Georgia Tech Procurement Assistance Center

Future of 5G is under the microscope at Georgia incubator

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Entrepreneurs needing — or wanting — a 5G testing environment can now start their search in the metro Atlanta area.  Peachtree Corners, a small town firmly rooted in technology growth, has launched a new incubator with a focus on the next-gen Internet innovation.

The initiative is a collaboration among the Georgia Institute of Technology, the city of Peachtree Corners and T-Mobile.  The 5G Connected Future incubator is based out of the $6 million Curiosity Lab, a city-owned 500-acre smart city technology park, outfitted with an autonomous vehicle test track and other advancements.

“This is kind of a unique model.  I’m not sure that I’ve seen one that’s exactly like it,” remarked John Avery, executive director of Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), a startup incubator.  ATDC is providing the program management, startup educational and event planning, and other services which go along with helping startups become successful.

“It’s very unique to have a public entity — the city of Peachtree Corners, an academic institution like Georgia Tech — and then a commercial provider, T-Mobile, come together, with overlapping interests, and decide to work together to help not only figure out some of the innovation about what 5G will bring us in the future, but to together, help whoever it is that’s coming up with this technology to get from Point A to Point B,” said Betsy Plattenburg, executive director of Curiosity Lab.

Continue reading at:  Government Technology

Collective worm and robot “blobs” protect individuals, swarm together

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Individually, California blackworms live an unremarkable life eating microorganisms in ponds and serving as tropical fish food for aquarium enthusiasts.  But together, tens, hundreds, or thousands of the centimeter-long creatures can collaborate to form a “worm blob,” a shape-shifting living liquid that collectively protects its members from drying out and helps them escape threats such as excessive heat.

While other organisms form collective flocks, schools, or swarms for such purposes as mating, predation, and protection, the Lumbriculus variegatus worms are unusual in their ability to braid themselves together to accomplish tasks that unconnected individuals cannot.  A new study reported by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology describes how the worms self-organize to act as entangled “active matter,” creating surprising collective behaviors whose principles have been applied to help blobs of simple robots evolve their own locomotion.

The research, supported by the National Science Foundation and the Army Research Office, was reported Feb. 5 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  Findings from the work could help developers of swarm robots understand how emergent behavior of entangled active matter can produce unexpected, complex, and potentially useful mechanically driven behaviors.

Continue reading at:  Georgia Tech News Center

The Partnership for Inclusive Innovation is now accepting applications for pilot programs

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The Partnership for Inclusive Innovation is a public-private partnership that launched in 2020 to lead coordinated, statewide efforts to position Georgia as the Technology Capital of the East Coast.  It is now accepting applications for pilot programs seeking funding of up to $250,000!

They are looking for Georgia businesses, entrepreneurs, and entities that want to help foster innovation, access, growth, entrepreneurship, and innovation throughout our state.

Pilot selection criteria include:

    • Team and infrastructure
    • Innovation and impact
    • Alignment with the Partnership’s values
    • Expected return on investment
    • Time needed to make an impact
    • Sustainability

Interested applicants should apply by March 8, and additional information is available online at PartnershipForInclusiveInnovation.org.

Georgia Tech will help manage DOE’s Savannah River National Laboratory

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The Battelle Savannah River Alliance (BRSA) – which includes Georgia Tech – has been selected by the Department of Energy to manage one of the country’s premier environmental, energy, and national security research facilities—the Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL).

Employing approximately 1,000 staff, SRNL conducts research and development for diverse federal agencies, providing practical, cost-effective solutions for the nation’s environmental, nuclear security, energy, and manufacturing challenges.  As the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Environmental Management Laboratory, SRNL provides strategic scientific and technological support for the nation’s $6 billion per year waste clean-up program.

As part of the BRSA, Georgia Tech will help manage the SRNL and guide the future growth of the lab’s core competencies while expanding collaboration with Tech’s $1 billion-per-year research program.  The laboratory is located near Aiken, S.C., across the Savannah River from Augusta and Richmond County.

Continue reading at:  Georgia Tech News Center

Dr. Abdallah testifies on U.S. competitiveness, research, STEM pipeline at Congressional hearing

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On Jan. 29, Chaouki Abdallah, Georgia Tech’s executive vice president for Research, testified before a U.S. House of Representatives committee about the cooperative United States research and development (R&D) enterprise, including the threat of falling behind other nations in critical technologies, investment in the nation’s institutions of higher education, and the future of the STEM talent pipeline.

