Category: Engineering Page 3 of 13

Decentralized Finance and the Power of Smart Contracts

On December 13, 2021

In Artificial Intelligence, Business/Economics, Computers/Technology, Data, Engineering, Faculty, Students

When people use apps or services like Netflix, Instagram, Amazon, etc. they sign, or rather virtually accept, digital user agreements. Digital agreements have been around since the 1990s. These agreements are written and enforced by the institutions that create these services and products. However, in certain conditions, these systems fail and these digital or service-level agreements can be breached, causing people to feel robbed.

A recent example of this is the Robinhood scandal that occurred in mid-2021. Essentially, people came together and all wanted to buy the same stock. However, Robinhood ended up restricting buying, citing issues with volatile stock and regulatory agreements. As a result, they ended up paying $70 million dollars in fines for system outages and misleading customers. And individual customers were left feeling robbed. This was partially the result of centralization and Robinhood having full control over the platform as well as enforcing the digital agreement.

Zak Ayesh Presenting on Chainlink
and Decentralized Smart Contracts

Zak Ayesh, a developer advocate at Chainlink recently came to Duke to talk about decentralized Smart Contracts that could solve many of the problems with current centralized digital agreements and traditional paper contracts as well.

What makes smart contracts unique is that they programmatically implement a series of if-then rules without the need for a third-party human interaction. While currently these are primarily being used on blockchains, they were actually created by computer scientist Nick Szabo in 1994. Most smart contracts now run on blockchains because it allows them to remain decentralized and transparent. If unfamiliar with blockchain refer to my previous article here.

Smart contracts are self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement being directly written into computer code.
Zak Ayesh

There are several benefits to decentralized contracts. The first is transparency. Because every action on a blockchain is recorded and publicly available, the enforcement of smart contracts is unavoidably built-in. Next is trust minimization and guaranteed execution. With smart contracts, there is reduced counterparty risk — that’s the probability one party involved in a transaction or agreement might default on its contractual obligation because neither party has control of the agreement’s execution or enforcement. Lastly, they are more efficient due to automation. Operating on blockchains allows for cheaper and more frictionless transactions than traditional alternatives. For instance, the complexities of cross-border remittances involving multiple jurisdictions and sets of legal compliances can be simplified through coded automation in smart contracts.

Dr. Campbell Harvey, a J. Paul Sticht Professor of International Business at Fuqua, has done considerable research on smart contracts as well, culminating in the publication of a book, DeFi and the Future of Finance which was released in the fall of 2021.

In the book, Dr. Harvey explores the role smart contracts play in decentralized finance and how Ethereum and other smart contract platforms give rise to the ability for decentralized application or dApp. Additionally, smart contracts can only exist as long as the chain or platform they live on exists. However, because these platforms are decentralized, they remove the need for a third party to mediate the agreement. Harvey quickly realized how beneficial this could be in finance, specifically decentralized finance or DeFi where third-party companies, like banks, mediate agreements at a high price.

“Because it costs no more at an organization level to provide services to a customer with $100 or $100 million in assets, DeFi proponents believe that all meaningful financial infrastructure will be replaced by smart contracts which can provide more value to a larger group of users,” Harvey explains in the book

Beyond improving efficiency, this also creates greater accessibility to financial services. Smart contracts provide a foundation for DeFi by eliminating the middleman through publicly traceable coded agreements. However, the transition will not be completely seamless and Harvey also investigates the risks associated with smart contracts and advancements that need to be made for them to be fully scalable.

Ultimately, there is a smart contract connectivity problem. Essentially, smart contracts are unable to connect with external systems, data feeds, application programming interfaces (APIs), existing payment systems, or any other off-chain resource on their own. This is something called the Oracle Problem which Chainlink is looking to solve.

Harvey explains that when a smart contract is facilitating an exchange between two tokens, it determines the price by comparing exchange rates with another similar contract on the same chain. The other smart contract is therefore acting as a price oracle, meaning it is providing external price information. However, there are many opportunities to exploit this such as purchasing large amounts on one oracle exchange in order to alter the price and then go on to purchase even more on a different exchange in the opposite direction. This allows for capitalization on price movement by manipulating the information the oracle communicates to other smart contracts or exchanges.

That being said, smart contracts are being used heavily, and Pratt senior Manmit Singh has been developing them since his freshman year along with some of his peers in the Duke Blockchain Lab. One of his most exciting projects involved developing smart contracts for cryptocurrency-based energy trading on the Ethereum Virtual Machine allowing for a more seamless way to develop energy units.

One example of how this could be used outside of the crypto world is insurance. Currently, when people get into a car accident it takes months or even a year to evaluate the accident and release compensation. In the future, there could be sensors placed on cars connected to smart contracts that immediately evaluate the damage and payout.

