March 30 - April 5, 2020

Dr. David Broniatowski (EMSE) and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Maryland have launched an open online database, housed on the website “Social Media for Public Health,” to help fellow researchers study COVID-19. The platform will collect data resources and publications focused on social media data and how it can be used to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Possible applications include the combating of misinformation, supporting messaging from public health organizations, and tracking information about the ongoing pandemic.

Dr. Michael Keidar (MAE) is helping develop a “plasma brush” that could be used to decontaminate protective masks, gloves, and other necessary gear so caregivers can reuse them. His research is aimed at helping address the medical equipment shortages that are resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. His effort is described in the March 27 GW Today article “SEAS Professor Developing Medical Equipment Decontamination System to Battle COVID-19.” Dr. Keidar also was quoted in the March 29 Science article, “Iran confronts coronavirus amid a ‘battle between science and conspiracy theories,’” regarding the use of cold atmospheric plasma to sterilize masks and other equipment used while treating COVID-19 patients.

Dr. Murray Loew (BME) is working with BME grad students Sofian Obaid, Konstantin Mitic, and Destie Provenzano, and with Dr. James Rao (GW Radiation Oncology) to make N95-equivalent respirators using 3D printers. Destie and James have been developing the filter material (using furnace-filter fabric) and testing the designs at the hospital, and Sofian and Konstantin have been building the prototypes for testing. Dr. Loew has been helping with design specifications and sizing. Dr. Loew reports separately that a number of BME labs in the SEH have donated their limited supplies of masks and other personal protective equipment to the GW Hospital. Sofian collected and delivered them.

Dr. Howie Huang (ECE) has received a $100,000 research grant from Booz Allen Hamilton for the project “High-Performance Graph Algorithms on Near-Memory Processing Architecture.” In this project, Dr. Huang’s GraphLab will design new memory architectures and techniques to improve the performance of irregular workloads where the memory access pattern is difficult to predict, such as in graph processing.

Dr. Payman Dehghanian (ECE) recently has published the following journal articles: 1) M. Nazemi. M. Moeini-Aghtaie, M. Fotuhi-Firuzabad, and P. Dehghanian. “Energy Storage Planning for Enhanced Resilience of Power Distribution Networks against Earthquakes,” IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy, Vol. 11, No. 2, pp. 795-806, April 2020; and 2) F. Wang, B. Xiang, K. Li, X. Ge, H. Lu, J. Lai, and P. Dehghanian. “Smart Households’ Aggregated Capacity Forecasting for Load Aggregators under Incentive-based Demand Response Programs,” IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications, Vol. 56, No. 2, pp. 1086-1097, March/April 2020.

A paper published by Dr. James Hahn (CS) and his co-authors won “Best Paper Award” at the 2020 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces, held virtually, March 22-26. The citation is: X. Xiao, S. Zhao, Y. Meng, L. Soghier, X. Zhang, and J. K. Hahn. “A Physics-based Virtual Reality Simulation Framework for Neonatal Endotracheal Intubation.”

Dr. Payman Dehghanian (ECE) attended and served as the student program chair at the IEEE Industry Applications Society (IAS) Electric Safety Workshop, held March 2-5 in Reno, NV. On March 18, Dr. Dehghanian gave an invited seminar (via WebEx) to the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Temple University. Dr. Dehghanian presented the SmartGrid Lab's research findings through a presentation titled “What It Takes to Realize a Resilient National Power Grid.”

Dr. Suresh Subramaniam (ECE) was an invited speaker at the International Conference on the Design of Reliable Communication Networks, held March 25-27. The conference, originally scheduled to be held in Milan, Italy, was held online. The title of his talk was “Disaster recovery in optical networks.”