about the 91̽��device

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Bioengineer Buddy Ratner believes his labs latest device could be a powerful tool, capable of addressing health and child development issues by delivering a blood test in minutes to some of the most remote parts of the globe.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation also sees potential in the device, adding an additional $611,000 last month�� to prior funding for this work. The device could save lives by allowing faster diagnosis and instant treatment for some forms of malnutrition.

While it looks like something you might use to light a barbecue, the Plasma Pencil Atmospheric Mass Spectrometer is really a sophisticated tool that rapidly measures micronutrients – zinc, iron, folate, vitamin A and iodine. The results can then be displayed on a mobile phone or tablet computer within minutes, instead of the 24 hours typically required.

Ratner, who led the team that invented this new tool, says the 91̽�� is currently pursuing a patent on the PPAMS device.

The plasma pencil creates a thin plume of charged gas – known as a cold plasma – similar in temperature to the neon signs in a bar or theater marquee. When the plasma touches the samples it forces charged particles, or ions, in the sample ��to break free of the surface. The spectrometer measures the weight and charge of these ions, and that information pinpoints what is in the sample.

In Bangladesh, where the Gates Foundation is trying to reduce infant mortality and diagnose malnutrition in mothers and babies, a woman might walk 15 miles to see one of the rare medical professionals available. With this device, a health worker could know immediately whether that patient needed iron or folate and could deliver the nutrient treatment on the spot, before the patient leaves.

“This device could be transformative. Ive been in research for 39 years, and Im as excited about the significance of this as Ive ever been,” said Ratner, a professor of bioengineering and chemical engineering. Ratner also holds an endowed chair in technology commercialization.

In the research community, blood samples get this spectrometric analysis all the time –but the machinery might cost $300,000 and be bigger than a refrigerator. Those machines usually require the samples to be carefully prepared by a technician and held under high vacuum.

Ratner and his team combined some recent technological advances into a package that delivers the same data – with this plasma pencil and a tablet computer or cell phone. The key advances are having a plasma pencil at body temperature, having a portable mass spectrometer and applying the right software analysis that allows for an enormous variety of data to be analyzed at one time – instead of analyzing one item at a time.

Giving results in a simple way, by cell phone, means workers with less education can give life-saving treatment accurately in places with few doctors, explained Jeanette Stein, senior researcher who helped design the PPAMS package. Stein holds a doctorate in bioengineering and is working on the analysis software that allows the plasma pencil to provide multiple results simultaneously.

Just as with other devices receiving Gates foundation grants, this one will not be sold for profit in developing nations, but some of its potential uses could bring profits in the developed world.

“Some people use the analogy of the tricorder device from the old Star Trek television show,” Ratner said. Just as those characters pointed their technology toward unknown substances while exploring planets, Ratner imagines wide uses for the wand, including finding contaminants in drinking water, finding lead in plastic toys, or even improving security screenings at airports.

The very first wands may cost about $100,000, but that price should fall with efficient manufacturing, Ratner said. He presented some of his research earlier this year at a meeting of the Biomarkers of Nutrition for Development program, a part of the National Institutes of Health.

For more information, contact Ratner at ratner@uweb.engr.washington.edu

The 91̽��’s DO-IT Scholars program invites applications from Washington state high school sophomores and juniors with disabilities who are interested in preparing for college and challenging careers.

DO-IT, which stands for Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking and Technology, introduces high school students with disabilities to technology, peer support and work-based learning in an effort to help them be successful in a college environment.

Between 15 and 20 students are selected each year. DO-IT is seeking students who:

• Are high school sophomores or juniors.
• Have an aptitude and interest in attending college.
• Have a significant disability.
• Want to meet other college-bound students with disabilities.

Selected applicants will travel to Seattle over three summers to take part in a one- or two-week program in which they participate in academic lectures and labs; live in residence halls; and practice skills that will help them become independent and successful in college. Participants are loaned laptop computers, software and adaptive technology for long-term use in their homes and at school or work. This technology enables them to continue to network online with peers, DO-IT staff and DO-IT mentors, many of whom are working professionals with disabilities.

At summer study sessions, students will learn about college selection, career options, technology and self-advocacy. Living in dormitories and navigating the campus also helps them get an early taste of college life.

