Engineering and... News: February 2024

Greetings GW Engineering Community!

During February, we celebrated Black History Month, honored engineers in commemoration of Engineers Week, and continued to enhance our reputation for excellence in education and research for societal good.

Black History Month is an opportunity to acknowledge the critical contributions Black Americans have made to improve the lives of people around the world. At GW Engineering, we celebrated members of our community and other notable Black engineers for demonstrating their excellence in various fields of engineering and computing. We highlighted current GW Engineering student Makeda Melkie, the former President of our GW Engineering National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) chapter and a current Dean’s Fellow, for being an outstanding member of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and a leader among her peers. We also highlighted alumna Ava Williams, who was an exceptional student in the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering, currently owns and operates a consulting firm, and is a member of the GW Engineering National Advisory Council.

In honor of the nationally recognized Engineers Week, we joined the celebration of the integral role engineers play around the world. We all understand that the work we do intersects with every aspect of society - from infrastructure and energy to health and national security. Engineers continue to be at the forefront of innovation in everything that shapes and moves our world forward. To launch the celebration at our school, we hosted an I Love Engineers Kickoff event for students, faculty, and staff. The administrative units at GW Engineering collaborated and planned a variety of events and student engagement opportunities. The 2024 Engineers Week celebration will culminate in the E-Council’s annual Engineers’ Ball on Saturday, March 2.

U.S. News & World Report’s 2024 Best Online Programs rankings were released earlier this month, and GW Engineering’s Online Graduate Programs – led by Shahram Sarkani and Thomas Mazzuchi – rose one spot to #11. Only three private universities (Johns Hopkins, Columbia, and USC) are ranked higher, and we are several spots higher than engineering powerhouses Texas A&M, Virginia Tech, and NC State. Our programs will be further enhanced by the recent addition of an online Master of Engineering in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

GW Engineering researchers Gina Adam, Pamela Norris, Tianshu Li, Can Korman, Mona Zaghloul, Anastas Propratiland, and Yigal Lilach are leading a team of scientists from the Washington D.C.-Metro area, including Georgetown University, Catholic University of America, Howard University, and Gallaudet University, to collaboratively develop the regional research capacity needed to create new types of devices for next-generation computing. This work is supported by a $1M award from the U.S. Department of Defense under their Defense Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (DEPSCoR) initiative.

The Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS) announced its inaugural round of seed grants. The eight funded projects, totaling just over $1.5 million, will advance cutting-edge research and scholarship that spans AI design, development, and governance. The diverse set of interdisciplinary seed projects reflects the vision and potential impact of TRAILS. It also reflects our unique sociotechnical approach to ensuring AI is both equitable and trustworthy.

This has been another busy month for GW Engineering. Without the collaboration of each of you, we could not do the work we do. Thank you for your continued support of our school!

Raise High Revolutionaries!
John Lach
Dean

When ChatGPT 3 was released in fall 2022, it brought the concept of generative artificial intelligence and large language models to the mainstream with a bang. But for Rebecca Hwa, now professor and department chair of computer science at the George Washington University School of Engineering and Applied Science, the discourse was finally catching up with her interests. Hwa has been researching natural language processing, the mechanism by which computer programs interpret and replicate human language, for decades.

“I have been interested for a long time in the question of how we make computers understand the way people talk—the ability to communicate to a computer as if it were another person, which used to take a bit of imagination because it sounded a little bit sci-fi,” Hwa said with a laugh. “But these days everybody's doing it.”

March 1 from 1-1:45pm: GW | Goldman Sachs Presentation & Experience Panel
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March 1 from 2-5pm: GW | Goldman Sachs Coffee Chats
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March 1 from 5-6pm: ASME Egg Drop
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March 2 from 7-10pm: Engineers' Ball
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March 5, 12, 19, & 26 from 12:25-1pm: Women's History Month Celebration
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March 6 from 4-5pm: Values and Volatilities
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March 7 from 5:30-6:30pm: AI/ML Bracket Challenge Kick-Off
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March 16 from 1-5:30pm: LEED Green Associate Training Webinar
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March 19 from 6-7pm: AI/ML Bracket Challenge Hackathon
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March 21 from 4-5pm: Ask an Alum Anything
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March 23 from 6-8pm: Science Friday at GW
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Computer chips are the basis for nearly every electronic device produced today. The tiny circuits that compose them can carry out computations, make decisions, and store information. Sustained research in new microchips for efficient computing and advanced artificial intelligence (AI) has been recognized as critical for U.S. strategic interests and Department of Defense priorities by former and current administrations to keep up with performance demands.

