VOLUME 132: WINTER 2015
Positive connections Universty researchers explain how positive distractions can enhance working memory. PAGE 8
Student Engineering Magazine at the University of Illinois
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3 TECHNOSTAFF Technograph editor Abrar Al-Heeti Assistant Technograph editor Victoria Snell Editor-in-chief Megan Jones Managing editor for reporting Declan Harty Managing editor for online Miranda Holloway Creative director Kelsie Travers Designers Juliany Nakazato Christine Ha Morgan Cleary Copy editors Jade Tyson Susan Szuch Lillian Barkley Writers Rabia Ilyas Publisher Lilyan Levant Web readtechnograph.com Email technograph@dailyillini.com Mail Technograph 512 E. Green St., 3rd floor Champaign, IL 61820 Phone (217) 337-8350 AN ILLINI MEDIA PUBLICATION COPYRIGHT 2015
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DATA
DISTRACTIONS
SOLAR
University leads Midwest Hub, aims to improve data science
Researchers examine how possible distractions impact memory
iSEE develops a way to prepare food with fewer emissions
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University to lead Midwest Big Data Hub BY EMILY SCOTT TECHNOGRAPH WRITER
Every day, vast amounts of data are created, with sources ranging from cell phones and social media to scientific research. But because more data exists now than ever, there are more problems arising when it comes to storing, accessing and sharing this data. To address this problem, the National Science Foundation announced on Nov. 2 the creation of four Big Data Regional Innovation Hubs. These hubs — the Northeast Hub, South Hub, Midwest Hub and West Hub — are a part of the White House’s “Big Data Research and Development Initiative,” which aims to improve the field of data science by implementing new strategies for managing big data. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will lead the Midwest Big Data Hub, which will cover twelve states. The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the University of North Dakota, Iowa State University and Indiana University will also be joining the hub as partners. Numerous companies and institutions have also agreed to participate in the hub. The Midwest Big Data Hub will provide organizational structures to establish effective sharing of data. The aim is to increase sharing and accessibility so that big data may be distributed effectively, prompting
new data infrastructures, collaborations and research findings. Edward Seidel, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, NCSA, helped coordinate the University’s proposal to the lead the Midwest Hub. He is serving as the principal investigator for the Midwest Hub and the interim chair for its steering council. He said he sees the NCSA’s involvement as an opportunity that is “of strategic importance” for NCSA’s mission. “NSF did something very interesting, they realized that there needs to be some organizational structures for communities to come together,” Seidel said. “Just the conception of how these organizational structures will be built, how they would be regional . . . that was all quite novel.” The organizational structure behind the hubs will help researchers share data to benefit their own work and solve bigger problems. Kandace Turner, project manager for NCSA, said the biggest problem the transferring of data. “There’s more data now than there’s ever been, and it’s being produced much faster than it’s ever been produced,” Turner said. “And it’s not just research data. So (people) realize that there’s more data available, so that means that there’s more to learn, and more things that
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could possibly be solved. This was a great opportunity to move in that direction.” Turner said that often, researchers at one institution, such as a university, have access to a data set that other institutions could benefit greatly from, but there’s no way to transfer the data. Turner said the Midwest Hub will build “collaborations that maybe otherwise would not be built” so researchers from institutions across the Midwest will have access to resources, data sets and people that they can collaborate with to which they previously did not have access. The Midwest Hub will serve as a facilitator for these collaborations. “I think the biggest thing is that the
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University is really participating in sort of a ground-breaking movement,” Turner said. “It’s really been important. This whole connection of data resources has been missing.” The problem of a disconnect between data and researchers is a problem known firsthand by Klara Nahrstedt, professor of computer science and director of the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University. Alongside Seidel, Nahrstedt was leading the proposal process for the University to lead the Midwest Hub. Nahrstedt has always been interested in problems surrounding the sharing of data, and the difficulties that researchers — including she and her colleagues
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— face in getting access to data. She explained how, for example, as a data scientist, getting access to tremendous amounts of data from big companies, such as AT&T or Caterpillar, is nearly impossible. She said there are typically two types of data: large amounts, such as from a telescope, that are received at one time, or small amounts of data that are received frequently, and thus accumulate into larger data sets over time. “We are not really doing a very good job on understanding, as a community, how to share data,” she said. But it’s not only understanding how to share the data, it’s about how to license and price it as well, according to Nahrstedt. Nahrstedt said the organizational structure of the Midwest Hub will help to provide a data infrastructure that was previously missing. Included in this structure are the different spokes, or concentration areas, that the Midwest Hub will be focusing on that are specific to the region. Some of the spokes for the Midwest Hub are digital agriculture, smart cities and communities and foodwater-energy — which Nahrstedt will serve as the lead for in connection to her involvement in related research. Nahrstedt said she anticipates that the collaborations within the Midwest Hub will create many new findings. “I envision in the computing and network infrastructure, there’s going to be a lot of changes,” she said. She expects that new algorithm and systems designs will be “booming” as a result of the new methods for managing data.