Decentralization allows us to avoid using intermediaries and simply connect people to people or people to information as opposed to first connecting people to institutions that can then connect them to something else. This also allows for fault tolerance: if one blockchain goes down, the entire system does not go down with it. Additionally, because there is no central source controlling the system, it is very difficult to gain control of thus protecting against attack resistance and collusion resistance. While risks like the oracle problem need to be further explored, the world and importance of DeFi, as well as smart contracts, is only growing.

And as Ayesh put it, “This is the future.”

Post by Anna Gotskind, Class of 2022

Duke has 38 of the World’s Most Highly-Cited Scientists

By Karl Bates

On November 16, 2021

In Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Cardiology, Climate/Global Change, Engineering, Environment/Sustainability, Faculty, Immunology, Medicine, Neuroscience, Physics

Peak achievement in the sciences isn’t measured by stopwatches or goals scored, it goes by citations – the number of times other scientists have referenced your findings in their own academic papers. A high number of citations is an indication that a particular work was influential in moving the field forward.

Nobel laureate Bob Lefkowitz made the list in two categories this year.

And the peak of this peak is the annual “Highly Cited Researchers” list produced each year by the folks at Clarivate, who run the Institute for Scientific Information. The names on this list are drawn from publications that rank in the top 1% by citations for field and publication year in the Web of Science™ citation index – the most-cited of the cited.

Duke has 38 names on the highly cited list this year — including Bob Lefkowitz twice because he’s just that good — and two colleagues at the Duke NUS Medical School in Singapore. In all, the 2021 list includes 6,602 researchers from more than 70 countries.

The ISI says that US scientists are a little less than 40 percent of the highly cited list this year – and dropping. Chinese researchers are gaining, having nearly doubled their presence on the roster in the last four years.

“The headline story is one of sizeable gains for Mainland China and a decline for the United States, particularly when you look at the trends over the last four years,” said a statement from David Pendlebury, Senior Citation Analyst at the Institute for Scientific Information. “(This reflects) a transformational rebalancing of scientific and scholarly contributions at the top level through the globalization of the research enterprise.”

Without further ado, let’s see who our champions are!

Biology and Biochemistry

Charles A. Gersbach

Robert J. Lefkowitz

Clinical Medicine

Pamela S. Douglas

Christopher Bull Granger

Adrian F. Hernandez

Manesh R.Patel

Eric D. Peterson

Cross-Field

Richard Becker

Antonio Bertoletti (NUS)

Yiran Chen

Stefano Curtarolo

Derek J. Hausenloy (NUS)

Ru-Rong Ji

Jie Liu

Jason W. Locasale

David B. Mitzi

Christopher B. Newgard

Ram Oren

David R. Smith

Heather M. Stapleton

Avner Vengosh

Mark R. Wiesner

Environment and Ecology

Emily S. Bernhardt

Geosciences

Drew T. Shindell

Immunology

Edward A. Miao

Microbiology

Barton F. Haynes

Neuroscience and Behavior

Quinn T. Ostrom

Pharmacology and Toxicology

Robert J. Lefkowitz

Plant and Animal Science

Xinnian Dong

Sheng Yang He

Philip N. Benfey

Psychiatry and Psychology

Avshalom Caspi

E. Jane Costello

Honalee Harrington

Renate M. Houts

Terrie E. Moffitt

Social Sciences

Michael J. Pencina

Bryce B. Reeve

John W. Williams

Post by Karl Bates

The Duke Blockchain Lab: Disrupting and Redefining Finance

By Anna Gotskind

On November 8, 2021

In Business/Economics, Computers/Technology, Data, Engineering, Students

The first decentralized cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, was created in 2009 by a developer named Satoshi Nakamoto which is assumed to be a pseudonym. Over the last decade, cryptocurrency has taken the world by storm, influencing the way people think about the intersection of society and economics. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum, another popular token, operate on blockchains.

Manmit Singh, a senior studying electrical and computer engineering, was introduced to blockchain his freshman year at Duke after meeting Joey Santoro ‘19, a senior studying computer science at the time.

Singh quickly found that he was not only interested in the promise of blockchain but skilled at building blockchain applications as well. As a result, he joined the Duke blockchain lab, a club on campus that, at the time, had no more than fifteen students. Singh, who is now president of the Duke Blockchain Lab, explained that there are now over 100 members in the club working on different projects related to blockchain.

“Blockchain is a computer network with a built-in immutable ledge.”
Manmit SIngh

Essentially, computers process information, the internet allows us to communicate information and blockchain is the next step in the evolution of the digital era. It not only allows computers to communicate value but to transfer it as well in a completely transparent way because every transaction is tracked and, a record of that transaction is added to every participant’s ledger which is visible to others.

