Given a very fast calculator and a digital camera, is it possible to relate what the camera “sees” to everyday life as we know it? Impossibly fast electronic signals pass from our optic nerves to our brains to our muscles to give us the power of object recognition and the ability to articulate that recognition. Algorithmically, this project attempts to take the wizardry of that recognition and “dumb it down” for computer consumption. Using the Python coding language, through a mathematical approach, an attempt is made to add rudimentary letter and word recognition to a Scribbler robot. The input to be analyzed is gathered by a hardware add-on, which provides a 220 x 220 pixel still-image camera to the Scribbler robot. Through an established letter recognition scheme, the Python code scans for matching values and assigns letters accordingly. The letters are then stored into string values and fed to the Scribbler's built-in text-to-speech command. Through this experiment, the bridge between human and computer understanding will be linked, if only for a crude, brief second.

According to American cultural tradition, domestic and work responsibilities are typically split between the spouses. The wife satisfies the domestic role and stays at home to care for the house and children while the husband goes out into industry to earn money. But with the recent economic decline, there has been an increase in the number of husbands enacting the domestic role as stay-at-home dads. Like many emerging social profiles, stay-at-home dads are struggling to establish a sense of community and individual identity given their limited networking resources and experience in the domestic domain. Transitioning from a role defined by the status of their job and their level of income, new stay-at-home dads may find it difficult to adjust to their new role. The primary scope of this project is twofold: 1) to create a profile of usability needs for the emerging audience of stay-at-home dads, and 2) to develop an online space for both new and current stay-at-home dads so they can network and share their experiences in the domestic domain. While our contextual inquires and competitive analysis of preexisting stay-at-home dad forums demonstrate a growing audience, our individual interviews with stay-at-home dads confirm the high demand for a user-friendly online space to stay connected with other stay-at-home dads. We report initial findings from research activities focused on designing an online space that meets the expectations of personal and social growth for stay-at-home dads.

Mesanchymal stem cells (MSC) can differentiate into a variety of cell lineages, including adipocytes, chondrocytes, and osteoblasts. This gives them great potential for use in regenerative medicine. To harness this potential, we must understand the effects of the various stimuli that can be applied to cells in in vitro culture. We produced an ECM mimetic nano-grooved cell culture substrate via capillary force lithography. An agarose diffusive microfluidic device was used to establish an SDF-1 α gradient across the nanogrooved substrate. Bone marrow derived mesanchymal stem cells (BM-MSC) were seeded on the substrate, and live cell imaging was carried out over a few days’ time. Using the time-lapse images, the differentiation, proliferation, motility, and elongation of the BM-MSC were analyzed and quantified. Understanding the synergistic effects of topography and bio molecular gradients will prove helpful in future efforts to create MSC regenerative medicines.

 Extraterrestrial regolith can be utilized for a variety of in-situ resource utilization applications including the production of oxygen and slurry materials. These capabilities are crucial for the success of long-term missions to both the Moon and Mars. However, the value of the regolith often depends on extracting a specific particle size. Therefore, our objective is to develop a regolith sifting system for integration into extraterrestrial surface systems. Furthermore, this system will be designed to operate independent of gravitational forces in order to offer flexibility by maintaining the same degree of reliability and efficiency in terrestrial, lunar, martian, asteroidal, and orbital environments. To accomplish this task, a centrifuge design was adopted. A container fitted with two sets of sifting screens is rapidly spun so that the centripetal forces cause the particles to pass through the screens. At high speeds the effects of gravity and particle cohesion become negligible. The design was carried through several stages of development where parameters such as geometry, induced agitation, sample size, rotation speed, and test duration were optimized to give accurate sorting results with minimal energy input. Data collected from ground testing will be compared to data collected on NASA’s low-gravity aircraft in June. The low-gravity testing introduces more challenges to the design, such as automated gates that keep the particles from self-sorting in between low-gravity flight parabolas, and integration into a air-tight glove-box for safety. For future research, techniques for autonomous and continuous operation will be crucial for adoption into extraterrestrial surface systems.

