(High school senior Samantha Scibelli – named yesterday as one of 40 finalists in the prestigious pre-college Intel Science Talent Search 2013 – wrote this excellent post for The Approach, to tell us about her research  with Professor Heidi Newberg. Enjoy!)

My name is Samantha Scibelli, I am currently finishing up my senior year at Burnt Hills–Ballston Lake High School. I have always had a love for science, starting from the time I was young, polishing rocks in my rock tumbler and analyzing fingerprints with my forensics kit. My passion for science escalated the summer before my sophomore year. That summer I attended a career exploration program at Cornell University where I took a workshop on astronomy. Immediately I fell in love with the field and the exciting research it was producing. I was fascinated by dark matter, exoplanets, parallel universes, and all of the mysteries in the farthest depths of our universe.

That same year I was accepted into my school’s science research program. This program is designed to have students work with professional mentors on cutting-edge research for three years starting their sophomore year. I was determined to work in astronomy research. So I got busy trying to find a mentor.

That fall I spent hours reading professional papers on various types of astronomy research. I scrolled through the internet searching for possible mentors at various college campuses. Incredibly, my science research teacher had arranged for me to meet with Professor Heidi Jo Newberg of RPI. I was thrilled! I had read dozens of her papers on topics such as tidal streams, dwarf galaxies, and dark matter. Shortly after we met I joined the research group and delved into a project of my own.

The research I do with Professor Newberg involves classifying blue stars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Stars are classed based on their temperature and luminosity, with blue stars being of the very hot and luminous variety. They are unique to study because of their rarity. Blue stars burn their fuel faster compared to other cooler stars, therefore they die faster. An accurate classification of stars, specifically rare blue stars, is important when astronomers want to gain information about stellar populations and describe the structure of our galaxy.

The SDSS provides publically accessible data of objects in one-fourth of the entire sky. The SDSS has been a part of numerous discoveries, including the discovery of the most distant quasars and of various substructures in the outer Milky Way. Visually, errors within the computer generated spectral template classification system have been noticed. It’s important to minimize these errors so future research can become more accurate.

My research involved looking by eye through the spectra of over 12,000 blue stars. I found that 10 percent of these stars were misclassified by the SDSS. I then placed these misclassified stars into 11 new classes. Some of these classes include binary stars, featureless stars, cataclysmic variable stars, DB white dwarfs, and unknown blue stars. I found that the spectral classification problems within the SDSS can be accounted for the lack of templates for stellar objects. There are 42 templates with only 8 templates for hot blue stars. I suggest that additional templates be added into the SDSS to account for rarer types of blue stars.

Much of the research done with SDSS is on extragalactic objects, such as galaxies and quasars. But as research on stellar spectra from the SDSS data becomes more common, errors with the classification should be minimized. The work I’ve done will hopefully draw attention to the classification problems and create accurate data results in the future so astronomers can learn about the structure of our galaxy and universe as a whole.

Working with Professor Newberg on this project has been an incredible experience. I have been fortunate enough to present my findings at various professional conferences and compete in local science fairs. Being a part of this research and being able to collaborate with professional scientists has been life changing. Scientific research has given me the ability to learn beyond the confines of a classroom. I have had the opportunity to ask questions and find my own answers. I look forward to a long and prosperous future in research, and I hope I can inspire other young students interested in math and science to follow in my footsteps.

News sites were abuzz today with a fun update from 400 kilometers above the surface of the Earth. NASA on Monday released new video footage of its friendly-faced robotic astronaut, Robonaut 2, working aboard the International Space Station (ISS). NASA has been running tests and experiments with R2, as the robot is called, since it was ferried to the ISS early 2011. The goal is for R2 to one day serve as an assistant or stand-in for astronauts during spacewalks, or perform overly dangerous or complex tasks.