The concept and application of blockchain is not intuitive to everybody. Not only do people have difficulty understanding it, but they do not even know where to begin asking questions.

For Singh, a key element to the club’s success was recruiting new members. The crypto space experienced a crash in 2017 resulting in a lot of skepticism around an already novel idea, decentralized currency. As a result, it was crucial to educate others on the potential of decentralized finance (DeFi), cryptocurrency, and, of course, blockchain. When recruiting, Singh wanted to bring in both tech and business-focused students so that they could not only work on building blockchain applications but conduct research on business models and how to generate value within decentralized finance as well.

Members of the Duke Blockchain Lab at a
weekly meeting learning about Stablecoins,
one type of token in cryptocurrency

Currently, members are working on a variety of projects including looking at consensus algorithms or how the blockchain makes decisions given that it is decentralized so inherently no one is in control. However, their most ambitious venture is the development of their Crypto Fund where people can invest money.

They are also looking to develop a Duke-inspired marketplace with talented Duke artists to sell non-fungible-tokens or NFTs. If unfamiliar, Abby Shlesinger, a senior studying Art History, created a blog to educate people on what NFTs are.

One of the first projects Singh led involved developing a “smart contract” for cryptocurrency-based energy trading on the Ethereum Virtual Machine, a computation engine that acts like a decentralized computer that can hold millions of executable projects. Smart contracts are programs stored on a blockchain that run when predetermined conditions are met.

Additionally, Singh and other members of the Duke Blockchain Lab are working on tokenomic research with Dr. Harvey, a Duke professor who recently published a book alongside Santoro titled “DeFi and the Future of Finance” which you can find here.

“Every blockchain is a complete economy that exists on a different plane.”

Within these blockchain economies are various different types of tokens that vary in function and value. Tokenomics explores how these economies work and can be used to generate value. When asked to compare tokenomic concepts to ones in traditional finance, Singh explained that payment tokens are like dollars, asset tokens are like bonds and security tokens are like stocks. Currently, several companies are working on creating competitive blockchains that will be both cheaper and faster allowing creating an avenue for blockchain to continue accelerating into the mainstream.

Meanwhile, Santoro, who introduced Singh to blockchain, graduated from Duke in 2019 and went on to form The Fei Protocol, a stable coin that unlike bitcoin does not change in value. His protocol raised one billion dollars within several weeks and while it had some initial challenges, it is now set to launch V2, a second version, soon.

Singh plans to continue working on blockchain applications after graduating this spring and hopes to combine it with his passion for entrepreneurship.

“I am enthused by the applications of artificial intelligence, blockchain, and the internet of things in disrupting the world as we know it.”
Manmit Singh

Back in Action: HackDuke’s 2021 “Code for Good”

By Zella Hanson

On November 3, 2021

In Artificial Intelligence, Computers/Technology, Data, Engineering, Science Communication & Education, Students

If you walked across Duke’s Engineering Quad between 9AM on Saturday, October 23rd, and 5PM on Sunday, October 24th, the scene might’ve looked like that of any other day: students gathered in small groups, working diligently.

But then you’d see the giant banner and realize something special was afoot. These students were participating in HackDuke’s “Code for Good,” one of the most eminent social good hackathons in the country.

Participants have to “build something, not just an idea,” said Anita Li, co-director of HackDuke. Working in teams, students develop software, hardware, or quantum solutions to problems in one of four tracks: inequality, health, education, and energy and environment.

Participants can win “track prizes,” where $2,400 in total donations are made in winners’ names ($300 for first, $200 for second, $100 for third) to charities doing work in that track. There are other prizes too. Sponsors, including Capital One, Accenture, and Microsoft give incentives: if participants incorporate their technology or use their database, they’re qualified to win that sponsor’s prize (gift cards, usually, or software worth hundreds of dollars).

This year, Duke’s department of Student Affairs sponsored the health track, in hopes that participants might come up with ideas that could help promote student wellness here at Duke. “It’s a great space for thinking about these issues,” Li said.

Li told me they had more than 1,000 registrations, though there’s always a little less turnout. HackDuke is open to all students and recent graduates, so that “you get to see these cool ideas from everywhere.”

Just under half of this year’s participants were from Duke, almost 10% hailed from UNC, and the rest were from other universities across the US and the world. 30 percent of participants were women — a significant increase from the last HackDuke covered by the Research Blog, in 2014.

This year is “particularly interesting,” Li said, because of the hybrid model. Last year, everything was virtual. This year, about 300 (vaccinated) students attended in person, making HackDuke one of the few Major League Hacking events with an in-person component this year. With the hybrid model, talks, workshops, and demos are all livestreamed so that no one misses out.

Some social events also had online elements: you could zoom into the Bob Ross painting session as well as the open mic, which Li said quickly turned into karaoke night. The spicy ramen challenge was “a little harder over Zoom.”

I came across Sydney Wang and Ray Lennon, along with teammate Jean Rabideau, as they were building a web app called JamJar for the Education Track contest. In the app, students give real-time feedback to teachers about how well they’re understanding the material. There are three categories: engagement (you can rank your engagement along a scale from “mentally I’m in outer space” to “locked in), understanding (“where am I?” to “crystal clear”), and speed (“a glacial pace” to “TOO FAST!”). Student responses get compiled and graphed to show mean markers of understanding over time.

Lennon said he’s participating because “this is the best way to learn: to be thrown in the fire and have to learn as you go.” Wang felt the same way. She’s new to coding, and feels like she’s learning a lot from Lennon.

Like Lennon and Wang, many participants see HackDuke as an opportunity to learn. There are technical workshops where participants can learn HTML and CSS. There are talks where speakers discuss working in the coding and social good sector. The CTO of change.org, Elaine Zhou, flew to Durham to speak to participants about her experience. So there’s a networking opportunity, too — participants can meet people like Zhou doing the work they want to do, and professors and company representatives who can help them on their journey to get there.

There were challenges. Staying hydrated was one: by Sunday morning, they’d gone through seven cases of water, 16 cases of soda, and three cases of red bull. “It takes a lot of liquids,” Li said. And then there’s sleep — or lack thereof. When Li was participating in her freshman year, she slept for about three hours. Many people pull all-nighters, but “nap sporadically everywhere,” Li said. “It’s like finals season, with everyone knocked out.” She saw a handful of guys sleeping on the floor in Fitzpatrick. She gave them bed pads.

Li’s love for HackDuke is contagious. She loves to see participants focusing on social good and drawing on their awareness of what’s happening in the world. “People are thinking about things that are intense; they’re really worrying about issues facing certain communities,” Li said.

At HackDuke, people really are coding for good.

Post by Zella Hanson

How Freshman Engineers Solve Real-World Problems in EGR 101

By Camila Cordero

On November 2, 2021

In Biomedical Engineering, Computers/Technology, Engineering, Lecture, Students

The sound of drills whirring, the smell of heated plastic from the 3D printers, and trying to see through foggy goggles. As distracting as it may sound, this is a normal day for a first-year engineering student (including myself) in class.

During these past few weeks, freshmen engineers have been brainstorming and building projects that have piqued their interest in their EGR101 class. Wanting to know more, I couldn’t help but approach Amanda Smith, Jaden Fisher, Myers Murphy, and Christopher Cosby, and ask about their goal to make an assistive device to help people with limited mobility take trash cans up an inclined driveway that is slippery and wet.

“Our client noticed the problem in his neighborhood in Chapel Hill with its mainly-elderly population, and asked for a solution to help them,” Fisher says. “We thought it would be cool to give back to the community.” Their solution: a spool with a motor.

Coming from a mechanical engineering mindset, the team came up with the idea to create a spool-like object that has ropes that connect to the trash can, and with a motor, it would twist, pull up the trash can, and then slowly unroll it back down the driveway. As of now, they are currently in the prototyping phase, but they are continuing to work hard nonetheless.

“For now, our goal is to slowly begin to scale up and hopefully be able to make it carry a full trash can. Maybe one day, our clients can implement it in real life and help the people that need it,” says Smith.

All of this planning and building is part of the Engineering Design & Communication class, also known as EGR 101, which all Pratt students have to take in their first year. Students are taught about the engineering design process, and then assigned a project to implement what they learned in a real life situation by the end of the semester.

“This is a very active learning type of class, with an emphasis on the design process,” says Chip Bobbert, one of the EGR 101 professors. “We think early exposure will be something that will carry forward with student’s careers.”

Not only do the students deal with local clients, but some take on problems from nationwide companies, like Vivek Tarapara, Will Denton, Del Cudjoe, Ken Kalin, Desmond Decker, and their client, SKANSKA, a global construction company.

“They have an issue scheduling deliveries of materials to their subcontractors, which causes many issues like getting things late, dropped in the wrong areas, etc.,” Tarapara explains. “There is a white board in these construction sites, but with people erasing things and illegible handwriting, we want to make a software-based organizational tool so that everyone involved in the construction is on the same page.”

Watching the team test their code and explain to me each part of their software, I see they have successfully developed an online form that can be accessed with a QR code at the construction site or through a website. It would input the information on a calendar so that users can see everything at any time, where anyone can access it, and a text bot to help facilitate the details.

“We are currently still working on making it look better and more fluid, and make a final solution that SKANSKA will be satisfied with,” Denton says, as he continues to type away at his code.

