Illinois Tech Research 2020

Research Illinois Tech

The Future Is Automated Patent Awarded for Multivariable Artificial Pancreas System

Solution in Sight

First-of-Its-Kind Artificial Vision System Enters Clinical Trial

Zzzzzzzz

Sleep Apnea Pill Aims to Put the CPAP to Bed

2020

Letter from the Vice Provost for Research ›

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llinois Institute of Technology is filled with curious minds—faculty, students, and staff alike. We want to understand ideas deeply. We want to see abstract insights put into practice for the welfare of society. We want to accomplish something that is substantially better than before. We appreciate the opportunity to highlight some of the scholarly achievements from our Illinois Tech community since the start of fiscal year 2020.

As noted on page 2, Illinois Tech is concentrating on three innovation-driven initiatives that represent multidisciplinary faculty and student work across the university, an outcome of our latest strategic plan. These priorities leverage the research expertise of the Illinois Tech community, address future national and global needs of greatest urgency, and distinguish Illinois Tech as Chicago’s only tech-focused university. These efforts go beyond leading-edge science and engineering to embrace the human and aesthetic aspects as well.

You will see stories about these three initiatives—computation and data, health and wellness, and urban futures—woven into several of the research programs highlighted in this issue.

In June of this year, Illinois Tech signaled its continued commitment to research and learning in computation and data by establishing the College of Computing, which is not only a grouping of departments, but also works across all schools and colleges.

Although Illinois Tech does not have a medical school, many of our faculty are working to improve the health and wellness of individuals. Last year we appointed Professor of Biomedical Engineering Phil Troyk as the new director of the Pritzker Institute of Biomedical Science and Engineering. COVID-19 is a current challenge to our health and wellness. Faculty from a variety of disciplines have directed their efforts to meet this challenge.

As the premier technology-focused university in Chicago, we are keenly aware of the need to plan for thriving urban futures. With the broad mix of disciplines here at Illinois Tech, including architecture, design, law, and the human sciences, we are able to take a holistic approach.

Illinois Tech began as a partnership between a minister and a business tycoon. We continue to rely on fruitful partnerships. If you have any questions about our research or how you might partner with us, please contact me at hickernell@iit.edu.

Sincerely, Fred Hickernell Vice Provost for Research Professor of Applied Mathematics

Contents ›

Illinois Tech

2020

Research

Features

Briefs 2 University Research Initiatives 3 Guarantee Clause 3 Regulating Airbnb 4 Partnering for the Future 5

Machine Learning and Finance

5 New Avenues in Alloy Design 6–7 Responding to the Pandemic 8 The Perfect Fit

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Multivariable Artificial Pancreas System

A patent has been awarded for a next-generation artificial pancreas system that factors in various metabolic changes in the body.

ntracortical Visual 16 IProsthesis System

A clinical trial will begin this year to implant a new type of wireless visual prosthesis system in volunteers.

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Design Solutions for Unfair Ticketing Design faculty and students are teaming up with the City That Works to help remedy Chicago’s ticketing practices.

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Peer Navigators for People with Mental Illness

A new study examines the impact of peer navigator support on the diet and exercise habits of African Americans with serious mental illness.

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Sleep Apnea Drug Development

9 Eating Ocean Plastics 10 Taking a Quantum Leap

Researchers are homing in on a solution aimed at helping people with sleep apnea rest better.

On the Cover

ndoor Air Quality 18 Iand COPD

Illinois Tech engineers are studying the impact of home air quality on the health of veterans with COPD.

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Gender and Technology

In their research and writings, one history professor is investigating gender and technology through a new lens.

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New and Improved Internet

An Illinois Tech computer scientist is co-directing a national initiative that is exploring the internet and internet architecture of the future.

[Left] A glucose sensor simulator with an adjustable dial and a transmitter that generates glucose concentration values and transmits them to the artificial pancreas software; [right] the receiver on the right (the black device) can receive and display glucose values and is next to the insulin pump (gray device). The device in the center is a screenshot of one of the screens of the artificial pancreas interface, displaying the glucose concentrations in a graph, the last glucose concentration value (inside the oval), and three small displays for plasma insulin concentration estimate, bolus insulin given, and basal insulin dose. The green band at the top depicts the various navigation buttons of the app, and the white icons indicate the status of the device, such as communications and power.

Illinois Tech Research is published annually by the Office of Marketing and Communications and the Office of Research.

ADA Statement Illinois Institute of Technology provides qualified individuals with disabilities reasonable accommodations to participate in university activities, programs, and services. Such individuals with disabilities requiring an accommodation should call the activity, program, or service director. For further information about Illinois Tech’s resources, contact the Illinois Tech Center for Disability Resources at disabilities@iit.edu.

Briefs ›

PHOTO: DAVID ETTINGER

RESEARCH INITIATIVES

Cutting-Edge Research Priorities Target Global Challenges

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s part of Illinois Institute of Technology’s “Our Students and Their Success Comes First: A Strategic Plan for Illinois Tech 2020–2025,” are three innovation-driven University Research Initiatives that represent multidisciplinary faculty and student work across campus. Together, they showcase faculty research, how Illinois Tech is working on future national and global needs, and the role of Illinois Tech as Chicago’s only tech-focused university.

“The priorities outlined in the strategic plan signify Illinois Tech’s continued commitment to providing all students with the opportunity to excel in tomorrow’s leading-edge professions,” says Peter Kilpatrick, Illinois Tech provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, who worked with trustees, alumni, faculty, staff, and students to craft the new plan. “With cross-disciplinary endeavors such as our University Research Initiatives, we will continue to develop creative ways to renew, reinvest in, and reimagine our university’s strategic direction so that we can stay on the leading-edge of twenty-first-century education.”

Computation and Data This initiative includes computational research from quantum scale to commercial manufacturing scale, and permeates all disciplines. The power of high-performance computing combined with the enormous value of available data provides both an opportunity and challenge to produce new and trustworthy insight. Multiple disciplines must come together to assure that both questions and answers are correct.

Health and Wellness Across campus, Illinois Tech faculty and students are exploring how we can be healthier as individuals and as a society. This initia2

Illinois Tech Research

tive encompasses chronic conditions, disease, the environment, food safety, medical devices, medical imaging, mental health, nutrition, and sports.

Urban Futures This initiative investigates advances in the sciences, engineering, business, architecture, design, and law to ensure smart, equitable, sustainable, and healthy cities. Topics under exploration include hard and soft infrastructure, climate change resilience, landscapes and ecology, and urban agriculture. The complexity of these issues requires multidisciplinary efforts that address the human factors, social issues, and public policy and management, with the goal of achieving positive social impacts.

Video ›

Building Software for Tomorrow’s Big Data Challenges

LAW AND POLICY

Fresh Look at the Guarantee Clause

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PHOTO: MICHAEL GOSS

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s challenges to voting rights escalate and states engage in partisan gerrymandering, the United States Congress has the authority and duty to address anti-democratic statelevel practices, according to Chicago-Kent College of Law Professor Carolyn Shapiro, co-director of the Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States.