I love a good space robot news story, but this one is particularly exciting because Rensselaer senior Nathaniel Quillin played a role in developing R2. Nathaniel, a computer and systems engineering major, seen in the photo above, spent two semesters and three summers at Johnson Space Center near Houston working directly on the R2 project. That is a hugely impressive and prestigious level for any researcher to be functioning at—it’s pretty amazing that Nathaniel got to work on this stuff as an undergraduate student.

During his time at NASA, Nathaniel wrote the computer code used to help debug R2’s hardware. Additionally, he helped write code for the graphical user interface that NASA researchers use to control R2. This control software creates 3-D visualizations that allows researcher to see how R2 will carry out their commands, prior to sending the actual commands for the robot to execute. All in all, he estimates he contributed hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

Click here to check out the video footage on NASA’s website, shown as part of an interview with Robonaut project lead Ron Diftler. Click here to read a newspaper story on Nathaniel and his work with R2.

At Rensselaer, it’s a different story.

Student members of the Entrepreneurship Club are getting ready to host the preliminary round of the University Hacker Olympics. The event will make its official debut tomorrow, from 2 to 6 p.m, in the Center of Industrial Innovation (CII) room 4034.

In a span of only four hours, students from Rensselaer and several universities will work to write a piece of code to solve a puzzle. If it works, then the students will continue to tweak the algorithm. Students creep up the leader board (we are not talking about the reality television show Dancing With the Stars) by refining the code to make it run faster and more efficiently.

So, how did all of this get started?

The Entrepreneurship Club was approached by several tech startup companies in California to compete in the event. Business and Management major, Kevin Petrikas, who also serves as the club’s president says that the club has been looking to expand its membership and include tenacity minded people:

The Hacker Olympics will help promote entrepreneurship on campus by linking the best and brightest RPI students to the top startups in California hopefully producing relationships and job offers. I think that students will get excited about entrepreneurship and an event like this encourage students to think about starting their own companies, or at least that’s the goal.

In addition to Rensselaer, some participating colleges and universities include: Berkeley, Brown, Carnegie Mellon, Champaign, Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Ohio, Penn State, Purdue, Rice, RIT, Stanford, University of Michigan, University of California, and many more.

The overall event is sponsored by SignalFire, a California-based company that was created to “engage the world’s most audacious dreamers and builders through events and initiatives designed to bring together today’s technology leaders with tomorrow’s breakout stars.”

The goal of the preliminary round is to construct a team of over 100 top developers from participating schools. Winners will get an all expense paid trip to Silicon Valley to compete in a weekend long hackathon, and get a chance to code alongside CTO’s and top engineers from the hottest tech startups like AirBNB, Square, Stripe, and 30 others. The national finals will be held Jan 11-13, 2013.

What do the winning hackers get out of this? Beyond the chance of competing for over $150,000 in travel and related prizes, winners get to party with awesome people. Meet other awesome students from across the country. And maybe even land a job at a top Silicon Valley company.

Sounds golden to me.

Click here for more information about the national competition.

A few weeks ago guest-blogger Tyler Hopf wrote about a fundraising effort he and a team of fellow Rensselaer School of Architecture students had undertaken on behalf of local food pantries. The students were preparing an entry for the second annual annual Capital District CANstruction.

In a recent update to the original post, Hopf reached out to say that the students raised more than $2,000 and more than 1,600 cans of food for area food pantries with their entry (pictured above).

CANstruction – a non-profit organization committed to ending hunger – organizes regional competitions in which local residents build and exhibit structures built entirely of cans of food. The structures raise awareness (and food) for food pantries. Following the exhibition, the structures are disassembled, and the cans are donated to local food pantries.

The Rensselaer team, the only student team in an event dominated by architecture and engineering firms, won the award for “Best Use of Labels,” one of four awards given among the 14 teams. Hopf said:

It was great to represent RPI, win an award and donate so much to a great cause.

The theme of this year’s CANstruction is “Zoo Can Do It,” and the students’ 10′ x 10′ x 8′ structure, shaped and patterned like a peacock, will be on display along with other entries on the fourth floor of the New York State Museum through April 26.