_{Vivek Tarapara (left) and Will Denton (right) working on their code and text bot}

One final project, brought up by Duke oral surgeon Katharine Ciarrocca, consists of students Abigail Paris, Fernando Rodriguez, Konur Nordberg, and Camila Cordero (hey, that’s me!), and their mouth prop design project.

After many trials and errors, my team has created a solution that we are currently in the works of printing with liquid silicone rubber. “We have made a bite block pair, connected by a horizontal prism with a gap to clip on, as well as elevated it to give space for the tongue to rest naturally,” Paris elaborates.

The motivation behind this project comes from COVID-19. With the increase of ICU patients, many receiving endotracheal intubations, doctors have come to realize that these intubations are causing other health issues such as pressure necrosis, biting on the tongue, and bruising from the lip. Dr. Ciarrocca decided to ask the EGR 101 class to come up with a device to help reduce such injuries.

_{Medium-fidelity prototype of mouth prop inside of mouth model with an endotracheal intubation tube}

Being part of this class and having first-hand look at all the upcoming projects, it’s surprising to see freshman students already working on such real-world problems.

“One of the things I love about engineering and this course is that we’re governed by physics and power, and it all comes to bear,” says Steven McClelland, another EGR 101 professor. “So this reckoning of using the real world and beginning to take theory and take everything into consideration, it’s fascinating to see the students finally step into reality.”

Not only does it push freshmen to test their creativity, but it also creates a sense of teamwork and bonding between classmates, even in the most unordinary class setting.

“I look around the room and there’s someone wearing a pool noodle, another boiling alcohol, and another trying to measure the inside of their mouth,” says Bobberts as he scans the area quickly. “I’m excited to see people going and doing stuff together.”

Post by Camila Codero, Class of 2025

Introducing: The Duke Space Initiative

By Zella Hanson

On September 17, 2021

In Behavior/Psychology, Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry, Climate/Global Change, Engineering, Environment/Sustainability, Mathematics, Medicine, Physics, Science Communication & Education

Engineers, medical students, ecologists, political scientists, ethicists, policymakers — come one, come all to the Duke Space Initiative (DSI), “the interdisciplinary home for all things space at Duke.”

At Duke Polis’ “Perspectives on Space: Introducing the Duke Space Initiative” on Sept. 9, DSI co-founder and undergraduate student Ritika Saligram introduced the initiative and moderated a discussion on the current landscape of space studies both at Duke and beyond.

William R. & Thomas L. Perkins Professor of Law Jonathan Wiener began by expressing his excitement in the amount of interest he’s observed in space at Duke.

One of these interested students was Spencer Kaplan. Kaplan, an undergraduate student studying public policy, couldn’t attend Wiener’s Science & Society Dinner Dialogue about policy and risk in the settlement of Mars. Unwilling to miss the learning opportunity, Kaplan set up a one-on-one conversation with Wiener. One thing led to another: the two created a readings course on space law — Wiener hired Kaplan as a research assistant and they worked together to compile materials for the syllabus — then thought, “Why stop there?”

Wiener and Kaplan, together with Chase Hamilton, Jory Weintraub, Tyler Felgenhauer, Dan Buckland, and Somia Youssef, created the Bass Connections project “Going to Mars: Science, Society, and Sustainability,” through which a highly interdisciplinary team of faculty and students discussed problems ranging from the science and technology of getting to Mars, to the social and political reality of living on another planet.

The team produced a website, research papers, policy memos and recommendations, and a policy report for stakeholders including NASA and some prestigious actors in the private sector. According to Saligram, through their work, the team realized the need for a concerted “space for space” at Duke, and the DSI was born. The Initiative seeks to serve more immediately as a resource center for higher education on space, and eventually as the home of a space studies certificate program for undergraduates at Duke.

Wiener sees space as an “opportunity to reflect on what we’ve learned from being on Earth” — to consider how we could avoid mistakes made here and “try to do better if we settle another planet.” He listed a few of the many problems that the Bass Connections examined.

The economics of space exploration have changed: once, national governments funded space exploration; now, private companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic seek to run the show. Space debris, satellite and launch junk that could impair future launches, is the tragedy of the commons at work — in space. How would we resolve international disputes on other planets and avoid conflict, especially when settlements have different missions? Can we develop technology to ward off asteroids? What if we unintentionally brought microorganisms from one planet to another? How will we make the rules for the settlement of other planets?

These questions are vast — thereby reflecting the vastness of space, commented Saligram — and weren’t answerable within the hour. However, cutting edge research and thinking around them can be found on the Bass Connections’ website.

Earth and Climate Sciences Senior Lecturer Alexander Glass added to Wiener’s list of problems: “terraforming” — or creating a human habitat — on Mars. According to Glass, oxygen “isn’t a huge issue”: MOXIE can buzz Co2 with electricity to produce it. A greater concern is radiation. Without Earth’s magnetosphere, shielding of some sort will be necessary; it takes sixteen feet of rock to produce the same protection. Humans on Mars might have to live underground.

