Illinois Tech Research 2021 (external)

Research Illinois Tech

2021

Constant Energy

Creating the Hardware to Make DC Electricity More Accessible

Sensible Science

Using Basic Chemistry, Physical Approaches to Improve Quality of Life

Map Quest

First-of-Its-Kind Atlas of the Older Adult Brain

Letter from the Vice Provost for Research ›

Illinois Institute of Technology is not as large as some of our sister institutes of technology, but it definitely has wide-ranging interests, which include architecture, business, design, and the human sciences in addition to engineering and the natural sciences. Our research community includes students, faculty, and staff. We proactively involve underrepresented minorities in our scholarly efforts. This diversity helps us better address urgent social issues, particularly with the university being situated in Chicago.

Much of Illinois Tech’s research falls under one or more of the umbrellas that comprise the university’s main research initiatives: computation and data, health and wellness, and urban futures. I hope that you will enjoy learning about our work on COVID-19 treatments, cancer treatments, and mapping the brains of older adults to improve disease detection. Our faculty and students have been exploring using fly ash for construction, better monitoring air quality to understand the spread of disease, and studying synergies within businesses and other entities to quantify their sustainability performance. We recently received a major grant to further develop an explainable artificial intelligence algorithm to detect fake news. This and much more can be explored in this year’s Illinois Tech Research magazine.

If you have questions about the research featured here, please contact the faculty to learn more. You may also contact me at hickernell@iit.edu.

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

Contents ›

Illinois Tech Features

Research

2021

Briefs 2 COVID-19/Built Environment 3 Learning in 3D 4 Chicago’s Modernist Homes 5 Unveiling Anonymous Extremists 6 Space Weather 7 BioCAT’s Biomedical Research 8 Defending the Right to Travel 9 Harvesting Energy

12

Building the Tools for DC Electricity

Buoyed by multimillion-dollar grants, an engineering professor aims to build the tools needed to make direct current electricity more prevalent.

14

Quantifying the Growth of Law

10 SoReMo Initiative 11 Medical Imaging Radiation

A law professor is part of a large international research project that studies the growth—in actual words, and how those words connect to and reference each other—of law.

On the Cover

Grainger Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering John Shen and his research team are working to develop state-of-the-art versions of solid-state circuit breaker technologies for direct current (DC) electricity. Some of the team’s work appears on a computer screen.

16

Creating Concrete with Fly Ash

Through a nearly $1 million grant, a civil engineering professor, along with his academic and commercial partners, is examining if fly ash can be incorporated in high volumes in precast concrete applications.

20 22 24 26

18

Mapping the Older Adult Brain

Having built an atlas of the young-adult brain, a biomedical engineering professor is now focused on creating a first-of-its-kind atlas of the average brain of an older adult.

A Pragmatic Approach to Treating Pelvic Floor Prolapse

A chemistry professor and her research team are actively testing the viability of cocoons from silkworms to regenerate and restore vital pelvic floor tissue and prevent prolapse

Using Design to Demystify Cancer Treatments

Working with a doctor from UChicago Medicine, a design professor has created guides to help patients better understand their cancer treatment.

Breaking the Data Bottleneck

Researchers at Illinois Tech, along with collaborators, have created a new deep memory and storage hierarchy software system designed to reduce bottlenecks in data movement from storage to memory in high-performance computing.

Completing the Loop

New state funding will allow Illinois Tech to complete the original vision for its microgrid, the nation’s first funtional smart microgrid.

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 ›

HEALTH AND WELLNESS

Sang Baum “Solomon” Kang

COMPUTATION AND DATA

Finance Researchers Show Their Mettle in Futures Predictability Study

R

esearchers at Illinois Institute of Technology’s Stuart School of Business have done some heavy lifting in a study of the industrial metals market, with results that yield direct benefits for finance professionals and other businesspeople who focus on commodities futures.

In “Do the Basis and Other Predictors of Futures Return Also Predict Spot Return with the Same Signs and Magnitudes? Evidence from the LME,” published in the Journal of Commodity Markets, Associate Professor of Finance Sang Baum “Solomon” Kang and one of his former students, Amazon.com, Inc. economist Jian Jia (Ph.D. MSC ’20), investigate spot-futures convergence, a principle about how futures and spot prices should move together. They tested their hypotheses using a 20-year span of data from the London Metal Exchange (LME), a leading international platform for publicly trading industrial metals.

“We theoretically show that most predictors [used by analysts in spot and futures price prediction models] forecast spot and futures returns with the same sign and magnitude, but the futures-spot basis is an exception,” Kang says. “The coefficient of the basis in a predictive regression for futures return must be lower than that for spot return, and this is the simplest explanation for why the basis negatively predicts futures returns. We empirically show that these theoretical restrictions make speculative and hedging strategies in commodity markets more accurate.”

“Our findings are valuable for finance practitioners who need to predict both futures and spot prices, such as investors and hedgers,” Kang adds, “as well as producers, storage operators, commodity processors, and others in industries that use the metals.”

This work also moves academic research in the field forward, according to Kang, by documenting a novel restriction on the co-movement of spot and futures prices and measuring futures returns consistently with economic theory.

—Scott Lewis

2

Illinois Tech Research

Researchers at Illinois Tech, led by Professor of Food Science and Nutrition Indika Edirisinghe, have discovered that adding orange pomace, a byproduct of orange juice production, to orange juice can boost its nutritional value and bring it closer to offering the same nutritional value as consuming an actual orange. Participants who drank the juice with orange pomace experienced a 6.2 percent decrease in their maximal glucose concentration, while those who ate an orange experienced an 8 percent reduction. —Andrew Wyder

HEALTH AND WELLNESS

Up in the Air: Understanding COVID-19’s Effect on the Built Environment Be it studying the spread of COVID-19 on a cruise ship or testing air purifiers that are marketed to defend against the same virus, Illinois Tech Professor Brent Stephens has spent the last year and a half studying SARS-CoV-2’s effect on the built environment. The work of Stephens and his colleagues has been highlighted in the New York Times and Building and Environment, and has played a role in helping the world better understand COVID-19’s indoor impact. —Andrew Wyder

ENGINEERING

Rocket Woman

A

ndy de Fonseca (AE 4th Year) has been spending a lot of time with her head in the clouds and her eyes on the stars. But don’t mistake her for just being a daydreamer. The overachieving Armour College of Engineering undergraduate student spent her summer interning at Stratolaunch—a company that manufactures, designs, and launches aerospace vehicles—as a Brooke Owens Fellow. She was one of 44 fellows chosen from more than 800 applicants to receive the competitive aerospace award, given to women students and genderminority undergraduate students.

COMPUTATION AND DATA

Learning in 3D: New Labs, Tools Provide Students the Resources to Solve Problems

A

rmour College of Engineering students will be able to harness the power of technology to address issues ranging from treating human disease to infrastructure and construction development through recent industry partnerships.

Natacha DePaola, professor of biomedical engineering, has launched the Illinois Tech Digital Medical Engineering and Technology (IDMET) Research and Education Center, with a mission to develop new technologies for diagnosing, treating, and managing human diseases.

Part of IDMET’s mission is to foster relationships between academia and industry; software company Dassault Systèmes is a founding partner and sponsor of IDMET. Through this partnership, IDMET has developed several research and education projects using the Dassault Systèmes’s 3DEXPERIENCE platform. 3DEXPERIENCE integrates multiple state-of-the-art digital tools supporting the creation of 3D models, simulations, product development, and collaborative project management.

“We need a workforce that can be equipped to really address these complex-

ities that the Fourth Industrial Revolution has brought, and a key element for success is proficiency in the use of advanced digital tools,” says DePaola.

Illinois Tech also has received a gift from Trimble to establish the state-of-the-art Trimble Technology Lab for the Department of Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering’s construction engineering and management program.

Among the applications that will be made possible through the partnership include conceptual design, estimating, structural engineering and analysis, project management, and office-to-field solutions.

The lab will include a broad range of Trimble’s industry-leading solutions, such as the Trimble XR10 HoloLens with hardhat, Trimble SiteVision augmented reality solution, 3D laser scanners, and Trimble total stations. Advanced software solutions include RealWorks scanning software, Trimble Business Center, ProjectSight, Tekla Structures, Tekla Structural Designer, Tekla Tedds, Trimble Connect, and the company’s popular 3D modeling software, SketchUp Pro. —Andrew Wyder

Even with the pandemic upending life in 2020, de Fonseca was able to secure a $5,000 scholarship from the NASA-affiliated Illinois Space Grant Consortium, a $7,500 supporting summer research experience from the National Science Foundation, and $5,000 in an award honoring distinguished undergraduates from the Universities Space Research Association. —Marcia Faye

3

Briefs ›

URBAN FUTURES

Social Networking: Using Games to Connect to the Community

I

n the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cliff Rome, who runs Parkway Ballroom in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, needed a new hook for the historic event space. Rome saw this challenge as an opportunity for which he believed Illinois Institute of Technology and its Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship were the ideal partners.