Here’s a picture with the Rensselaer team. Pictured from left to right (each holding a peacock feather) are: Emily Mastropiero, Cady Guyton, Rachel Medina, Katie Brust, Hyatt Tortorella, Tyler Hopf, Sarah Goldfarb, Julia Grabazs, Alex Dorn, Cat Callaghan, and School of Architecture Associate Dean and Associate Professor Mark Mistur.

(Civil Engineering senior Elizabeth Wroe wrote this excellent post for The Approach. It’s about an engineering competition last month in Oakland, Calif., where she and her teammates won second place. Enjoy!)

On March 26, a group of RPI students placed second in the annual Geo-Institutes GeoWall competition. The four students on the build team were Margaret Exton, Russell Jones, Panagiota Kokkali, and Leonard Lustrino.

As champions of last year’s competition, the RPI team fought hard to keep their title. Unfortunately, in classic bottom-of-the-ninth style drama, the final competing team managed to build a strong stable wall and steal away the prize.

The GeoWall competition is a contest to determine which team can build a retaining wall out of poster board and Kraft paper using the least amount of material. Between the final weight of the Kraft paper used, a report score, and any deductions that may have been incurred due to rule violation, each team receives a total score. If the wall fails under the loading, the team is disqualified. RPI came in second with a total of 159.2 points. Surrounding Rensselaer’s second place finish were CalPoly Pomona in first place with 182.5 points and CalPoly San Luis Obispo in third with 152.5 points.

The RPI team, which also includes alternates Derek Lousch, Jessica Stratton, Christopher Snyder, and Elizabeth Wroe, had been working on the final wall design long before their trip to Oakland. Over the course of sixth months, the team tested paper and soil parameters and built many different wall designs.

Beyond basic tensile tests of the paper, and shear tests for the soil, the team went so far as to establish their own pullout test for the paper strips. This test helped establish whether the strips were breaking under the load conditions or simply “pulling-out” of the soil due to insufficient friction between the sand and the paper. While pullout tests do already exist, the team had to modify the original testing materials to correctly represent the unique conditions of the paper retaining wall.

In addition to having a strong design and low paper weight, it is very important to construct and install the wall under the time limit set by the competition. After eventually deciding on a design and submitting the report, the RPI GeoWall team spent many weeks practicing to build the wall within the set time limits. Averaging at around one wall per week, sixteen separate retaining walls were built and tested to help calibrate team members to the competition standards.

The competition featured four heats based upon weight of the paper reinforcement. Having a relatively above-average paper weight, RPI competed in the second heat along with four other schools. Disqualifications were common, as a team’s wall had to stay intact under various loading conditions for a length of time. Only six teams were given a score.

After RPI’s wall held, the team had to wait anxiously for the following ten school’s designs to fail. Because all following teams had less design weight, they had a greater chance of receiving a higher score. Fortunately, for the RPI team, deductions were as common as failures. For example, each team was responsible for building and bringing their own box and any deviations from the specifications given in the rules were eligible for deductions. RPI’s relatively high report score and lack of deductions gave them a high lead early in the competition.

The competition was held in Oakland, Calif. this year at Geo-Institute’s annual GeoCongress conference. Along with presentations and exhibits, the gathering also featured two separate competitions as part of the GeoChallenge: the GeoPoster, a contest between research posters; and GeoPredictions, a contest where each team of students is presented with a real-world civil engineering problem and is asked to present the most reasonable geotechnical engineering solution. Next year’s GeoChallenge will be held in San Diego.

(Professor and friend of The Approach Tarek Abdoun is the faculty adviser of the Rensselaer GeoChallenge Team. For more on the team, click here and here.)

(Alex Giordano is a senior mechanical engineering major and shop manager for the Rensselaer Formula SAE student team. He wrote this excellent post for The Approach to talk about the yesterday’s event where the club unveiled its 2012 race car, which you can see above and below. Every year the club builds a new car from scratch and races it against cars created by other universities—pretty cool!)

