Yan Jin, Ph.D. - US grants

This research project seeks to contribute to the scientific foundation of engineering design by developing a conceptual framework that can be used to study, correlate and compare existing engineering design models, which may obtain from widely different perspectives. The resulting framework will consist of a design concept interchange language with rigorous mathematical evaluations. This interchange language will be used to explain the rationales and correlate the concepts used in different models. The mathematical evaluations will be used to explicate underlying assumptions of various design models and to evaluate their validity and limitations. Six to ten engineering design models will be selected from engineering, decision theory, and artificial intelligence fields for this research. The framework will be developed based on the critical review of these selected design models. An interdisciplinary research team, including engineers, mathematicians, and decision theorists, is assembled to develop this framework for engineering design models. Design is the essence of engineering profession; and engineering design has been a topic for researchers from different disciplines. Some of them are from various engineering disciplines, others from decision theory or artificial intelligence fields. Although a number of engineering design models have been proposed to date, little cross reference exists in these models and communication among the researcher has been difficult. It is commonly recognized that the lack of communication among researchers has become a major obstacle for the progress of engineering design research. If successful, the results of this research project will provide a common language and framework for engineering design researchers to share their insights and results in order to identify gaps between the models and directions for the future research.

Design creativity plays an essential role for development of new industrial and mission critical products and systems. Yet our understanding of design creativity and our ability to support creative design are very limited. This Design Creativity Workshop creates a forum for the key researchers around the world in the field of design and creativity to present and exchange their broad perspectives, argue about their similarities and differences, and discuss the future directions of both fundamental research on design creativity and practical development of creative IT tools for supporting creative design. The workshop participants present their ideas and research results on the following topics: Creative design and design creativity, Characteristics of creative thinking in design, Cognitive and computational models of design creativity, Collaboration and design creativity, Computational creativity for design, Bio-inspired creative design, Taxonomy of design creativity, IT tools for creative design, Design creativity & education.

The research objective of this EAGER award is to develop a synthetic DNA based, cellular and self-organizing framework for conceptualizing and designing adaptive systems. This represents a new design methodology for adaptive systems development. Such systems are needed in space exploration, performing tasks in hazardous situations, and for extending utility and lifetime of engineered systems. Following nature's biological synthesis approach to the formation of biological systems, this research will develop a DNA based product representation that maps biological concepts and processes into mechanical products and processes. It will also investigate DNA based cellular system configuration design and self-organizing based construction mechanisms. Computer simulation based case studies will be carried out to verify and demonstrate the effectiveness of the new methodology. The research will result in insights and a research program for a transformative approach to designing complex and adaptive engineered systems.

If successful, the results of this research will provide insights and initial design methods for applying a biology inspired system design and construction process to adaptive systems development. The research has the potential of opening a new field of design research that takes advantage of the knowledge of biology, complexity and complex systems. The adaptive systems developed using the resulting methodology of this research will significantly enhance human being's exploration capability to reach deeper spaces and oceans by eliminating the needs for having human beings involved in unreachable and dangerous situations. The knowledge gained from this research will be incorporated in workshops and design curricula. Graduate students from underrepresented groups will be involved. A research open house will be held for K-12 students to participate. The results, methods, and tools developed through this research will be available to the research community for future explorations.

0932686
Wang

An understanding of the environmental, health, and safety implications of engineered nanomaterials is fundamental to the progression of the emerging field of nanotechnology. Engineered nanomaterials are being proposed for use for applications ranging from medicine to environmental cleanup, which will ultimately lead to their release into the environment, either directly or as waste. As many pollutants reach the aquatic environment it will become increasingly important to assess the environmental implications of nanoparticle release, including their potential impact on species within aquatic ecosystems. Many regulatory organizations are struggling to identify how to assess potential environmental impacts associated with nanomaterials as they exhibit properties that are distinct from their larger counterparts. Studies to date have focused on cellular toxicity rather than whole organism studies, and have included limited types of nanomaterials in any one study leading to difficulties in creating theories about how nanomaterial properties influence the interaction with key organisms. The PI's lab has found that nanomaterial composition and surface chemistry has an influence on the responses of the aquatic crustaceans in the genus Daphnia. Questions that need to be addressed include: A) Do nanomaterials with similar surface chemistry have similar impacts on aquatic organisms or is the composition of the core of the nanomaterial more important? B) How do different nanomaterials interact with the physiology of aquatic organisms? In this experiment, Daphnia pulex will be used as a model aquatic organism to conduct experiments on the impacts of various nanomaterials from molecular and physiological responses to population level responses. General toxicity experiments, physiological and behavioral assays will be used to determine the impact of exposure to several nanomaterials of differing chemical composition. Impacts of exposure on molecular physiology will be conducted using quantitative PCR of key genes as well as microarrays for global gene expression analysis.
D. pulex is a model aquatic species for ecology and toxicology and is now a recognized model species for studies of the impact of environment changes on the genome. Using this species, results from nanoparticle experiments can be compared to genomic and toxicology information that has already been developed for other compounds and will take advantage of the resources available for this species.