Rome was connected with Bo Rodda, a senior lecturer in Illinois Tech’s signature Interprofessional Projects (IPRO) Program, and Illinois Tech students through the Kaplan Institute’s IPRO Labs program to reimagine the historic facility as Parkway Social, a revitalized space that would focus on connecting and building relationships with community members through social activities such as gaming.

IPRO Labs, which was launched in the spring 2021 semester, consists of labs that expose students to an unmet need derived by one community or industry partner.

The real-world, hands-on experiences in IPRO Labs allow Illinois Tech students to help these partners by working to find solutions to a need that is unique to them.

“The real reason why I’ve been wanting to do gaming and a GameLab is that I see that as a critical component for the university moving forward,” Rodda says. “When I say gaming, I think of gaming as an entry point into a much broader discussion of developing immersive technologies, interactive technologies, and technologies that engage the physical space of the physical environment.” —Andrew Wyder

Patrick Ireland

URBAN FUTURES

Support for Welfare Decreases as Diversity Increases, Study Finds

T

he relationship between migration and the welfare state in Europe and in North America is examined in a forthcoming publication from Professor of Political Science Patrick Ireland, who conducted a literature review on the topic and identified areas where further research is needed.

In “Migration, Diversity, and the Welfare State: Moving Beyond Attitudes” (Handbook

on Migration and Welfare, January 2022), Ireland analyzes the scholarly debate over whether the growing ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity that migrants bring to North America and Europe is resulting in changes in public attitudes and public policy regarding welfare benefits.

“While a lot of [quantitative] research has been done on the effect of diversity on popular attitudes about who should receive social benefits, the crucial link between attitudes and public policies has not received enough attention,” he says. “And to take the next logical step means moving beyond policy outputs to real-world outcomes: how welfare delivery truly operates in diversifying societies.”

Ireland found that much research shows that in the United States, public support of welfare benefits has decreased as the country has diversified.

“Social benefits are more under attack when the people getting the benefits are viewed as not being from the same group as the people paying them,” Ireland says.

“As the recipients of welfare are defined by right-wing populists as a mixed group of ‘undeserving’ people and not just ‘deserving’ white factory workers, support declines in the majority population. There are studies that have reached different findings for the U.S., however, and the picture in Canada and Western Europe is mixed.”

—Linsey Maughan

FACULTY PUBLICATION

Faculty Book Details the Remarkable History of Chicago’s Modernist Homes

F

aculty and alumni of Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture made lasting contributions to Chicago’s skyline by designing some of the city’s most noteworthy high-rises during the mid-twentieth century. Yet, while Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s students and cohorts commonly applied their skills to large-scale projects, many also took their design skills to the city’s residential neighborhoods and outlying suburban cities and villages.

Their designs are presented in Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929–75, co-authored

by Michelangelo Sabatino—College of Architecture professor, Ph.D. program director, and former dean—and historian Susan S. Benjamin. Through archival photos and written histories, Modern in the Middle tells the story for the first time of how Modernist architects in Chicago simultaneously experimented with tall buildings and forward-thinking singlefamily homes.

The book has been extensively reviewed in the local, national, and international press for detailing the overlooked story of Chicago’s Modernist homes. Most recently, it received a Docomomo Modernism in America Award, which recognizes and celebrates work that documents, preserves, or reuses Modernist architecture in the United States. —Andrew Connor Michelangelo Sabatino

4

Illinois Tech Research

COMPUTATION AND DATA

ILLUSTRATION: SCOTT BENBROOK

Unveiling Anonymous Extremists

S

ince 9/11, the United States has been focused on terrorist threats abroad, but that effort has not grown to include the growing internet activity of domestic extremists. Research conducted by two Illinois Institute of Technology graduate students aims to change that by examining

whether extremists can be identified through their anonymous online posts.

Andreas Vassilakos (ITM/M.A.S. CYF ’21) and Jose Luis Castanon Remy (M.A.S. ITM 2nd Year) published “Illicit Activities Beneath the Surface Web: Investigating Domestic Extremism on Anonymous Social Media

Platforms” in HOLISTICA Journal of Business and Public Administration. Maurice Dawson, Illinois Tech assistant professor of information technology and management, and Tenace Kwaku Setor, assistant professor of information science and technology at the University of Nebraska Omaha, co-authored the paper.

The researchers examined online platforms where anonymous extremist rants and thoughts are found. “Through these platforms, we were able to analyze data that was posted in plain text,” Vassilakos says. “We did not interpret the content, but collected it verbatim.”

Using Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) software input values, data from the social media posts were collected and then moved into a spreadsheet for analysis.

By combining OSINT with artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques, the researchers hope to be able to identify anonymous posters.

“With this intelligence-gathering strategy, we can collect publicly available data to conduct our analysis,” Vassilakos says.

Using tools such as Maltego, the researchers can examine IP addresses, MAC addresses, and mobile devices to unveil the identity of the poster. The researchers believe this work can translate to applications for military and police investigations.— Casey Moffitt

URBAN FUTURES

Developing a New Way to Measure Sustainability Outcomes

L

ife cycle sustainability assessments (LCSA) evaluate the environmental, economic, and social costs and benefits of products and processes, which can help businesses, governmental agencies, and other entities compare options from the viewpoint of sustainability. Illinois Institute of Technology Associate Professor Weslynne Ashton is part of a research team that is developing a new methodology aimed at broadening the scope of the resources that are considered in the assessments and quantifying the results to generate more robust and meaningful comparisons.

In “Capital-based Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment: Evaluation of Potential Industrial Symbiosis Synergies,” published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology, Ashton and co-authors Shauhrat S. Chopra and Karpagam Subramanian, both from the City University of Hong Kong, focus their sustainability assessment on capitals—that is, resources that create value. Their LCSA encompasses eight capitals: natural, social,

financial, cultural, manufactured, political, human, and digital.

“Trying to quantify the contribution of these different of types of capital is a completely new perspective,” says Ashton, a sustainable systems scientist with joint appointments at Illinois Tech’s Stuart School of Business and Institute of Design.

The methodology builds on groundbreaking theoretical work on the eight capitals by Ashton and ID colleagues Charles L. Owen Professor in Design Carlos Teixeira and Andre Nogueira (Ph.D. DSGN ’19) that was published in 2019.

“Reusing and recycling material capital— such as metals or industrial byproducts— puts it back into use, that is, regenerates the capital stock,” Ashton explains, and a similar process applies to non-material resources that societies rely on, such as cultures and political systems. “We are trying to elevate [society’s] perception of the value of non-material resources to sustainability,” she says. —Scott Lewis Weslynne Ashton

5

Briefs ›

COMPUTATION AND DATA

Research Signals Need for More Accurate Space Weather Forecasts

R

esearch from Seebany Datta-Barua, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology, shows just how impactful Earth’s space weather environment is.

At altitudes ranging from 100–1,000 kilometers above the surface of the planet, the weather forecast has nothing to do with rain or snow and instead is all about tracking the zones of charged particles,

also called the ionosphere. These particles move around the atmosphere, pushed by winds, electromagnetic fields, and interactions with other particles in their surroundings, both charged and uncharged.

Right now even the best models can’t accurately predict where these charged particles will move, which is a problem because their presence can decrease the accuracy of important navigation systems such as GPS. As a GPS signal travels toward you, interactions with the charged particles in the ionosphere slow down the signal. “It may take a few nanoseconds longer to reach you, and that could mean that your estimate of where you are is a few meters off from where you actually are,” says Datta-Barua. “That could have implications particularly for people who use GPS for precision-types of applications like aircraft landings or precision farming.”

In a paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics in May 2021, Datta-Barua focuses on one piece of the space weather puzzle: how the charged and uncharged particles interact and move together at this altitude in the atmosphere.

Datta-Barua’s goal is to continue building fluid dynamic analytical tools and estimation methods to produce more accurate forecasts. —Andrew Wyder

URBAN FUTURES

Analyzing Isotopes to Better Inform Pest Control Strategies BIOLOGY DOCTORAL student Dakota Bunn is using computational genomics to help Midwest farmers manage corn and dry bean crops against the western bean cutworm, a type of moth. By analyzing stable carbon isotopes of the crop pest that Bunn and his colleagues collected over two summers in Michigan, they are able to determine whether the western bean cutworms fed on corn or dry beans, resulting in data that one day could inspire new pest control strategies. —Andrew Wyder

HEALTH AND WELLNESS

IITRI Partners with NIH on COVID-19 Therapy’s Development

A

n inhaled therapy for COVID-19 that was tested for safety and efficacy at the IIT Research Institute (IITRI) has advanced to a German-based clinical trial led by the National Institutes of Health. The pre-clinical testing was overseen by David McCormick, a professor of biology at Illinois Institute of Technology and president and director of IITRI, who received a grant from the National Cancer Institute totaling $597,893 to conduct the research. The new therapy consists of a recombinant human protein that the COVID-19 virus is drawn to; when inhaled, its molecules help redirect the virus and prevent it from binding to the lungs, which reduces infection.