Ultra-high vacuum (UHV) techniques make it possible to observe interactions on clean, ordered surfaces without the complexity of realistic systems.  Final construction and testing of an improved UHV adsorption microcalorimeter capable of measuring the heat of adsorption of metals on single crystalline surfaces have recently been completed.  This calorimeter is the first of its kind to employ an electron beam evaporator to create a high, stable flux of metal atoms with low source radiation, which is then pulsed onto the thin single crystalline sample. Due to the properties of the electron beam evaporator, metals with high heats of sublimation such as Pd, Pt, and Au can be evaporated while maintaining the base pressures necessary for maintaining ideal surface conditions.  The new chamber is also equipped with a sample preparation chamber in which metal oxide surfaces can be grown on single crystalline samples.  Absolute calibration of the microcalorimeter was achieved by measuring the heat of formation of Cu multilayers on a Pt(111) surface, indicating that the theory behind our electron beam evaporator is correct, and will allow for the first direct measurements of the heats of adsorption of catalytically important metals such as Pt, Pd, and Au on any surface.

In recent years, electronic sensors, database technologies, and digital devices have been successful in improving the automated collection of personal activity data in a pervasive manner. Through these developments and advancements in mobile computing, the ability to accurately record and maintain complex health records has been realized. Yet, although an instrumental tool in preventative medicine, dietary assessment still lacks automated and objective means of data collection and analysis. Current methods of clinical dietary assessment are paper-based, burdensome, costly, and subject to bias, especially in terms of the estimation of food volume intake. To improve upon these deficiencies, we have developed the Dietary Data Recording System (DDRS). The DDRS incorporates a client-server architecture to efficiently collect, process, and store dietary data. The client is a mobile sensor package that is used for data collection, and the server runs image processing algorithms and maintains a database where organized and processed intake information can be accessed by clinicians through a specialized interface. The foundation of the sensor package is a Mobile Structured Light System (MSLS), which uses a laser to project patterns on viewed food and a mobile phone camera to capture video. The distinctive feature of the DDRS is the use of the MSLS and image processing techniques to determine the volume of food from recorded video without the aid of scale-identifying fiducial markers. Preliminary results prove the feasibility of this approach for assessing dietary intake with the DDRS, and future work will focus on automating and integrating the entire processing pipeline. The automated diet intake tracking resulting from this future development could provide clinicians with an invaluable tool in definitively correlating the long term intake of certain foods to cancer, heart-disease, diabetes, and various health disorders.

We consider a mathematical optimization problem that can be used to describe various physical situations that arise in physics and EE applications. In its general form, we study the following physical setting: There is some substance emanating from a source, which propagates through an inhomogeneous medium and reaches a drain. As a motivating application, we imagine a spark of fire igniting and spreading through a forest landscape. Alternately, light may be emitted from a point source and travel in a space with lenses of varying indices of refraction. In each case, we would like to influence the substance’s movement by optimally altering the medium in which it propagates. In the case of a forest fire, this corresponds to locating optimal places on the forest landscape to place water, in order to minimize the first arrival time of the fire at a specific location. To solve this convex optimization problem, we perform two tasks. In its general form, our first task relates to finding the shortest distance between a pair of points on a curved space, which is the solution to the Eikonal partial differential equation. Secondly, we take the derivative of the Eikonal solution with respect to a medium parameter. Due to the nature of our problem, these operations cannot be performed analytically. The results are approximated with the Subgradient Marching Algorithm. The unique element of this project has to do with the way we preform the algorithm. Once the shortest-path-length solution and its subgradient are known, we recognize a strategic location on the forest landscape to place a fire deterrent. In this work, we study and implement the overall optimization algorithm, and demonstrate an application to the forest fire problem.

