By using explosive devices to send shock waves through the Earth’s crust and upper mantle and by employing emerging technologies to record and “image” the Earth using the wave, the project could help scientists around the globe find subsurface faults and better understand how tectonic forces act to build mountains. This knowledge will ultimately enable scientists to predict earthquakes more reliably.

“I often joke that when we talk about blind faults, we are talking only abou t faults that we as geologists can’t see,” Wu said. “But we may be able to image them with seismic waves; and once we can locate small earthquakes at crustal depth precisely, we can determine whether these faults are active.”

Seismic waves produced by earthquakes, explosions or controlled vibrating sources are the primary method of underground exploration. They will also be the key in Wu’s project to unlock the mysteries of mountain building and tectonic activity that gives rise to earthquakes.

By sending waves through the Earth’s crust and upper mantle with controlled explosions, and by sensing, recording and tracking waves from natural seismic events, Wu’s team intends to develop a virtual three-dimensional image of the crust and upper mantle under Taiwan. Wu compares the process to that used by doctors to “see” cancerous tumors deep within the body using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Seismic shock waves bend inside the Earth because of changes in speed as they move through material of different density, composition and temperature. Abrupt changes in direction occur at the boundary between two layers, affording researchers an opportunity to see what lies deep beneath the surface.

A professor of geophysics at Binghamton, Wu has spent a significant portion of his research career doing fieldwork in the eastern hemisphere. Having worked in Tibet and New Zealand, among other regions, he is now concentrating on Taiwan. The small island nation, shaken by about 15,000 detectable earthquakes a year, provides an extraordinary laboratory for Wu’s current project, known as TAIGER (pronounced “tiger”), Taiwan Integrated Geodynamics Research.

Funded by the National Science Foundation and headed up by Wu, the five-year, $8 million TAIGER project involves nine investigators from six U.S. institutes, one from a Canadian university and scientists from five Taiwanese universities, as well as Taiwan’s Institute of Earth Sciences and Academia Sinica, supported by the National Science Council of Taiwan.

The project calls for geophysical experiments that will help researchers determine the locations, factor the scale and impact, and obtain multi-scale images of the forces at work within the Earth’s crust and upper mantle during manmade and natural seismic events.

By providing a better understanding of the forces involved in mountain building and the earthquakes to which that process gives rise, Wu hopes that TAIGER might also give scientists a better idea about which major faults to monitor for the purpose of early warning for earthquakes. For some potentially hazardous faults in Taiwan, a warning of 40 seconds or more for a metropolitan area may be possible.

“Some people might ask the question, ‘What is the use of this information if we will only know 40 seconds before the earthquake?’

“Maybe this would not be so useful for city dwellers who face a congested highway as they try to evacuate the city,” Wu said. “But on the other hand, even in cities, high-speed transport could be stopped, people could evacuate tall buildings and many businesses, particularly in the semi-conductor industry, which is very big in Taiwan, could have enough time to shut everything off. If you have tens of minutes, you can do all kinds of things. And if we could eventually predict within a few days of an earthquake, then we could effectively prevent loss of life.”

In almost every community, family size began to deflate and a social revolution began to swell up. This phenomenon, which began more than a century before the advent of the birth control pill, saw the average number of live births per woman drop from seven or eight in 1800 to slightly more than two today.

This decline changed the fabric of society throughout the 19th and 20th centuries and remains key to important social, economic, political and policy issues facing the United States.

Using uniquely processed census data and his own specialized skills, J. David Hacker, a demographic historian at Binghamton University, is revisiting and studying the early origins of this societal sea change. As he attempts to tease out the repercussions of this trend, he is also rewriting some important pages of history by helping to clarify the forces that fueled it.

Steven Ruggles, director of the Minnesota Population Center at the University of Minnesota, says Hacker’s work is causing historians “to rethink early American historical demography from the ground up.”

Hacker was tapped in 2006 for a five-year $674,000 grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. “In some ways I was the ideal candidate,” Hacker said. “They were looking for people interested in population topics including fertility decline, who perhaps came out of other disciplines, without formal training. I’m mostly self-trained and have a strong background in statistics and quantitative methods.”

Fertility decline is of interest from a historian’s standpoint for what it says about historical actors.

“It’s quite interesting when and why people began new, revolutionary behaviors,” Hacker said. “It says something about the changing status of women vis-à-vis men, industrialization, urbanization and the increasing cost of raising a child. It says something about individuals’ control over their own lives.”

From raising armies to growing the economy, almost every policy consideration one can think of is affected by population size and aging trends — both of which are linked to fertility rates.

Hacker’s project has two objectives that could affect policy debates influenced by the ebb in fertility rates. First, Hacker intends to describe American fertility decline in greater detail than previously possible. Second, he intends to explain that decline, and to shed light on the economic, social, cultural and geographic factors correlated with it.

Today in the United States, the fertility rate hovers at about 2.1, very near to “replacement rate,” the rate at which every death is offset by the birth of a child who will survive to adulthood. Beyond this point, populations begin to decline and age rapidly. Couple that with a decline in mortality and the effects on the population can be staggering.

In the 19th century, for instance, half the U.S. population was 15 or younger. Today the median age is 32. By 2050, with the fertility rate at its current level of 2.1 births per woman, half of the population will be 39 or older. In the 1880s, life expectancy was about 40. By 1920, life expectancy had increased significantly, and, today, it hovers near 80.

While non-historians are likely surprised to learn that fertility decline precedes by more than 100 years the advent of the birth control pill, historians have long held that it began at the turn of the 19th century. Hacker’s research shows that the decline started in 1840. Debunking theories of American demographic exceptionalism, his work brings the timing of the U.S. fertility decline in line with that of most other industrializing countries.

“We’ve long known there has been a long-term decline in fertility in the United States,” Hacker said. “There’s been a great deal of research on it. It’s interesting to economic historians, social historians, women’s historians, historians of medicine. Everyone’s taken a shot at this research.”

But not everyone has had Hacker’s resources or abilities. Ruggles credits Hacker with the first major revision of 19th-century fertility estimates in nearly 40 years, the first national own-child estimates of marital fertility trends and differentials in the 19th century, and the first under-enumeration estimates for the period before 1880. Ruggles calls Hacker “the most important historical demographer of his generation.”

Hacker’s work would not have been possible even 10 years ago. The recent completion of a full set of microdata census samples spanning 1850 to the present is critically important to his work.

“What the microdata allows me to do is, rather than to look at these really aggregate county-level statistics, I look at the level of individual women, individual families, and correlate their individual child-bearing experiences with economic and social indicators,” Hacker said. “I can create a much better series of data and do a much better job of describing fertility decline.”

David Davies has found and is in the process of synthesizing a compound that will cause biofilm colonies to disperse, thus leaving individual bacteria up to 1,000 times more susceptible to disinfectants, antibiotics and immune functions. It’s a discovery that will most certainly drive worldwide biofilm research in new directions and that could help put some of the most virulent “terrorist cells” in all of nature out of business.

Biofilms are complex aggregations of bacteria marked by the excretion of a protective and adhesive matrix. They develop almost anywhere that water and solids, or solids and gases meet, which means they are virtually everywhere. They are formed when individual microorganisms embed themselves in a gelatinous structure of their own making. When traveling alone in planktonic form most bacteria are of small consequence and generally easy to manage, even with antibacterial hand soaps. But when they form biofilms, bacteria seem to gain super powers.

In human terms the characteristic “slime” of biofilms, which comprises organic polymers that can grow to several centimeters thick and cover large areas, spells all kinds of big trouble.

Biofilms, for instance, fog your contacts, help to rot your teeth, and cause or complicate outcomes for a host of diseases from ear infections and ulcers to cystic fibrosis and colitis. They are a leading cause of hospital infections and non-healing wounds, and were even at the root this past summer of corrosion that forced the replacement of 16 miles of the Alaska pipeline. As a result of that incident, 400,000 barrels a day of production from the largest oil field in the United States was suspended. The indefinite shut down, at a cost equal to 8 percent of U.S. petroleum output, led to immediate increases in the price of crude oil, and drove up fuel oil and gas prices.

Annual worldwide costs of biofilm infection and remediation are in the high billions, even according to the most modest estimates, and they are costs borne by industries and consumers worldwide.

Name a manufacturing process and biofilms are probably a serious and costly issue. They have even been discovered in pipes at factories producing prepadine, the anti-bacterial, iodine-based solution that doctors swab on patients to “prep” them for surgery.

The small molecule Davies is working with appears to be one of the few known examples anywhere in nature of a communication signal that remains effective across species, family and phyla. In fact, though the evidence isn’t yet in on that, Davies predicts the compound may also prove to have communicative effect even across bacterial kingdoms.

“I consider this the Holy Grail of research in biofilms,” he said. “It’s a new paradigm in the way we look at how bacteria regulate their behavior.”

An associate professor of biology at Binghamton University, Davies’ prominence in his field was already secured when he showed in the late 1990s that bacteria “talk to one another” through cell-to-cell communication and that such signaling is key to biofilm formation. Davies discovered the molecular medium of that communication in Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a biofilm-forming microorganism that is arguably the most common organism on the planet.

Since that time, building on Davies’ work, others in the field have characterized two other molecular signals, or autoinducers, that are key to various phases of bacterial development cycles either within a particular bacterial species or across species.

The dispersion autoinducer Davies is now investigating has shown itself to be effective in dispersing biofilms containing Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Streptococcus mutans (strep), Escherichia coli (E coli) and Staphylococcus aureus (staph) whether those bacteria exist in a pure or mixed-culture biofilm.

“We’ve also tested it on undefined mixed cultures that we just got from the air and the water in the lab, and it worked on that too,” he said.

The dispersion inducing molecule provokes genetic and physiological changes in the biofilm bacteria, causing them to disperse and return to a planktonic state. In lay terms, Davies has discovered at the very least how to tell four of the most problematic organisms around to pack up and get out of Dodge. And in so doing, the bacteria become easier to kill than the average mosquito.

“There have been a lot of people working on finding a dispersion autoinducer, and it’s been a very tricky thing to nail down,” Davies said of his most recent breakthrough.

“But we now have a way of isolating and purifying the compound, and we should soon be able to synthesize it so we can make it in higher concentrations.”