—Linsey Maughan 6

Illinois Tech Research

ENGINEERING

Flipping the Script on Fountain Pens

Q

Why does my fountain pen leak?

Since the first mass-produced fountain pens appeared in the 1880s, the instruments have suffered from leakage issues. A paper co-authored by Illinois Tech professors Alex Nikolov, Sohail Murad, and Darsh Wasan, and Pingkeng Wu (Ph.D. CHE ’19), in the Journal of Colloid and Interface Science (October 15, 2020) looked inside the cartridge apparatus for a solution to the problem.

A

HEALTH AND WELLNESS

$8.6 Million Grant to Advance Biomedical Research at BioCAT

T

he Biophysics Collaborative Access Team (BioCAT) facility at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory will continue its biomedical research projects for the next five years thanks to an $8.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health.

BioCAT houses the most intense X-ray beams in the Western Hemisphere and is used for the study of muscle, connective tissue, amyloids, viruses, proteins, and other large biological molecules and their complexes. Researchers come from Illinois Institute of Technology and all over the world to use the facility.

Among recent projects, Weikang Ma, a research assistant professor at Illinois Tech and the beamline scientist responsible for BioCAT’s muscle X-ray program, co-authored a paper titled “Fast Skeletal Myosin-Binding Protein-C Regulates Fast Skeletal Muscle Contraction” with Sakthivel Sadayappan, a professor at the University of Cincinnati’s College of Medicine.

“BioCAT is the only facility in the world with a muscle X-ray diffraction program,” Ma says. “Dr. Sadayappan is a long-time collaborator with us. He has this novel mouse model with one important protein, fast skeletal myosin-binding protein-C, knocked out. Muscle X-ray studies were the best way to see how a lack of this protein changed the molecular structure of the muscle and how this affects muscle function.”

Researchers studying COVID-19 are also utilizing the BioCAT beamline to study elements of the virus. Research Assistant Professor of Biology Srinivas Chakravarthy is collaborating with researchers from Case Western Reserve University, Duke University, and Goethe University Frankfurt to explore how ribonucleic acid, or RNA, a molecule that is similar to deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, responds to potential COVID-19 drug candidates.—Linsey Maughan

The authors state that in the history of the fountain pen, little attention has been paid to the ink/air capillary flow balance. A poorly designed ink and air flow mechanism from the ink reservoir in the pen to its nib contributes to a flow imbalance, thereby causing an erratic flow of ink to the pen nib. The Illinois Tech team determined that an imbalance between the air holding pressure in the ink cartridge and the pressure drop across the capillary valve is the critical factor in the smooth functionality of the fountain pen.

Ink Air bubble formation

Capillary valve Air chamber Voltage [mV]

Tom Irving

200mV

100ms

Time [ms] Feed

7

Briefs ›

ILLUSTRATION: SCOTT BENBROOK

LAW AND POLICY

Defending the Right to Travel

S

ince the COVID-19 pandemic hit, there have been numerous instances in the United States where state governments have used quarantines to curb travel.

While most challenges to quarantines have failed, recent research by Chicago-Kent College of Law Assistant Professor Noah Smith-Drelich explores how an underutilized tenet of the U.S. Constitution—the right to travel—could provide a more fruitful basis for scrutinizing quarantines.

“These rights are well established by the Supreme Court but not well known,” Smith-Drelich says.

His paper “The Constitutional Right to Travel Under Quarantine” will appear in the fall 2021 edition of the Southern California Law Review.

Smith-Drelich stresses that he is not arguing that such quarantines aren’t important, simply that they should be subject to a more stringent form of judicial review. His paper lists historical instances when quarantines led to overreach, particularly against minorities and the disenfranchised.

“Quarantines are a crucial public health tool. Emergencies, though, are when we should be most attentive to our rights,” Smith-Drelich says.

A cornerstone of case law relating to public health mandates is Jacobson v. Massachusetts, a 1905 U.S. Supreme Court case in which the court ruled against a minister who argued that the Constitution gave him the liberty to refuse a vaccination he believed was dangerous.

According to the dominant view of Jacobson, to be deemed unconstitutional, public-health measures must either include “beyond

8

Illinois Tech Research

all question, a plain, palpable invasion of rights” or have “no real or substantial relation” to the government’s public health goals.

“This does not present a terribly high bar for policymakers to overcome,” Smith-Drelich writes.

But governments have at times taken this too far, infusing quarantines with race, gender, or class-based discrimination. In Jew Ho v.

Williamson, for example, Chinese-American residents of San Francisco were quarantined, though white residents were not, ostensibly to control a bubonic plague outbreak.

Under the Constitution’s right-to-travel standards, “The Constitution guarantees, at the very least, a right to free movement, to travel between the states, and to relocate from one state to another,” Smith-Drelich writes. One justification noted in case law: citizens have the right to travel to governmental seats of power to bring claims or protest.

Perhaps more importantly, Smith-Drelich notes, the Constitution’s privileges and immunities clause makes it unconstitutional to disfavor travel by nonresidents. But there have been multiple recent COVID-19related quarantines that might do exactly that. The Florida Keys, for instance, shut down access to outsiders at one point of the pandemic.

And Alaska mandated COVID-19 testing for people traveling into the state-free for residents but at a cost of $250 for nonresidents.

“It’s encouraging to see policymakers think creatively about how to control the spread of COVID-19,” Smith-Drelich says, “but regulations must be tailored to the public health demands at hand.” —Tad Vezner

COMPUTATION AND DATA

Reaping an Efficient Energy Harvest

I

n the internet of things era, many devices are interconnected for information exchange. Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering Lin Cai’s research takes advantage of this to let some smaller devices charge their batteries using the Wi-Fi signal that’s already around them.

Any time one device in the network sends data, nearby devices can harvest energy from that signal to charge their batteries.

Devices farther away from the Wi-Fi access point tend to require longer charging times because the distance means they detect a weaker signal.

Cai develops algorithmic protocols that each device follows when deciding how to interact with the network, such as how long the device should charge or how long it should wait if it tries to send data and fails. —Simon Morrow

Wireless Data Link Wireless Charging Link

Wireless Charging Link

Wireless Devices

Wi-Fi uses carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA/CA) to determine how

devices connect to an access point such as a router. If two or more

devices try to send data at the same time, the transmissions collide and

then all involved data transmissions may fail. A sustainable wireless

charging network using Wi-Fi needs a balance between:

Too many devices trying to send and receive data, so that they waste energy by frequently colliding

Not enough data transmission, so while the devices are ready to charge, there is no signal available for them to use to charge 9

Briefs ›

SoReMo Fellows Ignite Passions to Spark Solutions Four fellows from various academic backgrounds were chosen to conduct research tackling societal issues for the inaugural semester of Illinois Institute of Technology’s Socially Responsible Modeling, Computation, and Design (SoReMo) initiative.

Ryan Ciminski (MATH 2nd Year) examined disaster preparedness in Chicago neighborhoods, while Barien Gad (BCHM 3rd Year) showed how the university can increase student access to feminine hygiene products.

Alisha Khan (CS 3rd Year) investigated admissions metrics, and Leila Mirghaderi (Ph.D. THUM 3rd Year) explored how social media influencers in Iran use followers as unwitting laborers. Each fellow shared a thought about their experience: Ryan Ciminski—“My project focused on analyzing whether or not income-levels pose a dictating factor to how a school perceived preparedness in the Chicago Public School District. I completed this by randomly distributing online-based surveys to Chicago teachers and school administrators.”

PHOTO COLLAGE: DAVID ETTINGER

COMPUTATION AND DATA

Technology (and Mission) Driven

A

new effort at Illinois Institute of Technology is empowering students to apply their academic research in computation and data science toward positive societal change.

The Socially Responsible Modeling, Computation, and Design (SoReMo) initiative, which wrapped up its inaugural semester in May 2021, sponsored four student research fellows from various academic backgrounds. Each fellow developed an individual research project with the responsibility of making a beneficial impact on society.

“I wasn’t surprised by their work, but I was surprised by their passion,” says Sonja Petrović associate professor of applied mathematics and SoReMo founder. “We 10

Illinois Tech Research

set clear expectations for them, but their passion inspired us, the faculty.”

SoReMo connects students with a network of academics to bring their research into the real world and to help solve societal concerns.

“Let’s say you just do ‘math,’” Petrović says. “How do you make a difference?

SoReMo will show you how to pursue a passion within the discipline and use it to make a difference and enact change.”

The fellows got a full research experience conducting the work and receiving critical and constructive feedback from anonymous Illinois Tech faculty. They each wrote technical reports that were published in the SoReMo Journal, which is hosted by Illinois Tech’s Paul V. Galvin Library. —Casey Moffitt

Barien Gad—“I worked on battling stigmas surrounding menstruation and increasing accessibility to menstrual sanitary products on campus. I received a fellowship from the SoReMo initiative to continue my work in research facilities, amenities, and accommodations for minorities in STEM and the impact on Illinois Tech’s community.”

