May 24-30, 2021

Congratulations to Dr. Ahmed Louri (ECE), who was selected by GW’s Office of the Vice Provost for Research to receive its 2021 Distinguished Researcher Award. The award is given annually to just one GW faculty member.

Dr. David Broniatowski (EMSE) has received a seven-month $37,800 grant from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace for the project “Measuring Valence in Information Operations Supplement to Understanding How Influence Operations Across Platforms Are Used to Attack Journalists and Hamper Democracies.”

Dr. Samer Hamdar (CEE), who leads the GW Transportation Program (GWTP), and his colleagues from Texas A&M University, University of California - Davis and University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign have received a four-year, $7 million US Department of Transportation (USDOT) Automated Driving Systems Demonstration Grant. Their project, titled “Automated Vehicles for All” (AVA), has been cleared administratively by the USDOT and the Texas Department of Transportation. The research activities in the project are divided into annual tasks related to demonstrating the risks and opportunities associated with autonomous Level 4 vehicles in an urban multi-modal environment. The AVA team is led by Texas A&M University; the GWTP's share in this project is $1.24 million.

GW has awarded two grants to Dr. Luyao Lu (BME). Dr. Lu has received an $18,000 GW University Facilitating Fund grant to work on the project “Novel self-healable, stretchable, and transparent microelectrode arrays” and a $44,996 GW Cross-Disciplinary Research Fund (CDRF) grant to work on developing wireless, minimally invasive, multifunctional all-optical recording and modulation biointerfaces for in vivo behavioral studies. He will work with co-investigator Dr. Hui Lu (Department of Pharmacology & Physiology) on the CDRF project."

Dr. Danmeng Shuai (CEE) has received a $17,000 GW University Facilitating Fund grant to support his research on developing indoor-light-powered self-cleaning photoreactive coatings to prevent SARS-CoV-2 transmission via fomites. 

Dr. Peng Wei (MAE) has been awarded three grants. He and his collaborators from West Virginia University (lead) and Honeywell Aerospace have a two-year, $400,000 Federal Aviation Administration award to focus on the design and implementation of a Safety Verification Framework for Learning-based Aviation Systems. The team will integrate two novel methodologies: offline mixed-fidelity verification for AI/ML-enabled decision-making systems onboard aircraft, and reachability and statistics-based online monitoring and safeguard for a deep reinforcement learning decision making model to complement the offline verification methods. Working with collaborators from University of Virginia (lead) and George Mason University, he also has secured a one-year, $250,000 grant from the Virginia Commonwealth Cyber Initiative. This project, “Smart City Infrastructures for Safeguarding Autonomous Vehicles Against Cyber Attacks,” will address threats from autonomous vehicles as they become victims of emerging cyber attacks. The project integrates two novel mechanisms: city-scale video intelligence for detecting attacks, and multi-agent reinforcement planning for reacting to attacks and non-cooperative vehicles. Finally, he has received a six-month, $125,000 NASA SBIR Phase I award to work with Intelligent Automation, Inc (lead) on the project “UAM Demand Capacity Modeling through Ensemble Learning,” to support the emerging large volume of urban air mobility traffic by mitigating the potential congestion in airspace. The team will focus on how to enable the high arrival and departure rates at vertiports, which will be the major bottlenecks of traffic throughput.

Dr. Taeyoung Lee (MAE), his master’s student K. C. Tejaswi, and their collaborators at the University of Alabama, Huntsville have published the following paper: K. C. Tejaswi, M. K. Sridhar, C-k Kang, and T. Lee, “Effects of abdomen undulation in energy consumption and stability for monarch butterfly,” Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, Vol. 16, No. 4.

Dr. Murray Loew (BME) and his doctoral student Shuyue (Frank) Guan have published the following paper: S. Guan and M. Loew, “A novel measure to evaluate generative adversarial networks based on direct analysis of generated images,” Neural Computing and Applications. Published online May 15, 2021. DOI: 10.1007/s00521-021-06031-5.

Dr. Danmeng Shuai (CEE), his colleague Dr. Yun Shen (University of California, Riverside), and CEE graduate students Hongchen Shen, Zhe Zhou, Haihuan Wang, and Mengyang Zhang have published the following research article: H. Shen, Z. Zhou, H.Wang, M. Zhang, M. Han, D. Durkin, D. Shuai, and Y. Shen, “Development of Electrospun Nanofibrous Filters for Controlling Coronavirus Aerosols,” Environmental Science & Technology Letters. Published May 17, 2021. Both the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control have now recognized that the airborne transmission of SARS-CoV-2 is an important mechanism for spreading COVID-19. The study revealed that commercial masks, such as surgical and cotton masks and neck gaiters, have limited efficiency in removing coronavirus aerosols. The researchers developed electrospun air filters that can capture almost all coronavirus aerosols (up to 99.9%), which can have broad applications for face masks and indoor air filtration. This study was supported by National Science Foundation RAPID grants.

Dr. Lorena Barba (MAE) was cited on the topic of computational reproducibility in the feature story “Decoding Science: Repeat After Me.” The story was published as a New Resource on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine website.

On May 10, the Brookings Institution published the article “Detecting and mitigating bias in natural language processing,” authored by Dr. Aylin Caliskan (CS). The article was published as part of Brookings’ “AI and Bias,” a series that explores ways to mitigate possible biases and create a pathway toward greater fairness in AI and emerging technologies.

WJLA-ABC7 spoke to Dr. Arkady Yerukhimovich (CS) about continuing cybersecurity threats in its May 12 news report “Personal data of DC police leaked by Russian-speaking ransomware gang.” 

Dr. Lorena Barba (MAE) was one of four keynote speakers at the 35th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS), held May 17-21. Her talk was titled “12 Ways to Fool the Masses with Irreproducible Results.” Her talk slides are available online.

Dr. John Helveston (EMSE) gave a pre-recorded, virtual talk, titled “The {logitr} R Package: Obtaining Willingness to Pay Estimates from Preference Space and Willingness to Pay Space Utility Models,” at the Sawtooth Software Conference Turbo Choice Modeling Seminar, held April 19-23 in San Antonio, TX. During the talk, he demonstrated a software package he wrote. A recording of his talk and the slides are available on his website.

Dr. Volker Sorger (ECE) organized and moderated the workshop “Analog vs. Digital Photonic Information Processing,” hosting three plenary speakers at the 2021 CLEO, the world-renowned peer-reviewed program that unites the field of lasers and electro-optics by bringing together all aspects of laser technology organized by the Optical Society (OSA). At the workshop, Dr. Sorger also gave an invited talk titled “Photonic TPU & Memory for Machine Intelligence” and the contributed talk “Massively-parallel Amplitude-Only Fourier Optical Convolutional Neural Network,” highlighting the first optical CNN prototype offering 10^6 channel parallelism.