The resiliency of biofilms and their unusual resistance to remediation stems from a combination of mechanisms, including such things as restricted transport of antibiotic through the biofilm, reduced metabolic activity of biofilm bacteria, and such physiological resistance mechanisms as the use membrane pumps to remove antibiotics from inside the cell, Davies said.

But even in nature, biofilms will disperse when environmental conditions become adverse. If sources of nutrition run low or waste products build up, bacteria within a biofilm community “save” themselves by breaking free of the bad situation, turning on some genes and turning off others, and returning to a planktonic state.

By homing in on the regulatory device that he thinks leads to their natural dispersion, Davies not only seems to have found the key to inducing biofilm dispersion at will, but might also have solved one of the older mysteries in microbiology.

Biofilms will not grow in a flask. No matter how many bacteria you put in a flask, no biofilm. They require a flowing system-water, tears, saliva, a pipeline, etc.-and nutrients. But against all intuition and previous thinking, turning up the flow in a pipe or stream doesn’t shear off or break up biofilms. It only produces more robust biofilms. And Davies now thinks he knows why.

“I think this dispersion molecule is just something naturally produced with growth. And the idea is that the flowing liquid will wash out the dispersion inducer molecule, so the faster the flow rate, the less the inducer molecule builds up in the biofilm, and the biofilm gets bigger and bigger and bigger.

“So, in fact, if you have a batch system, like in a flask, the inducer molecule can’t get washed away. Instead it builds up so much that you can’t grow any biofilm at all.”

Davies’ feels certain his discovery will dramatically change the way infections are treated.

“I think people will start inducing dispersion to disaggregate biofilms and, then, treat them concurrently, and with significantly greater efficacy, with antibiotics.”

He envisions his discovery first making its way to market as a topical treatment for cuts, lacerations and minor burns, perhaps even as an additive in adhesive bandages.

But his major interest, and something he hopes to turn his attention towards in earnest in the coming year, is the area of non-healing wounds. Davies watched his diabetic great-aunt lose both of her feet to amputation after bacterial biofilm infections set in.

“If we can treat those kinds of wounds and clear up the infection, they will heal. We know that from wound debridement studies.,” he said. “I really think we can make a difference with these people, and if that was the only thing we did, it would be worth everything we’re doing.”

“The defense in these kind of cases would often be that the images were not taken by this person’s camera or that the images are not of real children,” said Jessica Fridrich, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. “Sometimes child pornographers will even cut and paste an image of an adult’s head on the image of a child to try to avoid prosecution.

“But if it can be shown that the original images were taken by the person’s cell phone or camera, it becomes a much stronger case than if you just have a bunch of digital images that we all know are notoriously easy to manipulate.”

Fridrich and two members of her Binghamton University research team – Jan Lukas and Miroslav Goljan – are coinventors of the new technique, which can also be used to detect forged images.

The three have applied for two patents related to their technique, which provides the most robust strategy for digital image forgery detection to date, even as it improves significantly on the accuracy of other approaches.

“There are about six or seven forgery detection techniques in the literature,” Fridrich said. “And each one of them breaks at a certain point. You can always come up with a case where any particular technique – including ours – will not be applicable. So our technique is another tool for forensic examiners to use in cases where they have the camera itself or multiple images taken by the same camera.

“The nice part about this is that the reliability with which you can reach a decision about forgeries is orders of magnitude higher than anything ever built before.”

Fridrich’s technique is rooted in the discovery by her research group of this simple fact: Every original digital picture is overlaid by a weak noise-like pattern of pixel-to-pixel non-uniformity.

Although these patterns are invisible to the human eye, the unique reference pattern or “fingerprint” of any camera can be electronically extracted by analyzing a number of images taken by a single camera.

That means that as long as examiners have either the camera that took the image or multiple images they know were taken by the same camera, an algorithm developed by Fridrich and her co-inventors to extract and define the camera’s unique pattern of pixel-to-pixel non-uniformity can be used to provide important information about the origins and authenticity of a single image.

The limitation of the technique is that it requires either the camera or multiple images taken by the same camera, and isn’t informative if only a single image is available for analysis.

Like actual fingerprints, the digital “noise” in original images is stochastic in nature – that is, it contains random variables – which are inevitably created during the manufacturing process of the camera and its sensors. This virtually ensures that the noise imposed on the digital images from any particular camera will be consistent from one image to the next, even while it is distinctly different from the “noise” produced by any other camera – even one of the same make and model.

In preliminary tests, Fridrich’s lab analyzed 2,700 pictures taken by nine digital cameras and with 100 percent accuracy linked individual images with the camera that took them.

“Now, we are focusing on analyzing the reliability and mathematically describing the algorithm,” she added.

Fridrich, who specializes in all aspects of information hiding in digital imagery, including watermarking for authentication, tamper detection, self-embedding, robust watermarking, steganography and steganalysis, as well as forensic analysis of digital images, says it is the absence of the expected digital fingerprint in any portion of an image that provides the most conclusive evidence of image tampering.

“What we can do is outline regions of interest in the image and test for the presence of the pattern in that region,” she said. “If it’s not there, we can test some other area of the image and show, ‘Look, I can detect the noise here, but elsewhere within the same image, suddenly it’s missing.’ Then we have strong evidence that something is wrong with that particular region, that it has been tampered with.”

In the near future, Fridrich’s technique promises to find application in the analysis of scanned and video imagery. There it can be expected to make life more difficult for forgers, or any others whose criminal pursuits rely on the misuse of digital images.

“We already know law enforcement wants to be able to use this,” Fridrich said. “What we have right now is a research tool; it’s a raw technology that we will continue to improve.”

“This designation is a sign that the state has a bold vision and intends to tap the rich potential of the science and technology across the disciplines,” Sammakia said. “It positions the IEEC to complement and support the efforts of regional industry and our new Small Scale Systems Packaging Center, the state’s first high-technology commercialization center, to improve the economy and create new jobs in the Southern Tier and throughout the state.”

The IEEC works with more than 60 industrial members to share important electronics packaging research and development breakthroughs, With a state investment of $7 million since 1996, the IEEC has helped to create or retain 700 advanced technology jobs in the region, creating an economic impact of more than $315 million.

The IEEC, which was established in 1991, pursues leading edge research in electronics packaging. Like all other CATs, its designation expires at determined intervals, and without redesignation by the state, the CAT program would have expired this year.

The IEEC is focused on the process of bringing a semiconductor chip, with its resident circuitry, to a form that can be integrated effectively into a larger microelectronics assembly. The range of research support and reliability testing services provided by the IEEC has attracted some of the country’s largest electronics companies, including IBM, ADI, and GE Corporate Research, as well as regional companies such as Universal Instruments, Lockheed Martin and British Airways Electronics, to the center’s membership roles.

Examples of the kind of real-world research and development support offered to companies by the IEEC include:

· Working with the IEEC’s equipment and staff, a New York State company did real time x-ray testing to determine the cause of connector assembly problems. The IEEC staff determined that the connectors were assembled incorrectly. The IEEC researchers were able to non-destructively identify the defect, which made it possible for the company to implement corrective actions in the manufacturing process to eliminate the problem.

· A company that makes dispensing equipment had a contamination problem with their circuit boards. This contamination presented a reliability concern and could eventually cause the machines to malfunction. The IEEC identified the location of the contamination and the cause, and then defined a process that eliminated the potential for contamination. The IEEC also developed a rework process that permitted the company to clean and reuse field returns.

· Working with a local company, the IEEC performed thermal, shock and vibration testing, which helped them update their mobile video recording system to one that had additional capability and improved reliability. The tests would have been very costly if done at an independent testing laboratory. The resulting improvements in the product resulted in a significant increase in sales revenue.

As part of its standing commitment to foster development of the US electronics industry, therefore, the IEEC is moving into new areas where micro- and nanotechnologies are the clear wave of the future. These areas will be driven by new development in small-scale electronics, including microelectric mechanical systems or MEMS, optical MEMS, known as MOEMS, and nanostructured materials.

The CAT program is part of an overall initiative to encourage greater technological and economic collaboration between New York State’s industries and New York’s research universities, Governor George E. Pataki said. The Governor announced that Binghamton and nine other universities in New York have been awarded newly designated Centers for Advanced Technology (CAT).

Russell W. Bessette, M.D., Executive Director of the New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research (NYSTAR), said, “Under Governor Pataki’s leadership, the CAT program has become an extremely important component of the State’s high technology economic development efforts. The universities that have been awarded a highly coveted CAT designation will be key partners in helping to create a vibrant technology-based economy well into the foreseeable future.”

The CAT program, which consists of 15 research centers, has been successful to date. In a five-year period, New York’s CATs have helped create or retain more than 5,300 jobs and generated more than $1.7 billion in private sector revenues, cost-savings and capital expenditures.

As detailed in a request for proposals (RFP) issued early this year, New York is awarding 10 CAT designations to enhance universities’ ability to increase New York companies’ competitiveness by commercializing promising new technologies and create significant economic impact in New York State. The RFP was issued because 10 CATs required re-designation. The other CATs are not required to be re-designated at this time.

Based upon historical appropriations and subject to the availability of State funds, it is expected that each CAT will receive up to $1 million annually. Each CAT will be designated for up to 10 years to serve as a vehicle for transferring applied research in its technological focus from the university to industry.

“By challenging our research centers to focus their intellectual talents on the technological needs of the 21st century, we are further securing New York’s role as an international leader in high-tech and biotechnology research and economic development,” said Pataki. “These grants will support the world-class research being performed at New York’s colleges and universities and will complement our other high-tech economic development initiatives, such as our Centers of Excellence program.”

“As we move forward with Phase II of our high-technology and biotechnology job creation efforts, we are ensuring every opportunity for our young people to secure a good paying, high-tech job so they can build their future right here in New York State,” Pataki said. “With every new high-tech job we create, we can realize our goal of creating one million new jobs by the end of the decade.”

Building upon the State’s efforts to promote a thriving high-tech economy in New York, the Governor’s proposed budget provides strong support for Phase II of New York’s High-Tech/Biotech Efforts to encourage new investment and job creation in emerging high-tech and biotechnology industry in New York.

Phase II of the Governor’s plan includes: $350 million for a Higher Education Capital Matching Grants Program; a new Biotech Capital Access Program; additional support for the Centers of Excellence Program; and the establishment of a new High-Tech Council, as well as the establishment of a high-tech commercialization center at Binghamton University.