The ability to detect magnetic nanoparticle tags could be an important technique in a wide variety of biological applications such as particle tracking and immunoassay labeling. We aim to detect magnetic fields at the nanometer scale using the optical detection of the electron spin resonances of Nitrogen Vacancy (NV) centers in diamond. This system combines the possibility of high spatial resolution with magnetic sensitivity. I am developing a diamond based magnetometer designed for biomagnetic nanotag sensing at room temperature. The magnetometer is a diamond substrate with a dense layer of NV centers at the surface. Magnetic nanoparticles are placed on the surface and detected by utilizing wide-field photoluminesence imaging. The intensity of the NV photoluminescence is highly sensitive to magnetic field; therefore we can obtain information about the local magnetic field magnitude and direction and thus the position of the nanotags. I am working on building data acquisition and instrument control software for the magneto-optical microscope. It involves instrument control of a Radio Frequency (RF) signal generator, automated data acquisition using an EMCCD camera, integration of RF unit with data acquisition and real time image processing.

Phase Change Memory (PCM) exploits the difference in resistivity between the amorphous and crystalline solid phases of chalcogenide alloys. With easier scalability, faster write speeds, and higher switch endurances, PCM is set to replace Flash Memory and lead the way to greater functionality of our everyday electronic devices. The major obstacle preventing development of this technology is the power required to transition between the two solid states. In order to switch between phases, the material must first be melted and at greater cell densities, it becomes uncertain if the memory access device can supply enough current for resistive heating. A solution for the high power consumption is to adopt a nanowire (NW) structure whose geometry lowers the melting temperature of the phase change material. Our research was focused on improving simulation codes written by Ph.D. student Jie Liu for Nanowire Phase Change Memory (NW-PCM). As the code was based on macroscopic electro-thermal equations, a significant part of the research became to determine how accurately macroscopic physics could describe the operations of NW-PCM cells with mesoscopic dimensions - where quantum mechanics is known to cause fluctuations from classical results. By simulating published experiments on NW-PCM and comparing the results, we concluded that NW-PCM with dimensions ranging from 5nm – 200nm can be adequately described by classical physics within an error margin. The conformity of results for NW-PCM dimensions as low as 5nm was unexpected as devices with dimensions smaller than 10nm have been experimentally observed to undergo ballistic electron transport. The anomaly piqued interests in the published experiment that caused it and the data analysis from our research as a whole went towards identifying how the simulation should be improved.

Opiates are considered an effective treatment of severe pain for a long time. However, repeated exposure to opiates induces analgesic tolerance, which has been correlated with an increase in opiate associated deaths due to respiratory depression. This project aims to compare and contrast tolerance to opiate-induced analgesia and tolerance to opiate-induced respiratory depression. We hypothesized that the rate of development of the former tolerance phenomenon occurred faster than that of the later tolerance phenomenon. In such a case, patients may be more likely to develop respiratory depression as the dose of opiate is escalated in an attempt to provide continued analgesia. To date, animal tests have been conducted to look at effects on nociception and ventilation produced by various doses of opiates in opiate naive and opiate experienced rats. The nociception testing was conducted through paw withdraw experiments, where the time for rats to move their paws under a hot light indicated analgesic effects, and the ventilation testing was conducted using whole body plethysmography, where ventilation signals of rats were conveniently and accurately measured and recorded. In the ventilation testing, rats’ responses to different ambient carbon dioxide concentrations up to 5% were measured. From the collected data, a potential therapeutic window for morphine was found to be between 5 mg/kg to 15 mg/kg, under which no obvious respiratory depression was observed while above which severe respiratory depression happened and almost no respiratory response to carbon dioxide was noticed. Future results may indicate the relative large discrepancy between the magnitudes of tolerance to opiate-induced analgesia and that of tolerance to opiate-induced respiratory depression. This may further indicate the different mechanisms mediating these two opiate-induced tolerance phenomena, a better understanding of which may allow treatments that make opiates safer for patients with chronic pain.