Meals, housing and accommodation are covered. Primary funding for DO-IT is provided by the National Science Foundation, the State of Washington, and the U.S. Department of Education.

“Some young people with disabilities have expectations that are lower than they need to be,” said Sheryl Burgstahler, director of accessible technologies in 91̽��Information Technology and founder and director of DO-IT. “We try to change that. Our focus is on the use of empowering technology and teaching students the skills they need to succeed in challenging careers.”

Students are encouraged to apply by January 10, 2012, but enrollment continues until all positions are filled. For more information or application materials, contact the DO-IT office at 206-685-3648 (V/TTY), or download forms at .

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For more information, contact DO-IT project coordinator Scott Bellman at 206-685-3648 or swb3@uw.edu.

For video about lenses, see link including interviews

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Hands-free information could stream across your contact lens, in a device that came one step closer to reality this week.

In a new , 91̽�� researchers demonstrated the safety of a prototype device tested in the eye of a rabbit.

At the moment, the contact lens device contains only a single pixel of information, but the researchers say it is a proof of the concept that the device could be worn by a person. Eventually it could display short emails and other messages directly before a wearers eyes.

“This is the first time we have been able to wirelessly power and control the display in a live eye,” said , an author and 91̽�� of electrical engineering. Among his coauthors are Brian Otis, of electrical engineering, and Andrew Lingley, a graduate student.

“Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside,” Parviz explained during a 2008 ��

The researchers findings were published Nov. 22 in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.

Perhaps the best-known science fiction character to use such a display is the Terminator, and for almost seven years Parviz and others have worked on trying to make the display a reality.

Building the lenses required researchers to make circuits from metal only a few nanometers thick, about one-thousandth of a human hair. They built light-emitting diodes (LED) one-third of a millimeter in diameter. And to help focus the images, the researchers made arrays of tiny lenses that were put into the contacts.

The contact lens has an antenna to take power from an external source, as well as an integrated circuit to store this energy and transfer it to a transparent sapphire chip containing a single blue LED.

Otis called this successful wireless transmission to a lens “an extremely exciting project … that presents huge opportunities for health-care platforms.” The team is working on a way to monitor a diabetic patients glucose level using lenses.

The 91̽��researchers collaborated with a group at Aalto University in Finland. Other authors from the 91̽��are Yudo Liao and Ramin Mirjalili, both former graduate students, and Tueng Shen, an of both ophthalmology and bioengineering.

For more information, contact Parviz at babak@ee.washington.edu

or Otis at botis@uw.edu .

The researchers findings, published today in the journal , could help bring about a significant change in computer memory technology and reduce its electrical power demands.

“Our findings address a fundamental issue in a promising field. In the long run, this research could lead to more reliable and power efficient ferroelectric memories,” said , associate professor of mechanical engineering and an author on the paper. Yuanming Liu, a 91̽��doctoral candidate, is also an author. ��Here is a about the work.

“This is a direct visualization of the operation of ferroelectric memory,”�� lead author Xiaoping Pan, a professor of materials science at the University of Michigan, said in a . Pan sees this first visualization paving the way toward memory with “less power consumption.”

Researchers at Cornell University, Pennsylvania State University, Peking University in China and the University of Wisconsin-Madison also took part in the work. ��Both the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation supported the work.

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Researchers studying the nature of crowds playing called some strategies “shocking” in how well they mimicked some of the methods already used by protein scientists.

Gamers made headlines in September for unraveling of a protein central to research on AIDS.�� Today, in a published online at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 91̽�� researchers reveal the creative power of Foldit players strategies and compare them to the best-known scientist-developed methods.

“We enabled players to create and improve each others best recipes to play the game.�� Once we looked at the variety and creativity of these recipes, we were shocked to find state-of-the-art algorithms.” said Zoran Popovic, principal investigator of the Foldit Project and the Director of the . Foldit is developed by the Center in collaboration with the biochemistry laboratory of David Baker.

“To us, this paper is even more exciting than the one in September,” said Firas Khatib, a co-author on both papers and a researcher in . Baker, also principal investigator on the project, has been exploring ways to further protein structure research using distributed computing for many years with the .