As part of the selection process for the CAT initiative, applications were judged on the basis of the center management team’s experience, the applicant’s track record in assisting industry with applied research and commercialization, the institution’s breadth of research resources, and the degree to which New York’s investment will enable the applicant’s ability to create economic impact in New York State.

The RFP sought proposals in six specific areas of technology that represent significant economic opportunity for New York State: information technology and telecommunications; life sciences, enabling sciences, and agricultural sciences; nanotechnology; semiconductors and microelectronics; photonics and imaging science systems; and energy systems. Binghamton’s IEEC focuses on semiconductors and microelectronics.

Institutions that were eligible to apply for designation as a Center for Advanced Technology included any New York State university, university-affiliated research institute, or consortia, that met specific eligibility criteria identified in the RFP.

The other academic institutions awarded newly designated CATs include:

Institution: City University of New York-City College
Center Name: CAT in Photonics Applications
Technology Focus: Photonics and imaging science systems

Institution: Columbia University
Center Name: Center for Advanced Information Management
Technology Focus: Information technology and telecommunications

Institution: Cornell University
Center Name: Center for Life Science Enterprise
Technology Focus: Life sciences, enabling sciences and agricultural sciences

Institution: Polytechnic University
Center Name: CAT in Telecommunications
Technology Focus: Information technology and telecommunications
Consortium Member(s): Columbia University

Institution: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Center Name: Future Energy Systems
Technology Focus: Energy systems
Consortium Member(s): Cornell University

Institution: Stony Brook University
Center Name: CAT in Medical Biotechnology
Technology Focus: Life sciences, enabling sciences and agricultural sciences

Institution: Syracuse University
Center Name: CASE (Computer Applications and Software Engineering) Center
Technology Focus: Information technology and telecommunications

Institution: University at Albany
Center Name: CAT in Nanomaterials and Nanoelectronics
Technology Focus: Semiconductors and microelectronics
Consortium Member(s): Einstein College of Medicine, Binghamton University, Alfred University, Stony Brook University

Institution: University of Rochester
Center Name: CAT for Electronic Imaging Systems
Technology Focus: Photonics and imaging science systems

The CAT program complements NYSTAR’s other programs to spur technology-based research and economic development in New York State; promote national and international research collaboration and innovation; better leverage the State’s research expertise and funding with investments from the federal government, foundations, businesses, venture capitalists, and others.

Governor Pataki and the Legislature have advanced several major initiatives to expand high technology and biotechnology business and job-creation opportunities in New York. The Governor’s Centers of Excellence initiative, along with Strategically Targeted Academic Research (STAR) Centers and Advanced Research Centers (ARCs), focus on critical emerging technologies that are expected to become major high-tech growth areas. Each Center is designed to complement other specialized academic centers in a seamless network of high-tech research and economic development.

For more information about the IEEC visit http://www.ieec.binghamton.edu/ieec/default.htm

Developed much like grading systems used by faculty in universities around the country, the report card features specific criteria for evaluation. Each indicator is weighted by its importance to the overall mission of promoting and ensuring human rights, and each is graded based on performance indicators, said Patrick Regan, director of the Center on Democratic Performance and professor of political science at Binghamton.

The seven indicators are:

• the number of times the president refers to human rights in the State of the Union address;

• the number of political prisoners, political detainees, and detainees held without trial as identified by Amnesty International;

• an index of child welfare concerns, which includes the percentage of persons under 18 living in poverty and the number of juvenile executions;

• asylum cases approved from highly repressive countries;

• the number of visits by heads of states from highly repressive countries,

• the number of International Labor Organization agreements signed; and

• the percent of the discretionary budget allocated to international agencies committed to human rights issues.

Each category is weighted to reflect its relative importance in determining the overall grade, and the weighted aggregate of the individual indicators reflects an overall grade for an administration’s preferences and policies regarding human rights. In order of importance the assigned weights are 25 percent for the State of the Union address, 20 percent for violations of Integrity of Person issues, 15 percent for child welfare provisions, 15 percent for financial support to human rights organizations, 10 percent to the approval of asylum petitions, 10 percent for visits from heads of states from human rights violating countries, and 5 percent for the number of signed human rights agreements.

To generate a grade for the current administration, the Center adopted a two-pronged strategy for developing the grading standard. First, the specified data was collected from what is generally viewed as the most human rights focused of recent Administrations, that of President Jimmy Carter. Data in the same categories was then collected on President George W. Bush’s completed years in office (2001-2003.) Data was also generated on one year from Ronald Reagan’s administration (1983) and one year from George H. W. Bush’s administration (1991.) Based on these nine years, mean values were calculated on each of the indicators, along with the standard deviation on each.

In effect, this allows the current administration – as well as each subsequent year or new administration — to be judged against a mean generated by a mix of contemporary and recent presidential policies representing both of the major political parties.
While Carter’s administration still sets the high standard, Regan said the report card does not directly compare Bush’s policies to the standard set by Carter, but rather a standard set by the combined policies of a number of Bush’s predecessors. For example, the percentage of children under 18 living in poverty in 1979 (Carter) was 16.4 percent; during Reagan’s term (1983) 22.3 percent, and during George W. Bush’s second year (2002) 16.7 percent.

“The mean level of child poverty across all the recorded data used in the study was 17.9 percent,” Regan said. “Both Bush and Carter are below the mean, while Bush senior and Reagan are above the mean. In a rough sense, we use the standard deviation from the mean to determine the grade ranges on each category, using the mean on each indicator as a B grade.”
If the final year of the Carter administration is used as a reference point, Carter would have received an “A” in every category except the percentage of the population under 18 living in poverty. On this latter indicator he was at the mean level across the four administrations and would receive only a “B.” Combined with his A grade for no juvenile executions, his grade on child welfare issues would be a B+. Overall, Regan said, Carter would have received an “A” for his policies and preferences regarding human rights, generating a score of 93 out of 100.
President Bush’s grades in 2002 were a “D” for his State of the Union address, a “D” for political prisoners, a “C” on child welfare issues, a “C” on granting asylum to people from abusing states, “C” on visits by heads of state from abusing states, a “B” for human rights treaties, and a “C” for his use of discretionary money to support human rights organizations.

When his scores are weighted across all categories the President gets a C-minus for his policies and preferences regarding human rights practices in 2002, garnering 71 out of 100 points. President Reagan in 1983 would have received a B-minus for the importance he placed on human rights issues, whereas George H.W. Bush would have received a B-minus.
The Clinton administration was not included in the analysis in an effort to avoid biasing the result toward Democratic administrations and against the current Bush presidency. There are nine years included in the study-four from the Carter administration, which in general have the potential to bias the study against Bush, and five from Republican administrations, including Reagan, Bush Sr., and President Bush.

“The difference in the grades between presidents Carter and Bush do not necessarily suggest that the United States is more repressive today than under President Carter, but rather that President Carter paid much closer attention to issues of human rights, put much more emphasis on questions of human rights when developing foreign policy, and was much more likely to describe the preferences of his administration as being predicated on advancing global standards of human rights than President Bush is willing to do,” Regan noted.
At the same time, Regan thinks President Bush’s grade can be seen as important to analysis of such current issues as the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.

“If the President had scored higher on this report card, then we could be more confident in assigning culpability to lower levels of the military hierarchy, possibly finding more credibility in the tendency to blame the enlisted soldiers,” Regan said.

The Center on Democratic Performance was established in 1999 at Binghamton University as a research center of the Research Foundation of State University of New York. Its mission is to assist the academic and policy communities in understanding the functioning and performance of democratic political institutions. Since 1999 the Center has undertaken a number of research projects, country assessments, and held workshops on topics ranging from satisfaction with democracy to cooperation and conflict. Another key initiative of the Center has been to generate systematic data on democratic elections around the world. The Election Results Archive provides a user-friendly database and provides information needed to evaluate elections in over 130 countries between 1974 and 2002. It is believed to be the largest such database in the world.

Data centers. Thousands of them. All processing vital information, critically important to much that drives our daily lives– from world financial markets, government and military operations, business and industry, worldwide shipping and transportation, health and human services, entertainment–even organized athletics and religion.

Keeping data centers in business by optimizing their design, energy efficiency and information processing efficacy is the goal of a $437,270 two-year project backed by a $247,533 contract from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.

Peter R. Smith, NYSERDA’s president, said the data center project is one of several high-tech, but fundamentally important research projects sponsored by the public benefit corporation. “These data centers are high electric-demand nerve centers whose utility service is large. They require stable and secure electric power for machine operation and cooling. Considering New York’s prime financial center role, NYSERDA seeks to find ways to serve these centers efficiently and securely, and then replicate those designs at universities and other large computing power centers around New York.”

The project, “Optimizing Airflow Management Protocols in New York Data Centers,” will team researchers at Binghamton University, Georgia Tech, Lawrence Berkeley Labs and IBM. The project will focus on surveying, modeling, and then testing design improvements to an existing Manhattan data center, all in hopes of devising new design strategies that can be employed the world over.

Just now approaching their adolescence, data centers have already become the heart and central nervous system of the information age. Without these data storage and processing strongholds, the Internet would be reduced, at least temporarily, to a grown-up, digitized version of the old Campbell’s soup-can network, where end users hunker down and share sketchy information available to few and meaningful to even fewer. Search engines would die with nary a sputter. Encyclopedia salesmen would be cruising middle-class neighborhoods by tomorrow. “Googling” someone, unless quickly redefined and with a possible jail term attached, would be out of the question.

Not to worry. Data centers, like most adolescents, probably aren’t going to leave us anytime soon. They will, instead, grow stronger. Hopefully, they will also grow smarter. Like it or not, they will reproduce. And like adolescents everywhere, data centers, at least for the foreseeable future, will continue to consume fuel at rates guaranteed to raise eyebrows and empty wallets.

Bahgat Sammakia, interim vice president for research at Binghamton University and director of the University’s renowned Integrated Electronics Engineering Center, has spent much of his 30-year career working to improve thermal management strategies in electronics packaging. That means devising ways to keep computers and other electronics from spontaneously combusting the moment they are turned on.

“Imagine the heat generated by a 100 watt light bulb,” Sammakia explained. “Now take that same amount of power and double it, so you have the equivalent of a 200 watt light bulb in an area the size of a computer chip. Now you have extremely high heat density. When you turn your machine on, the temperature shoots up to 200, 300 or even 400 degrees Celsius.”

