioengineering have been converging and collaborating for decades, and that collaboration continues to get closer and closer,” said Seltzer, noting a burgeoning clinical need for advanced technologies in functional and molecular imaging; information technologies ranging from data mining to image processing; and minimally-invasive diagnostic and therapeutic procedures guided by high-technology imaging techniques.

Interview in Kathimerini (Greek newspaper)

October 20th, 2013 in Interviews

An interview given to Kathimerini (10/20/2013). (Online, As it appeared in print: Interview in Kathimerini.)

ENG faculty developing sensors that stay in touch

October 31st, 2003 in Research

By Tim Stoddard

	John Baillieul, Christos Cassandras, and Yannis Paschalidis (seated, from left) of ENG’s Center for Information Systems Engineering are developing sensor network control systems with far-reaching applications in manufacturing, homeland security, and space exploration. Their interdisciplinary team includes University of Massachusetts, Amherst, faculty Abhi Deshmukh, Weibo Gong (standing, from left), and Robert Gao (seated, far right). Photo by Fred Sway

When an unbalanced washing machine starts dancing across the floor, a sensor inside detects the wild gyrations and halts the spin cycle. In the future, says Christos Cassandras, washing machines and other household appliances will go a step further: they’ll call a repairman before a part breaks.

Cassandras, an ENG professor of manufacturing engineering, says that appliances will be only one of many applications for so-called sensor networks, which feature a constellation of miniature devices that monitor a wide range of things, from vibrations to temperature to toxic chemicals and biological weapons. Cheap, lightweight, and built with tiny radios, the sensors will talk to one another, coordinating their reconnaissance and relaying their findings to a distant computer. An aging washing machine, for example, might notify the manufacturer of an imminent problem over a wireless Internet connection. The owner might then receive an e-mail from the dealer to schedule a service visit for a part that may not break for several weeks.

Sensor networks promise to improve everything from manufacturing to homeland security to endangered species management. But while the technology for building tiny, cheap, and intelligent sensors is rapidly emerging, Cassandras says, the challenge now is to develop theories for managing the flow of information among hundreds or even thousands of networked sensors. With an interdisciplinary team of engineers at ENG’s Center for Information Systems Engineering (CISE), Cassandras and his colleagues have received a prestigious award from the National Science Foundation’s Division of Design, Manufacturing, and Industrial Innovation to develop methods of managing complex sensor networks.

With the award’s $2.5 million over the next five years, the BU team will work with colleagues at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, to design sensors that communicate with one another, learn on the job, and tolerate extreme environments. The team includes Yannis Paschalidis, an ENG associate professor of manufacturing engineering, David Castañon, an ENG professor of electrical and computer engineering, and John Baillieul, an ENG professor and chair of the department of aerospace and mechanical engineering.

Initially, the CISE team will go to the chalkboard, hashing out the theories and principles underlying sensor networks. “We’ll be conceptualizing these new technologies and abstracting them to pictures, equations, and computer-based simulations,” Cassandras says. “One of our main tasks is to develop algorithms — systematic and methodical ways of doing something more efficiently — to make good decisions and get this information and technology to people who can implement it.”

Down the road, members of the team will also develop a test bed at BU to experiment with sensor network designs. To start, however, the UMass faculty will be principally involved in building and testing sensor hardware. Researchers there have been designing ball bearings with tiny sensors that monitor vibrations and send a wireless signal when the ball bearing is breaking down and needs to be changed.

Repair thyself

The CISE team believes sensor networks will play an important role in large-scale industrial settings. In factories, for instance, sensors will be embedded in tools and machines to identify problems before they cause catastrophic failures. A variety of sensors could be used to keep track of fuel and raw materials at every step of production, says Paschalidis, providing a real-time inventory that would dramatically improve planning and supply chain management. The smart washing machine is an example of the potential for postmanufacturing product monitoring. “What we’re headed for is a day in which products essentially will repair themselves,” Baillieul says, “or communicate with the factory about what’s gone wrong and what needs to be done.”

Locating personnel and mobile equipment such as forklifts within an industrial campus can be a major bottleneck to efficiency and safety, Cassandras says. By tagging these mobile elements with radio frequency identification tags (RFIDs), similar to the EZ-pass units used on the Massachusetts Turnpike, companies would have a real-time map of the location of each item. RFIDs are also expected to have a major impact in retail. Instead of bar codes, items in the supermarket and department stores will have tiny RFIDs that identify themselves to sensors on the shelves, giving companies valuable real-time inventories.

The major challenge for the CISE team will be integrating different kinds of information from sensors that are built to monitor different things. “Computers talk to each over the Internet,” Cassandras says. “That’s fascinating, but relatively simple. What we’re dealing with in sensor networks are heterogeneous devices that are taking qualitatively different measurements at different rates. It’s not just the exchange of information. There’s also the element of motion in the different sensors, and the fact that they are essentially speaking different languages.”

As the CISE team wrestles with the management of sensor networks, it is prepared to adapt to the rapidly evolving sensor technologies that will undoubtedly develop in the coming years. “As a group, we’ve done a lot of work in other areas that are cutting edge,” says Cassandras. “But this is really one situation where we don’t know what’s going to happen in fundamental technology three years down the line.”