The Uncommon Engineer by Steve McLaughlin, dean of the College of Engineering, interviews and discusses research with Georgia Tech faculty. The podcast highlights the wide world of engineering.
The Uncommon Engineer is the Georgia Tech College of Engineering’s podcast, hosted by Dean Steve McLaughlin. It has covered topics ranging from healthcare to the environment to data privacy in our digital world. Through the last year, the Dean has sat down with researchers across Georgia Tech to explore the wide world of uncommon engineering and the impacts it has on the world.
Cyber Security with Brendan Saltaformaggio
The 2017 Equifax breach left millions of people exposed to identity theft. Facebook is selling our data for political gain. The city of Atlanta was stymied by a 2018 ransomware attack demanding payment. Cybercrime is rampant. Professor Brendan Saltaformaggio, professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering is developing programs to fight both cybercrime and real human crime. He’s at the top of his field of data security and cyber forensics.
"Personal data is really becoming the new digital currency. Companies which can collect the most data on their users and explain their user’s behavior and understand their users best, this is really going to be the competitive advantage of the future. And so a lot of the work going on in my group is trying to protect that personal data that people are either sharing or unknowingly sharing with companies."
Travel Behavior with Pat Mokhtarian
Emerging technologies are reshaping how we work and how we get around, from teleworking to ride shares to autonomous vehicles. Pat Mokhtarian is a Susan G. and Christopher D. Pappas Professor & Group Coordinator in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech. She discusses Pat what considerations and expectations inform our travel decisions.
"There's the connected vehicle phenomenon, and then again automated vehicles, as you know, are already in testing phases, in use in real-world applications. So in the future, we'll see automated trucks, automated buses, as well as automated personal vehicles potentially of all sizes. You can imagine the portfolio of the little automated car that you'll just send to pick up the dry cleaning or the groceries, the RV automated vehicle that you’ll use for the cross-country trips, and so on."
It Came From Outer Space with Brian Gunter
Man set foot on the moon in 1969, and since then we’ve been reaching ever deeper into our solar system. We're discovering evidence of water on Mars. We’ve stepped beyond our stellar neighborhood with Voyager 1, the only Earth object to reach interstellar space. And now, yes, we're exploring commercialized space travel. Professor Brian Gunter from the Georgia Tech Guggenheim School of Aerospace Engineering hitched a ride on SpaceX to deploy autonomous satellites to further research on space exploration.
"I think we're fairly unique or just one of a handful of universities that could even offer a mini-NASA experience. So at Georgia Tech’s aerospace, we have a fantastic machine shop within the SSDL, the Space Systems Design Lab. Among the shared facilities that we have, of all the professors there, we have thermal vacuum chambers. We have vibration tables that are we use out at Georgia Tech Research Institute, so we can do all of the testing and analysis. We have the setups to do hardware in the loop testing where we’re evaluating attitude control systems and the communication systems. We have multiple ground stations. We have an S-band station and we have multiple, what are UHF radio stations, and those were used during mission operations."
Decoding Memory with Annabelle Singer
The human brain starts creating memories as early as 20 weeks after conception. It’s really hard to believe that a baby's memories are forming while in the womb. Our memories really do make us who we are, you know, in many ways they define us which is why Alzheimer's and other diseases that affect memory are so devastating to so many people. Annabelle Singer is an assistant professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, which is joint between Georgia Tech and Emory. In that department, she is a professor and neuro-engineer. She's helping to find effective therapies for Alzheimer's disease.
"Engineering is a key part of how we think about how the brain works. We think about, when we're trying to understand memory, we're trying to understand how the brain encodes information, how it stores that information, and how it recalls that information. And that kind of information processing is really heavily informed by engineering in terms of the brain is in many ways an electrical organ. It's also a chemical organ, so that information is encoded with electrical signals. Sometimes we think of them as 0’s and 1’s—it's actually not quite that simple, but that's a key way that we think about the brain. We also use engineering in a lot of the methods that we use. So we use extensive data analysis. We write code to analyze a vast array of data that we get. We do a lot of signal processing, machine learning, things like that. We build devices to manipulate brain activity to record brain activity."
The Animal Kingdom with David Hu
How we can solve complex human problems by studying animal functions? How exactly do snakes move without legs? How can some spiders seemingly walk on water? These answers can inform how we engineer new technologies. David Hu is an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Biology (as well as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Physics) in Georgia Tech's George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. He studies animals, including how they walk, eat, and yes, how they urinate.
"In biology, this has been a longstanding question of why in the world do animals sniff? Like, when I have dirty gym socks, I don't take a long whiff. I'll do these sniffs. And if you look at your dog, they'll do the same thing. And it turns out it's this principle that's been observed. We've done experiments at the Atlanta Zoo. Elephants also sniff. Why in the world are these animals sniffing? Why does taking short periodic breaths, why does that help you distinguish objects better?
So we built this device that resembles a bellows. We call it Gromit. It basically has a bellows that pulls and pushes air around a sensor, and we found out if we basically emulate the animals sniffing rates—for a dog that's about two to almost eight times per second—we could actually get the sensor to read much more data from the cheese than without. And so, with this device and this sniffing mechanism, we were able to actually get third place in this international sniffing competition."
Listen to The Uncommon Engineer
The Uncommon Engineer premieres one new episode each month, with supplemental deeper-dives as GEEKOUT bonus features. The podcast is available on all major streaming services and podcast directories.