Sammakia’s point is this: Without adequate thermal management, the electricity coursing through your computer would reduce it to a puddle of melted solder and burnt plastic before you could pull the power cord.

That’s the kind of thermal management challenge Sammakia and other electronics packaging researchers have become accustomed to dealing with at the device and packaging level. The issue becomes even more heated, however, when hundreds of pieces of electronic equipment, drawing thousands of kilowatts of power 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year, are housed together in a data center, he said.

If the computers had their way, data center energy costs would be significantly higher. For all the heat they generate, computers actually thrive on cold. Most electronic computing devices run 30 to 40 percent faster at subfreezing temperatures, Sammakia said. Human interaction and monitoring of data center equipment, however, is a round-the-clock enterprise, so optimum temperatures in the range of 60 to 70 degrees Farenheit are maintained not because they best serve the needs of the machines, but for the practical purposes of human comfort and survival. While the computers might prefer an Arctic clime in data centers, achieving temperatures even as cool as a late spring day are a tall order, Sammakia said.

“We’re talking about rooms the size of basketball courts, where you have row after row of main frames and servers, all dissipating heat, and the entire room is designed with the sole purpose of sustaining this equipment and maintaining it at the right temperature,” said Sammakia. “These data centers, and there are hundreds of them in New York City alone, consume massive amounts of power. By making computations more cost and energy efficient, by reducing total energy consumption, and by passing on the environmental benefits of those savings, any energy efficiency can make a very significant difference.”

Simply discovering the best location for cold-air delivery vents could easily mean million-dollar savings once incorporated as a standard strategy in data center designs, Sammakia said.

The research team will be striving to achieve whatever energy efficiencies it can. Sammakia thinks improvements on the order of 20 to 25 percent are “very doable.” To reach that goal Binghamton University researchers will build numerical, computer models of the Manhattan data center during the first year of the project. Their models will then be used to enhance the team’s ability to predict the efficacy of design changes proposed throughout the remainder of the project.

Researchers at Georgia Tech will confirm the accuracy of the modeling by building an actual room at scale and taking appropriate measurements. Finally, in year two, the team will send researchers to take measurements in the actual data center and will write a design guide to help improve energy efficiency in all data centers. IBM, an established leader in energy metrics, will mentor modeling and measurements, while Lawrence Berkeley Labs, already a prominent name in data center research and design in California, will help to benchmark the Manhattan data center.

C. J. Zhong, who joined the faculty at Binghamton in 1998, is committed to advancing our understanding of the nanoworld, where structures tens of thousands of times smaller than a human hair behave in ways we are only now learning to predict. His work, which involves fundamental research as well as the development of practical applications, has high-stakes implications in fields as diverse as chemical and biological sensing, information storage, and catalysis.

Catalysis, which is key to everything from the development of fuel cell vehicles to new chemicals, refers to the acceleration of chemical reactions by materials that are chemically unchanged at the end of the reaction. It is involved in more than 80 percent of all chemical processing, and the production of petroleum products is entirely reliant on it. Catalysis saves money by making reactions possible at lower temperatures, with smaller quantities of materials, or by generally reducing the energy requirements, Zhong said.

But researchers are learning in nanoscience that it’s not just a matter of applying what is already known to ever-more miniature systems. The rules of engagement for catalysis in the nanorealm are very different than they are at larger scales. In fact, across the board-sensory, magnetic, electronic, and catalytic properties of nanoscale particles have little or no precedent.
“When you are working at nanoscale, it’s not just that things get smaller, it’s that there are a whole different range of possible outcomes,” Zhong said. “Nanoscale right now is a an entirely new world. At the fundamental level there is a need to better understand the complex electronic, magnetic, sensory and catalytic behaviors of nanoparticles.”

That’s because even the most familiar of compounds behave very differently at nanoscale-or billionth-of-a-meter-proportions. As a prime example, Zhong points to the metal gold, which has long served as a preferred model for research because it is not easily oxidized. Many other metals tend to easily breakdown and degrade during experimentation. Gold, which in bulk form appears yellow, melts at over 1000 degrees C, and generally hasn’t been seen as much of a catalyst in the past.

“That’s why we use it for jewelry,” Zhong joked.

Gold nanoparticles, however, exhibit very different properties from the metal in a more massive state. They melt when heated to only a few hundred degrees C and are proving able catalysts in a broad range of reactions, where they more easily and less expensively lower barriers to important reactions than do more traditional competitors, such as platinum. At nanoscale, even the yellow color from which gold draws its name changes. Gold nanoparticles can appear as red, blue or a wide variety of other colors, depending on their size and spacing from each other, Zhong noted. This characteristic, first capitalized on by ancient artisans who used tiny flakes of gold to colorfully decorate everything from jewelry to vases, today offers great promise in the field of biological sensors, Zhong said.

Since the visible color of gold nanoparticles changes depending on their spacing, if specific DNA strains can be made to hook up with nanoparticles of gold and thereby to change the spacing of the gold particles, the visible color of the gold particles will change. Presuming the sensor is tuned to bind with anthrax DNA, for instance, exposure to anthrax would immediately be signaled by a change in the color of the gold particles in the sensor. This idea actually being pursued by other researchers in the field, Zhong said. That makes it possible to develop gold-particle biosensors that are essentially the nanoparticle equivalent of litmus paper, providing a quick, visible signal to indicate something important about the environment to which they are exposed.

Similarly, by making use of magnetic and electronic properties of specific nanoparticles, which can also be very different from those associated with larger particles of the same substance, important new information storage applications will likely be developed, he said.

Because of the sweeping implications of his work, Zhong enjoys more than $600,000 in funding from sponsors in addition to his NSF career award. Those sponsors include the NSF by means of other awards, the American Chemical Society, the World Gold Council and Honda, for which he conducts research that could prove critical to the development of fuel cell vehicles.

As part of his NSF career award research plan, Zhong expects to develop novel mediator-template pathways as a general strategy for assembling nanoparticles, making it possible to better control the size, shape and interspacial properties of assembled nanoparticles. He also hopes to develop new design parameters in terms of size, shape, and interparticle spatial properties, an approach that will allow for the electrical and binding properties of nanoparticles to be tuned for such specific applications as chemical sensors and biosensors.

But Zhong’s research isn’t the only thing that should be significantly advanced by the NSF career award, which is expected to span the next five years. While the award supports Zhong’s proposed plan to address some of the most pressing problems in nanoparticle assembly in the research lab, it also places strong emphasis on curriculum development.

“Current technology is micron technology and most students are comfortable with that,” he said. “But 10 years down the road, everything will be nanotechnology, and we have to start preparing them to live and work in that world as well. This small stuff is going to be big for a very long time.”

In order to do that, Zhong intends to develop new graduate and undergraduate course modules centered on “nanoscale chemistry,” he said. The educational component will also involve hands-on interdisciplinary activities and outreach to area high schools.

Research and education already go hand-in-hand in Zhong’s laboratory, which includes a research team comprising a senior research scientist, eight graduate students and 10 undergraduate students. Zhong says the enthusiasm they bring to helping to chart the limits and explore the possibilities of the nanoworld is one of his biggest rewards.

When she bought her first house in 1996, literary scholar Jo Malin was in her early fifties. It was at once the most scary and wonderful thing she had ever done- a risky personal decision with far reaching social and professional consequences that Malin could not have imagined at the time.

Today those consequences help to underscore the messages of Malin’s most recent literary project, Herspace: Women, Writing, and Solitude. A book of essays edited by Malin and Victoria Boynton, Herspace is a work that is “dynamic, disruptive and wonderfully emancipating,” according to William J. Kennedy, a professor of comparative literature at Cornell University.

“These fifteen robust, timely, and intellectually challenging essays explore women’s relationships to private time and space as opportunities that enable creative work, as alternatives to masculine models of creativity, and as sites of ownership and autonomy,” Kennedy writes in his cover critique of the book.

Malin, a project director in the School of Education and Human Development and an adjunct assistant professor of English at Binghamton, welcomes Kennedy’s enthusiasm, particularly coming as it does from a man. As a rule, when she discusses her book, which was published last year by The Haworth Press, men don’t respond with the same sense of universal intrigue as do women.

“Women are always very, very interested in the topic. I can tell that the subject is striking a chord with them,” she said. “The typical response from men tends to be very different, although it also seems to derive from hitting a nerve. Whenever I discuss the book with men, when I dare to suggest that many women might be just fine with a house as a partner rather than a man, they become very nervous.”

Malin’s accustomed to “That’s a depressing topic,” and similar conversation-stopping replies from men, she said.

Depressing or not, Malin’s topic has been a theme relevant to feminist perspectives on creativity and literature for more than a century. It predates by 60 years or more Virginia Woolf’s bold assertions in 1929 that a woman must have money and a room of her own, that human dignity is born of “privacy and space,” and that “intellectual freedom depends on material things.”

Malin, who is divorced and lived in an apartment for more than 20 years while she raised her two children and then completed her doctorate, ought to know about that. Though buying a home as a “single” woman put her at the vanguard of a burgeoning social phenomenon in the United States, even today her situation as the owner of “nearly 2,000 square feet of solitude” remains an unobtainable fantasy to many women worldwide.

“I feel very privileged, and sometimes even guilty to have such good fortune,” she writes in her introduction to Herspace.

As recently as the 1980s, in fact, even in the United States and even if they could afford the payments on a house, women still had a hard time buying real estate in their own names. Changes in lending standards over the past decade have opened the U.S. real estate market to women, and women are seizing the opportunity to own their own space in record numbers. By 2002, single women were buying homes at twice the rate of single men, with women representing a full 18 percent of all first-time home buyers in the United States, up from 15 percent just the year prior. Condominiums, which generally include grounds maintenance and some upkeep for a fee, are also popular with women. The National Association of Realtors estimates that close to half of all condominium owners in the United States are single women.
“Speaking for myself,” Malin writes of her own house in the introduction to Herspace, “I love my work and the freedom to write on a Sunday afternoon in blissful uninterrupted solitude. I am in love with the house as an architectural structure as well as a protected, intimate space that nurtures my solitude.”