Alisha Khan—“I received undergraduate admissions data from 2018–2021 from Professor [Mike] Gosz, the vice president for enrollment and senior vice provost. A lot of time was spent exploring the variables in the data and observing correlations.”

Leila Mirghaderi—“As a SoReMo fellow, I gained access to resources that were not previously readily available to me, such as getting a chance to speak with experts outside of my discipline. Getting feedback from experts with different backgrounds and disciplines is important when we are working on projects that may be affecting a large group of people.”

HEALTH AND WELLNESS

Applying Deep Learning to Reduce Radiation in Medical Imaging

T

wo professors in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology are the leading researchers on two grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health in July 2020 that total $6 million.

The projects, led by Motorola Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Miles Wernick and Harris Perlstein Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Yongyi Yang (M.S. MATH ’92, Ph.D. EE ’94), aim to use a type of artificial intelligence called deep learning to reduce the amount of radiation that patients are exposed to when undergoing medical imaging.

Medical radiation is by far the largest source of radiation exposure for the general public.

“Even relatively healthy people have lots of imaging done, such as mammograms and dental X-rays, and the radiation exposure from these can add up,” says Wernick.

Wernick and Yang work with nuclear imaging scans, where the patient is injected with a small amount of radioactive material. In photos taken by the scanner, that radiation shines brightly, lighting up parts of the body where blood is flowing and letting the doctor spot any problems.

“If the radiation dose is too low, it’s like taking a picture at night,” says Yang. “When you don’t have much light, the picture is going to be really bad.”

The two researchers use deep learning to see through the fuzz, reconstructing important information from scans that a doctor wouldn’t otherwise be able to read.

One of the grants, which will amount to $3 million over the next four years, is in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts Medical Center to reduce radiation in single-photon emission-computed tomography scans of the heart, the second-largest human-made source of radiation to which the general public in the United States is exposed.

Yang says their advanced deep-learning algorithm can potentially cut the radiation doses of these scans by eight to 16 times.

The second grant, which is also $3 million over the next four years, is in collaboration with Boston Children’s Hospital to apply similar techniques to kidney scans in children, a group that is especially vulnerable to the development of cancer from radiation exposure.

For both projects, Yang and Wernick work closely with clinicians, training their image-processing algorithm on thousands of real patient scans acquired in clinical studies as part of their projects.

“The point is not to make a picture that looks good, but rather to make a picture that will be useful for diagnosis. You can make a very clean picture, but if it doesn’t give you the diagnosis information, then it is useless,” says Yang.

—Simon Morrow

A scan of the cross section of a heart ventricle. A healthy heart would show a nice, complete ring. This scan looks blobby mostly because of “noise”—an outcome of the physics of the imaging process—which is present because the image was taken using a radiation dose that is reduced eight times compared to what would typically be used.

The same scan after image processing using Wernick and Yang’s artificial intelligence method. The processing has identified and removed the noise, revealing a ventricle with coronary artery disease, as shown by the incomplete ring.

11

Features ›

DC, Interrupted

By Simon Morrow

A

s John Shen likes to say, Thomas Edison was right—he was just 100 years or so too early.

In the late nineteenth century, Edison said that direct current (DC) is a better form of electricity than alternating current (AC). Shen, the Grainger Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology, agrees.

“DC has always been more efficient and stable compared to AC electricity,” says Shen. “Unfortunately, at the time, people didn’t know how to raise the voltage level in DC for long-distance transmission, but they did for AC. That’s why AC won the war. But that’s changed.”

Around a decade ago, Shen started to see signs that emerging technologies would benefit from greater use of DC power, so he set out to eliminate one key remaining barrier: a lack of effective, cost-efficient DC circuit breakers.

“You can buy an AC circuit breaker from a Home Depot for $5 or $10 that is very reliable, but you can’t use those for DC power networks,” Shen says. Since Shen started working with DC electricity, the Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy (ARPA-E), of the United States Department of Energy, has awarded him $2.65 million to develop DC fault protection technology and has started a new funding program dedicated to developing medium-voltage DC circuit breakers, credited in part to his work.

12

Illinois Tech Research

A prototype of the iBreaker, a 380 volt solid-state circuit breaker for DC data centers

DC in Your Home or Office: iBreaker

Shen and his research team have been working since December 2017 to develop state-of-the-art versions of solid-state circuit breaker technologies.

While many conventional circuit breakers work by melting a fuse or triggering a flip to switch, solid-state circuit breakers contain electronics that monitor the flow of current and use algorithms to decide when to switch it off. These semiconductor switches are more precise, reliable, and durable, and stop the flow of electricity much faster.

Among the prototypes that the Illinois Tech graduate students on Shen’s research team have developed include a 380-volt iBreaker for DC data centers and a new version of Smart Plug devices, which control home appliances via Wi-Fi while also protecting against fire or shock hazards in homes and offices.

DC power has an inherent efficiency advantage over AC because it constantly transmits peak voltage and current while AC constantly fluctuates in a waveform, alternating between a maximum and minimum.

“With DC, you’re utilizing the hardware resources constantly, versus AC, where you’re only utilizing [the hardware resources] a fraction of the time,” says Shen.

“For the same voltage level, you get 40 percent more DC power using the same set of cables than AC.” This makes it the preferred power method for high-voltage applications like electric cars, aircraft, and boats, and already almost all of our electronic loads such as computers and printers run on DC power.

Many of our renewable power sources such as wind turbines and solar panels already generate DC power. But with the average wall outlet still set up to transmit AC power, there is often still an intermediate step.

“By using DC power directly,” Shen says, “you’d eliminate the DC-AC-DC power conversion stages that hurt your energy efficiency.”

The Future of Flight

While he continues to develop iBreaker, Shen has taken the lessons from that project to move on to bigger things. Where iBreaker is an improved version of the standard ideas of how DC circuit breakers should be made,

Grainger Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering John Shen

Shen is now developing proprietary technology called superconducting momentary circuit interrupters (SMCI).

“It breaks the previous paradigm and is very different from anything in the market or anything that previously existed in the technical literature,” he says.

Shen was awarded a $779,374 grant in March 2021 from ARPA-E to develop this technology for the use of circuit protection in turboelectric aircraft, which require massive power outputs to run.

Turboelectric aircraft are expected to be the new design for commercial aircraft within the next 20 years. Unlike current jets, which burn fuel to power propellers directly, turboelectric aircraft will burn fuel to generate electricity and then use that electricity to power propellers, which turns out to have huge efficiency benefits.

“Jet technology hasn’t changed much in the last 70 years,” says Shen. “But turboelectric aircraft, being propelled by many electric fans distributed across the body of the aircraft instead of just at the wings, represents a fundamental and exciting shift in air travel as we know it, with the potential to reduce air travel emissions by up to 90 percent. This technology will be a critical step to make that a reality.”

Each turboelectric plane will be powered by up to 50 megawatts of electricity, enough to power a small city, so ensuring these planes continue to function safely while in the air is critical.

To develop the SMCI concept, Shen considered the limitations of existing technology. Solid-state circuit breakers can shut off a

fault current quickly, but they tend to produce a lot of heat when a current flows through the semiconductor material. For high-powered turboelectric aircraft, this is a major efficiency and weight drawback.

Hybrid circuit breakers exist with lower power loss, but their slow response time would allow the fault current to rise dangerously, causing excessive stress to the power system.

To achieve the best of both worlds, Shen has developed a design to temporarily interrupt the current flow to buy time for a mechanical isolation switch to open safely.

When everything is running normally, current flows through superconducting materials in the SMCI, resulting in ultralow power loss of less than one watt, even lower than hybrid designs that tend to lose a few watts.

When a problem occurs, the SMCI interrupts by injecting a voltage into the system that counteracts the normal flow of electricity, driving it to zero within 10 microseconds, even faster than solid-state circuit breakers, which tend to take around 100 microseconds.

The counter voltage produced by the SMCI holds the current at or near zero for a few hundred microseconds while a series of mechanical switches open, isolating the problem. This idea of using a counter voltage is brand new, offering a paradigm shift in the way electricity is controlled in the system.

Shen has preliminary proof of concept results showing that the design works. “Now we’re working to increase the power level and perfecting the art,” he says. ● 13

Features ›

WORD JUMMassive BLE Growth

BY TAD VEZNER

Quantifying the Law’s

As the world grows more complex and diverse, how does the law change?

The short answer: it gets bigger. Quantifiably bigger.

D

aniel Katz, director of The Law Lab at Illinois Institute of Technology’s Chicago-Kent College of Law, is part of a large international research project that studies the growth—in actual words, and how those words connect to and reference each other—of law. His recent publications study the growth of federal law in the United States and Germany over the past two and a half decades.

His team found that it grew significantly. Simply put, from 1994 to 2018, the total word count of federal statutes in the U.S. grew from 14 million words to 21.2 million words, a 51 percent increase. Germany saw even larger relative growth over the same time period, with its federal statutes growing from 4.5 million to 7.4 million words, or 64 percent.