With the increased sharing of data sets, Nahrstedt also hopes to see new impacts on research. If two research areas have access to each other’s data — for example, water and energy — she said they will be able to see correlations more quickly that will allow researchers to see trends that they may not have known existed. “If you allow people to suddenly look at the correlations, people will much faster find out — what’s the impact of my action?” Nahrstedt said. “If we could create these kinds of interdependencies, I think we could maybe have a much better understanding of ‘what if’ scenarios.” With this understanding, Nahrstedt said reaction time to findings can be increased significantly. “Instead of reacting on a year’s basis, we can react on a monthly, daily basis,” she said. “We can see trends much finer . . . therefore saving lives, or improving the quality of life.” Making an impact on real-world problems is exactly what the Midwest Hub aims to achieve, and Seidel said the application areas are countless. He said the NCSA’s expertise in computing and software will help communities come together around “grand challenge problems,” relating to fields such as precision agriculture, medicine, manufacturing and much more. “We’re very excited about launching into this endeavor,” Seidel said. “I’m hopeful and confident that it will be successful and have a lot of impact in the communities and in the country.” emscott5@dailyillini.com
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Distractions impact on working memory BY SUSAN SZUCH COPY CHIEF
Imagine: A hundred thousand years ago, your ancestors are working to gather food, their attention focused on remembering where the ripe fruits they saw earlier were. Suddenly, a predator distracts them, diverting their attention from the task and making them run. It’s been known that negative distractions, like predators, impact our ability to remain focused on a task, but the influence of positive distractions on the task at hand was not known.
“(Positive and negative emotions) are evolutionarily set to influence us differently,” said Associate Professor of cognitive neuroscience Florin Dolcos.“Instead of having us focus on things to take action if there’s something negative, (positive emotions) actually have a kind of mind-opening effect of the attention, rather than tunneling the attention to a danger you have to be careful of.” While previous studies indicate that negative distractions impair our ability to recall recent information, the question remains about the effect of positive distractions. A recent study by Dolcos and Alexandru Iordan, graduate student in cognitive neuroscience, has been exploring just that. The study,“Brain Activity and Network In-
teractions Linked to Valance-Related Differences in the Impact of Emotional Distraction,” was published in early November in the journal Cerebral C or te x . Subjects in the study were given a series of faces to look at and told to keep them in mind during a short delay where they were shown positive, neutral and negative images, then asked if they’d seen specific faces or not. The images they selected were chosen so they could test both the reaction and the intensity of the reaction — in fact, they had to eliminate some of the most intense images. The study used MRI machines to look at brain activity and see which structures in the brain were working whi l e s ub je c ts c omp l e te d the tas k . What they found was that multiple brain regions were involved in processing the information, and that negative distractions can make certain brain regions work together, even if they don’t normally work together. One of the regions they found that was affected was the lateral parietal cortex, which is involved in worki ng me mor y p r oc e s s i ng — s i mi l ar to when you are given a phone number and have to remember it until you can write it down or put it in your phone. It’s also more involved in paying attention and being involved in the outside world. The other region was the medial prefrontal cortex, which is sensitive to emotions. The medial prefrontal cortex is also part of a network called the d e faul t mod e ne twor k , whi c h i s ac tive when we’re not paying attention to the outside world and are introspective. The study found that the medial prefrontal cortex communicated more with the lateral prefrontal cortex un-
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11 der negative ones, and could explain why processing negative information interferes with working memory. “The medial prefrontal cortex and te lateral parietal cortex are part of different brain networks, and they do not typically communicate with each other when we are atrying to keep information active in our minds,” Iordan said. “Their increased coupling under neagtive distraction may explain why the negative stimuli were more impairing for cognitive performance.” Iordan and Dolcos hope that this research can help shed more light on how people with depression or post-traumatic stress disorder
process information, and subsequently, what’s happening in their brains. Iordan noted that while it’s something that needs to be tested, researchers could see how the face recall task works with patients who have depression and suffer from anhedonia, or a lack of sensitivity to positive emotions. “Certain clinical conditions, such as depression, are also characterized in the way we process positive information,” Iordan said. “It is possible that, compared to healthy individuals, patients with depression may find positive stimuli more interfering in this context, because they are discordant with their mood. He also looks forward to
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the research that may potentially stem from this study. Discovering what brain regions are sensitive to different kind of emotions and how that may be linked to depression or PTSD can help develop more targeted treatments for those mental illnesses, as well as preventative measures. “In the end, it is not only about finding what is wrong, but also about preventing people from developing emiotional disorders,” Iordan said. “It’s also important to know how the healthy brain works so that we can foster this healthy state and intervene before a clinical condition develops.” szuch2@dailyillini.com
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Cooking with solar energy cooking solutions for impoverished people worldwide. The research team, which includes four faculty members, three Ph.D. students, one master’s student, four undergraduate students and two high school students, is working to create the stove, which will store solar energy in portable vessels at high temperatures that will consequently eliminate the need for fire or fuel, which can have dangerous implications for personal health and the environment.