The 2012 Roll Out event was a great success this year as faculty, sponsors, family, and friends gathered to witness the unveiling of our competition racecar. “R12,” as we call it, features several major improvements from last year’s car. To start, the front and rear suspension geometry has been completely redesigned with a focus on decreasing body roll and lowering the center of gravity of each suspension component. Front and rear anti-roll bars have been implemented as well as a transition to the use of pull rods in the rear suspension. Six chassis members were removed after the results from physical testing deemed them unnecessary in this year’s design. “R12” will also feature electronic shifting actuated by paddles on our suede-wrapped steering wheel. The engine package will include an upgraded engine control unit (ECU) as well significantly more hours of dyno-tuning than our previous years’ race car.

Completing the car for our Roll Out was challenge as always, and team members logged more than 1500 shop hours in the last three weeks. The team continues to grow in size and effectiveness as students become more aware of FSAE around campus. A focus on recruiting during the fall semester yielded a strong new influx of bright motivated students to take the baton and carry the team into next year. I’m very proud to be a member of the Rensselaer Formula SAE Race Team, and as a senior club member graduating in May I look forward to competing for the final time at Michigan International Speedway next month. I am very happy to say the team is alive and well, the car will certainly improve dramatically over the next few years as some very creative and motivated students move into leadership.

For further reading about the Rensselaer FSAE club, click here and here.

Ever wonder what would happen if you attached video cameras to a weather balloon, hit “record,” and then launched it up, up and away? Some engineering students here at Rensselaer were wondering the same thing, so they tried it. They found their answer, and it’s captured in the above video.

Now, this is not necessarily an uncommon endeavor. Lots of people send balloons and rockets and other stuff into space with cameras. What is unique about the Rensselaer project, however, is how the students “stitched together” the video from three cameras to create an interactive 360-degree panoramic video. Check out the 360-degree video here.

Read more about the students’ project here, and see below for a local TV news clip.

On June 6th, I traveled with three other RPI students (Michelle Decepida ’13, Adriana Rojas ’12, and PhD candidate Eduardo Castillo) to Madrid for an eight-week collaborative research project at the Institude for Microelectronics in Madrid, Spain. The research focused on the development of thermoelectric materials, or materials which generate electricity when there is a flow of heat through them—very similar to solar cells which generate electricity when light flows through them. These materials have the potential to provide vast amounts of energy and have expanded the diversity of clean energy technologies.

We had two primary research goals: 1) develop a procedure for producing high quality films of bismuth telluride on a silicon substrate via pulsed electrodeposition, and 2) design and install the experimental set-up required to measure the figure of merit of the films.  The thermoelectric effect that drives the power generation capability of these materials is improved remarkably when the material is dimensionally very small— like a thin film from 100-5,000 nanometers. Thin film technology is generally very expensive; however, the same process used to plate car wheels with chrome metal (electrodeposition) can be used to deposit thermoelectric materials too! Electrodeposition is a well known technology and much cheaper to do than other thin film methods. Therefore, our research is focused on optimizing the electrodeposition procedure to produce high quality thermoelectric films.

The figure of merit for thermoelectric devices is a standard measure how well they perform. Current commercial products have a figure of merit just below 1. In order for this technology to be viable for mass production, the figure of merit needs to be around 3. Measuring the figure of merit is fairly easy for large materials, but for thin films it is quite difficult, hence it is an active area of research among scientists.

In addition to conducting research we traveled around Spain and visited many of the most famous areas here. The museums in Madrid have many famous paintings from Spanish artists such as Picasso and Salvador Dali (so incredible to see in person)!