Glass noted that although “we have the science to solve a lot of these problems, the science we’re lagging in is the human aspects of it: the psychological, of humanity living in conditions like isolation.” The engineering could be rock solid. But the mission “will fail because there will be a sociopath we couldn’t predict beforehand.”

Bass Connections project leader and PhD candidate in political science Somia Youssef discussed the need to examine deeply our laws, systems, and culture. Youssef emphasized that we humans have been on Earth for six million years. Like Wiener, she asked how we will “apply what we’ve learned to space” and what changes we should make. How, she mused, do prevailing ideas about humanity “transform in the confines, the harsh environment of space?” Youssef urged the balancing of unity with protection of the things that make us different, as well as consideration for voices that aren’t being represented.

Material Science Professor, Assistant Professor of Surgery, and NASA Human System Risk Manager Dr. Dan Buckland explained that automation has exciting potential in improving medical care in space. If robots can do the “most dangerous aspects” of mission medical care, humans won’t have to. Offloading onto “repeatable devices” will reduce the amount of accidents and medical capabilities needed in space.

Multiple panelists also discussed the “false dichotomy” between spending resources on space and back home on Earth. Youssef pointed out that many innovations which have benefited (or will benefit) earthly humanity have come from the excitement and passion that comes from investing in space. Saligram stated that space is an “extension of the same social and policy issues as the ones we face on Earth, just in a different context.” This means that solutions we find in our attempt to settle Mars and explore the universe can be “reverse engineered” to help Earth-dwelling humans everywhere.

Saligram opened up the panel for discussion, and one guest asked Buckland how he ended up working for NASA. Buckland said his advice was to “be in rooms you’re not really supposed to be in, and eventually people will start thinking you’re supposed to be there.”

Youssef echoed this view, expressing the need for diverse perspectives in space exploration. She’s most excited by all the people “who are interested in space, but don’t know if there’s enough space for them.”

If this sounds like you, check out the Duke Space Initiative. They’ve got space.

Post by Zella Hanson

Invisible No More, the Cervix

By Cydney Livingston

On February 3, 2021

In Biology, Biomedical Engineering, Cancer, Computers/Technology, Engineering, Global Health, Students

How many people have seen their cervix? Obscured from view and stigmatized socially, the cervix is critical to women’s, transgender-men’s, and non-binary folks’ health — and potential reproductive health issues. A team formed through Duke’s Center for Global Women’s Health Technologies (GWHT) has created a device that not only holds immense medical potential but the potential to empower people with cervixes across the globe: It makes visible a previously invisible organ.

Top Row, left to right: Andrea Kim, Wesley Hogan, Gita Suneja. Bottom Row, left to right: Mercy Asiedu, Nimmi Ramanujam

Nimmi Ramanujam (Ph.D.), founder of GWHT and Professor of Engineering at Duke University, heads the team. Mercy Asiedu (Ph.D.), Gita Suneja (M.D.) Wesley Hogan (Ph.D.), and Andrea Kim have all been integral members of the interdisciplinary collaboration. Dr. Suneja is Associate Professor of Radiation Oncology at the University of Utah School of Medicine and a clinical researcher. Asiedu, former PhD student with Dr. Ramanujam and current postdoc at MIT, was integral to the development of Callascope.

The Callascope allows women and others who have cervixes, along with health professionals, to perform cervical exams without use of traditional examination tools that are larger, cannot be used for self-examinations, and often scary-looking.

When Wesley Hogan, director of Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies and research professor, heard about the idea “she was hooked.” Andrea Kim graduated from Duke University in 2018. Her senior thesis was a 12 minute documentary focused on the Callascope and its potential uses. Following graduation, over the last two years, she expanded the film to a 50-minute piece titled “The (In)visible Organ” that was screened January 14, 2021. Kim moderated a panel with Ramanujam, Asiedu, Suneja and Hogan January 28th, 2021.

Callascope: A handheld device that can be used to conduct cervical screenings. All that’s needed is a smart phone.

The Callascope addresses a dire global health need for better women’s reproductive health. Further, it empowers women as self-advocates of their own gynecological and reproductive health through reinvention of gynecological examination. Cervical cells have an “orderly progression,” says Suneja, we have a “great idea” of how cells become cancerous over time, “with multiple places to intervene.” Cervical examinations, however, are necessary for assessing cervical health and potential disease progression.

Originally from Ghana, Dr. Asiedu was interested in using her engineering skills to develop technology to “improve health outcomes,” particularly in countries like her own, which may lack adequate access to preventative healthcare and could benefit most from Callascope. Many women in underserved countries, as well as underserved areas of the United States, suffer disproportionately from cervical cancer — a preventable disease.