Shapiro makes the argument in her article “Democracy, Federalism, and the Guarantee Clause,” published in the Arizona Law Review in March, in which she states the Guarantee Clause empowers congressional control over elections when necessary to protect democracy.

The Guarantee Clause of the U.S. Constitution states that “[t]he United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican form of Government.” While many legal scholars have looked at the clause through a court-focused lens, Shapiro argues that the Constitution’s framers saw it as a structural promise between the states and the federal government. The nation’s founders believed that some forms of government were incompatible with each other and, if adopted by one state, could have significant negative effects on others.

“They especially feared monarchy and tyranny, and so empowered Congress to regulate state-level government if it became necessary to protect national cohesion,” Shapiro says.

For the framers, the “republican form of government” was not well defined, but it incorporated some level of democratically elected representative government, although the framers tolerated slavery and the exclusion of all women from the polity.

But the Constitution—and the country—have both evolved.

The Constitution has repeatedly been amended to expand voting rights, Congress has enacted laws protecting voting, and democracy is seen as being central to the nation’s identity. The Guarantee Clause must be understood in light of those changes, says Shapiro.

Today, she writes, democracy appears under threat. Extreme partisan gerrymandering and targeted voting restrictions, for example, make it more difficult for the party that does not control the legislature to retake power or to exercise it, if they prevail. In 2018 in Wisconsin, Democratic candidates for governor and attorney general won the general election. But due, in large part, to gerrymandering, while Democratic candidates for the state assembly received 53 percent of the votes, they received only 39 percent of the seats. Before the new governor took office, the legislature scaled back the governor’s appointment power and prevented the incoming administration from withdrawing from a lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act, a central campaign issue.

“Actions like these can have anti-democratic effects, even outside the states where they occur,” Shapiro says. “They can be part of an anti-democratic spiral, where neither party can tolerate an electoral loss and Americans lose faith in the democratic process and elections.”

Shapiro says that congressional action under the Guarantee Clause to address antidemocratic activity is appropriate. Congress could prohibit extreme gerrymandering of state legislatures, as well as congressional districts, and could mandate the appointment of nonpartisan election officials, for example. —Jamie Loo

BUSINESS

Regulating Airbnb

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hen does a three-bedroom apartment become three single rooms?

According to a study conducted by a pair of researchers at Illinois Institute of Technology’s Stuart School of Business, such transformations can occur when a city or state cracks down on illegal shortterm rental listings, as their research illus-

trates in New York’s borough of Manhattan, home to one of the largest, most active short-term rental (STR) housing markets.

New York state law prohibits most STRs, and Professor of Economics Liad Wagman and Jian Jia (Ph.D. MSC ’20) have studied the effects—and the effectiveness—of local and state enforcement of those rules in Manhattan. Their research paper, “Platform, Anonymity, and Illegal Actors: Evidence of Whac-A-Mole Enforcement from Airbnb,” has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Law and Economics.

Their analysis reveals that illegal operators of Airbnb listings may try to evade detection and punishment by converting their entire-home listings into a less-enforced category of the Airbnb marketplace—single rooms—and thus a large apartment gets relisted as multiple single rooms. In recent events studied by Wagman and Jia, such sleight-of-hand took place after New York’s mayor publicly

Carolyn Shapiro

committed $10 million to enforcing STR laws and after New York State enacted stricter STR regulations.

“There are other approaches to regulating a market that are not solely brute force in terms of detecting illegal operators and punishing them. Alternate approaches can yield similar outcomes, require fewer resources [for enforcement], and result in less of this sneaky behavior [by STR owners],” says Wagman. As an alternative, he cites a model used in various cities that registers, regulates, and taxes STRs in cooperation and coordination with platforms such as Airbnb and VRBO. “[The cities] create rules in the market and work with the platforms to facilitate those rules being followed by individual operators,” Wagman explains. “That middle ground approach seems to be the way to go, because you get compliance, and tax revenue that can be put to good use.”

—Scott Lewis 3

Briefs › INNOVATION

Partnering for the Future of Illinois

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vision is unfolding on a large tract of vacant land in Chicago’s South Loop a few miles north of Illinois Institute of Technology’s Mies Campus. It is the future site of the Discovery Partners Institute, a collaborative research and education center led by the University of Illinois System that will fuel economic growth for Illinois and the city while nurturing and retaining next-generation talent. Illinois Tech became DPI’s academic partner in 2019.

The university is sharing its expertise in such critical areas as computing, data science, design thinking, food science, biomedical engineering, and intellectual property law. Illinois Tech will provide educational, cultural, and research activities including the exchange of faculty and students for research, lectures, and discussions.

“Illinois Tech is honored to marshal our resources as Chicago’s tech university in support of the Discovery Partners Institute’s vision,” says Illinois Tech President Alan W. Cramb. “We believe the future of Chicago—and the state—depends on expanding tech innovation to more of our fellow citizens as well as to new horizons of economic opportunity and entrepreneurship. Illinois Tech was founded on this mission more than 125 years ago, and we look forward to supporting that mission as a partner in the Discovery Partners Institute.”

With its focus on workforce development for in-demand tech jobs and on applied R&D to solve problems, DPI projects that in 10 years it will have trained and educated more than 7,000 students— including 3,000 from underrepresented and underserved backgrounds—and will help generate more than $200 million each year in economic activity through research and innovation programming.

To address the loss of jobs across Illinois because of the COVID-19 pandemic, DPI and the Chicago technology initiative P33

launched the program TechReady Illinois, an opportunity for in-state residents to gain new digital skills at discounted tuition rates in courses at various schools including Illinois Tech.

Over this past summer, DPI granted $125,000 in research and development funding to the I-Brain research team led by staff at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s College of Medicine and Illinois Tech. The I-Brain initiative is an expanded data repository for brain research. Also this summer, teams of faculty, graduate students, and researchers from Illinois Tech and other DPI academic partners as well as a number of Chicago entrepreneurs participated in the inaugural I-Corps program. The seven-week virtual boot camp for individuals interested in entrepreneurship provided them with knowledge about how to move their technology from a lab setting into the market and improve their chances of overall commercial success. The program is part of the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program. —Marcia Faye

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IMAGE: COURTESY OF DPI

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A rendering of the future Discovery Partners Institute headquarters—located within The 78 neighborhood set to open in 2025—in Chicago’s South Loop neighborhood

Illinois Tech Research

$ $

$

FACULTY PUBLICATION

A Machine Learning Approach to Finance

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ake note, STEM disciplines.

Machine learning is now beginning to reshape the finance industry.

In response, Illinois Institute of Technology Assistant Professor of Applied Mathematics Matthew Dixon has brought his research in algorithmic finance, financial modeling, and deep learning to bear in co-authoring a new textbook that rigor-

ously addresses applications of machine learning in the field. Machine Learning in Finance: From Theory to Practice, which was released in May by Springer, is written in collaboration with Paul Bilokon, chief executive officer and founder of Thalesians Ltd., and Igor Halperin, a research professor in financial engineering at New York University and artificial intelligence

research associate at Fidelity Investments.