Additionally, the San Fermin festival was from July 7-14 in Pamplona—it’s the festival where the famous “running of the bulls” occurs every year. Michelle, a junior engineering student at RPI, and I traveled to the festival for a weekend and joined the people of the town in the celebrating the event. Earnest Hemmingway was right about what he said of the Matadors, they are very brave! Eduardo and Adriana (senior engineering student) traveled with us to a hostel, the first time for all of us, and met a lot of really cool people from all over the world (Sweden, Australia, Denmark, England)—and they all spoke English too.

We learned a lot about the Spanish culture during our stay. Thirty minute coffee breaks are a common thing. Everyone looks forward to them so it’s rude not to invite everyone else in the lab when you go for a coffee. The students here are all graduate students or postdocs. They were very welcoming and made our stay here so enjoyable. We became fast friends and found ourselves wishing we could stay longer.

To read more about the faculty adviser of these students, Diana Borca-Tasciuc, click here and see her 3° interview on The Approach here.

For further reading about international experiences and study abroad at Rensselaer, check out my story here from a recent issue of the Institute’s Alumni Magazine.

The RPI Steel Bridge Team competed in the AISC-ASCE Student Steel Bridge Competition at the Upstate New York Regional Conference on April 29th in Montreal, Quebec.

The team of ten students, primarily civil engineering undergraduate students, designed the bridge during the fall semester adhering to strict competition guidelines. Design decisions focused on building a strong, yet efficient bridge that could be assembled quickly.

Constructability was a continuous topic of discussion throughout the year. During the spring semester, Stonebridge Iron & Steel in Gansevoort, NY fabricated the bridge. The team performed additional labor including drilling bolt holes for each connection, modifying the design for increased lateral stability, and painting the final product. Finally, after many hours of practice builds, the bridge was ready to make the trip to Montreal.

A few weeks before the competition, the team hosted a class of fourth grade students from the Doane Stuart School. The bridge was displayed as a hands-on prop and the students participated in a short presentation on civil engineering, bridge design, and the competition. A picture from this trip is below.

At the competition, four team members built the bridge in 18 minutes and 40 seconds, well under the 45 minutes allowed. A lateral load test of 75 lbs was performed, but the bridge deflected 1/16” more than permitted. As a result, RPI was disqualified. There was controversy over the way the measurement was taken. Four other teams were disqualified at this stage of the competition for similar reasons. Finally, a vertical load test was performed. The main span was loaded with 1800 lbs, and 700 lbs was placed on the cantilever. A cumulative deflection of 3/16″ over two locations, well under the allowable deflection, was measured! RPI placed third in the competition.

The team consisted of Tucker Allen, Craig Buechele, Erika Hango, Rina Hoshino, Matthew Michnewich, Sam Seifert, Paul Tegnazian, Stephan Tchorbajian, Brian Watts, and Andrew Yeskoo.

Continuing on with our tales from the Rensselaer clean room lab, let’s talk about lighting. More specifically, LEDs.

At one stop along the clean room tour, physics doctoral student Christoph Stark, seen above using the Reactive Ion Etch machine, gave us a look at his work on developing high-power green light-emitting diodes, or LEDs.

Here’s what Stark told us:

Solid-state lighting technology is evolving rapidly at the moment.  These advances are made possible by high-brightness LEDs, which are based on the semiconductor gallium nitride.  I design and fabricate high-efficiency micro- and nanostructured green LEDs which emit a great deal of useful light.  Conversely, high quality films of gallium nitride can be used to make efficient solar cells which capture light that is otherwise lost in conventional silicon solar cells.

The Rensselaer clean room allows me to access advanced semiconductor processing tools.  For example, in my research I use electron beam lithography and dry etching tools to create my nanometer-sized structures with unique properties.

Stark is a member of Professor Christian Wetzel’s research group, and this work is affiliated with the Rensselaer-led NSF Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center.

I hope you enjoyed this behind-the-scenes peak at the great work taking place in the Renssleaer clean room.

Tune in tomorrow for more on the scientific intrigue and drama surrounding the hunt for the elusive green LED.