Malin points out that many of the women who contributed to Herspace share her affiliation with higher education, and specifically with Binghamton University. But like all women in the United States, they have also been schooled in a “male-centered literary canon.”

“There are still relatively few women writers included in English classes,” Malin said.
That’s in part why many readers of the collection will be struck by such realizations as the fact that the word “husband” actually originates with “housebond,” the holder of the bond on the house.

Ultimately, though, the strength of Herspace is not limited by its examinations of the meaning and importance of solitude to women writers of the past. This is a book rooted in and rising up from the honesty and strength of the modern-day essayists and scholars who contributed to it.

Still, as pointed out by former faculty member Sidonie Smith, now the Martha Guernsey Colby Collegiate Professor of English and Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan, in Herspace “the voices of women writers accumulate into a chorus of exemplars, models, strugglers, and jugglers of the temporal and spatial pressures and pleasures of solitude: May Sarton, Virgina Woolf, Charlotte Bronte, Zora Neal Hurston, Marguerite Duras, Kate Chopin, Alice Koller.”

Besides Malin, other modern day contributors to Herspace with Binghamton University affiliations are: Boynton, co-editor of the book and associate professor of English at SUNY Cortland; Anne Mamary, a contributing writer, who is now a visiting assistant professor at Clarkson University and like Boynton earned her doctorate at Binghamton in 1994; former faculty member Suzette Henke; and Kassia Fleisher and Lisa Johnson, both of whom earned their doctoral degrees from Binghamton in 2000.

Malin is also the author of The Voice of the Mother: Embedded Maternal Narratives in Twentieth Century Women’s Autobiographies and co-editor with Boynton of The Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography forthcoming in 2005.

Binghamton’s Integrated Electronics Engineering Center will bring to the alliance its world-class expertise in mechanics, thermal management and reliability, said Bahgat Sammakia, interim vice president for research and director of the IEEC, a New York state Center for Advanced Technology.

“The areas of research at Binghamton, at RPI’s Center for Automation Technologies complement one another very well,” Sammakia said. “We are excited to join this initiative with the Infotonics Center, and we expect great things to come from it.”

Some of those things will be in the form of improved products and technologies in fields ranging from health care and homeland security to agriculture, consumer products and manufacturing processes, Sammakia said. Others will likely include significant increases in research funding as well as new opportunities to explore and refine collaborative working relationships across the region.

New machines that will be thinner than the human hair, diagnostics that will function at the molecular level, electronics packaging materials that will be lighter, stronger, and more versatile than anything now known-these are just a few of the expected fruits of such small-scale systems research and engineering, Sammakia said.

“Our part will be the fundamental science that supports the development of world-class products that can survive in the harshest of environments and conditions,” he said.
Electronics packaging is all-important to microsystems. Take the microprocessor out of your computer, lay it on your desk and you have little more than an interesting doodad. That’s because in the same way that the potentials of the human brain are realized only as a result of the protection and environmental interfaces provided by the human body, micro-devices are wholly dependent on their packaging for the mechanical supports and interconnections needed to realize their potential.

That’s why the new alliance is so exciting said Duncan Moore, chief executive officer of the Infotonics Center.

“While microsystem devices have been researched and prototyped,” Moore said, “very little packaging research has been developed to serve this high-growth market. We are about to change that. We expect this initiative will keep high-tech jobs in this field in the United States, rather than losing them to other countries.”

According to Moore, the alliance is expected to have national impact because the unique packaging capabilities of the alliance are primed to provide the kind of breakthrough research needed by this rapidly emerging field.

The Infotonics Technology Center Inc. is a not-for-profit corporation that operates New York State’s Center of Excellence in Photonics and Microsystems. Infotonics is structured as a consortium with industrial participants including Corning, Inc., Eastman Kodak Company, and Xerox Corporation. Academic participants include about 20 New York State colleges and universities. The goal of the center is to establish a unique, world-class research and development facility to enable rapid commercialization of new products. With financial support from New York State, the federal government, and three founding corporate members-Corning, Kodak, and Xerox- the initiative is expected to drive economic development and to create 5,000 jobs within ten years.

A $20 million renovation project is currently under way at the Infotonics Center’s Canandaigua site. A major part of the renovation is the upgrading of 40,000 square feet of cleanroom space. A cleanroom is a laboratory-like setting featuring ultra-high filtration of particles and control of interior climate and static to meet the requirements for handling highly sensitive silicon wafers.

In addition to projects for the founding corporate members, the Center’s interim packaging lab currently is providing services for Integrated Nano-Technologies, a Rochester-based company that specializes in chemically synthesizing complex electronic circuits and devices.

Representatives from RPI and Binghamton met recently with Infotonics management and scientists from Corning, Kodak and Xerox to review research opportunities and to discuss potential business and government customers.

Several BU faculty were already involved in individual research projects sponsored by the Infotonics Center, Sammakia said. The alliance will enhance those relationships and provide significant new opportunities for collaborative research, he said.

Binghamton honorees were: Christopher Fynsk, chair of comparative literature; Steven J. Lynn, professor of psychology; Krishnaswami Srihari, director of the University’s electronics manufacturing research and services and associate director of the Integrated Electronics Engineering Center, a state designated Center for Advanced Technology; and David Sloan Wilson, professor of biological sciences.

“Binghamton University is proud to see the strengths of its faculty recognized by the chancellor,” said Bahgat Sammakia, interim vice president for research. “These particular honorees represent much of what is best about Binghamton ” expertise, imagination and a commitment to scholarship and discovery across the disciplines. Each is a standout in his field.”

Fynsk is an internationally renowned Heidegger scholar. He teaches comparative literature and philosophy and is also a professor of continental philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. His research interests include modern literature and philosophy, psychoanalysis, and contemporary art, and his current research is devoted to philosophy of language.

Lynn studies the clinical applications of cognitive psychology, experimental psychopathology, hypnosis, memory, trauma and risk prevention, dissociation, science vs. pseudoscience and forensic psychology.

His current projects include memory in hypnotic and non-hypnotic situations; sexual assault models and traumatic sexualization; self-mutilation and suicide; and a National Institute of Mental Health funded study of the modification of hypnotic suggestibility.

He is a forensic consultant to attorneys and courts on eyewitness testimony, repressed memories, competence and insanity and his work is regularly cited in professional journals and the popular press.

Srihari’s specialty is manufacturing systems engineering, and his expertise in electronics manufacturing has earned him an international reputation in electronics packaging. Research projects under his direction have resulted in innovative technologies at leading international companies, among them Solectron, Motorola and Texas Instruments.

Srihari’s research has garnered multi-millions in external funding and is at the heart of multiple industrial partnerships.

Wilson is an evolutionary biologist whose work in the area of multilevel selection theory is noted for turning heads and changing minds. His most recent book, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society, takes the radical step of proposing an evolutionary theory of religion that shakes both evolutionary biology and social theory at their foundations. Wilson’s approach is to nurture the thought that if society is considered a single organism, then the notions of morality and religion can be considered as “biologically and culturally evolved adaptations that enable human groups to function as single units rather than as mere collections of individuals.”

Wilson is best known for his work suggesting that altruism and other pro-social behaviors evolve because they benefit whole groups, despite being selectively disadvantageous within groups.

President Lois B. DeFleur noted that the award builds on the University’s momentum by bringing new support and attention to a critical area of research expertise.

“This major grant, as well as the recently announced $1.1 federal earmark and developing partnerships with industry, give us a solid foundation for the development of major research initiatives in small-scale systems,” DeFleur said.

The University was notified last week of the award, which comes specifically from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. The largest single research grant in the University’s history, the award will support a project titled “Sensing and Processing for Directional Hearing Aids.”

Miles’ aim is to dramatically improve the ability of the hearing-impaired to understand speech in noisy environments. The work could help more than 28 million Americans who already suffer from or face imminent hearing loss. That significant demographic is likely to become even larger as aging Baby Boomers move into their senior years.

“Our focus is to improve the technology of acoustic sensing and signal processing so that we can minimize the influence of unwanted sounds,” Miles said. “Research shows that hearing in noisy environments remains the number one unsolved problem faced by hearing aid wearers.”

Miles is one of many BU faculty members pursuing small-scale systems research. His work, which is based on discoveries about the directional hearing capabilities of a small parasitoid fly, Ormia ochracea, holds promise in any number of civilian and military applications where microphones and acoustic sensing systems are or could be employed.

Miles, a mechanical engineer, has used a tiny structure found in the ear of the fly as a model to develop the world’s smallest directional microphones.

“This important award is an indication of the level of research going on at Binghamton University,” said Bahgat Sammakia, interim vice president for research. “Attracting funding at this level distinguishes Ron Miles as one of the top researchers in his field and underscores the important work being done in small-scale systems development across the disciplines here at Binghamton.”

Improving the directionality of hearing aids, enhancing their ability to filter out unwanted noise and producing microphones that create less self-noise will mean major enhancements to speech intelligibility in noisy environments, Miles said.

Miles said these improvements would be accomplished by means of three interrelated areas of technology development: novel directional microphones, novel optical electronic sensors and novel signal processing.

As principal investigator for the project, Miles will partner with researcher Douglas Jones at the University of Illinois, an expert in signal processing algorithms, and Levent Degertekin at Georgia Institute of Technology, an expert in optical sensors. The optical sensors will replace and improve upon the variable capacitors in traditional hearing-aid technology.

By “reading out” sound waves hitting the microphone’s diaphragm through signals created by changes in light rather than in electronic voltage, much thinner and more sensitive diaphragms can be used.

“This will remove some of the key design constraints that have limited the development of small microphones,” Miles said. “It should permit a revolution in microphone designs and enable the achievement of much greater sensitivity and lower noise.”

The signal processing algorithms will allow for the fine tuning and customization of hearing aid sensitivity and will reduce unwanted sounds beyond what is possible with existing hearing aid technology.

Ultimately, the signal processing could be tuned based on any of a number of criteria including directionality, frequency, or volume of sounds, Miles said. For starters, researchers will focus on directionality, since most hearing-aid users want to hear the speaker or sound source they are facing more than other ambient room noise.

Miles’ laboratory will be in charge of designing and fabricating the microphones and incorporating the optical sensors and signal processing into a working prototype by the project’s completion.

Three years ago, Miles’ research attracted a $2.8 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency. That award concludes this June. That project involved the development of acoustic sensing systems to detect troop and equipment movements and to help locate snipers.