As consumers continue to face high energy bills and the efficient use of resources becomes vital to the sustainability of modern society, the need for a device to intelligently manage electricity consumption grows. The Energy Saving Butler, a computer system to be installed in homes and workplaces, seeks to meet this need by simultaneously minimizing the cost and unnecessary use of electricity--all without inconveniencing the users. The Butler is true to its name: acting behind the scenes and within the confines of the household's schedule, while working to allocate electricity efficiently and discreetly. Our team has conceptualized the features and functions that will drive the future technical design of this device. Based on data from the power company and data on appliance use, the Butler can delay or initiate tasks, such as laundry and dishwashing, so that they occur at times where power rates are at their lowest. Using a complex and dynamic priority level system, this control of power allocation is designed to work within the user’s schedule. If the user is having a dinner party one night, for example, the Butler will automatically suspend its own activities so as to not interfere with any social functions. If that user also finds his or herself driving home on a cold night, that user’s smart-phone can notify the Butler when it is within a 10-mile radius, so that the Butler can turn on the home’s heating. With these and a wide array of other practical features, we feel that the Energy Saving Butler will go a long way in saving consumers' money and working to stabilize the over-burdened power grid. It’s appealing to the consumer; it’s appealing to the utility companies; it’s a step in the right direction for a more sustainable society.

Preventing a child from accessing a self-defense weapon in the parents closet when home alone is difficult if the parent does not even know that the child has tried to acquire it. Designing a home monitoring system that can alert parents when children access restricted areas around the home even when they are away from the home could help prevent the child from harming himself or others. To achieve this goal, an Internet connected microcontroller and sensors were used in congruence to detect the presence of a child in a restricted room. The system consists of an Arduino microcontroller connected to a PIR(passive infrared) sensor that could detect when there was motion. Using an internet connection, the microcontroller can send a twitter post to a dedicated twitter account. The twitter account can be linked to a smart phone and alert parents even when they are not around the house. A smart phone could be configured to automatically retrieve the post within minutes of the child’s breaching into the restricted area, notifying parents of the breach.  A system like this would be a great way to monitor a child’s activities at home and help parents control what their child is doing.

Telemetry is concerned with the problem of making automatic, real-time measurements of remote data which are transmitted to base stations for further analysis. We present here an overview of our work in rocket telemetry for a Stage II Rocket which focuses on problems related to real-time telemetric data acquisition from high-speed, high-altitude projectiles, with detailed overviews of contributions from the six student teams, including: Airframe Team, Propulsion Team, Software, Sensors and Acquisition Team, Computational Physics Team, Launch and Recovery Team and the Computer Modeling Team. The Airframe Team designs the mounting apparatuses for the interior of the rocket. Our Propulsion Team synthesized and thrust tested the fuel we will use for rocket propellant, which is comprised of (Ammonium Nitrate-Oxidizer), C12H22O11 (Sucrose[Sugar]-Fuel) and HTPB(Hydroxyl-Terminated Polybutadiene- Fuel and Binder). The Software, Sensors and Acquisition Team is responsible for designing and programming the scientific equipment that will be onboard the rocket (Steering fins, an Arduino Microcontroller and a Two-Axis Accelerometer to maintain a linear flight path). Our data will be video, 3 axis acceleration, tilt, and altitude. The Computational Physics Team derived models to predict the rockets performance and they worked with the Computer Modeling Team to make CAD sketches. The Launch and Recovery Team make sure we follow safety precautions in launch and will use GPS tracking to retrieve the rocket when landed. The broader goal of this project is to recruit and invigorate future scientists at community colleges specializing in aerospace studies by providing a basic starting point from which they can learn and on which they can improve. We expect that by sharing our initial discoveries and experiences this multi-disciplinary research project, we will help to encourage other students at community colleges to actively participate in realistic team aerospace projects at an earlier stage in their educations.

