Millennium Café

Mauricio Terrones & Yin-Ting Yeh | Physics, Chemistry, and Materials Science & Engineering

We will show that it is possible to build a portable platform capable of capturing viruses according to their size and thus enabling direct genomic sequencing in the field. I will discuss how aligned carbon nanotubes (A-CNT) on different substrates can be used as novel three-dimensional (3D) filters that are able to effectively trap viruses by size without labels (antibodies). We are able to tune the inter-tubular spacing from 20 to 500nm. This range covers more than 90% of known viral pathogens. A new technology using this CNT-device in conjunction with Raman spectroscopy and machine learning will be discussed. This platform in now able to identify human viruses with 90% accuracy.

The Penn State Manufacturing and Sterilization initiative came together in March 2020 in response to needs and shortages caused by the novel coronavirus outbreak. I will give a brief overview of the current working groups that are being organized as well as list of the most immediate priorities as of March 23^rd. Beyond priorities under MASC activities there is a critical need to inventory PPE which may be useful for our front line healthcare workers – more information on that can be found here:  https://www.research.psu.edu/covid_labs

Matt Ferrari | Biology | The Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics

In the words of the WHO Director General, the recent emergence of SARS-CoV-2 has led to both an epidemic and an infodemic. The state of scientific knowledge about the new virus, the threats it poses, and the strategies to mitigate its spread has been evolving on an hour-by-hour basis. I will present a situation report on the current state of the outbreak and discuss our role, as scientists, in communication to the broader community. 

Vishal Monga | Electrical Engineering

Humans and machines alike are often engaged in visual tasks that involve analyzing, interacting with, forming or improving image data. The application landscape of automating visual tasks is rich and diverse and spans consumer and medical imaging, robotics and vision, remote sensing and space sciences, smart systems such as those for traffic analysis and process control. In the past decade, machine learning algorithms have greatly accelerated advances in automating visual tasks -- yet they are overly dependent on the quantity and quality of training image data available.  This talk will survey research topics pursued in the Information Processing and Algorithms (iPAL) lab at Penn State (http://signal.ee.psu.edu), which is focused on developing innovations for visual tasks such as image quality enhancement, segmentation and classification when available data is severely limited, noisy or non-ideal.

Adam Rawding | Pennsylvania State University Police

What should you do if you see something suspicious? How should you respond if you are the victim of a crime? What if you have a friend that is behaving in a way that concerns you? We are here to help. I will discuss “Who We Are” and the services the Pennsylvania State University Police can provide, not only in a crisis, but in our everyday lives. From a theft, to harassment, to a dead car battery, know how to get help, and what to expect.

Stephan J. Goetz | Agricultural Economics, Sociology, and Education

Conventional measures of innovation such as patents, R&D spending and science and engineering workforce are narrow and may miss economically important new goods and services, as well as new ways of producing them. In this talk I will discuss where new ideas and innovation can come from and the conditions under which they may arise. This information is then used to construct a measure of innovation that is likely to be occurring in different counties but that is not measured in official statistics. This latent innovation measure explains regional income and job growth beyond other typical explanatory factors.