Miles said he also hopes to adapt his acoustic sensors to predict the impact zone of incoming ordnance to keep soldiers safe in battlefield conditions.

Ultimately, Miles’ work will be important in any application in which a miniaturized microphone and signal processing technology could improve the utility and performance of a product. Besides the manufacture of next-generation hearing aids, other envisioned civilian applications include security devices, cell phones and teleconferencing equipment.

The technology, which will eventually be incorporated into a tiny biosensor that can be injected into the body, will help researchers and doctors detect and image tumors by binding with gallium in blood and tissues. Sadik estimates an in vivo sensor developed from the technology will be ready for clinical testing within the next three to four years.

Gallium is a radioactive substance commonly used by doctors to locate cancer cells or areas of inflammation. In current practice, a very small amount of radioactive gallium is injected into a vein and travels through the bloodstream. The gallium is taken up by rapidly dividing cells in the bones, tissues, and organs and is detected by a scanner. Tissues that are infected or cancerous have a very high affinity for gallium and it therefore migrates to those tissues. When a scan is performed those areas “light up” on the image. Generally, patients have the gallium injection one day, then come back three to four days later for the actual scan.

Sadik said her technology provides a rapid, low-cost means for detecting gallium, along with even greater selectivity than existing instrumentation. The selectivity of Sadik’s bioassay was tested under routine clinical conditions with over 30 metal ions other than gallium, with no observable interference from any of them, she said. Sadik’s assay is also extremely sensitive, detecting gallium in the parts per billion range. Prototype assay formats based on the new technology have been established and successfully tested. Sadik expects to continue laboratory work to enhance selectivity during the next few years while a sensor suitable for in vivo use is designed and readied for clinical testing.

Another recent patent issued to Binghamton Professor Kenneth J. McLeod; chair of the Department of Bioengineering, and Clinton T. Rubin, professor and chair, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Stony Brook University is for a non-invasive method of treating postural instability in the elderly. The patent builds on and stems from McLeod’s fundamental research into the workings and interactions of the nervous system, muscular system, and cardiovascular system.

“The main reason older people fall is because they lose their balance,” McLeod said. “And that is most often due to age-related muscle loss, particularly of Type IIA muscles, the kind of muscles involved in fine postural control.”

The patent is for a treatment strategy and vibrational device that can improve involuntary postural control by stimulating the development of Type IIA muscle fibers. Research shows that treatment efficacy can be noted with sessions of at least 10 minutes a day over a minimum of four weeks. A sister patent issued this past spring addressed a related technique for rapidly characterizing postural stability and therefore for recording changes for the better or worse as a result of activities, aging or a variety of factors.

“Basically, we can make a device for about the size and probably the cost of bathroom scale to measure postural stability. Research shows that people tend to continue behaviors only when they can get relatively immediate feedback about whether their exercise or therapeutic interventions are working,” McLeod said. Making such feedback readily available in the home would replace current technologies for measuring postural stability, which are generally only available in hospitals and laboratories and involve large pieces of equipment that cost in the range of $150,000.

“The ability to manipulate and understand the world at a scale five times smaller than a virus promises to be the taproot of major change from here on,” said Bahgat Sammakia, interim vice president for research. But no matter how powerful the chip, no matter how small, sensitive or maneuverable the probe, it’s the incorporation of micro- and nano-scale elements into working systems that will spell the difference in the 21st century between fanciful pieces and parts and valuable, viable products.”

Sammakia said the federal appropriation would add momentum to the University’s efforts to grow its research infrastructure both on and off campus.

“This is exciting news and will allow us to continue to develop thematic areas of expertise that will help Binghamton University and the Greater Binghamton community enhance their contributions to regional economic vitality and quality of life,” he said.

Hinchey’s earmark, the second federal appropriation received by BU in as many years, is part of a Defense Appropriations conference report that passed the U.S. House of Representatives last week. The report is expected to pass the U.S. Senate and be signed into law. The earmark is five times larger than the University’s first-ever appropriation, which last year targeted $200,000 toward the support of BU’s protein dynamics research.

“The researchers at Binghamton University are working on some innovative and important projects, including this one, which has great potential for enhancing the safety of our troops,” said Hinchey of the sensors research. “At the local level, the influx of money will have significant economic benefits for the Southern Tier. The University is unique situation to effect positive change in the area’s economy.” In combination with other federal and state funding and with the support of cooperative partnerships with other institutions and regional companies, the earmark will enhance the development of small-scale systems research facilities on the main campus, at the Innovative Technologies Complex at the eastern edge of the campus, and at Endicott Interconnect Technologies in Endicott, Sammakia said.

Renovation of the former NYSEG building is underway at the Innovative Technologies Complex, located on a 21-acre site along Murray Hill Road. The work is expected to get a major boost with the expected receipt of $15 million in state Gen*NY*sis funds. The funds were pledged to the project earlier this year with the backing of state Senator Thomas Libous.

Plans call for the transformation of the existing building at the site from an out-of-date office building into leading-edge research laboratories, pre-incubator space and support service and community outreach offices. Preparatory design and related work has been underway at the site. In Endicott, the University is also collaborating with EIT in the development of nanotechnology research projects that promise to lead to the expansion of the BU’s off-campus research infrastructure, Sammakia said.

The sensor’s earmark will support projects involving all three sites and up to 30 Binghamton faculty members from across the disciplines working in small-scale systems research.

As a member of the House Appropriations Committee, Hinchey helps write the 13 discretionary spending bills that Congress must pass each year. In that capacity, he has direct influence on the funding of federal programs and has a greater opportunity to request specific earmarks for projects in his district.

In September 2002, Hinchey held two meetings in his Washington office with President Lois B. DeFleur and researchers from the school to discuss the need for federal assistance. He met again with University officials in June and agreed to look for ways to provide help BU, which he said is key to the region’s economic health.

In July, Hinchey succeeded in placing a $2.2 million earmark in the House version of the Defense spending bill. The earmark was not included in the Senate version. A House-Senate conference committee, formed to resolve differences between the two versions, reduced the amount to $1.1 million.

If the tool sounds simplistic, Gueldner is just fine with that. Existing tools to measure people’s sense of well-being have tended to be far more erudite than hers and for some populations not worth the paper they were written on, Gueldner said.

“The usual tools that people give you to measure well-being ask questions like, ‘ Do you feel more pragmatic or visionary…more finite or transcendent,'” she said. ” Can you imagine going into a nursing home and asking people that?

“Many people, particularly in older groups, which is what I’m interested in, have no research voice because they couldn’t respond to those kind of questions. But they can do mine.”

Gueldner is convinced, and early studies seem to confirm, that her admittedly simple, black-and-white pictorial tool –consisting of 10 pairs of line drawings of everyday images like a butterfly, balloons, sneakers, eyes, clouds, pencils, puzzle pieces, candles and water faucets– will soon be helping nurses and other health care and human service practitioners learn more about the sometimes silent populations that rely on their services.

The fact that the tool, known as the refined Index of Field Energy (IFE-R), can be completed in crayon was proven by at least one group of children with cerebral palsy who participated in field trials of the instrument. The pictorial survey presents oppositional image sets, such as a sharp pencil opposite a dull pencil, a turtle opposite a butterfly, a lion opposite a mouse. In the space between the oppositional images are seven unnumbered and conjoined boxes that comprise a scale along which participants are asked to mark the place on the scale that best describes how they feel.

For scoring purposes each box on each of the 10 sets of scales is assigned a number from 1 to 7, with 1 being the lowest and 7 being the highest. The numbers are not used on the tool as presented to participants to avoid biasing their responses. Possible scores on completed tests range from 10 to 70, with 70 indicating the respondent has a high sense of well-being and 10 indicating a low sense of well-being.

Based on the success of trials in Africa, Taiwan and Japan and its high correlation with other measures of well-being, Gueldner feels confident that the tool will hold up as perhaps the first international tool of its kind. Even more important is its potential to reach the broadest possible range of populations, including people who may not be able to see well, may have limited formal education or language skills, and who may be too sick or frail to respond to lengthier or more complex measures. Gueldner suspects the tool will even give a research voice to persons with mild to moderate cognitive impairment.

Well-being, Gueldner says, is recognized as “a relative sense of harmony and satisfaction in one’s life.” An effective tool for measuring well being is critical to measuring the success of interventions with those suffering from a low sense of well being, a state which almost certainly affects overall health, is likely linked to depression and certainly leads to general dissatisfaction with one’s life

In the Rogerian school of nursing theory to which Gueldner subscribes, well-being can be determined by measuring four things: energy, which is also known as frequency and is akin to life force; awareness of oneself as energy or an understanding that the body is only the shape the energy we represent happens to take; action, or the choice to do something whether physical or cognitive with that energy; and power, which essentially refers to whether or not you feel able to use and channel your energy toward getting what you need in life. Gueldner’s tool is designed to measure each of these aspects of an individual’s interface with his or her social and physical environment

Gueldner’s immediate goal is to learn more about what targeted populations such as the housebound elderly think of their well-being so that, when called for, simple interventions can be tried and tested. That could mean something as simple as getting people outside for regular walks or arranging to have a friend or family member call or stop by on a daily basis.

“People just need to have one good friend. They can manage the losses of old age, as long as they have somebody that they can see and talk to everyday, catch a meal with or something. It’s hard because if you live a long time, the price you pay for that is that your friends are gone.” she said.

Gueldner’s broader goal is to use the tool to collect research data that can begin to help redefine societal notions of wellness and spur human service and health care policy changes that will allow people to live more enriched lives, for all the days of their lives.

Her own parents set a good example of how to do that, she said. By being a part of a close community they were able not only to remain in their home until their deaths, but to experience a high-quality of life even when they were ill, she said.

“They lived to be 83 and 86, well beyond their life expectancies, and they did it right. They did it about as good as you can. They had awful, really major things wrong with them. But they never did lose their will to live, their will to live good.”

Nurturing the will to live well is what Gueldner and her tool are all about. By helping to discover people who have a low sense of well-being and providing a benchmark for progress as a result of simple interventions, she hopes that perfect health will no longer be the perceived requisite for living a good life.