Along with Abdallah, the hearing brought together expert testimony from representatives from federal and industry perspectives, including Diane Souvaine, chair of the National Science Board, and Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and founder of Schmidt Futures.

In his testimony to the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Abdallah stressed the importance of maintaining the U.S. position of leadership in R&D, and the importance of the collaboration between the federal government, higher education, and the private sector.

“The mission, alignment, and cooperation of these three actors have historically made the U.S. research landscape the most productive and admired in the world … and made the U.S. safer, healthier, and wealthier.”

Continue reading at:  Georgia Tech News Center

Georgia Tech’s Technology Square Phase III to include George Tower

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Momentum for Technology Square Phase III continues to grow with the naming of its second tower in honor of longtime supporters of Georgia Tech.  The Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia approved the naming of George Tower at its meeting Feb. 11 in recognition of philanthropists William “Bill” and Penny George.

George Tower will be home to the nation’s No. 1-ranked H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, as well other programs.  George Tower will complement Scheller Tower, also planned on the site, to house the graduate and executive education programs of the Scheller College of Business.  Both new towers in Tech Square Phase III are expected to open by the end of 2022.

Continue reading at:  Georgia Tech News Center

Student surprises his teacher with Georgia Tech acceptance news

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Since the seventh grade, 17-year-old Max Pacheco has dreamed of attending Georgia Institute of Technology. On Jan. 18, Pacheco checked the school’s website and found out his dream was coming true — he had been accepted.

The South Forsyth High School senior wanted to thank and surprise his favorite teacher, Dr. Gloria Green, an AP Spanish teacher who wrote a letter of recommendation on his behalf.

Pacheco delivered the good news to Dr. Green along with a bouquet — and her response was priceless.

Continue reading at:  WSB TV

Georgia Tech Applied Research will support DHS information safeguarding effort

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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T) awarded a $704,000 research-and-development (R&D) contract to Atlanta-based Georgia Tech Applied Research Center (GTARC) to support trustmark framework efforts to aid the public safety community’s information sharing and safeguarding capabilities, DHS reported.  The GTARC R&D project will specifically address the lack of mature software tools to support the trustmark framework’s primary use-cases, such as emergency communications interoperability.  GTARC will upgrade the trustmark framework’s Federated Identity, Credential and Access Management (Federal ICAM) capability, in order to help advance public safety information sharing and safeguarding capabilities communications across agency boundaries.

Continue reading at:  SIGNAL magazine

$25 million project will advance DNA-based archival data storage

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The demand for archival data storage has been skyrocketing, and if a new research initiative reaches its goals, that need could be met by taking advantage of an efficient and robust information storage medium that has proven itself through the centuries: the biopolymer DNA.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity’s (IARPA) Molecular Information Storage (MIST) program has awarded a multi-phase contract worth up to $25 million to develop scalable DNA-based molecular storage techniques.  The goal of the project, which will be led by the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI), is to use DNA as the basis for deployable storage technologies that can eventually scale into the exabyte regime and beyond with reduced physical footprint, power and cost requirements relative to conventional storage technologies.

The technology already exists for storing and reading information into DNA — which also encodes the genetic blueprint for living organisms — but significant advances will be needed to make it commercially practical and cost competitive with established magnetic tape and optical disk memory.  While current archival storage has a limited lifetime, information stored in DNA could last for hundreds of years.

Continue reading at:  Georgia Tech News Center

Georgia Tech collaborates with IBM to develop software stacks for quantum computers

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The Georgia Institute of Technology has announced its agreement to join the IBM Q Hub at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to help advance the fundamental research and use of quantum computing in building software infrastructure and developing specialized error mitigation techniques.  Georgia Tech will have cloud access, via the Oak Ridge Hub, to the world’s largest fleet of universal quantum computing systems for commercial use case exploration and fundamental research.

“Access to IBM machines will allow Georgia Tech to build software infrastructure to make it easier to operate quantum machines, create specialized error mitigation techniques in software – thereby mitigating some of the hardware errors – and develop algorithms and applications for the emerging noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) computing paradigm,” said Moinuddin Qureshi, a professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.  “Access will also allow Georgia Tech researchers to better understand the error patterns in existing quantum computers, which can help with developing the architecture for future machines.”

Continue reading at:  Georgia Tech News Center

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