Category: Sci/Tech

by Ashley Wills–

For more than 20 years, Innovation Space was known as the go-to place for students to check out the latest equipment and use the latest digital technology, but now it has a new mission. Over the summer, Virginia Tech faculty at the Technology-enhanced Learning and Online Strategies worked to completely revamp the space to become a collaborative learning area for faculty.

“As we support the faculty, the faculty get better at using teaching and learning in their technology and that ultimately impacts the student experience,” said Quinn Warnick, TLOS senior director of academic innovation.

Now, the site that once housed the latest technology will become a place where new technologies can be explored. According to Innovation Space’s website, it’s known as the Sandbox Project.

Warnick says the change better aligns with the TLOS mission.

“The Innovation Space was always the exception to TLOS’s primary mission,” Warnick said. “So the rest of TLOS was focused primarily on faculty and the Innovation Space was kind of our student-facing part of TLOS.”

The equipment once housed in Innovation Space can now be checked out at the Newman Library Circulation Desk, but the equipment is just a small part of the library’s bigger plan for the Digital Media Studio.

Patrick Tomlin, University Libraries director of learning environments,  says the space will operate much like Innovation Space but with several updates to the technology.

“Currently, there is no space on campus dedicated to digital media production that’s just for students, so we want it to answer that immediate need,” Tomlin said.

The new studio will join the library’s other studios including the 3D Design Studio, Virtual Environments Studio, Data Visualization Studio and Fusion Studio.

“Each of these studios has their own focus and services, but they are all predicated on a similar service model — we want to lower the barrier for students to embrace creative, inspiring enterprises, hands-on research and emerging technologies,” Tomlin said.

According to the Digital Media Studio website, the new studio will be located on the fourth floor of Newman Library. Tomlin expects it to open January 2018.

by Stephen Dixon, Sidney Cook–

Stroubles Creek is a waterway that runs underneath the town of Blacksburg and flows into the Duck Pond. It is also an important tributary to the New River and provides water for a variety of plant and animal life in the region. However, in 2000 the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality registered the creek as an impaired waterway.

In order to constantly collect data on Stroubles Creek to know the full extent of its impairment, Virginia Tech formed the LEWAS Lab. The LEWAS, or Learning Enhanced Watershed Assessment System, uses instruments to measure the flow rate, pH level, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, depth and temperature. According to their website, it also has WiFi capability so that the live data updates in real time.

Dr. Daniel Brogan, a postdoctoral associate for the LEWAS Lab, developed the user interface for the data and works on how to best educate the public. He has been presenting the interface in classes at Virginia Tech and seven other institutions. He believes that “having access to this interactive, live data increases students’ motivation and learning about environmental monitoring issues.”

While college students make up a large part of the program, having access to this data is important for all members of the New River Valley. Brogan has also attended science fairs around the area to help educate the youth in the community. He noted that educating people when they are young is a key component to ensuring that they are environmentally conscious through their adult lives.

While the LEWAS Lab mostly focuses on measuring data of Stroubles Creek, the StREAM Lab does more in terms of reducing the sediment and bacteria loadings in the stream. According to StREAM’s website, their goal is to “remove Stroubles Creek from the Clean Water Act list of impaired waters.”

Dr. Cully Hession, the lab director, noted that since 2009 the lab has excluded livestock from stream access, planted riparian zones and installed bioretention cells at the Blacksburg Community Center and Foxridge Apartments. However, there is still much to be done in order to accomplish the goal of removing Stroubles Creek from the list of impaired waters.  Starting this summer, Hession will partner with the Stroubles Creek Restoration Initiative and work with a $6,000 grant from the VT Green RFP program.

While not necessarily working together, Dr. Brogan and Dr. Hession both share a common passion for educating the public about this issue.

“The more people that know about the problems in this creek and know that it’s there, the more that people will care,” Dr. Hession said.

In the end, that is exactly what Dr. Brogan is doing as well, communicating the data effectively in order to educate the public.

by Johnny Kraft–

Cyberbullying is quickly developing into one of the most popular forms of bullying as social media and technology can be used as a weapon 24 hours a day, seven days a week. However, an assistant professor at Virginia Tech has built his own weapon in the battle against cyberbullying.

Professor Bert Huang has developed an algorithm to detect traces of cyberbullying. Huang is an assistant professor in the Virginia Tech Department of Computer Science, where he is using his knowledge of machine learning to develop algorithms to combat cyberbullying.

According to bullying statistics, about half of adolescents experience some form of cyberbullying, and 10 to 20 percent experience it regularly. However, Huang has found in his research that adults experience cyberbullying more frequently than people realize, and that men experience about the same amount of cyberbullying as women, although they are much different forms of cyberbullying.

Huang developed computer algorithms to identify cyberbullying automatically by using machine learning, which is a type of artificial intelligence that provides computers with the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed.

“We have to provide information as human experts for the machine-learning algorithm to learn from where these are explicit examples of here’s something that I am looking and here’s something that I’m not looking for,” said Huang. “So in this case, it would be here’s an example of cyberbullying and here’s an example of not cyberbullying. Doing that is really expensive and takes a lot of human effort, and is really tricky for humans to do.”

According to DoSomething.org, 81 percent of teens believe cyberbullying is easier to get away with than bullying in person. Right now, the algorithm can only detect traces of cyberbullying, but Huang’s challenge is to eventually find a way to prevent cyberbullying after detection. Huang acknowledged this as the biggest obstacle and focus of his research.

“That’s the goal. There’s a big open problem beyond the detection task. So once you detect it, what do you do?” said Huang.

The algorithm is still developing, as it is not completely accurate yet. Huang hopes to keep evolving his weapon, as a practical tool for social media and other Internet users in the future, but the next step is not completely clear.

“There’s a big question of what you do if you actually detect cyberbullying. This is a problem that we as humans have not solved,” said Huang. “How you intervene and how you fix that problem is not obvious, so getting a computer to do that is an even harder problem.”

by Katt Carter–

Communication majors at Virginia Tech are required to take a Capstone course in order to graduate, one of these courses focuses on research with media and video games.

The course was started by Dr. James Ivory, an associate professor at Virginia Tech who wanted to look at video games in terms of their social dimensions.  The research he headed made way for the G.A.M.E.R. lab at Virginia Tech, researching content in video games, as well as the effect on players.

The lab also focuses on television research, looking into how topics in media are handled and how that impacts viewers’ perceptions of the world.

Visibility at such a large research-oriented university can be difficult to achieve, and the G.A.M.E.R lab is significantly smaller than other operations at Virginia Tech.

James Zogran-Werness is a senior in multimedia journalism who took the course in hopes to have an interesting capstone and further his insight on gaming and if genre impacts levels of violence in players. He said he feels that “Virginia Tech doesn’t have a prominent focus on this type of research and that may be due to how new it is as a field.”

The Guardian published an article last year discussing how despite the popularity of video games, they get little media attention or coverage.  The article went on to mention that this may be due to the stereotype of gamers being lonely teenage boys which could lead people to ignore the social impact that games can make.

While video game research is still considered young by industry standards, Virginia Tech is making headway by incorporating it as a capstone course to encourage interest. In the years to come the lab is hoping to expand and grow as student interest increases.