“They say by the time we’re 50 everybody has some type of chronic illness,” Gueldner noted. “But it usually starts sooner than that. As we add years to life expectancy, very rapidly really, we just have to think of health in a different way. We have to begin to recognize that even with serious illness, there is always the chance for well being, for a good life. Otherwise, if the belief is that there is no longer any hope of well being just because you have some things wrong with you, it’s likely to be a really long and depressing life for many people.”

Imagine having no memory in a world rife with change. Everything and everyone is brand new to you at every moment. You don’t recognize family members. You don’t recognize your surroundings. You don’t recognize that you are the same person you were as a child…or even last week. You don’t know whether things are safe to eat or drink, or what the darkening sky and blustering winds might foreshadow. No past. No future. Just a totally confounding present in which the word “change” has lost all relevance and meaning because that’s all there is. If the scenario is unnerving, that’s likely because it would probably mean the end of life as we know it.

“Without a some thread of constancy,” agrees Eric Dietrich, a cognitive scientist and philosopher of the mind, “we’d be toast.”

According to Dietrich, what actually happens for most of us is that change and constancy engage in a mysterious and symbiotic dance-a reel in which the two alternate the lead, working separately and in collaboration to inform our perceptions and interpretations of the world around us. Fortuitously, this results in a whole significantly greater than the sum of the parts. It also points to the kind of emergent properties that continue to fuel cognitive studies and perplex cognitive scientists, Dietrich said.

“You’ve got a whole bunch of neurons doing their thing in the brain,” he said. “What individual neurons do is very sophisticated. But it’s nothing compared to what a whole human can do.”

Somehow, new and unpredictable properties emerge from the system-and a brain becomes part but not parcel of a mind.

“You get all these neurons doing their thing and somehow you end up with a language- speaking human engaged in trying to establish world peace,” he said. “That’s a little hard to predict from neuronal activity in the brain. We couldn’t even predict consciousness from the neuronal activity in the brain.”

Still it is minds, after all, that keep an ever-changing world from utter chaos most philosophers now agree.

“The world is constantly changing, but humans stamp constancy on it with their minds.” Dietrich said. “Minds make an ever-changing world somewhat constant. But no one is really sure how we manage to pull it off.”

“Look at the computer,” he said. “Twenty years ago, it was huge. Now it’s tiny.” He eventually hopes to create what he calls a “lab on a chip,” by shrinking down all of the equipment in a chemistry lab to the size of computer chips. Smaller equipment not only uses fewer resources, he said, but creates less waste.

How is it that we develop and sustain the kind of constancy that is critical to learning, relationships and very possibly our basic sanity and survival in an ever changing world?

Dietrich thinks the answer might be found in analogy and abstraction, both of which are at the heart of his current research interests. Analogy depends on and is characterized by an ability to draw similarities between things that are dissimilar. Abstraction is the act of developing a general sense or gist notion from many specific pieces of information, he said. He is working in both areas through the development of algorithms to inform the development of artificial intelligence and his studies of cognition and the human mind.

In 1909, when it suddenly occurred to Ernest Rutherford that electrons must hold the negative charge of atoms and that they must also orbit the nucleus “like planets around the sun,” Rutherford was abstracting from bits of data before him and drawing an analogy between a familiar or “constant” idea and an observed phenomenon or perception to arrive at a brand new concept, Dietrich said. Though analogy research is a great success story in cognitive science, Dietrich said researchers are still a long way from building a machine that can spontaneously do what Rutherford did.

“We have artificial neural networks that do a good job of perceptual abstraction. They can look at your face and my face and despite the obvious differences, they can abstract the notion of face,” he said. ” We even have machines-Deep Blue-that can sometimes beat world chess champions. But at the end of the game (Garry) Kasparov can stand up and go home. He can tie his shoes. He can make pasta. He can have a conversation.”

When the game’s over for Deep Blue, on the other hand, the game is truly over. Deep Blue will not be sitting down over a glass of wine to discuss the “thinking” that led up to some critical move during the game.

“It can’t do that,” Dietrich said. “It’s like a mousetrap.”

Dietrich thinks his work helps to demonstrate that abstraction and analogy are key to the problem of constancy with change. He also hopes to learn more about how both relate to the kind of human creativity and artificial intelligence that will fuel the most promising nanoscale changes of the future, he said.

“It’s one thing to know the actual string of bases in the human genome,” Dietrich said. “It’s another thing to know what to do with that information.”

Sammakia, who will continue to devote a portion of his time to the IEEC, will serve while the University conducts a national search to replace Frances Carr, who is leaving to become vice president for research and dean of the graduate college at the University of Vermont..

Sammakia received his Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering in 1977, from the University of Alexandria in Egypt. He received the masters and doctorate degrees in mechanical engineering in 1980 and 82 respectively from the State University of New York at Buffalo. His research work was in the areas of natural convection heat transfer. After graduating from SUNY, Sammakia worked at the University of Pennsylvania as a postdoctoral fellow.

Sammakia joined IBM in 1984 as an engineer in the thermal management area. In 1985 he was promoted to manager of the thermal management department. Sammakia continued to work in IBM until 1998, in various management positions, including managing the thermal and mechanical analysis groups, the surface science group, the chemical lab, the site technical assurance group, and his last position in IBM was manager of development for organic packaging in the IBM Microelectronics division.

He became director of the IEEC, which was established in 1991, in 1998.

Sammakia holds seven US patents and twelve IBM technical disclosures; he has published over 50 technical papers in refereed journals and conference proceedings. Sammakia has contributed to three books on natural convection heat transfer.

Under Sammakia’s leadership, the IEEC, a New York State Center for Advanced Technology, pursues research in electronics packaging. Electronics packaging is the process by which a semiconductor chip, with its circuitry, is brought to a form that can be integrated effectively into a larger microelectronics assembly. The IEEC’s mission is to foster economic development in the state by conducting innovative electronics packaging research and to speed the transfer of new technologies to the private sector.

IEEC membership includes several levels. ADI becomes the seventh full member of the center that also includes IBM Microelectronics, Lockheed Martin Systems Integration, GE Corporate Research and Development, Universal Instruments, BAE Systems Controls and others. With more than 50 other partners at the participating or associate member levels, the IEEC annually contributes $30 million to the region’s economic base. Full membership in IEEC costs about $60,000 per year and gives companies access to the center’s research capabilities, including the expertise of student and faculty researchers, diagnostic equipment, literature, laboratories and the broad scope of intellectual property gathered or produced by the center.

Three undergraduate teams competed for $2,500 in start-up funding for their proposed businesses, while a fourth team of graduate students detailed the feasibility of commercializing the research of faculty member Ronald Miles-technology they said has multi-million-dollar potential in a number of arenas.

Miles’ work with digital directional microphones has attracted significant attention from civilian and defense agencies because it significantly improves on current microphone technologies. Digital and directional microphones are employed in everything from hearing aids and cell phones to military surveillance equipment. Miles has developed a prototype device based on the ears of a small parasitoid fly. His digital, differential microphone diaphragm creates significantly less self-noise and responds very well to a significantly broader frequency spectrum than any current technology.

SOM Dean Upinder Dhillon said the event was designed to capitalize on the technologies and expertise available on campus by pairing those resources with energetic students who embody the entrepreneurial spirit.

The undergraduate competition saw three competing teams presenting business plans before a panel of off-campus judges, including a venture capitalist, a private investor, and a regional business leader. The plans included:

• a proposed debit-card service that would make it easier for parents to monitor student food spending and would encourage students to eat at off-campus restaurants participating in the MealCash plan
• a custom-designed Indian furniture import business that would allow online selection of woods and carving styles as well as providing a centralized showroom somewhere in Westchester County
• a residential cleaning service that would hire BU students, giving them access to relatively high-paying, part-time jobs, while providing Southern Tier residents with access to more affordable housecleaning services.

Winners of the competition were the Co-Ed Cleaners team comprising Kristen McTiernan, Linda Ni, Joy Westby, and Julie Nuba. Team members said they are trying to secure the number 1-800-LUV-DIRT for their business and hope to actually open their doors in the fall.

The Co-Ed Cleaners will receive $2,500 to be used for their start-up and will receive another $2,500 if they survive for one year. If they remain viable at the end of their second year as a local business they will receive an additional $5,000 for a possible total award of $10,000. All the prize money must be invested in the business and cannot be used for salaries.

The entrepreneurship program, which is the culmination of a venture course taught at BU by Angelo Mastroangelo, former owner of Adirondack Beverage Corp., was established through a six-figure gift from Barry Goodman, Dhillon said. Goodman is a principal and executive vice president of Milburn Ridgefield Corp., an alternative investment management firm with assets of $800 million. He graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s in economics from Harpur College in 1979. In addition to chairing the entrepreneurship program’s Board of Advisors, Goodman plays an active role in alumni outreach and fundraising for the School of Management. The Botnick Foundation also committed a six-figure donation for prize money, Dhillon said.

The MBA team presenting on Miles’ research is part of BU’s Advanced E-Team Pilot Program initiative. That program has already committed to similar feasibility studies on the commercialization of non-invasive pathogen detection technologies developed by BU faculty member Omowunmi Sadik and of nanotechnology and electronics packaging technologies developed by faculty members Bahgat Sammakia and Wayne Jones.

According to the feasibility study on Miles’ research, his differential microphone should command a price premium in the sizable hearing-aid market. Also, because many people who could use them don’t buy hearing aids because they expect to be disappointed in them, the team said the “significant improvement to hearing devices that Dr. Miles’ technology represents should encourage entry in the market by previously reluctant consumers.”

Projecting a conservative 10 percent initial market share, the team projected sales revenue of $7.2 million annually, even without the probable $500 per unit price premium the technology could be expected to command over competing technologies. Again assuming a 10 percent market share of current sales levels and presuming the manufacturer would command 20 percent of the total price premium, could be expected to result in an additional $60 million in revenue to the manufacturer, the team reported.

Annual revenues for the technology in the cell phone arena were projected at $15 million based on a 10 percent market share of the 100 million cell phones expected to be sold during 2003. Cell phone market sales are expected to be twice that in 2004 and to continue to increase exponentially since global market penetration is currently only 18 percent, the team said.

Bottom-line recommendations for Miles were to pursue a license agreement, probably to industry specific companies, hearing aids, cellular phones and defense industries among them, and to trademark his microphone to distinguish his technology “through the use of words, logos or even sounds.”