By studying the most effective formal recipes or algorithms that players used to solve protein structure puzzles, the group hopes to formalize complex strategies and apply them widely to scientific problems, Khatib explained. (An algorithm is a list of instructions for a computer program.) In the game, these lists are called recipes.

“With our previous papers, we proved that a scientific-discovery game can solve long-standing scientific problems, but this paper shows how gamers codified their strategies, shared them and improved them. This is just the beginning of what Foldit players are capable of solving,” explained Seth Cooper, the primary architect and co-creator of Foldit and the creative director of the ,

Researchers put 721 gamers under a magnifying glass during a three-month period, and studied their play in detail. These players used tools for creating, editing, sharing and rating game-playing recipes within the Foldit game. One of these, dubbed Blue Fuse, was the most popular recipe used in the game.

In the game, puzzlers must build proteins that show certain characteristics – including using the least energy. This is called “energy optimization.” Blue Fuse scored well in designing proteins for this requirement. In a surprising turn, Blue Fuse also bore a striking resemblance to a scientist-built yet-unpublished algorithm from the Baker lab that they named “Fast Relax.”

People playing the game, including the author of Blue Fuse who plays under the Foldit username Vertex, were surprisingly willing to share their recipes. Sharing, which may seem odd for competitive people, proved quite common among Foldit players. “I shared BF fully because Foldit is so much more than a game – the competition is serious and fierce, but we are also trying to improve the understanding of huge biological proteins. We collaborate and compete at the same time,” Vertex wrote. He pointed out that he built Blue Fuse partly borrowing from the elegance of another recipe by a different gamer, “Acid Tweeker.”

“Blue Fuse spawned from Acid Tweeker…and now has many children of its own. To ‘Fuze’ has even become a Foldit verb. And the next flash of inspiration can come from literally anyone,” he wrote via email.

While researchers hope to find ways to almost automate human intuition, Khatib pointed out that this study demonstrates the remarkably flexible nature of the gamer intelligence.

“Foldit players employ recipes only to do certain tasks at different stages of their puzzling,” he said. Used at the wrong time, even Blue Fuse would not give you an advantage. “The art of discovery still rests with creative game play and how and where to use the codified strategies,” explains Popovic.������ The team has loaded the newest version of Foldit to allow players more creativity and more scripting tools. They wait to see what Foldit-player ingenuity and social gaming will discover next.

The project was developed by the in collaboration with the Baker laboratory, with funding from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Adobe and Microsoft Corp.

Other co-authors are the Foldit players themselves, Michael Tyka, postdoctoral researcher in the Baker lab, and Kefan Xu and Ilya Makedon, both software engineers at the Center for Game Science.

Foldit videos are on YouTube at

For more information, these authors can be contacted via emails: David Baker at dabaker@u.washington.edu; Zoran Popovic at zoran@cs.washington.edu; Seth Cooper at scooper@cs.washington.edu; Firas Khatib at firas@uw.edu.

“Wine growers, organic farmers and gardeners of all sorts are part of the market we are targeting,” said Jenny Knoth, a doctoral student in in the . The chose the project, and Knoth as key student leader, for their announced Oct. 6.

After a stand of trees is harvested, the stumps and other woody debris not useful for the sawmill are collected into what are called “slash” piles, and typically burned in place because hauling the tons of material is not practical. It takes money and staff to burn the piles, and the burning produces more smoke than the new method designed by Knoth and her collaborators.

“This new product helps us manage an expensive problem,” explained principal investigator , chair and Boeing-Sutter professor of the and adjunct professor of . Landowners are required to clear slash before a timber sale can close. “It is a radically simple and low cost way to turn slash piles into a source of jobs and income,” Schwartz said.

Knoth, with other team members, developed the new low-technology solution called the C6 Systems blanket, which covers and accelerates the piles gradual conversion into char. The blanket is designed to limit the oxygen flow to the burning pile. Lowering the oxygen getting into the pile changes the chemistry from combustion to pyrolysis. Pyrolysis describes organic material burning with low oxygen into a char.

The process can take one day for a small pile or longer for larger piles. Slash on US Forest Service and tribal lands has been offered for pilot study locations for the students.