The objectives of this project are to determine the characteristics of nanomaterials that make them toxic to aquatic organisms, using Daphnia pulex as a model species. The ultimate goal will be to identify the ways in which nanomaterials may be developed to be less toxic to aquatic invertebrates. Specifically they will 1) determine the impact of changes in nanoparticle chemical structure and surface chemistry on the general toxicity to Daphnia pulex, 2) determine the potential sublethal impacts on reproduction, physiology, and behavior, and 3) determine the molecular effects of nanomaterials on Daphnia pulex by characterizing gene expression patterns specific to each exposure. This molecular data will provide an indication of the mechanism by which nanomaterials alter the physiology of aquatic invertebrates.

The project proposed here will take a focused approach to examine how alterations in structure and surface chemistry of one class of nanomaterials (those based on fullerene carbon structures) will affect the interaction of a particle with the aquatic ecological, toxicological and genomic model species, Daphnia pulex. Taking this approach will provide insight into how structure and surface chemistry play a role in nanomaterial-organism interactions and will provide hypotheses with which to test with other types of particles with different core structures. The ultimate product will be not only toxicological data but a tool with which to evaluate other nanomaterials. In addition the project will provide a means to train students in an interdisciplinary manner that is requisite for understanding the environmental implications of nanotechnology.

The objective of this research award is to model collaborative creativity in engineering design teams in a way that considers both an individual's internal creative processes and the external creative processes that occur through team interactions. Creativity in the generation of new concepts is a key driver of innovation in engineering design, but a continuing challenge has been to postulate strategies that consistently encourage high quality concept generation in design teams. Much research on creativity has focused on theories for internal cognition in individuals, while engineering and organizational behavior research has centered on more general creativity-focused activities at the team level. A comprehensive set of experiments and metrics will be formulated to assess the role of each of these aspects of individual and collaborative creativity.

If successful, this research will help advance the fundamental understanding of the nature of creativity in engineering design teams and further the basic knowledge of innovation in design. This work will have impact across many industries, from product development to automotive to services. The metrics and approaches that arise from this research will serve as a foundation from which to develop strategies for design teams and organizations to become more creative as well as innovative. This research will involve the active participation of undergraduates, women, and underrepresented minorities at MIT, USC, and Wellesley College. Research will also involve urban high school students to encourage the pursuit of careers in engineering through exposure to design activities.

This objective of this research award is to create a new generalization of cellular self-organization as a way to automate the design and control of complex and interdisciplinary systems. Concepts from nature such as evolution, cellular organization, and self-organizing behavior serve as the inspiration for the research. The researchers are creating a software framework built on four elements: graphs, fields, rules, and rule decisions. The graphs are used to define system architecture and dimensions and exist within a three-dimensional physics-based simulator environment with pertinent internal state variables (positions, velocities, accelerations, temperatures, stresses, etc.). Rules and rule decisions govern how graphs change in response to state variables and external field effects like gravity or temperature in a manner that mimics true physical and biological effects.

The computational framework will enable the ?cyber-physical boundary? to be easily shifted. For example, the framework would serve as a design automation tool to design a device before fabrication (simulating the environment of the device virtually) and also used as a control system for the device in actual operation so that the device might adapt to changes in the environment. This would occur by monitoring real-world fields from external sensors and transforming the graph or configuration of the resulting reconfigurable device. The research is a generalization of various published techniques (e.g. cellular automaton, topology optimization, and claytronics) under a single method. Such a framework is necessary for solving interdisciplinary and multi-physics design problems such as those found in mechatronics and robotics. The results will be widely disseminated for greatest impact.