The team also suggested Miles consider corporate partnerships with a Southern Tier company capable of helping to bring the technology to market on a mass production scale and that he continue to pursue patent and business strategies with BU’s Office of Technology Transfer and Economic Development, headed up by Donald Colbert.

Members of the MBA Advanced E-Team reporting on Miles’ work included: Erin Yetsko, Kindra Oddy, Amy MacDonald and Cynthia Gordineer.

Miles said he was impressed by the thoroughness of the team’s study. He said he will seriously consider the recommendations, which are extremely timely in the development of his technologies.

While conventional approaches for detection of heavy metals in water are expensive and not suited for use in the field, Sadik and her research collaborators have already developed a prototype nanosensor that can concentrate and trap lead particles 10 times smaller than a human hair. No existing technology is able to filter such small metal particles from water, Sadik said.

The lead prototype was enough to secure them EPA funding to go after some of the other “most wanted” metals in the EPA’s priority list of metals that are of major environmental concern. The list includes lead, cadmium (industrial), arsenic (natural decomposition and industrial), chromium 6 (nuclear reactors) and copper, among others. Cadmium and copper are industrial wastes, arsenic is produced by natural decomposition and as an industrial waste, and chromium 6 is a nuclear waste product, Sadik said.

Working with Joseph Wang from New Mexico State, who will focus on nanofabrication of the small electrodes required by the nanoreactor, and chemical engineer Ashok Muchandani of the University of California Riverside, who will work on the remediation or metal reclamation phase of the project, Sadik intends to develop a one- square-centimeter prototype nanoreactor that is capable of detection and remediation of all of the above-mentioned heavy metals.

In order to do that, she will first have to develop specific colloidal-metal nanoparticles that can be incorporated into a bed of electrically conducting polymers. In analogy to integrated circuits used in semiconductors, in which millions of microcircuits are located on a small silicon chip, this nanoreactor can be viewed as comprising millions of identical, elementary, molecular active sites that are 10 times smaller than a human hair. These molecular active sites will be generated through electromechanical synthesis and tailored to meet specific environmental or industrial needs. It is basically an elementary, molecular, heavy metal reactor, which can generate a field of molecular interactions, secure the recognition of the desired metal and decide on the specificity of the reaction. The nanoreactor may be coupled with other components and additives in order to achieve the desired remediation or to meet industrial needs.

“With additives that ensure a very specific reaction, each of the monomers are sensitized to the particular metal so that in the making of the polymer it creates colloids that will do the sensing and trapping,” Sadik said.

Once Sadik has worked out the required chemistry from temperature and pH to the novel nanostructured materials that will be used in the nanoreactor, she is hoping the team can produce a simple device that could be used much like the paint-matching systems common to most home improvement stores.

“For example, if we come up with a set of conditions for the chemicals, pH and temperature for removal of lead in water, by changing the chemistry inside the reactor we can make it applicable for industrial effluent,” she said. “And we should be able to provide a template for each of the metals in water or in industrial effluent.”

The idea is that after all the metals have been trapped, they can then be stripped out into another medium, making reclamation possible in the case of valuable metals like silver. As for toxic metals such as arsenic and chromium 6, the EPA would likely oversee safe disposal, Sadik said.

Although the tiny size of the proposed prototype nanoreactor will limit the quantity of water it can treat, at this point in the research, that is not an issue, Sadik said.

“What matters is we must be capable of removing 100 percent of the metal in a volume of water. So if I have only a cup of water, I must be able to remove all the metal,” she said. “If we can do this so that it would give us 100 percent trapping of the metal, then the engineers can come in and scale the system up to the size that would be required to treat larger volumes. What matters to us as chemists is to make sure the chemistry works for the metals of interest.”

Sadik accepts Radcliffe fellowship for fall semester

Omowunmi Sadik, associate professor of Chemistry, has accepted an appointment as a Distinguished Invited Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Boston for the fall semester.

Normally a competitive fellowship that accepts only one out of every 20 applicants, the honorary position, along with an interim faculty appointment at Harvard, was directly offered to Sadik as a result of discussions she had over dinner with world-renowned Harvard chemist, George Whitesides.

“I met him and over dinner and we began talking about one area of sensors that really intrigues me,” she said. Sadik said she told Whitesides that she would love to have the time and resources to pursue her thoughts on polyvalent theory and how that affects biochemical devices.

“In biosensors,” she said, “there is an immuno reaction…antibody to antigen. The prevalent theory is that there is only one antibody that will bind to an antigen. But that’s so simplistic and there is good evidence that it doesn’t actually work like that in the real world. In the real world you find some cross reactivity, which would suggest there is more than one antigen binding to the same antibody. It seems then as if the attachment of the antigen to the antibody looks different than has been theorized, and there’s evidence that polyvalent theory might be involved.”

Sadik expects to focus on that mystery during her stay in Boston.

The fellowship program includes 40 fellows who pursue their own projects as part of a broader community of scholars, artists and writers. Fellows are drawn from every field, from fine arts to physics.

The fellowship will extend from August until mid-December and will cover Sadik’s salary as well as providing some research expenses, to help defray relocation and living expenses, office space, a telephone, a computer, access to Harvard’s state-of-the-art chemistry laboratories and the opportunity to network with colleagues from around the world. Fellows also meet in a weekly colloquia and each fellow present on his or her own work during one of these sessions.

From personal and commercial digital image libraries and multimedia databases to data mining programs and high-tech security and defense surveillance, our need for more efficient and more effective ways to index, retrieve, manipulate and understand complex video or images is pressing. Verbal cues–whether keywords or multiple page abstracts–are just not cut out for the job and neither coercion nor clichés can change that fact, Zhang said.

“It’s very difficult to capture the entire content of a picture with any number of words,” Zhang said. “And you certainly can’t capture an image with a single word or with a few key words. In terms of effectiveness, this is not a good approach.”

Take, for example, a picture in which a couple stands in front of their house. Behind their house is a large palm tree. Several other shrubs, trees and plants are in the front yard, which is enclosed by a fence. In the background, there are hills and clouds. Imagine what the people are wearing, what they are doing, that one is white and one is black, and the problem comes into sharper focus.

“Looking at such an image, what are the keywords?” Zhang asked. “Couple? Man? Woman? House? Palm? Fence? It’s almost impossible to use words to describe the net content of the image, including its shapes, colors and textures. It takes the power of extensive computer analysis and processing to manage this kind of task.

Still, so far, there is no commercial product available that can index large-scale imagery or non-textual databases in their own modality. As far as I know, all or almost all commercially available multimedia database programs work at the keyword level.”

That’s why Zhang is involved in a number of research projects that seek to understand and optimize the indexing, retrieval and use of images based on algorithms that rely on the semantics of the images themselves. His work is funded by industry and defense agencies with grants that are expected to reach more than $200,000 by year’s end.

An expert in image understanding and multimedia indexing and retrieval, Zhang has worked in the recent past on image indexing and retrieval issues with Kodak Corp., and on issues of multimedia indexing and retrieval of patient records with Upstate Medical Center. Those active collaborations evaporated as funding for the projects dried up, but along with his current funded research projects, Zhang continues to pursue the research as well as another currently unfunded project: facial recognition. His progress on all fronts is impressive.

Earlier this month Zhang filed an invention disclosure on his prototype system for improved content-based image retrieval with his student Ruofei Zhang. The system involves the use of a novel fuzzy logic-based indexing scheme, as well as a novel user relevance feedback algorithm. Based on semantic similarity within the images themselves, it can rapidly and effectively identify and retrieve images from very large data bases or the Internet. The system which Zhang has dubbed “FAST” –for Fast And Semantic-Tailored image retrieval– also “learns” from user feedback about the relevance of images retrieved. In other words, of the images it returns, you tell it which ones bore the closest resemblance to what you were looking for, and it continues to improve its performance with each new search based on your feedback.

Zhang has already been approached about the prototype by the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where databases of hundreds of thousands of images could become more accessible through better indexing and retrieval.

He is also currently working with funding from the US Air Force on a project to develop a system to automatically recognize independent motion directly in the compressed surveillance video, particularly video shot from unmanned surveillance aircraft such as the Predator. (See related story.)

When video is shot from a moving plane, extensive analysis is needed to detect which if any elements in a given frame or set of frames are moving independently. Currently that analysis requires decompression of compressed video followed by tedious inspection of large, archived image databases by human image analysts.

Zhang is developing a technology that will automatically detect independent motion in compressed video streams from an archived database or even directly from the remote sensor hook up in real time. It will improve by orders of magnitude on the efficiency of the current process.

“If you have a still camera and you want to detect motion, all you have to do is detect the difference between two individual frames,” Zhang said. “However, in many scenarios, especially in military surveillance, typically the camera is also in motion, so everything is in motion from frame to frame. We have developed a preliminary prototype system to robustly and automatically detect independent motion directly from the compressed video domain.”

But Zhang’s most challenging project to date might be his new work on automatic model generation in an area called information fusion. Preliminary work on this project was funded jointly by the U.S. Air Force and the National Institute of Justice. The project aims at automatic detection of money laundering schemes.

“This is a completely new research problem,” Zhang said. “I used to work on computer vision and image understanding focusing on imagery and video data. Now my research horizon is extending to incorporate the area of data mining in general, and in this project we are focusing on the text data modality in particular.”

To investigate money laundering crimes, Zhang’s research team has access to a significant amount of textual data, ranging from court reports, financial transaction records and bank statements to personal communications and news reports.

Zhang and his students are developing robust data mining techniques to automatically build up money laundering crime models from scanning such large collections of textual documents. A generated model indicates those involved in a specific money laundering crime, and helps detail the relationships between the individuals involved in the crime (e.g., who is in charge of the group), as well as all the activities the individuals have engaged in as part of the crime.

“Current investigation techniques require at least several months’ effort to build up the model because the model is generated manually,” Zhang said. The prototype system Zhang’s group has developed only takes a few minutes to generate a money laundering crime model and so holds great promise in future money laundering investigation, prosecution, and prevention.

“The government is extremely interested in automating, or at least semi-automating this investigation process to significantly save the man power in law enforcement agencies and to significantly expedite the crime investigation and prosecution time,” Zhang said.

“Considering the threat of global terrorism, preventing money laundering becomes ever more important to stop the financing of terrorist activities,” Zhang said, “and I can tell you, though, that this research has great potential.”