“Together, we decided to write the most comprehensive book on the market, covering entirely new areas of machine learning based on our research and combining our industry knowledge, mathematical research, and educational ideas,” says Dixon, who began his career in structured credit trading at Lehman Brothers. He earned a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Imperial College London and focuses much of his machine-learning expertise on deep neural networks and their role in algorithmic trading.

The textbook equips graduate students and professionals in data science, engineering, and quantitative finance with the technical knowledge and skills to embark on high-income careers in trading and investment management, according to Dixon, who also serves as an affiliate assistant professor at Illinois Tech’s Stuart School of Business.

—Scott Lewis

ENGINEERING

Exploring New Avenues of Alloy Design

I Wei Chen ›

llinois Institute of Technology Assistant Professor Wei Chen has received the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award for innovative machine learning studies of lightweight and flexible high-entropy alloys, spearheading research efforts to design enhanced alloys that can be used to specifically improve mechanical applications. The CAREER award acknowledges Chen’s contributions to computational discovery and the design of new materials with high-performance computing and data mining titled “First-Principles Predictive Understanding of Chemical Order in

Complex Concentrated Alloys: Structures, Dynamics, and Defect Characteristics.”

“By using state-of-the-art artificial intelligence to advance the design of materials, we are promoting Illinois Tech’s strategic goal of growing our computational and computing capacities in research and education through data analytics and machine learning,” says Chen.

—Mary Ceron-Reyes Wei Chen, “First-Principles Predictive Understanding of Chemical Order in Complex Concentrated Alloys: Structures, Dynamics, and Defect Characteristics,” National Science Foundation ($500,000); NSF Grant Number: 1954380

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Briefs ›

Responding to the Pandemic

HEALTH AND WELLNESS

Illinois Tech Supports State’s COVID-19 Testing

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his spring a team of researchers at Illinois Institute of Technology produced 104,426 tubes of

viral transport medium (VTM) in support of state testing for COVID-19. The project came at the request of the Illinois Department of Public Health and ran for nearly two months.

Viral transport medium is a solution that preserves sample swabs until they are able to

COMPUTATION AND DATA

Modeling the Pandemic

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s a cautious pace necessary as society reopens its communities and economies during the COVID-19 pandemic?

Absolutely, says an Illinois Institute of Technology professor, who has been conducting research into controlling the spread of the virus as a part of any plan to ease shelter-in-place and business-lockdown restrictions.

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be tested for COVID-19. It is composed of a combination of substances that help to prevent growth of bacteria and fungi, in addition to controlling pH levels and stabilizing the virus, which preserves the swab samples.

Alvin Lee, an associate professor of food science and nutrition at Illinois Tech, oversaw the labs’ efforts.

“We saw it as an opportunity to help the state meet its testing goals,” Lee says. “Having said that, this was carefully planned so that we did not expose staff to additional risks.”

A team of 15 faculty, staff, and Ph.D. students utilized more than 10 labs at the university’s Institute for Food Safety and Health at Moffett Campus in Bedford Park, Illinois. The group produced and shipped about 13,000

tubes of VTM per week.

Researchers involved in the production of VTM worked on a schedule that allowed for social distancing, with only one or two people in a lab at any given time.

The schedule also allowed for sufficient cleaning of the labs between uses.

“This could be a once-ina-lifetime event, and we were happy that we were able to contribute, no matter how big or small, to help the state,” Lee says. “We had the right equipment, staff, and knowledge. We are happy with the outcome and happy that the governor acknowledged the contribution of Illinois Tech toward testing.” —Linsey Maughan

Sanjiv Kapoor, professor of computer science, earned a grant from the National Science Foundation to examine how easing shelter-in-place and business restrictions will affect the spread of COVID-19 cases. Kapoor developed a social distancing based Susceptible, Infectious, or Recovered (SIR) model studying the tradeoffs between the timing of removing these restrictions and increases in infection rates both in Illinois and New York state, where the virus spread quickly early on in the pandemic.

“Modeling the spread of the pandemic is a challenging task, as the spread of the infection is dependent on human contacts, general susceptibility, personal protective equipment measures, and other behavior,” Kapoor says.

Results show dramatic spikes in infection rates in both states if restrictions are lifted in a matter of weeks from peak of new cases, if too many people are released at a time, or if the daily rate of population release exceeds 1 percent after peak. —Casey Moffitt Note: The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed are those of the researcher(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Sanjiv Kapoor Illinois Tech Research

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Building a Solution

PHOTO: C.E. SAVAGE

Tim Truty started the app development by designing the back-end structure using a blob storage to house the data and then added some login information with tables and queues.

After the back-end infrastructure was complete, it was tested using a command line interface to get a file into the pipeline.

INNOVATION

An Azure Skies Approach to Solving Problems Remotely

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im Truty and his co-workers’ research at Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center was in jeopardy after the COVID-19 pandemic forced them out of the state-of-the-art facility in March. But Truty found a solution by using skills he learned in a Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform course at Illinois Institute of Technology.

Truty, who was then a secondyear information technology and management graduate student and a project coordinator of devices and technology at the Alzheimer’s center, which is located

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Tim Truty, holding an Azure Kinect camera

in Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, needed to share very large video files with 25 research assistants. The center’s study uses an Azure Kinect, a special camera that collects depth data to record video of Alzheimer’s patients walking. Analyzing this video helps researchers understand how people develop the disease.

The files are about 10 gigabytes and typically uploaded onto a physical hard drive. With everyone working from home, the researchers faced the possibility of being halted with a deadline tied to their grant funding looming. Using Truty’s steps [at right], the Rush staff members were able to upload the massive videos, and the project coordinators were able to view the files and download them from the same application, based on the sign-in page. —Casey Moffitt

1.

2.

He framed how he wanted the user interface to work and made some simple controls for the user to upload and download the file.

Truty tested it again using a small file.

Once that worked, he ramped up the size of the file.

Truty worked on different methods for splitting the file into chunks. Sending them to the back-end required overcoming roadblocks, including browser timeouts and upload file size limits.

The final product was a system with the Azure cloud infrastructure with a blob storage, web app, and queue and table.

PHOTO: DAVID ETTINGER

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Mohammad Shahidehpour

FACULTY PUBLICATION

Pandemic Power Systems Planning

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OVID-19 has sparked changes in demands on power systems and could have deeper implications as a result of shelter-in-place rules, according

to the director of Illinois Institute of Technology’s Robert W. Galvin Center for Electricity Innovation, The Distinguished Bodine Chair Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Mohammad Shahidehpour—who also oversees the university’s microgrid as part of his role at the Galvin Center—wrote an article about the pandemic’s impact on power system operations planning for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE).