The treatment of a disease is often based on that disease's progression. In cancer, such information is derived from indicators such as the location and extent of tumor within tissue. In addition to determining the presence of a disease, biopsies are often taken with the goal of finding these indicators. Unlike cell biopsy, samples from tissue biopsy preserve biological architecture, allowing these indicators to be more easily determined. For this project, Thin Needle Core Biopsy (TNCB) is used to obtain small cylindrical tissue samples 250µm in diameter and up to 2cm in length. Tissue samples are imaged with Optical Projection Tomography Microscopy (OPTM), which is currently used to generate high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) images of individual cells. Imaging through the tissue is facilitated by axial scanning through the optically cleared tissue; however, the microscope has limited lateral field of view and the TNCB specimen must be imaged in a series of 3D images. This project has three focuses. First, stitch a series of OPTM images using morphological operations, histogram manipulation, and phase correlation. Second, perform image reconstruction to create a single continuous 3D image of all cells within the biopsy. Third, present the 3D images to pathologists in a user-friendly interface. In addition to displaying the 3D image, the computer interface allows clinicians to view cross-sections of the 3D image in the x-, y- , and z-planes to simulate pathological tissue slices. The results allow pathologists to analyze the entire tissue sample, not just samples of cells, and have potential to reduce sources of error in making diagnoses.

Wind is highly variable and unpredictable, unlike conventional generation resources such as coal. The U.S. grid system is ill-equipped to accommodate resources that are stochastic in nature. Policies exist at the federal, state, and local levels that attempt to subsidize the production cost of wind generation, but how will these incentives impact system operations? We explore how the power generation mixture will change due to policies that incentivize wind. Our approach involves an analysis of a case study of three different incentive schemes: a base case (un-incentivized), the federal production tax credit (PTC) for wind, and a feed-in tariff (FIT) system modeled on the FIT proposed in California. Computer simulations will be developed to qualitatively model how these policies impact system operations using the economic dispatch algorithm, which is used in practice to deploy generation resources to serve the load and meet all power system constraints at the lowest cost. Comparing these cases will show which of these incentives have an impact on the total energy cost over a given time frame, as well as give an idea about the resulting generation profile.

Wind tunnels are devices used to simulate real-world aerodynamic conditions and characteristics using small-scale models that will be experienced by larger-scale engineering structures such as aircraft, buildings, bridges, windmills, and even cities. They are useful for studying and addressing problems of the stability, efficiency, and feasibility of engineering designs on a small-scale before scaling-up to larger and more-expensive engineering projects. We present here an overview of the design, construction, and testing of the EdCC Undergraduate Research Students Association (URSA) research-grade wind tunnel which was conceived to support further student studies in aerodynamics across the Physics, Engineering, and Materials Sciences departments at EdCC, including detailed contributions from the four student teams involved with the project: Aerodynamic Theory Team, Engineering and Construction Team, Software, Sensors and Acquisition Team, and the Computational Physics Team.

Cyclotrons are devices used to accelerate charged particles to high kinetic energies.  Their applications range from experimental studies in fundamental high-energy particle physics to serving as proton sources for medical use in the treatment of cancerous tumors.  We present here an overview of the design and engineering of a 2-MeV cyclotron currently under construction at EdCC by the Undergraduate Research Students Association (URSA), including detailed work being pursued by each of the seven student teams working on the project: HEP Theory Team, Ion-Injection Team, Vacuum Team, Materials Engineering Team, Magnetics Team, Sensors and Acquisition Team, and the Computational Modeling Team. The long-term goal of the URSA Cyclotron Project is to provide future EdCC students with a starting platform for continued multidisciplinary research in high-energy physics, mechanical and electrical engineering, and computer science. The first near-term project goal is to create and measure the electron-positron pair production process $\gamma \rightarrow \e^+ - \e^-$ by scattering of ~2.2 MeV protons from tungsten target nuclei and looking for $\e^+ - e^- \rightarrow 2\gamma$ annihilation signatures with an event-coincidence detector comprised of bismuth germanium oxide scintillators. At 2MeV, this accelerator will not likely make significant direct contributions to the extant pool of PDG data; but it may make significant indirect contributions by introducing and engaging future practitioners in the field earlier in their educations.