Dr. Ramanujam, who served as a voluntary test-subject for Asiedu’s Callascope prototypes, says that it’s a really important tool “in actually changing [the cervix’s] narrative in a positive way” — it is an organ “that is indeed invisible.”

The hope is that with more awareness about and use of Callascope, cervical screenings, and vaginal health, cervixes may become more de-stigmatized and cultural norms surrounding them may shift to become more positive and open. Dr. Hogan stated that when Ramanujam pitched her the Callascope idea they were in a public restaurant. Hearing Ramanujam say words like “vagina” and “cervix” loud enough for others to hear made Hogan recognize her own embarrassment surrounding the topic and underscored the importance of the project.

The project and the team serve as a wonderful example of intersectional work that bridges the sciences and humanities in effective, inspiring ways. One example was the Spring 2019 art exhibit, developed in conjunction with the team’s work, presented at the Nasher Museum which exposed the cervix through various mediums of art.

Multidisciplinary Bass Connections research teams contributed to this work and other interdisciplinary projects focused on the Callascope. Dr. Asiedu believes documentaries like Kim’s are “really powerful ways to communicate global health issues.” Kim who directed and produced “The (In)visble Organ” hopes to continue exploring how “we can create more cultures of inclusion …when it comes to reproductive health.”

A piece of artwork from the (In)visible Organ art exhibit at Duke’s Nasher Museum in the spring of 2019.

Ramanujam emphasized the need to shift biomedical engineering focus to create technologies that center on “the stakeholders for whom [they] really [matter].” It is multi-dimensional thinkers like Ramanujam, Asiedu, Hogan, and Kim who are providing integrative and inventive ways to address health disparities of the 21st century — both the obvious and the invisible.

Post by Cydney Livingston

Cybersecurity for Autonomous Systems

By Guest Post

On January 6, 2021

In Computers/Technology, Data, Engineering, Guest Post

Over the past decades, we have adopted computers into virtually every aspect of our lives, but in doing so, we’ve made ourselves vulnerable to malicious interference or hacking. I had the opportunity to talk about this with Miroslav Pajic, the Dickinson Family associate professor in Duke’s electrical and computer engineering department. He has worked on cybersecurity in self-driving cars, medical devices, and even US Air Force hardware.

Miroslav Pajic is an electrical engineer

Pajic primarily works in “assured autonomy,” computers that do most things by themselves with “high-level autonomy and low human control and oversight.” “You want to build systems with strong performance and safety guarantees every time, in all conditions,” Pajic said. Assured Autonomy ensures security in “contested environments” where malicious interference can be expected. The stakes of this work are incredibly high. The danger of attacks on military equipment goes without saying, but cybersecurity on a civilian level can be just as dangerous. “Imagine,” he told me, “that you have a smart city coordinating traffic and that… all of (the traffic controls), at the same time, start doing weird things. There can be a significant impact if all cars stop, but imagine if all of them start speeding up.”

Pajic and some of his students with an autonomous car.

Since Pajic works with Ph.D. students and postdocs, I wanted to ask him how COVID-19 has affected his work. As if on cue, his wifi cut out, and he dropped from our zoom call. “This is a perfect example of how fun it is to work remotely,” he said when he returned. “Imagine that you’re debugging a fleet of drones… and that happens.”

In all seriousness, though, there are simulators created for working on cybersecurity and assured autonomy. CARLA, for one, is an open-source simulator of self-driving vehicles made by Intel. Even outside of a pandemic, these simulators are used extensively in the field. They’ve become very useful in returning accurate and cheap results without any actual risk, before graduating to real tests.

“If you’re going to fail,” Pajic says, “you want to fail quickly.”

Guest Post by Riley Richardson, Class of 2021, NC School of Science and Math

Most Highly Cited List Includes 37 from Duke

By Karl Bates

On November 18, 2020

In Behavior/Psychology, Engineering, Faculty, Immunology, Medicine

Five of the ten Duke women included in the most highly-cited list this year. Their scholarly publications are viewed as important and influential by their peers. (Clockwise from upper left: Costello, Curtis, Dawson, Bernhardt, Moffitt)

Duke’s leading scholars are once again prominently featured on the annual list of “Most Highly Cited Researchers.”

Thirty-seven Duke faculty were named to the list this year, based on the number of highly cited papers they produced over an 11-year period from January 2009 to December 2019. Citation rate, as tracked by Clarivate’s Web of Science, is an approximate measure of a study’s influence and importance.

Two Duke researchers appear in two categories: Human Vaccine Institute Director Barton Haynes, and Michael Pencina, vice dean of data science and information technology in the School of Medicine.