BY NASTARAN SHISHEGAR TECHNOGRAPH WRITER
A group of researchers at the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment, iSEE, at the University are working to develop a revolutionary way to prepare food. A solar-powered stove would harness solar thermal energy and release it in the cooking process, effectively creating zero emissions. This technology contributes to sustainability and climate change efforts, as well as efforts to create viable, healthy
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The team conducts research to find out how energyimpoverished people around the world cook, and studies their energy consumption behavior. The members strive to develop methods to gain, accumulate and recover solar thermal energy. “The earth receives more solar energy every hour than civilization uses in an entire year,” said Bruce Elliott-Litchfield, professor of agricultural
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15 and biological engineering and lead investigator of the research project over email. “And so we want to use some of that free, clean energy.” The device is viable virtually worldwide, and can be tailored to accommodate various levels of solar energy in regions around the globe. Litchfield said people might think that solar cookers are slow, do not provide enough heat or cannot cook at night, and therefore are impractical and ineffective. “But we are developing systems to concentrate, collect, store and then recover solar thermal energy at high temperatures — near flame temperatures, and that’s key for replacing fire cooking,” he said. Litchfield said the device’s ability to store solar heat is key to allowing someone to cook later in the evening, or even the next day or several days later in another location. Previous attempts to develop solar cooking devices were not successful because the energy was not readily available when needed or the heat was insufficient. Environmentally, the solar stove is a more viable option than fuel or fire-burning alternatives. Litchfield said warming elements such as carbon dioxide, black carbon and ozone precursors are produced in the cooking process. Also, cooking with fire not only wastes energy, but it also creates unsafe conditions which could result in burns and destructive fires. ‘’Our customers and beneficiaries include energy-impov-
erished people in the developing world, with a particular emphasis on women and children tasked with fuel collection and cooking,” Litchfield said. “By using reflective parabolic dishes and custom vessels to collect, store, and recover solar thermal energy, we avert the problems and provide energy for cooking and other household-scale applications.” Although individual fires might not make a large impact, the collective effects are significant and create negative impacts on the environment and public health. Cooking, heating space and drying food with the help of stored solar energy could decrease the negative health impacts caused by burning solid fuels. On a daily basis, Litchfield said, three billion people worldwide cook using solid fuels such as wood and animal dung. “Hence, the air pollution which is generated by this matter causes the premature death of over 4 million people each year,” he said. “This also is responsible for 20 percent of global climate forcing.” The technology could also have economic implications. “We expect that collecting and distributing stored solar energy could empower women entrepreneurs and provide meaningful jobs,” Litchfield
said. “It will free women and children from the burden of collecting firewood and other fuels, as many spend several hours a day on this task. This will allow them to engage in furthering their education and finding employment outside the home.” The device would cost around $100, making it affordable for most people around the world. There is also a potential business aspect to this device, Litchfield said. Someone could run a business by leasing the device to others. As the stove collects solar energy during a day, it would be fully charged, and others could rent charged buckets. Sun Buckets, located at Research Park in Champaign, deals with the business side of this research project. The researchers have been working on this project for several years. Many prototypes have been produced and tested in order to find any potential problems with the device. If it turns out to be commercially successful, more research will be done and more designs will be created to improve and extend the application. nshish2@dailyillini.com