“People have the notion that the complexity of the law is growing. But there’s been surprisingly little effort to quantify that: by how much and in what ways and where in the law is this happening?” Katz says. “These are some of the basic scientific questions you might ask about a field. And it hasn’t been done for law. We’re here to change that—to treat law like a science, to take the scientific methods of Illinois Tech and apply them to the law itself.”

Katz’s original article, “Complex Societies and the Growth of the Law,” which was published in Scientific Reports in October 2020 with co-authors Corinna Coupette, Janis Beckedorf, and Dirk Hartung, provides some methodological groundwork for his latest paper, “Measuring Law Over Time: A Network Analytical Framework with an Application to Statutes and Regulations in the United States and Germany,” which was published in Frontiers in Physics in May 2021.

The latest article was co-authored by the same research team, with one additional author, Michael Bommarito.

Typically, Katz notes, when he asks people how much they believe that the law has quantifiably grown, “they’re sometimes off by orders of magnitude.”

Here’s another example from the research: the growth in federal regulations based on statutes grew even higher in the U.S. than the federal code, from 43.9 million words in 1998 to 84.3 million words in 2019, a 92 percent increase.

Not only that, but the added language dramatically entangled the overall whole, with additions and addendums creating more and more references and cross-references, requiring those trying to understand the changes to look up other statutes. The research concluded that instances where regulations referenced other regulations, for example, increased by 159 percent in the U.S. between 1998 and 2019.

14

Illinois Tech Research

Also, the changes often require a wider array of federal agencies or departments to take a role in enforcement or oversight.

And the effect of that growth, Katz says, will be that for the average person to comply with this ever-growing mass of laws and regulations, they’ll need a lot more lawyers to help them understand it. In terms of accessibility, starting and running a business, and even adhering to criminal statutes, that’s not such a good thing.

“It creates the demand for lawyers and compliance officers and such, and the economics of just putting more people on problems kind of breaks down at some point,” Katz says. “If modern societies are going to continue to make rules at this rate, you have to come up with some other way to manage all this…to not make it so expensive.”

“It sounds like this project was a massive undertaking, and a great example of collaboration within our field of legal tech,” said Nicole Shanahan, master of ceremonies at Stanford Law School’s April 21, 2021, Law, Education and Experience Talk.

“The very fact that we have such a thing in a physics journal shows that this research is inherently interdisciplinary, and that there is increasing interest in the hard science side,” Hartung— who is executive director of legal technology at Bucerius Law School in Hamburg, Germany—said at the Stanford event.

Katz says the research team stuck to studying federal legislation, as trying to tackle statute growth in 50 separate states would be a gargantuan project.

In their research, the team also measured the law algorithmically, to map which areas of the federal codes were getting more complex. In the U.S., statutes and regulations relating to housing, energy, agriculture and food, and finance consistently had the highest word counts.

“In companies, huge compliance divisions and very large legal teams are trying to manage all this. They have to change [company] policies, make sure people in the company are aware they changed, make sure they’re doing it, and on and on it goes. That’s what it leads to in real life,” Katz says.

“The research does call for a different way of doing law. How are we going to organize the legal and law and compliance industry to manage all this?” Katz adds. “There should be some thought to ways to construct laws and regulations over time, including sunset clauses. We just can’t keep doing things the same way.” ●

“There should be some thought to ways to construct laws and regulations over time, including sunset clauses. We just can’t keep doing things the same way.”—Daniel Katz

15

Features ›

NEW KID ON

THE Creating Concrete with Fly Ash

BY ANDREW WYDER

16

Illinois Tech Research

T

here is good reason that the United States Department of Energy is interested in finding ways to utilize fly ash, a fine powder coal byproduct: U.S. power plants produce literally tons of the bulk waste product each year—38 million tons as of 2017, to be exact—according to the American Coal Ash Association.

In 2020 the DOE set out to fund research projects focused on developing alternative uses for it.

Among the first-round funding recipients was Illinois Institute of Technology Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering Matt Gombeda and his academic and commercial collaborators, who received a nearly $1 million grant to examine methods to incorporate fly ash in high volumes as a supplementary cementitious material (SCM) for precast concrete applications.

SCMs do not typically compose the prominent fraction of cement used in construction, but rather, offer an environmentally friendly alternative in addition to facilitating other benefits such as durability and workability. “[The concrete industry] has typically limited fly ash use because of unique yet stringent structural performance requirements that sometimes fly ash has traditionally gotten in the way of,” Gombeda says.

“We’re going to [address] that by re-examining some different ways of looking at concrete mix designs for these components. [We’ll look to] incorporate larger volumes of fly ash with other novel additives and materials that allow us to keep the same high-level structural performance and other unique requirements that are needed for precast.”

In collaboration with two other universities, Gombeda and the research team began working on the project, titled “Facilitating Implementation of High-Volume Fly Ash Use in Precast Concrete Construction to Increase Beneficial Utilization,” in early October 2020.

Each member of the research team brings a specific area of expertise, allowing the project to explore the engineering and construction aspects,

Searching for a Sustainable Solution Using Fly Ash in Concrete Mix Designs

Illinois Tech students work in the structures and materials laboratory in Alumni Memorial Hall.

as well as any environmental concerns. Additionally, they’re working with Prairie State Energy Campus, a coal-fueled power plant in southern Illinois that produces fly ash; Boral Resources, a leading fly ash distributor with partners based in Georgia; and Metromont Corporation, a precast concrete fabricator headquartered in South Carolina.

This collaboration allows the research team to look at how fly ash is currently being used and to find new ways to utilize it while emphasizing the benefits for precast concrete, which is generally used in buildings and other structures in the form of prefabricated products such as concrete beams, slabs, and columns.

Some of the benefits of precast concrete products include high quality control and rapid fabrication and installation, but incorporating large amounts of fly ash into the concrete mix designs often makes that more difficult. It can hinder the development of the concrete’s strength, meaning prefabricated products can’t be removed from formwork or casting beds as rapidly as needed to maintain the operational efficiency of precast facilities. Gombeda and his collaborators are working to develop novel concrete mix designs consisting of next-generation high-volume fly ash binders. This effort will be done by first re-engineering the binders’ hydration mechanisms, then scaling up the most effective binders to feasible concrete mix designs, and, lastly, demonstrating proof of concept via full-scale experimental testing of precast structural components.

Gombeda, who is still early in this research, says that after data is collected—a process that will entail producing environmentally conscious mix design(s) featuring more fly ash and testing the new concrete(s) by breaking precast components in Illinois Tech’s structures and materials testing laboratory in Alumni Memorial Hall—the goal is to bring the team’s results to the precast industry. ●

Acknowledgment: “This material is based upon work supported by the Department of Energy under Award Number(s) DE-FE0031931.”

Disclaimer: “This report was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency of the United States Government.

Neither the United States Government nor any agency thereof, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government or any agency thereof. The views and opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof.”

17

Features ›

Google Maps for the Older-Adult Brain

By Simon Morrow

18

Illinois Tech Research

Professor of Biomedical Engineering Konstantinos Arfanakis works in his office.

B

rains change as they age, and pinpointing small changes as they happen is especially important in older adults, who are more likely to suffer from brain-related diseases. To improve early intervention, Illinois Institute of Technology Professor of Biomedical Engineering Konstantinos Arfanakis is building the Multichannel Illinois Institute of Technology & Rush University Aging (MIITRA) atlas, the first of its kind, which describes the average brain of an older adult, giving researchers and doctors a reference to compare and contrast when examining patient scans.

Common forms of brain imaging, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), create a series of images of a person’s brain. Sometimes, an anomaly will be obvious just by looking at the images, for example, if a large tumor is present; but this is not always the case.

Researchers have been building brain templates and atlases as references for comparison.

These tools take hundreds of brain scans and identify the structures, connections, and patterns of brain function that are most common, mapping out the average human brain. Templates provide the first step, allowing a computer to associate which pixels in the image correspond to which parts of the brain, much like mapping a satellite image of a city through a basic map of its roads. An atlas takes it to the next level.

“It is like Google Maps. It has satellite pictures, but then it also has information such as streets, traffic, altitude, traffic cameras, and other information that makes it more versatile,” says Arfanakis.

Arfanakis has already spent a decade building the IIT Human Brain Atlas, which offers a detailed view of the average young-adult brain. As he has become increasingly involved in age-related brain research, such as early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease, Arfanakis noticed the need for an older adult equivalent.

Professor of Biomedical Engineering Konstantinos Arfanakis

“In older adults, the brain shrinks,” he says. “The ventricles and the spaces between the gyri [ridges on the cerebral cortex] are enlarged. In general, with age, we’re losing brain volume, and the free space is occupied by cerebrospinal fluid.” This means that using a young-adult brain atlas as a reference decreases the computer’s ability to accurately identify the regions of an older adult brain.

“The extreme would be if you tried to map an image of the brain to an image of a house,” Arfanakis explains. “It’s not going to go very well. Comparing young and older adult brains is not quite that bad, but there is a difference.”

Having an accurate reference is especially important for older adults, who are more at risk of Alzheimer’s, dementia, and other age-related brain diseases, where the later the detection, the higher the chances of irreversible damage.