The biochar is estimated to sell for $1,500 per ton as a soil amendment to ecologically conscious gardeners and landscapers as well as organic farmers, Schwartz said. “This could transform what is a big problem and money sink into a money-making and job-producing engine for landowners, while helping to improve soil conditions and reduce smoke.”

NSF chose this project as one of 21 nationally for a $50,000 grant to help boost the team of five students who have worked for months to develop a business plan. The project links people across the 91̽��campus from forestry, chemical engineering and the . Within six months, the NSF hopes the startup will prove itself ready to grow to higher commercial level.

“If we keep science in our labs, we are only doing half the work,” Knoth said. She hopes to see the teams company, C6 Systems, become a viable commercial seller of biochar. As a child, Knoth grew up around people in the forest industry and says: “I grew up talking board feet at the dinner table.”

Another key mentor for the project was Jeffry Canin, a former entrepreneur in residence at the Center for Commercialization at the UW. He has worked with several bioenergy and energy projects as they seek to transition technology from the bench to the marketplace.

This latest project follows earlier work by Schwartz. He leads the NSF-funded program at the UW. The bioenergy program brings forest resource and engineering students in to the field to solve problems that real land managers face. His students have founded or co-founded five technology companies, all of which continue to operate.

Besides Knoth and Canin and Schwartz, other team members of C6 include Kenneth Faires, Derek Churchill, Nate Dorin and John Tovey, III.

For more information, contact Schwartz at dts@uw.edu or 206-685-4815.

“Electrical engineers play a critical role in advancing developments in energy, human-computer interfaces, remote sensing and advanced wireless networks and communications,” said Matt O’Donnell, dean of the 91̽��College of Engineering. “Vikram understands both the academic and industry cultures, and I look forward to working with him to leverage the departments strengths and further the innovative research, teaching and outreach programs.”

Jandhyala earned a master’s and a doctorate in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has been a faculty member at the 91̽�� since 2000, and directs the .

Jandhyalas research interests include several aspects of large-scale simulation, physics-based computing algorithms and electronic design automation.

He is a Presidential Entrepreneurial Faculty Fellow in UW’s Center for Commercialization and a founder and chairman of (formerly Physware), a cloud-based electronic design automation and electromagnetic simulation startup.

Jandhyala is chairman of the in the Department of Electrical Engineering, and also regularly teaches short courses at several companies, government labs, consortia and conferences. He is known for blending mathematical rigor, physical intuition, computational methods, real world examples, simulations and humor. He also lectures regularly on computational electromagnetics, signal and power integrity, electronic design automation and entrepreneurship.

91̽�� computer scientist Dieter Fox will co-lead an Intel Science and Technology Center that will focus on “pervasive” computing, which aims to incorporate computing and sensing into everyday devices and environments.

Fox, a 91̽��associate professor of computer science and engineering, will join Intels Anthony LaMarca in operating the center, which Intel announced today will receive $2.5 million annually for operations.

“This is an honor and we look forward to working with Intel to continue our quest toward making computing systems better able to respond to people,” said Fox, who is well-known for research in artificial intelligence and robotics, and has worked with Intel in prior collaborations.

The 91̽��has shown remarkable strength in innovations related to pervasive computing, and this collaboration with Intel reinforces that leadership, Fox said.�� As an example of that strength, the UWs Shwetak Patel, also part of the new center, won a MacArthur “genius” award last week for his innovative sensor work.

UWs Intel Science and Technology Center will be housed in the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. The center will develop technologies that allow pervasive computing systems to be trustworthy, richly aware of their users and continuously learning and adapting. Experts in wireless communication, artificial intelligence, computer vision and other disciplines will collaborate to enable this next generation of pervasive computing systems.

Other collaborators are from the Georgia Institute of Technology and one each from Cornell and Stanford universities, the University of Rochester and the University of California, Los Angeles.

This new Intel center is the fifth to open this year and is part of a larger commitment by Intel to establish university collaborations to fuel discoveries in key areas, the firm said. Earlier this year, the company announced centers for visual computing, secure computing, embedded computing and cloud computing.

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For more information, contact Fox at 206-685-2517 or fox@cs.washington.edu.