He says that the power system has to be flexible, as the gap between a day’s highest-peak and lowest-valley points of power ebb and flow with demand. Data shows that usage drops during the middle of the day and spikes in the evening, even during the pandemic. The second challenge is the ability of power systems to manage voltages. System equipment can only handle a certain voltage range;

however, that range is increased when more solar power is added to the grid and usage is lowered.

“With the availability of advanced monitoring and communication technologies, it is possible to use aggregated levels of flexible loads as dispatchable resources for shifting and shaving power consumptions during peak periods,” writes Shahidehpour. “Flexible loads can significantly reduce peak-to-valley load differences in order to enhance the grid flexibility and increase the grid efficiency and reliability during critical days to come.”

Since power is cheaper when the demand is low, the article indicates that a better solution to help manage voltage is for users to employ smart technology that can help identify the best times for power usage. —Mary Ceron-Reyes 7

Briefs ›

PHOTO: DAVID ETTINGER

Alphonso Peluso and a group of Illinois Tech students are working to build lighter, cheaper, and more aesthetically pleasing, and customizable prostheses.

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INNOVATION

Designing the Perfect Fit

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hen Alphonso Peluso, an expert in digital design and studio associate professor at the College of Architecture, wanted to explore the architectural possibilities of 3D printing, he faced a problem: the discordant scales of buildings and currently available printers. But then it hit him; rather than apply 3D printing to architecture, why not apply architectural principals to another area that could benefit from 3D printing technology: the design and manufacturing of prosthetic limbs.

“Applying [3D printing] to prosthetics seemed like a great place to create alternatives and something beneficial, since the technology is relatively quick and relatively cheap,” says Peluso.

Through Illinois Institute of Technology’s RES-MATCH program, which pairs faculty and students with similar research interests, Peluso met Jennifer Sabatka (BME 2nd Year), a biomedical engineering student who had previously worked in prosthetics as a high school senior.

“I have always been interested in [prostheses]—how they look, how they function, and how they’re put together,” says Sabatka. “I’ve always wanted to explore how we could make them better.”

Sabatka worked with fellow engineering student Tran Le (BME ’20), Ekerin Agboola (ARCH ’20), and Edvin Nielsen Johansson, a third-year product-design engineering student from Sweden, to develop a process for 3D printing an aesthetically pleasing and high-performing prosthesis for transtibial (below the knee) amputees, who make up the majority of individuals living with amputations.

The team used generative design software, which optimizes the design to use the smallest amount of material possible while achieving the desired strength and durability to create the ideal structure. This, in turn, makes the prosthesis lighter and cheaper to produce than a handmade unit, while presenting opportunities to improve comfort.

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Illinois Tech Research

“On average, people with a [prostheses] burn twice as many calories as somebody who doesn’t,” says Sabatka. “So we decided a leg scan would be a part of the process so you can see how the muscle has healed over the bone to get the ideal shape.”

The project not only proposes a new future of higher-quality and more-equitable prostheses, but it also emphasizes the value of a cross-disciplinary approach to solving difficult design challenges.

“Seeing this project as an extension of architecture requires an adjustment of perspective,” adds Agboola. “Responding to this problem as an architect required abandoning my preconceptions about what belongs to architecture and what belongs to prosthetics.” —Andrew Connor

A close-up view of the material used in the transtibial prosthesis being developed by an Illinois Tech team

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BIOLOGY

PHOTO: OLIVIA DIMMER

Gobbling Up Ocean Plastics

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he National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates that 8 million metric tons of plastics enter the oceans annually, threatening wildlife and humans alike. But what if an organism could be used to break down the plastics? Over several semesters, a team of Illinois Institute of Technology students worked to genetically modify algae that could potentially eat away at this growing problem.

After learning about bacteria that can degrade plastic, the research team isolated the specific gene from the bacterial DNA and implanted the gene into E. coli, which can carry genes independently of its own chromosomes. For the next step, members are working to modify blue-green algae, which uses sunlight to produce its own food.

Since the algae does not ingest the plastic, its enzyme-producing gene must be modified to secrete the enzyme at a rate that will break down plastic efficiently. In theory, once the DNA is introduced to the algae through the E. coli, the algae should secrete the enzyme to break down plastics. —Casey Moffitt

[From left] Illinois Tech students Sadie Meunier (BCHM 4th Year) and Annah Ellingson (BIO 4th Year) work in the lab to genetically engineer algae that will degrade ocean plastics.

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Briefs › IMAGE: COURTESY OF FERMILAB NEWS

SCIENCE

Research Poised to Take a Quantum Leap

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llinois Institute of Technology is charging into the quantum information sciences with funding from the United States Department of Energy’s five-year, $575 million commitment to the National Quantum Initiative. It includes funding for five new Quantum Information Science Research Centers nationwide, of which two include Illinois Tech faculty.

John Zasadzinski, Paul and Suzi Schutt Endowed Chair in Science and professor of physics, performs superconducting tunneling spectroscopy on sample pieces from particle accelerator superconducting radio-frequency cavities. His proposal for the Superconducting Quantum Materials and Systems Center at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory incorporates using this form of spectroscopy to help identify the sources of decoherence in quantum bits (qubits) and potential ways to mitigate the problem. Such research should help increase the length of time a qubit can effectively process information.

While “bits” in conventional computers are transistors that are either off or on to create a binary logic system, qubits oscillate between two states, much like a pendulum, while conducting useful calculations during the motion. This ability makes a quantum computer much more efficient in terms of the resources of time and space that are needed to process complex computations with applications in a wide variety of fields from defense and financial trading to unraveling the myster-

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Illinois Tech Research

ies surrounding the origins of the universe.

“If we disrupt the pendulum, say, with a puff of air, we destroy the simple harmonic motion, it becomes decoherent, and the qubit becomes useless,” Zasadzinski says.

“The sources of decoherence in current superconducting-based qubits is the most important question in the field.”

Rakshya Khatiwada, assistant professor of physics and associate scientist at Fermilab, focuses on developing quantum sensors for ultra-light dark matter detection. She and two of her colleagues at Fermilab were awarded $4.1 million for their project through the Quantum Science Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Khatiwada’s project aims to develop a high throughput cryogenic testing facility for novel quantum sensors and devices that will be controlled through highly multiplexed readout electronics, an essential area of research in scaling up the qubit infrastructure for quantum computing and sensing.

“We are charting a new territory in the quantum science field by investigating and fabricating novel sensors and their readout techniques and are paving the way forward for science in this relatively new area,” Khatiwada says. “One of the current challenges in quantum computing is efficiently scaling up control and readout of a large array of qubits without adding significant heat load and bulky electronics in the dilution refrigerator, where quantum computers are built.”

With Khatiwada’s project, an array of novel qubits and devices will be controlled and readout with minimal electronics and heat load, which will be applicable not only to quantum computing, but also in developing highly sensitive dark matter detectors.

The Department of Physics at Illinois Tech is expanding its research and involvement in quantum science with its faculty and graduate students working in various subfields, including quantum materials and systems, sensing and computing, and collaborating with different academic, national labs, and industry partners. The NQI awards will fund the project from 2020–25 and will open many opportunities for students as well as for postdocs.

—Casey Moffitt

Social Media ›

Feature ›

PHOTO: DAVID ETTINGER

Patent Advances a Next-Generation Artificial Pancreas System

By Mary Ceron-Reyes

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rtificial pancreas technology has tremendous potential to improve the daily lives of people with Type 1 diabetes beyond what is achievable using traditional methods. New research led by Illinois Institute of Technology Professor of Chemical Engineering Ali Cinar provides the fundamental algorithms necessary for the next-generation technology to further advance artificial pancreas systems, while introducing a new approach for monitoring and regulating the glucose levels of people with diabetes.

His research team obtained a patent from the United States Patent and Trademark Office in May for its invention titled “Multivariable Artificial Pancreas Method and System.”

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Modules of the Multivariable AP System

Control System

Insulin Pump

Body

Glucose Sensor (CGM) Wearable Device (biometric)

Hypoglycemia prediction and rescue snack suggestion Hypoglycemia prediction and insulin blousing Exercise detection, type, and intensity classification Plasma, insulin, and glucose estimation

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AP fault detection and diagnosis, data reconciliation Acute psychological stress detection and classification

Additional new modules

Since 2004, Cinar—director of the Engineering Center for Diabetes Research and Education, and Hyosung S. R. Cho Endowed Chair in Engineering—alongside co-inventors Kamuran Turksoy (Ph.D. BME ’15) and Iman Hajizadeh (Ph.D. CHBE ’19), have been developing fully automated, multivariable artificial pancreas systems to automatically monitor and infuse insulin according to metabolic changes that occur in response to food consumption and physical activities. The team’s design consists of a glucose sensor, a wristband, a dedicated smart phone, and an insulin pump that is fully automated and does not require manual inputs from the user.

Cinar explains that the regulation of glucose levels requires people with diabetes to conduct an extensive amount of daily maintenance, including testing their blood glucose regularly with a fingerstick or use a continuous glucose 12

Illinois Tech Research

monitor. By making management of Type 1 diabetes easier and more precise, this technology could reduce the daily burden of this disease, while also potentially reducing diabetes complications.

While today’s hybrid AP systems still require frequent input and decisions from the user about when and how much insulin to administer, in comparison, a fully automated artificial pancreas alleviates that responsibility from people with diabetes, especially from those who are unable to take care of themselves.

Individuals with Type 1 diabetes must receive insulin from external sources to regulate the concentration of glucose— the main source of fuel for the body—in the blood. However, too much insulin or other diabetes medications may cause blood-sugar levels to drop too low, causing hypoglycemia.

The Illinois Tech team is further

developing the multivariable artificial pancreas to interpret the signals from the glucose sensor and the wristband for determining the presence, type, intensity, and duration of physical activities; the presence of acute psychological stress; and the characteristics of sleep. All of these factors affect blood-glucose concentration and an AP system can automatically mitigate their effects.

With current grants from the JDRF, Cinar and his researchers have been refining the algorithms that control their AP system by factoring in additional physiological signals, or bodily reactions, from wearable devices that indicate future variations in blood-glucose concentration.

By capturing the information in physiological variables reported by the wristband, Cinar says that his team can interpret the presence of physical activities, sudden Ali Cinar physiological stress, and sleep character-

Multivariable Artificial Pancreas (mAP): Closed-Loop Automated Insulin Delivery System

Biosignals Feedforward

Glucose Measurements (CGM) Feedback

Controller mAP

Insulin Pump

• System identification in real time: Recursively updated model to predict future glucose concentrations • Multivariable controller that mitigates effects of meals, exercise • Machine learning to discover the habits of the patients over time from historical data (previous days) and adjust the controller parameters

“This is important because to date, there have been very few studies that considered how an artificial pancreas functions in an environment of exercise and proactively manages the potential effects of exercise.” —Ali Cinar istics, and adjust insulin dosing even before these factors affect the glucose levels of individuals with diabetes. This helps to enable the glucose levels of people to remain within the desired range in spite of factors that would cause significant perturbations.

“This is important because to date, there have been very few studies that considered how an artificial pancreas functions in an environment of exercise

and proactively manages the potential effects of exercise,” says Cinar.

As stated in the patent description, this invention will “automatically predict and alarm the patient of a predicted future, low blood-glucose concentration,” determining and suggesting responsive measures including carbohydrate consumption. This new method incorporates the automated detection of food consumption and/or a rapid glucose-level increase without manual entries from the patient.

These new modules will also assist in detecting errors in the components and operation of the artificial pancreas to achieve a system that can function in the presence of various equipment errors and limitations in control algorithms.

“Our patented work will assist in making researchers and companies in the United States become aware of this integrative process,” says Cinar. “It will

help them develop algorithms to use for interpretations, resulting in better decisions on how much insulin to provide to patients using the artificial pancreas.”

Illinois Tech’s Office of Technology Development manages faculty intellectual property at the university and is in the process of identifying potential startup partners to commercialize this new technology for public use and benefit.

In addition, Cinar and his research team received a patent in 2014 for “Automatic Insulin Pumps Using Recursive Multivariable Models and Adaptive Control Algorithms.” This patent relates to developing adaptive models to describe and predict the glucose concentrations of the user and to automating insulin pumps to reduce or eliminate the need for patient inputs. ● These research efforts utilized resources supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under grants 1DP3DK101075-01 and 1DP3DK101077-01, and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation International (JDRF) under grants 17-2013-472 and 3-PDF-2016-175-A-N. Current funding from JDRF (2-SRA-2017-506M-B and 1-SRA-2019-819-S-B) enable further progress in treatment of diabetes and artificial pancreas research.

Video › Artificial Pancreas: Developing Devices for the Future of Diabetes Care

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Mask-Free Solution

Better Than a Lullaby

By Casey Moffitt

PHOTOS: DAVID ETTINGER

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Illinois Tech Research

› IIT Research Institute President and Director David McCormick consults with a member of his technical staff about the sleep apnea drug they are developing.

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avid McCormick, IIT Research Institute professor of biology and IITRI president and director, says research on a family of new chemical compounds convinces him that he is on the path to finding an unusually safe and effective drug to treat sleep apnea.

“The idea is that you take a pill, it becomes active in 15 minutes or so, it maintains its activity for seven or eight hours, and then you get up and go to work,” McCormick says. “[People with sleep apnea] will get more sleep. They will have many fewer apneas, and they’re going to wake up much less often during the night. Importantly, they are also very likely to have reduced risks of stroke, heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, and other diseases that are linked to sleep apnea.”

McCormick says he is encouraged not only by the efficacy of these compounds, but also by their safety.

United States Food and Drug Administration-mandated testing in preclinical models has shown very little toxicity, and none is detected until compounds are administered at doses that are 500 to 1,000 times greater than effective doses.