“Detecting a disease early means that we need to see small abnormalities, so you need to do everything in your study as accurately as you can,” says Arfanakis.

The MIITRA atlas aims to bring those subtle changes into focus.

In January 2021 Arfanakis and his collaborators published the foundation of the atlas—their older adult brain template—in Human Brain Mapping, and showed that it performs better for older-adult brain scans than the current most popular template options.

“For now, the field has not really picked up on the limitations of using young adult atlases for older adults, and even if they did, there weren’t any other atlases available,” says Arfanakis, who will continue to build the atlas, adding more labels and functionality to identify connections, function, and types of tissue in the brains being scanned.

While Arfanakis will be using the MIITRA atlas for his own research identifying biomarkers for brain disease, the open source project is available for use by researchers in all fields. ●

Disclaimer: Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R01AG052200. This content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.”

Konstantinos Arfanakis, “Comprehensive Longitudinal Probabilistic Atlas of the Brain of Older Adults Without Dementia,” National Institutes of Health; Award Number R01AG052200

19

PRACTICAL SCIENCE A Pragmatic Approach to Treating Pelvic Floor Prolapse By Linsey Maughan

20

Illinois Tech Research

“We make basic science useful in practical applications for improving the quality of life.” — Rong Wang

W

omen who’ve experienced or are at risk of pelvic floor prolapse may one day see improved health outcomes thanks to the research of Illinois Institute of Technology Professor of Chemistry Rong Wang and one unlikely resource: cocoons from silkworms.

Wang and her student researchers are actively testing the viability of silk to regenerate and restore vital pelvic floor tissue and prevent prolapse, which occurs when muscles and tissue in the female body weaken and can no longer hold pelvic organs including the uterus, bladder, and rectum in place.

“We make basic science useful in practical applications for improving the quality of life,” Wang says. “I love the idea of tackling a biological problem with chemical and physical approaches, so my research is quite interdisciplinary.”

The silk material can help revive the function of fibroblasts—cells that help make up the structural framework of tissue—through an in vitro electrical stimulation process. A cell-imbedded fiber matrix can be injected or applied as an internal bandage or implant, and can be repeatedly used to stimulate the cells’ renewal through a medicated electrical stimulation process. The matrices degrade in approximately 20 days and should be replaced by native tissue.

“The use of [the patient’s own] autologous cells to treat, for example, connective tissue wounds or disorders is relatively safe and simple,” Wang says, “effectively avoiding complications in other approaches such as immunological rejection of cells derived from other individuals; complicated control of isolation, expansion, and differentiation conditions of stem cells; or heterogeneity between cells of the same type but from different origin.”

Wang’s research into pelvic floor restoration began with the use of spider silk proteins, but the team later replaced them with silkworm silk proteins, which Wang says are “abundant and cheap” and have proven effective for use in cell stimulation.

The silk cocoon research is funded by a $440,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health; collaborators on the project include Anne Sammarco at Rush University Medical Center and Margot Damaser at Cleveland Clinic Lerner Research Institute. The team is also developing flexible, transparent silk films for potential use as corneal scaffolds, contact lens material, and scaffolds for gum healing.

Rong Wang

“I am particularly excited about learning from natural biological processes, then tailoring functional materials and inventing new methods for early disease diagnosis, prevention of disease progression, and effective treatments,” Wang says. ●

Rong Wang

21

Demystifying Cancer Through Design

By Andrew Connor

Breast Cancer 5 After treatment

Notes

Assessing radiation’s effects on cancer and your body

E

very year, more than 17 million people worldwide receive a cancer diagnosis, and many of them will undergo external beam radiotherapy, the most common radiation treatment for cancer. Yet despite its frequency of use, the procedure can be intimidating and unfamiliar to many patients, no doubt compounded by the uncertainty that a cancer diagnosis can bring.

That is why Dr. Dan Golden, a radiation oncologist and associate professor in the Department of Radiation and Cellular Oncology at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine, had the vision of a portfolio of discussion guides that could help cancer patients through it. Working with Illinois Institute of Technology Institute of Design Clinical Professor Tomoko Ichikawa and her students, and with support from UChicago’s Bucksbaum Institute for Clinical Excellence, Golden brought his vision to fruition with a suite of discussion guides.

“When the patient visits the radiation oncologist for a consultation, they are in a very vulnerable emotional state. Much of their normal life and the control they would typically have is diminished,” says Ichikawa. “We wanted to create something that was tangible, that empowered them with information so that they had some sense of what was about to come. We wanted to support awareness of the process, understanding of their experience, and engagement should they want to be active in their treatment pathway.”

Called Communicating External Beam Radiotherapy Experience (CEBRE) discussion guides, the materials use graphic narratives and easy-to-digest information to facilitate conversations between patients (or their caregivers) and their medical care providers. The discussion guides focus on the process of radiation treatment, which involves

22

Illinois Tech Research

• Radiation’s effects are still at work in your body

FOLLOW UP

• Side effects (skin irritation, tenderness, fatigue) begin to subside 2-3 weeks after treatment

4-6 weeks after her last treatment, the doctor checks Beth’s side effects.

• Contact the clinic if your side effects worsen

Changes to her skin have become less noticable.

CONTINUING CARE

Doctors continue to monitor Beth long term. They watch for any side effects.

Beth continues to have mammograms. She exercises to maintain her wellbeing and health.

MONITORING

EXAM

MAMMOGRAM

My Information DOCTOR’S SKETCHPAD

MY PLANNING SESSION

/

at

am

:

pm

Before my planning session, I need: blood work

physical therapy

see my plastic surgeon

stop these medications Customize, and print phone number section from file: Avery5352 EBRT DiscussionGuide phone no.doc

small tattoos

During my scan, I will receive:

days

Planning my treatment will take

weeks

TREATMENT INFORMATION

Throughout treatment, I will see my doctor every

M

T

W

Th

F

Before each visit, I need to: take pain medication

practice arm exercises

other MISSING APPOINTMENTS • Contact the clinic to reschedule • Each missed day will be added to the end of your treatment schedule • Long breaks between appointments could make your treatment less effective This work was supported in part by the Radiation Oncology Institute.

For more information: Dr. Dan Golden dgolden@radonc.uchicago.edu

Treatment tracker

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialShareAlike 4.0 International License. Make attributions to: IIT/Institute of Design and UChicago Medicine v.09.20

DISCUSSION GUIDE BREAST

Your radiation treatment pathway

1

visits (

boost treatments)

2

3

4

5

21 22 23 24 25

10

11 12 13 14 15

26 27 28 29 30

31 32 33 34 35

6

7

8

1 Consult

Beth has breast cancer and is about to receive radiation treatment. She’s here for her first appointment. The nurse and doctor examine her. They tell her what she needs to know about radiation.

Avery6870/8257 EBRT DiscussionGuide Logo.doc

CARE TEAM

WHAT IS EXTERNAL BEAM RADIATION TREATMENT?

Beth’s experience will give you an idea of what to expect.

Your radiation treatment may be different.

DOCTOR

Understanding your radiation treatment

NURSE

Behind the scenes

RADIATION THERAPIST

A machine called a linear accelerator—or ‘linac’—delivers doses of high energy rays. These rays kill remaining cancer cells in and around your breast.

Other members

HOW WILL RADIATION AFFECT ME?

may include medical assistant,

Planning session

social worker,

Determining the best treatment position

dietitian

Treatment planning

Treatment Visiting your clinic daily for radiation After treatment Assessing radiation’s effects on cancer and your body

PHYSICIST

NURSE

16 17 18 19 20

Customize, print logo on:

Discussing radiation treatment

Consult

Professionals create your custom plan

9

DOSIMETRIST

DOCTOR

What’s the goal of radiation treatment?

I’ve heard some things about radiation.

Are they true?

What are the most likely short and long term side effects—during and after treatment?

Can I still work and see people?

Radiation will not hurt. You will not see, smell or feel the radiation beams.

In fact, you will not be able to tell that you are receiving treatment.

Most people continue to work, engage with others and live their normal lives while undergoing radiation treatment.

Please, however, allow yourself the space to heal and rest.

2-3 weeks into treatment, side effects like skin irritation, breast tenderness and fatigue may occur. Other side effects are possible.

If you experience any side effects or notice any changes in your health, ask your doctor or nurse. They are available every day if needed.

Lung Cancer Luke, we’re ready for you now.

2 Planning session

You’ll be in a mold to keep you in the same position every day.

Determining the best treatment position

• Duration: 60-90 minutes • This is also called a “simulation scan” • No radiation treatment happens today • Radiation therapists position your body for the best treatment. They make a record so they can put you in the same position every time TRACKING TUMOR MOTION Your lung and your tumor(s) move as you breathe.

Your care team may use these techniques and devices to track this movement.

RADIATION THERAPISTS

SIMULATION ROOM

Be sure to speak up if you cannot hold your position.

The goal is to relax in this position. This is difficult if you are uncomfortable.

CT scans are taken to customize his treatment plan.