AI models are an area where innovation is particularly important as companies are looking to increase their model’s performance, which in turn requires more computational power that has to be delivered by the hardware. Devices inspired by the brain’s neurons and synapses promise high-performance accelerator chips that meet the small size/weight and ultra-low power hardware needs for the training and inference of AI models. 

However, these emerging electronic and sensing devices present challenges in low yield, poor uniformity, and scalability, which prevent them from system-level adoption. Researchers from GW’s School of Engineering & Applied Science are leading a strong team of scientists from the Washington D.C.-Metro area, including from

Georgetown University, Catholic University of America, Howard University, and Gallaudet University, to address this issue. 

The $1M Defense Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (DEPSCoR) capacity-building grant from the Department of Defense, “Short-range Order Materials for Neuromorphic Electronic and Biosensing Devices,” supports this team in collaboratively developing the regional research capacity needed to create new types of devices for next-generation computing. In particular, they are focusing on emerging electronic and sensing devices for future integration in brain-inspired, also known as neuromorphic, computing systems. 

A Tale of Two Topics: Innovating Medical Imaging and Broadening Access to Research

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Damage Free Structural System to Resist Large Magnitude Natural Hazards

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Moving Beyond an App-centric Approach to Support Vulnerable Populations' Privacy

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Professor Subramaniam Shares Expertise on Optical Networking

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Solving the Latest Challenges in Engineering Systems

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Prolific Inventor Charles Garris Elected to NAI Fellows Class of 2023

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The Institute for Trustworthy AI in Law & Society (TRAILS) has unveiled an inaugural round of seed grants designed to integrate a greater diversity of stakeholders into the AI development and governance lifecycle, ultimately creating positive feedback loops to improve trustworthiness, accessibility and efficacy in AI-infused systems.

The eight grants announced on Jan. 24, totaling just over $1.5 million–were awarded to interdisciplinary teams of faculty associated with the institute. The projects include developing AI chatbots to assist with smoking cessation, designing animal-like robots to assist caregivers interacting with autistic children, and exploring how users interact with AI-generated language translation systems.

Senior Academic Advisor Jonathan Yoo works hard to ensure all undergraduate students achieve academic success & are connected to the countless resources available to them at GW Engineering.

Q: How long have you been working at GW and what is your position?
A: I am currently the Senior Academic Advisor in the GW Engineering Undergraduate Advising Office and have been in this position for one year, since February 2023.

Q: What led you to this career?
A: I have a great passion for higher education and enjoy working with students to achieve academic success.

Q: Why did you choose GW?
A: I chose GW for its career and networking opportunities in higher education and admire the University’s mission for academic excellence.

Q: What is one thing you wish you’d known when you started working at GW?
A: I have worked in different schools at GW in the past so I had the same expectations.

Last year, the GW Innovation Center worked with Sustainable GW, Dr. Tara Scully, director of GW’s Sustainability Minor Program, and Kennedy Center artist-in-residence Celia Ledón to fabricate the art installation, “The Shape of Water,” for The John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts' first international festival series dedicated to sustainability, the RiverRun festival. They teamed up again this year to create THE-FORESTATION, a towering baobab tree skinned with recovered cardboard and other packing materials, for the Kennedy Center's second festival, REACH to Forest.

The Computer Science Department’s Colloquium Series features speakers from across the country, and for its latest installment, the department collaborated with GW’s Department of Physics to offer a joint colloquium. On Friday, February 16, they welcomed GW alum, Dr. Adam Hughes, Ph.D. ‘15, to the Science & Engineering Hall to give a talk titled, “Why you should be excited to be a software engineer in 2024.” The talk revisited the significant growth and evolving trends in cloud computing over the past 15 years and compared it with the recent surge in generative artificial intelligence.

In 1951, the National Society of Professional Engineers (NSPE) founded Engineers Week to commemorate how engineers make a difference in the world and spark curiosity in the next generation of innovators. GW Engineering joined the more than a week-long celebration to honor our school’s community of budding and impactful engineers through a slew of events focused on boosting professional development, developing innovative engineering solutions, and strengthening the GW Engineering community from February 20th to March 2nd.

The GWU-PREP is a collaboration with GWU in Washington, DC and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) campus in Gaithersburg, Maryland. GWU-PREP provides research opportunities at NIST to students, faculty, research staff, and postdoctoral researchers at GW as well as researchers at SURA-affiliated universities.

We support your ambitions by offering financial support to eligible GW community members, including a monthly stipend, hourly wage, or full tuition reimbursement for qualifying undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff.