Biosensors are can detect a variety of molecules in a rapid and highly sensitive manner. A new biosensing technology was developed to allow scientists to customize the biomolecular target they wanted to detect, called an open-gated silicon junction field effect transistor (JFET). However, this technology lacks user friendly packaging needed accommodate its use in diverse research settings. This can discourage people from using and building new sensing platforms.

In recent years, automation has become more accessible to small- and medium-sized businesses, leading to an increase in popularity of ultra-compact and easy-to-integrate industrial robot arms like Mecademic’s Meca500. However, because of their size constraints, it is harder for these robots to accurately follow a programmed path. This research project aims to improve the path-tracking performance of Mecademic’s Meca500 robot by fusing state-of-the-art machine learning techniques with modern control design techniques.

The IPCC project aims to utilize the advancements in lasers, optics and semiconductor fabrication facilities to deliver a computing chip that uses laser instead on electrical signals to perform computations. The new paradigm of computation execution allows computations to be performed much faster at lower energy consumption which directly leads to lower costs for computations. The advantage is particularly huge for AI computations. The Interns will perform research work to design, fabricate and test the new chip and develop software that allow using this chip efficiently.

Vehicles that are able to autonomously move in the air, on the ground, or underwater must fuse various forms of sensor data together in order to ascertain the vehicles location relative to objects or a map. Typical sensor data includes inertial measurement unit data and some sort of positioning data, such as GPS data. However, positioning data is not always available, especially indoors and underground. SBQuantum (SBQ) has developed a novel quantum magnetometer that can measure the Earth’s magnetic field gradient.

Just as every computer needs a processor, every processor needs a cooling system. Without one, the significant heat generated by the processor will overheat the system. As time has advanced, this heating issue has only become more critical, thus necessitating the advent of more effective cooling solutions. Microgaps, which pass coolant through, as the name suggests, a microscale gap, are uniquely suited to meet the ever-increasing cooling demands of modern processors. Moreover, they are capable of doing so in a compact and reliable manner.

The freight trucking industry is in a transformational phase by adopting smart mobility options to reduce operational costs and minimize carbon foot print. The autonomous truck platooning is a major step in this regard and the goal of this research project is to assess the readiness of the bridges for the peculiar loading conditions due this new form of the mobility by performing reliability analysis. The partner organization will benefit from the outcomes of this research by keeping its leading role in the smart mobility segment of the industry.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has received extensive interests due to its low cost, battery-free, and small size. Many exciting applications based on RFID have been developed in recent years, such as localization, gesture sensing, and health monitoring, etc. However, none of these systems are widely in real-world use. The reason is that most existing systems assume a static communication environment, while a small environmental variation or tag geometrical condition change will cause a large accuracy decrease.

Plants are always associated with a well coordinated and beneficial community of microbes - the phytomicrobiome; this plus the associated plant forms the holobiont, the entity that provides crop yield. There is considerable communication between the phytomicrobiome and the plant, often in through signal compounds. Bacilin 20 is a small protein produced a Bacillus thuringiensis strain and discovered by the Smith laboratory. It is improves plant ability to tolerate stress when applied at very low concentrations.

Since the dawn of the human genome sequencing in 2003, great hopes have been put into the development of new therapeutics and personalized medicine tailored on individual DNA profiles. Nonetheless, progress in these fields has been slow, mainly due to the focus of the research community on only a small number of genes and proteins involved in diseases. As a result, there remains a plethora of unexplored proteins and genes responsible for diseases such as Alzheimer's, cancer, or rare/orphan diseases, that have yet to be understood.

The current gold standard for the diagnosis of genetic disorders and infectious diseases involves the use of molecular methods for target gene detection through DNA/RNA amplification techniques. However, this requires a critical upstream step of extracting purified nucleic acid (NA) material from a variety of collected patient samples. This step can be easily performed through magnetic-based NAs extraction techniques which have recently replaced traditional spin-column approaches in diagnostic testing labs in the world.