Done for today.

We’ll see you after planning.

Everyone’s position will be different.

Do you feel comfortable? gating

compression belt

active breathing control

replace with Phil

OTHER POSSIBILITIES actual size

IV

esophageal contrast

marks & tape

Therapists position Luke with support devices to help him relax and remain still. Marks are drawn on his body to align him to the radiation.

tattoos

3 Treatment planning

IN THE MEANTIME

DOSIMETRIST

Professionals create your custom plan

“We wanted to create something that was tangible, that empowered them with information so that they had some sense of what was about to come. We wanted to support awareness of the process, understanding of their experience, and engagement should they want to be active in their treatment pathway.” —Tomoko Ichikawa

Plan Arrange transportation to the clinic Coordinate with work and others, so you can come to treatments and focus on healing

• Duration: 3-10 weekdays • Your custom radiation plan targets the cancer and limits damage to healthy tissue

PHYSICIST

Prepare for treatment Get answers to your questions about insurance and/or billing

DOCTOR

• A quality check is preformed on your treatment plan before you are treated

Seek Support Consider reaching out to friends, family and others

Together with your doctor, specialists work behind the scenes to create your custom radiation plan.

The nurse can refer you to other services

4 Treatment

Visiting your clinic for radiation

Luke is back to start treatment.

He is a little nervous.

Luke notices that the room has thick walls and no window to the control room. Therapists verify Luke’s position before starting treatment.

Luke, we’re ready for you now.

• Duration: 15-45 minutes • The first treatment is usually the longest

I’m going into the control room to start your treatment now.

LINAC MACHINE

Ok.

• Your nurse and doctor will see you weekly to help you with side effects (trouble swallowing, fatigue) • Some clinics check positioning again on the first day. This is called a ‘dry run’ or a ‘v-sim.’

Your treatment may be different from Luke’s shown here.

RADIATION THERAPIST

Even though you can’t see us, we can see and hear you.

The radiation machine is tested daily to ensure safe and accurate treatment.

Whrrrrr.....buzz...click...click...click...click......click....CLICK

You did great.

See you again tomorrow!

Ok

Luke won’t see, smell or feel the radiation.

The machine moves around Luke.

In between treatments, Luke goes about his day normally. He can safely be around friends and family.

He is not radioactive.

Good to see you this week, Luke. How are you?

There is a 2-3 week delay in feeling side effects.

TREATMENT

His treatment soon feels routine.

2-3 weeks

Feeling tired?

A little bit

WEEKLY DOCTOR VISIT

SIDE EFFECTS

If you experience any side effects or notice any changes in your health, tell your doctor or nurse. They are available every day if needed.

Luke is having trouble swallowing food. He mentions this to his doctor.

“Physicists and dosimetrists are the folks who devise individual treatments in terms of how big the ray should be or how often, how frequently, and how long [patients] are exposed. They’re the ones that really formulate the patient’s therapy, but they don’t ever see the patients,” says Ichikawa. “That can take a long time, a week or two even, and patients often wonder why they can’t start treatment right away. We suggested preparation activities the patients could do in the meantime so they feel more empowered, rather than being passive.”

Since the project’s creation, seven of the discussion guides have also been translated into Spanish in collaboration with Dr. Pilar Ortega, clinical assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Hispanic Center of Excellence in Medicine. Ichikawa says that the three CEBRE guides in progress are slated to be translated to Spanish, and that there will likely be more languages included in the future, further expanding the reach of the project.

“I don’t want these guides to be something that only I use because that’s not worth the hundreds of hours of effort Tomoko and the students put in,” says Golden. “But if people all over the country and even the world could use them? That would be incredible.” ● Prostate Cancer

exposing the body to a concentrated beam of radiation to shrink a tumor. Licensed with Creative Commons, anybody can download the materials and print them on a typical office printer.

“It helps patients to have a more concrete idea in their heads of what we’re talking about,” says Golden. “I can show these graphic narrative images that are designed intentionally to have the right amount of detail. This helps the patient to have just the right amount of granularity to understand what’s going on, without being intimidated by it.”

When the CEBRE project was initiated in 2017, the result was a general guide to external radiation therapy. But after receiving follow-up feedback from doctors and patients, it became clear that more specific materials would further provoke more fruitful conversations between patients and doctors. And so Golden and Ichikawa received two years of grant funding from the Radiation Oncology Institute to create a total of six new guides that cover the nuances of external radiation beam therapy on some of the body’s most common cancer sites.

Working with a team of ID students over the last two years, the team created three new guides in summer 2020—for lung, breast, and prostate cancers—and will be completing three more guides for brain, gastrointestinal, and head and neck cancers in summer 2022.

Separately, three additional guides for a different radiation treatment called brachytherapy—a type of internal radiation therapy— were developed in 2019 for gynecological cancers, totalling 10 discussion guides.

As part of their design process, Ichikawa and her students interviewed patients and caregivers as well as medical staff—doctors, nurses, radiation therapists, and social workers, to name a few—to better understand the intricacies of the radiation treatment process and what information should be included to help ease anxiety and inform patients.

2 Planning session

You’ll be in a mold to keep you in the same position every day.

Phil, we’re ready for you now.

Determining the best treatment position

• Duration: 60-90 minutes • This is also called a “simulation scan” • No radiation treatment happens today • Radiation therapists position your body for the best treatment. They make a record so they can put you in the same position every time

RADIATION THERAPISTS

SIMULATION ROOM

Be sure to speak up if you cannot hold your position. The goal is to relax in this position.

This is difficult if you are uncomfortable.

Radiation therapists position Phil with support devices to help him relax and remain still.

Everyone’s position is different.

They also draw marks on his body to help align him to the radiation.

OTHER POSSIBILITIES

oral contrast rectal contrast penile clamp

marks & tape

tattoos

You may receive these markings during this session or in treatment.

3 Treatment planning

Phil has a small tube inserted into his penis. This allows for dye to ensure the best picture possible.

IN THE MEANTIME

DOCTOR’S SKETCHPAD

Plan

Professionals create your custom plan

Arrange transportation to the clinic Coordinate with work and others, so you can come to treatments and focus on healing

• Duration: 3-10 weekdays pelvic bones

• Your plan targets the cancer and limits radiation on healthy tissue

Prepare for treatment

prostate

Find a water bottle to use before treatments

• Your plan is tested before you are treated

Get answers to your questions about insurance and/or billing

rectum PHYSICIST

Seek Support

tailbone

RIGHT DOCTOR

Done for today.

We’ll see you after planning.

actual size

enema IV contrast

CT scans are taken to customize his treatment plan.

Consider reaching out to friends, family and others

LEFT

The nurse can refer you to other services

DOSIMETRIST

Your experience may be different than Phil’s.

BEFORE TREATMENT

4 Treatment

A full bladder moves the bladder and small bowel away from the radiation field.

Visiting your clinic daily for radiation

• Duration: 15-45 minutes • The first treatment is usually the longest • Before treatment, drink water and don’t go to the bathroom until after treatment

Try to drink at the same time before every treatment. Inconsistent water levels may delay your treatment that day.

Phil, we’re ready for you now.

• Your nurse and doctor will see you weekly.

You should mention any side effects like changing bladder and bowel habits

I’m going into the control room to start your treatment now.

LINAC MACHINE

Ok…

Phil is back to start treatment. He’s a little nervous. He needs to pee, but he is trying his best not to go.

• For many, not peeing is the hardest part of treatment

Even though you can’t see us, we can see and hear you.

Phil notices that the treatment room has thick walls and no window to the control room. His mold from the planning session is on the table.

The radiation machine is tested daily to ensure safe and accurate treatment.

RADIATION THERAPIST

Whrrrrr.....buzz...click...click...click...click......click....CLICK You did great.

See you again tomorrow!

Ok

Phil won’t see, smell or feel the radiation.

The machine moves slowly around him.

Good to see you this week, Phil. How are you?

In between treatments, Phil goes about his day normally. He can safely be around friends and family.

He is not radioactive.

Tell your nurse and doctor if you notice any side effects or changes in your health.

There is a 2-3 week delay in feeling side effects.

TREATMENT 2-3 weeks

His treatment soon feels routine.

SIDE EFFECTS

Feeling tired?

A little bit

‘BOOST’ WEEKLY DOCTOR VISIT

Phil’s bladder and bowel habits have changed. He mentions this to his doctor.

You may receive extra targeted radiation treatments called a ‘boost.’ It will feel just like your other radiation treatments.

A brachytherapy boost is also possible.

23

Features ›

Rerouting the Data Traffic Jam

By Casey Moffitt

Xian-He Sun

24

Illinois Tech Research

R

esearchers at Illinois Institute of Technology, with collaborators from the HDF Group, have brought to market Hermes, a new deep memory and storage hierarchy software system designed to reduce bottlenecks in data movement from storage to memory in high-performance computing.

Improvements in microprocessors, data storage, and memory hardware have drastically increased the amount of data that supercomputers can process, but they also have resulted in traffic jams that occur when moving data from storage to memory. High-performance computing researchers will experience more efficient input/ output performance with Hermes.