“That number is astronomical,” says McCormick, who is a diplomate of the American Board of Toxicology. “I’ve been doing preclinical toxicology for a long time, and I’ve never seen a drug like that.”

McCormick and his research collaborator, Nanduri Prabhakar, the Harold Hines Jr. Professor of Medicine at the University of Chicago, have spent the last five years developing and testing the family of amino-acid-based compounds, which maintain the tonal structure of the airways during sleep and modulate signal transmission in the carotid body. These factors underlie obstructive and central sleep apnea. Obstructive sleep apnea occurs when the airways are restricted. Central sleep apnea occurs when signals from the brain to the breathing muscles fail. In either case, patients stop breathing during the night, sometimes hundreds of times.

The FDA has not approved a drug to treat sleep apnea.

Treatments approved by the FDA for sleep apnea include oral appliances, but more common is the use of a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine, which uses mild air pressure to keep airways open.

More than 22 million Americans suffer from sleep apnea, according to the American Sleep Apnea Association, making it nearly as common as Type 2 diabetes—and a potentially large market for the drug.

Development and testing of the compound were funded with a five-year, $9.5 million grant from the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health.

McCormick and Prabhakar co-founded Anapneo Therapeutics to commercialize the intellectual property aspect and accelerate the translation of the lead compound into clinical trials, which are expected to begin in 2021.

In June 2019 Anapneo was selected to receive a $250,000 investment through the George Schultz Innovation Fund at the University of Chicago’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

The technology is licensed to ANP Therapeutics, a venture-capital-backed startup in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which now oversees the work Anapneo conducts.

McCormick earned a seat on the ANP Board of Directors, while he and Nanduri co-chair the startup’s Scientific Advisory Board. ●

Video ›

Illinois Tech Researchers Make Strides Toward First-Ever Sleep Apnea Drug

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› An artist’s concept of the Intracortical Visual Prosthesis System. The vision regions of the brain are stimulated by electrodes contained within Wireless Floating Microelectrode Arrays (WFMA) electronic modules. WFMA size shown relative to United States penny.

Electrode tip shown relative to human hair.

A group of WFMAs acts like an implanted cell-phone network for communicating vision information directly to the brain. Stimulation patterns derived from the camera image are communicated to the implant via a transcutaneous link with no wires that cross the scalp to produce the perception of artificial vision.

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Illinois Tech Research

IMAGE: COURTESY OF PHILIP TROYK

Vision Quest

By Mary Ceron-Reyes

While there is currently no cure for blindness, a first-of-its-kind artificial vision system that Illinois Institute of Technology researchers have developed will advance to clinical trials this year.

PHOTO: DAVID ETTINGER

IMAGE: COURTESY OF PHILIP TROYK

›

Wireless Floating Microelectrode Array (WFMA) device that will be implanted into the visual area of the brain. Eighteen tiny electrodes protrude from the 5mm diameter device. ›

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A WFMA undergoes electrical testing in the laboratory to assure functionality. The completed WFMA will be packaged for sterilization before being implanted into the recipient’s visual area of the brain located in the lower back of the head.

he National Institutes of Health has awarded $2.5 million for the first year of a three-year project that includes implanting a new type of wireless visual prosthesis system in volunteers.

Funding will be provided as part of the NIH’s The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative.

The implant system was developed by a multi-institutional team led by Philip R. Troyk—executive director of the Pritzker Institute of Biomedical Science and Engineering, professor of biomedical engineering, and affiliated professor in Stuart School of Business—and represents the culmination of nearly three decades of Illinois Tech research dedicated to ultimately providing artificial sight to those with blindness due to eye disease or trauma.

“This is an incredibly exciting moment, not just for the field of biomedical science, but more importantly for people with blindness and their loved ones around the world,” says Troyk.

Since many individuals affected by total blindness do not have intact retinas or optic nerves but retain the visual cortex—the area of the brain that allows people to see—an intracortical visual prosthesis may be the only possible advanced visual prosthesis from which they can benefit.

The Intracortical Visual Prosthesis System is the first intracortical visual implant to use a group of fully implanted miniaturized wireless stimulators to help explore whether individuals with no sight can visualize rendered images in real time through visual perception. The system also allows devices to be implanted for an extended period of time, which is a unique advantage that provides researchers ample time to explore how the device can work effectively, and for the recipient to learn how the device can be useful.

The research team began the clinical trial process this September, with implant surgeries scheduled to take place at Rush University Medical Center in early 2021. Illinois Tech will partner with The Chicago Lighthouse; Johns Hopkins

University; the University of Texas at Dallas; Microprobes for Life Science; Sigenics, Inc.; and The University of Chicago on the initiative, with Troyk serving as the principal investigator. In addition, Illinois Tech’s Department of Psychology is also a team participant in the research project. ● Disclaimer: Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number UH3NS095557.

This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

Philip R.Troyk, “Clinical Testing of an Intracortical Visual Prosthesis System,” National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke ($2,522,750); Grant number 4UH3NS095557-03.

Video ›

First-of-Its-Kind Artificial Vision System Moves to Clinical Trials

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Exploring the Impact Exploring the Impact of on Veterans with COP on Veterans with COPD

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Illinois Tech Research

ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: DAVID ETTINGER 123RF

tIndoor of Indoor Air Quality Air Quality PD

By Mary Ceron-Reyes

By Mary Ceron-Reyes

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any United States armed forces veterans with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease—a progressive lung disease that can cause coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, chest tightness, and other complications—may soon have a chance to breathe a sigh of relief, thanks to Illinois Institute of Technology faculty researchers. Last fall the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded the university a $1 million research grant so that Brent Stephens and his team could investigate the impact of home air quality Many United States armed forces veterans with chronic obstructive on veterans’ health.

pulmonary disease—a progressive lung disease that can cause coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, chest tightness, and other complications— may soon have a chance to breathe a sigh of relief, thanks to Illinois Institute of Technology faculty researchers. Last fall the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development awarded the university a $1 million research grant so that Brent Stephens his [atteam investigate Brent Stephens right] andcould Marina Beke, a master’s student in the › Professor and architectural engineering, set up a portable air purifier for testing in a newly constructed large chamber test facility designed by Assistant Professor impact of home air quality on veterans’ health.

Mohammad Heidarinejad.

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An artist’s rendering of human lungs, with a close-up view of a bronchiole leading to an alveolus. The alveolus is the site of gaseous exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between inhaled air and the bloodstream.

Stephens, professor and chair of Armour College of Engineering’s civil, architectural, and environmental engineering department, is leading the study, which focuses on Chicago-area veterans being treated at the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center. In collaboration with Mohammad Heidarinejad, assistant professor of architectural engineering, the team is exploring the effectiveness of stand-alone air filtration for improving indoor air quality, specifically assessing individuals with COPD. The team is also exploring the utility of using low-cost indoor air quality sensors for informing both doctors and patients.

The duo is partnering with Israel “Rudi” Rubinstein, M.D.—a professor of medicine at the University of Illinois College of Medicine and associate chief of staff for research and development at the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center—and Elevate Energy to investigate potential housing-related factors that may contribute to increased COPD exacerbations, particularly within underserved, socioeconomically disadvantaged neighborhoods of Chicago.

Veterans will use high-efficiency air cleaners in their homes for two years, aiding researchers in gathering air-quality results and assessing COPD health outcomes as compared with results of individuals who live in homes without air cleaners.

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Illinois Tech Research

“We are working with veterans, but the research results could help everyone with COPD and give doctors new tools for helping their patients,” says Stephens. “And the team uniquely integrates engineering, medicine, and public health to address the issue.”

The Jesse Brown VA Medical Center experienced nearly 11,000 clinic visits and 700 emergency room visits from patients with COPD in FY18, costing more than $2.3 million for treatment, as noted in the HUD grant application. If the air cleaners show benefits, they could become standard measures that could be prescribed by doctors. And if the low-cost air quality sensors prove to be useful, they could become an easy tool for doctors to help assess whether home air quality may be impacting the COPD of their patients. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that COPD is the third leading cause of chronic morbidity and mortality in the U.S. and, in addition, the World Health Organization projects it will rank third in 2030 in burden of disease caused worldwide.

This past summer Stephens and Heidarinejad were awarded Illinois Tech’s Summer 2020 Faculty Innovation Grant, sponsored by the university’s offices of Career Services and Student Success and Strategic Initiatives, recognizing educational activities that provide meaningful career and professional development for

PHOTO: ELENA ZHUKOVA

“We are working with veterans, but the research results could help everyone with COPD and give doctors new tools for helping their patients.” —Brent Stephens

students. The grant helped to directly support the purchase of low-cost air quality monitors delivered to students’ homes, thus providing them with the opportunity to evaluate the monitors’ overall effectiveness. The students published their findings and results in blog posts throughout the semester.

The information will help to inform which low-cost sensors will be employed for the COPD research study.

Stephens and Heidarinejad run the Built Environment Research Group at Illinois Tech, which is dedicated to investigating problems and solutions related to energy and air quality within the built environment. Stephens’s major research areas include indoor pollutant dynamics, building science measurements and methods, air cleaning and filtration, human exposure assessment, and building energy efficiency and energy simulation.

Heidarinejad is co-director of BERG, with expertise in building science, multiscale modeling of the built environment, building energy and environmental systems, building energy simulations, computational fluid dynamics, building control, and sustainable and smart cities. ●

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Brent Stephens and Mohammad Heidarinejad, “Air Filtration to Improve Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) Outcomes in a High-Risk Urban Population of U.S. Military Veterans,” U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development ($1 Million)

Dan Zhao (Ph.D ENVE ’20) samples building materials for microbial growth in Brent Stephens’s lab.

Social Media › PHOTO: DAVID ETTINGER

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The project team is testing the utility of low-cost consumer-grade sensors for monitoring indoor air quality in the homes of military veterans with COPD and reporting results to their physicians.

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PHOTO: DAN CHICHESTER

Rewriting Unfair Ticketing Practices

By Andrew Connor

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Illinois Tech Research

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n early 2018 an investigation by the ProPublica Illinois investigative journalism team revealed that thousands of Chicagoans, most from low-income and minority neighborhoods, were forced into bankruptcy after they incurred debts through parking tickets and other non-moving traffic offenses. A joint report with WBEZ, Chicago’s National Public Radio station, further revealed a pattern of fee accrual and, in many instances, repeat tickets for the same offenses, leading to a debt spiral.

In light of the revelations, the City of Chicago created the Fines, Fees & Access Collaborative—a group of city departments, community organizations, elected officials, and academic institutions including Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design (ID)—to address the inequities of Chicago’s ticketing practices.

“Having academic partners pushes us to think outside of the box. That’s especially from the user end, which I think is really important for the government to look at more,” says Chicago City Clerk Anna Valencia.

Led by ID Professor Mark Jones (M.Des. ’95), a class of 18 students conducted secondary research—analyzing how other cities handled similar problems—and interviewed roughly 60 Chicago residents to learn about their interactions with the city in regard to parking tickets. Students found vocal residents bemoaning a lack of clear and easy-to-access information from the city.

“As we did the research, we saw the communications weren’t working well.

People weren’t understanding, they’re confused, not getting the messages,” says Jones. “One thing that came through is how much people rely on word of mouth, and that the official channels where people are supposed to learn things aren’t effective; word of mouth isn’t always accurate. I think residents, particularly in low-income neighborhoods, feel as though they’re not being taken care of well. They feel as though the city is not trying to prevent them from getting into trouble.”

The students then honed in on a suite of solutions to improve communication between the city and citizens, to help avoid tickets and build trust. One example is a Tailored Ticket Roadmap, an online portal that graphically breaks down how much money an individual may owe and important dates—when to contest or when a fine doubles—to offer residents a clearer understanding of how to approach their debt.

Similarly, a mobile lawyer program could provide unfairly ticketed individuals, especially lower-income individuals who may not otherwise have the resources to challenge a ticket, with guidance on how to contest.

Though these specific interventions have not been adopted by the city, the root findings from the ID team have been invaluable and have informed the development of new-and-improved communications and programs, according to city officials. In addition, the project was recognized as a Fast Company Innovation

by Design finalist in the Students category.

“The research and proposals presented to us by Illinois Institute of Technology have been at the center of the Fines, Fees, & Access Collaborative’s policy-crafting strategy moving forward,” says Treshonna Nolan, a representative from the Office of the City Clerk. “Unfortunately, our office won’t have the opportunity to go out into the community with our previously developed programs due to [COVID-19] safety concerns, but we’re continuing to improve our e-commerce platform, creating a more user-friendly experience. Our office is also working with members of the Fines, Fees, & Access Collaborative and City [of Chicago] departments to continue building a better system for our residents.” ●

ID’s Mobile Lawyer In Action

Step 1

Beginning the contesting conversation with your personal lawyer

Step 2

Contesting overview

Step 3

Your evidence

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PHOTO: SCOTT BENBROOK

Peer Navigators Lend Support to African Americans with Serious Mental Illness

By Linsey Maughan

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ew research from Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago Health Disparities Center explores the benefits of providing “peer navigators” to members of marginalized populations struggling with health issues. The latest study, wrapping up in 2020, examines the impact of peer navigator support on the diet and exercise habits of African Americans with serious mental illness.

Patrick Corrigan, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology and director of the center, is spearheading the research alongside Senior Research Associate Lindsay Sheehan. The study is funded

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Illinois Tech Research

by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities.

“People with serious mental illness get sick and die 20 years before everyone else, and if they’re of color, it’s even worse,” Corrigan says. “Another problem is obesity, which is one of the biggest concerns for people getting sick, and even bigger for people with serious mental illness and people in the Black community. We wanted to focus on diet and exercise [in this study]—the innovative part is the peer navigator.”

Peer navigators involved in the program are members of the same demographic as the study participants who themselves have

› Patrick Corrigan [left] and Sonya Ballentine, of the Chicago Health Disparities Center

“People with serious mental illness get sick and die 20 years before everyone else, and if they’re of color, it’s even worse.”

—Patrick Corrigan

to your community and see you in your neighborhood, park, grocery store.’”

The study was developed through a 15-month communitybased participatory research program, wherein the target population weighed in on the planning. One-third of participants make individual efforts toward improving diet and exercise habits, one-third are assigned randomized diet and exercise programs, and one-third are assigned peer navigators to help support their diet and exercise efforts. In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, the study’s 2020 participants have been connecting with peer navigators by phone rather than in person.

Corrigan and Sheehan will spend 2021 analyzing their research findings and sharing that information. They also plan to pursue more studies involving peer navigators and other underserved groups. ● Research reported in this article is supported by two grants from the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities, of the National Institutes of Health, under award numbers U101MD01054101 ($2,392,826) and 1R24MD007925-01 ($1,214,548). The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

adopted successful diet and exercise habits and are able to share what they’ve learned with others.

“The navigator works in the world helping the person actually get to the places they need to go to achieve their goals,” Corrigan says. “The very real task of walking someone around supportively is essential to navigating.”

All study participants live on the South Side of Chicago, which presents its own challenges to diet and exercise success. Many of the participants live within food and activity deserts, meaning there is a lack of access to grocery stores selling healthy foods in addition to a lack of access to safe and suitable outdoor spaces for exercise. “[Factoring in those barriers] takes these health issues and puts them in the social justice perspective,” Corrigan says. “You live in parts of the city where you can’t get good food or where you can’t go out and walk. [Within our study] we have this peer navigator that goes in and helps you deal wherever you live. The essence of the peer navigator is, ‘I see you in your space, I come

Video ›

Chicago Health Disparities Center

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PHOTO: COURTESY OF MAR HICKS

Rewriting the History of Gender and Technology

By Linsey Maughan

Mar Hicks has a lot going on.

Since receiving the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize from the American Historical Association in 2019 for their debut book, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing (MIT Press), the associate professor of history has been working on a number of book projects and is a go-to expert for major media outlets seeking commentary on issues related to the history of gender and technology.

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Illinois Tech Research

“At times like these, it might seem like nothing we do matters. In the U.S. right now we are seeing unapologetic cruelty at scale, we are seeing destruction of lives, and we are seeing viciousness directed at people who have had to struggle the most historically to be heard, be free, and exercise their rights.” —Mar Hicks

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he Massachusetts native, who has been a faculty member in the Illinois Institute of Technology Department of Humanities since fall 2011, says they were originally motivated to write Programmed Inequality because of the high number of women of older generations they’d known who had worked in computing, including their own mother, who was a programmer.

“I knew there were a lot of women who had done this work, and then somehow the gender of the field had flipped,” Hicks says. “Nobody really talked about how and why that happened.”

Hicks focused their research on the United Kingdom’s rise and fall in the field of computing, and discovered along the way how gendered labor played a role in the decline of computing in the U.K. The lessons learned “can be applied far beyond the U.K. context,” Hicks says.

Hicks spent the 2018–19 academic year in North Carolina as the recipient of a Founders’ Fellowship through the National Humanities Center, during which they worked on several projects including a new book they are writing, Digital Resistance: Hidden Histories of the Electronic Age. “Digital Resistance investigates the history of users’ resistance to hegemonic technological systems,” Hicks says, “including the early history of work-from-home computer programmers, of women-designed computer dating systems, and of transphobic algorithmic bias in the mainframe era—and trans people’s attempts to push back against it.”

In spring 2021 Your Computer Is on Fire, a book Hicks co-edited, will be published by MIT Press. It looks at problems around large techno-social infrastructures that are a part of our daily life. Halcyon Lawrence (M.S. TCOM ’10, Ph.D. ’13), who is now an assistant professor at Towson University, also contributed an essay to the collection.

Hicks has also begun working on two other books.

From the Ashes: How Disasters Highlight Flaws in the Social Contract and Advance Technological Progress

looks at technological disasters throughout history that in the end helped shape national and global infrastructures.

Women in Mathematics (MIT Press), on which Hicks is a co-writer of this updated, rewritten, and expanded version of Lynn M. Osen’s earlier volume, will “help diversify, contextualize, and reorient the history of the field.”

When difficulties arise, Hicks says, it is important to continue teaching and learning about the humanities.

“At times like these, it might seem like nothing we do matters. In the U.S. right now we are seeing unapologetic cruelty at scale, we are seeing destruction of lives, and we are seeing viciousness directed at people who have had to struggle the most historically to be heard, be free, and exercise their rights,” says Hicks.

“This is when the work of humanists and historians matters the most. When we’re up against a power structure that doesn’t care about our humanity, that’s when we have to redouble our efforts to show how important these subjects are, and how they keep us moving forward.” ●

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Ushering in a New Internet Era

By Casey Moffitt

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nita Nikolich, Illinois Institute of Technology computer science research professor, was named a co-director of the National Science Foundation FABRIC (Adaptive Programmable Research Infrastructure for Computer Science and Science Applications) project, led by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with Illinois Institute of Technology, Clemson University, the University of Kentucky, and the Department of Energy’s Energy Sciences Network as partners. FABRIC’s goal is to enable scientists to explore what a new internet could look like and to determine the internet architecture of the future. The first high-speed node in the $20 million project is going up in Chicago, in preparation for early experimentation by researchers and industry partners seeking to build the future internet.

“The internet was designed to move packets of information and to allow people to talk between a few locations,” Nikolich says. “By the late 1990s it grew to include people using it in their daily lives. These protocols are not scaled for today’s uses.”

The FABRIC project’s 2020 plans also include global smart city experiments in cooperation with the Chicago-based Array of Things and internet of things sensors based in Georgia to imagine how cities can use artificial intelligence and share data in real time to improve urban quality of life.

It will also test new network designs that will allow experimentation with decentralized architectures instead of relying on current service providers’ networks. This could potentially enable faster speeds, allow transfers of larger data sets, provide service to underserved areas, and find new ways to protect transferred information.

These designs will be tested on a nationwide scale using dedicated high-speed optical links between locations. A new $3 million grant, FAB: FABRIC Across Borders, extends FABRIC internationally to Tokyo; the CERN particle accelerator facility in Geneva; Amsterdam; and Bristol, England, with each node testing cuttingedge technologies such as 5G wireless networking, data collection and transmission, cloud computing, and smart city efforts. ● This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. (1935966) and Grant No. (2029260).

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Illinois Tech Research

Research Professor Anita Nikolich makes adjustments to a computer system at the Ocient Computational Center on Illinois Tech’s Mies Campus.

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PHOTO: OLIVIA DIMMER

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Office of Research 10 West 35th Street IIT Tower, 7th Floor Chicago, IL 60616