And two of the Duke names listed are new faculty, recruited as part of the Science & Technology initiative: Edward Miao in Immunology and Sheng Yang He in Biology.

This year, 6,127 researchers from 60 countries are being recognized by the listing. The United States still dominates, with 41 percent of the names on the list, but China continues to grow its influence, with 12 percent of the names.

Clinical Medicine:

Robert M. Califf, Lesley H. Curtis, Pamela S. Douglas, Christopher Bull Granger, Adrian F. Hernandez, L. Kristen Newby, Erik Magnus Ohman, Manesh R. Patel, Michael J. Pencina, Eric D. Peterson.

Environment and Ecology:

Emily S. Bernhardt, Stuart L. Pimm, Mark R. Weisner.

Geosciences:

Drew T. Shindell

Immunology:

Barton F. Haynes, Edward A. Miao

Microbiology:

Barton F. Haynes

Plant and Animal Science:

Sheng Yang He

Psychiatry and Psychology:

Avshalom Caspi, E. Jane Costello, Renate M. Houts, Terrie E. Moffitt

Social Sciences:

Michael J. Pencina

Cross-Field:

Dan Ariely, Geraldine Dawson, Xinnian Dong, Charles A. Gersbach, Ru-Rong Ji, Robert J. Lefkowitz, Sarah H. Lisanby, Jie Liu, Jason W. Locasale, David B. Mitzi, Christopher B. Newgard, Ram Oren, David R. Smith, Avner Vengosh.

Students Dance Their Way Out of “AI Bias”

By Guest Post

On March 10, 2020

In Art, Computers/Technology, Engineering, Guest Post, Students

Martin Brooke is no ordinary Engineering professor at Duke University. He teaches computer scientists, engineers, and technology nerds how to dance.

Brooke co-teaches Performance and Technology, an interactive course where students create performance projects and discuss theoretical and historical implications of technologies in performance. In a unique partnership with Thomas DeFrantz, a professor of African and African American Studies and Dance students will design a technology based on “heart,” for example, in order to understand how human expression is embedded in technology. Two weeks later, they’ll interact with motion-sensing, robotic trees that give hugs; and 3D printed hearts that detect colors and match people, sort of like a robotic tinder.

Thomas DeFrantz (left) and Martin Brooke watch their students perform in the Performance and Technology course .

Brooke loves that this class is fun and interactive, but more importantly he loves that this class teaches students how to consider people’s emotions, facial expressions, cultural differences, cultural similarities and interactions when designing new technologies.

Human interface is when a computerized program or device takes input from humans — like an image of a face — and gives an output — like unlocking a phone. In order for these devices to understand human interface, the programmer must first understand how humans express themselves. This means that scientists, programmers, and engineers need to understand a particular school of learning: the humanities. “There are very, very few scientists who do human interface research,” Brooke said.

The students designed a robotic “Tinder” that changes colors when it detects a match.

Brooke also mentioned the importance of understanding human expressions and interactions in order to limit computer bias. Computer bias occurs when a programmer’s prejudiced opinions of others are transferred into the computer products they design. For example, many recent studies have proven that facial recognition software inaccurately identifies black individuals when searching for suspects of a criminal case.

“It turns out one of the biggest problems with technology today is human interface,” Brooke said. “Microsoft found out that they had a motion sensitive Artificial Intelligence that tended to say women, [more often than men], were angry.” Brooke said he didn’t consider the importance of incorporating the arts and humanities into engineering before coming to Duke. He suggested that it can be uncomfortable for some scientists to think and express themselves artistically. “[When] technologists [take Performance and Technology], for example, they are terrified of the performance aspects of it. We have some video of a guy saying, ‘I didn’t realize I was going to have to perform.’ Yeah, that’s what we were actually quite worried about, but in the end, he’s there in the video, doing slow motion running on stage — fully involved, actually performing, and really enjoying it.

Duke has a strong initiative to promote arts and humanities inclusion in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Brooke plans to bring Bass Connections, a research program that focuses on public outreach and cross-disciplinary work, to his Performance and Technology class before the end of the semester to demonstrate bias through a program he calls AI Bias In the Age of a Technical Elite.

“You give it someone’s name and it will come up with a movie title, their role, and a synopsis of the movie,” Brooke said. “When I put in my name, which is an English name, it said that the movie I would be in is about a little boy who lives in the English countryside who turns into a monster and terrorizes the town.” This program shows even something as simple as a name can have so much stigma attached to it.

Bass Connections Students working on technology and engineering projects. (From the official Duke page for Bass Connections.)

Brooke’s hope is that his class teaches students to think about technology and human interface. “Hopefully that’s a real benefit to them when they get out actually designing products.”

Guest post by Jordan Anderson, a masters student in Science & Society