“Different systems and different technologies all also run different software,” says Anthony Kougkas (Ph.D. CS ’19), Illinois Tech research assistant professor of computer science and lead researcher on the project. “Ideally, the presence of those multiple tiers of storage should be transparent to applications without having to sacrifice I/O performance.”

Kougkas outlined Hermes’s capabilities as part of the software’s virtual launch in March 2021, with presentations from Hermes team collaborators Christopher Hogan, HDF Group software engineer; Kimmy Hu, HDF Group HPC lead engineer; Hariharan Devarajan (Ph.D. CS ’21) from Illinois Tech’s Scalable Computing Software Lab;

and Gerd Heber, HDF Group lead engineer. Illinois Tech Distinguished Professor of Computer Science and Ron Hochsprung Endowed Chair Xian-He Sun is the principal investigator for Hermes, which was funded through a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

Hermes organizes and accesses data from a variety of local and remote storage devices and moves it efficiently into memory, where the data can be processed.

“The problem is all of [the storage devices] are independently designed, deployed, and managed, making it hard for the end user to manage the complexity of hierarchical storage,” Kougkas says. “Hermes holistically manages this storage system and brings the benefit of each [storage component] to the end user.”

Hermes software allows users to draw data from various storage hardware, organize it, and send it to memory using a single software package. This allows the user to write less code with a universal software package, rather than using different software for each storage device.

Although Hermes is fully functional and ready for researchers in high-performance computing to use, Kougkas says the open source software is still “in development,” and he hopes that users will continue to offer their feedback to improve the package. ●

Reducing the Bottleneck with Hermes Memory

Memory

Memory

(e.g., DRAM)

(e.g., DRAM)

(e.g., DRAM)

Far Memory (e.g., Intel Point)

Far Memory (e.g., Intel Point)

I/O Performance Gap

Parallel File System (e.g., disks)

Local Storage (e.g., NVMe)

Hermes

Local Storage (e.g., NVMe)

Burst Buffers (e.g., SSD)

Burst Buffers (e.g., SSD)

Parallel File System (e.g., disks)

Parallel File System (e.g., disks)

ChronoLog: New Storage System for Activity Data IN ADDITION TO FUNDING support for the Hermes project, Distinguished Professor Xian-He Sun and Research Assistant Professor Anthony Kougkas have received a National Science Foundation grant to advance a new data storage system that will optimize the efficiency of high-performance computing.

to store that data. ChronoLog can distribute this activity data across multiple storage devices to effectively scale storage capacity. Older log entries are maintained in a capacity storage tier, while more recent data is stored onto a capability storage tier, creating a feature called log data auto-tiering.

High-performance computing increasingly uses activity data, or log data, which captures information as it occurs. The rapid growth of activity data stresses current data-management systems beyond their capability, creating performance backups.

In response, the researchers are developing ChronoLog to organize and store activity data.

ChronoLog also will have the ability to sequence activity data by leveraging a physical time stamp, avoiding expensive techniques such as synchronization, data sorting, or centralized sequencers.

Activity data grows with time and is time sensitive. For example, a security camera that is constantly recording needs a place

Illinois Tech will lead this project with $2.7 million of the $4 million National Science Foundation grant. Sun and Kougkas will be collaborating with Kyle Chard, research assistant professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, who was awarded $1.3 million.

25

Closing the Loop

Achieving Illinois Tech’s Microgrid Vision

By Simon Morrow

I

n the early 2000s, the future of Illinois Institute of Technology’s electrical supply was at a crossroads. Power demand on the university’s Mies Campus was reaching the limits of what the existing power substations could handle, and the university was considering a $5 million investment into a new substation that would allow its campus to draw more power from an electric utility.

However, with outages occurring on campus multiple times per year and causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, the university decided to shift away from a reliance on external power and to invest in a bold new idea: building its

26

Illinois Tech Research

own electricity infrastructure, completely controlled by the university at every stage, from generation to delivery.

University Distinguished Professor and Bodine Chair Professor Mohammad Shahidehpour had already been making models to figure out how a system like this, now widely known as a microgrid, might work. Supported by the $5 million that would have gone toward the new substation as well as an $8 million grant from the United States Department of Energy, in 2008 Shahidehpour embarked on developing one of the first microgrids in the nation.

With the first phase completed in 2013, Illinois Tech is now home to the nation’s first

functional smart microgrid. It has become a cornerstone of research and development at the university and the paradigm for other microgrids that have followed.

The microgrid has saved Illinois Tech $10 million over the past 10 years, including an average of $200,000 per year in energy savings. It has provided eminently reliable power on campus, transitioned more of the university’s power to sustainable sources, and served as an invaluable learning facility for Illinois Tech students and the larger Chicago community.

In 2021 Shahidehpour was awarded $5 million by the State of Illinois to install four new loops in the system over the next two

Mohammad Shahidehpour

years, completing the original vision for the microgrid and further increasing the system’s reliability.

“If you watch the news these days about hurricanes hitting the southern states and see the level of devastation caused by the storms, then you realize the importance of having a resilient grid that can support your critical needs such as hospitals, fire stations, and shelters in such emergency situations,” says Shahidehpour.

A Grid of One’s Own Fundamentally, a microgrid is a self-sufficient energy system that serves a discrete area.

They are typically still connected to the main utility, but must be “islandable,” meaning they can disconnect at will and maintain operation independently. By 2013, Shahidehpour had accomplished this on Mies Campus.

For decades, Illinois Tech had owned and managed campus power from the point it arrived in the two on-campus substations that received power from the utility company.

With the introduction of the microgrid, battery storage, wind turbines, flywheels, and

solar photovoltaic power generation capabilities were added to the campus to give the existing thermal power generation the ability to fast-start on demand. In addition, three nanogrids were added to the campus microgrid in order to enhance the reliability of the electric power system on Mies Campus.

Every microgrid is unique to the needs and priorities of its community, and the Illinois Tech microgrid is built to emphasize reliability. As such, the microgrid is designed in a loop system with redundancies to ensure constant power delivery.

Conventionally, power is distributed using a radial system, where buildings in a series are supplied power one after another in a row. If a power failure occurs in the first building in the chain, all subsequent buildings also lose power until the problem in the first is resolved.

In contrast, a looped system connects both ends of the chain to the main power source. Under normal conditions, electricity flows in one direction along the chain as is done in the radial system. But if a problem occurs in one building, power can be supplied from either end of the loop, letting all other buildings remain operational.

Shahidehpour’s goal has been to also transition all campus buildings to a looped power distribution system. He started with three loops that covered about half of campus. The other half of campus, while connected to the microgrid, has so far continued to use radial power distribution systems.

Each loop utilizes a high-reliability distribution system (HRDS), or ‘smart switch,’ that operates as the brains of the loop, identifying, sequestering, and rerouting power flows when necessary, “essentially functioning as a self-healing circuit,” says Shahidehpour.

Much of the design and development for the microgrid has been driven by Ph.D. students in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

“We have converted the campus to a living laboratory in the sense that right now we practice what we preach,” says Shahidehpour. “We go to teach our classes, and we tell students about these ideas. Now, we can demonstrate at all levels how this technology works. “ Connections to the Future At Illinois Tech the microgrid is a constantly evolving project. Utilizing the new funding awarded by the State of Illinois, four new loops will be constructed starting in 2021, which will connect all buildings on campus via the looped system. Other upgrades have also been in progress to use more sustainable power sources on campus.

The new solar panel array installed on Mies Campus can currently offer around 5 percent of campus power needs, and Shahidehpour says he hopes to continue building renewable energy sources on campus.

“We’re just beginning the process of installing new thermal generators on Mies Campus that are significantly more efficient and should be able to allow us to produce electricity more reliably and at a lower cost,” says Shahidepour.

Shahidehpour has also been involved with a range of initiatives to reduce electrical power use on campus overall. This includes installing wireless and renewable energybased LED lights in high-use areas such as Keating Sports Center, adding LED streetlights throughout most of Mies Campus, and outfitting campus with intelligent sensors in both the grid itself and the devices it powers, such as building LED lights and electric vehicle charging stations. They are optimized to increase energy efficiency on campus and to reduce electrical power use overall.

“I think this is just the beginning,” says Shahidehpour. “Now the whole world is interested in microgrids.” ●

Power Distribution at Illinois Tech

1950s

2003

2008

2011

2013

2013

2021

Original Ludwig Mies van der Rohe campus plan allows Illinois Tech to own and manage campus power starting at two on-campus substations that receive power from ComEd

Illinois Tech begins renovating the electric grid on campus by replacing the North Substation with modern equipment and controls

Launch of the microgrid project

Illinois Tech installs Chicago’s first researchbased advanced wind turbine

Campus grid can operate separately from the main grid and supply power to all of campus independently, making it officially a microgrid

Around half of campus is switched to a looped system with the completion of three loops

Illinois Tech begins work to put Mies Campus completely on a looped system by installing four additional loops

27

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