| NEWS & IDEAS |
April 1998
KYOTO PACT ON GREENHOUSE GAS:
Chinese Oil Use a Threat to Treaty
NANOTECHNOLOGY:
Around the World, Thinking Small
LIGHTING RESEARCH:
Night Lighting Measure Misleading
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING:
Liquids Stuffed With Oxygen
PARALLEL COMPUTING:
Counting Prime Numbers, 2 by 2
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE:
Brutus.1-- A Silicon Hemingway
KYOTO PACT ON GREENHOUSE GAS:
Chinese Oil Use a Threat to Treaty
China's future energy import needs will dramatically affect the global
environment and energy security, says Jon Erickson, assistant professor of economics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
"Any level of climate protection resulting from the greenhouse gas treaty
negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, which opened for signature at the United Nations on March 16, will depend on the future of Chinese emissions," Erickson and co-writer Thomas Drennen of Sandia National Laboratory say in a recent article in Science magazine, "Who Will Fuel China?"
By 2025, China's annual CO2 emissions alone will be 3.2 billion tons carbon,
compared to current world CO2 emissions of 6.15 billion tons, the article says.
"Without significantly altering its energy structure, China's primary energy
supply will be 68 percent coal and 25 percent oil in 2025," says Erickson. "This carbon-intensive development underscores the importance of China's participation in international climate change negotiations."
Erickson and Drennen say substantial research and policy supporting energy
efficiency and renewable energy technologies would help.
China became a net importer of oil in 1993, and 1997 average net imports are
estimated at 800,000 barrels per day - - twice 1995 levels. China's import needs by 2015 could equal current U.S. import demand of over 8 millions barrels per day.
"Assuming foreign investment will rise to meet optimistic nuclear and hydro-electric scenarios, and the considerable environmental challenges of these energy sources are overcome, future hydro and nuclear development would account for less than 6 percent of primary energy needs by 2025," Erickson says.
Contact: Jon Erickson (518) 276-2523, erickj@rpi.edu
NANOTECHNOLOGY:
Around the World, Thinking Small
Particles so small that only the newest and most sensitive instruments can see and study them are being used to create new materials and devices that will revolutionize everything from drug delivery to sunscreens, says Richard Siegel.
Siegel, the Robert W. Hunt Professor and chair of materials science and engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, heads a committee for the World Technology Evaluation Center that was asked by the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies to conduct a two-year, $400,000 study of nanotechnology around the world.
Nanotechnology is a new, rapidly expanding scientific field that is in an early stage of development, similar to the position of computer and information technology in the 1950s, Siegel said. New characterization and modeling tools, a better understanding of the basic science, and a new breed of researchers able to work across disciplines are needed to help the field advance, he said.
Siegel, a pioneer in the field who coined the phrase "nanophase" materials, explains that new tools are letting scientists and engineers characterize and manipulate materials at the nanoscale level. He works with materials comprised of common atoms arranged in grains less than 100 nanometers in diameter -- 10,000 times smaller than grains in conventional materials. Researchers use these building blocks to create materials with entirely new properties.
The committee held a workshop in Washington, D.C., last May to hear experts from U.S. universities, national laboratories, and industry discuss research in nanotechnology applications such as dispersions and coatings, nanodevices, and biology. Committee members spent a week in Japan and a week in western Europe visiting research sites. Siegel and committee co-chair Evelyn Hu of the University of California at Santa Barbara led a one-day workshop in Russia.
Results were presented Feb. 10 in a Washington workshop attended by 250 people from around the world. A final report is planned for release late this spring.
Contact: Richard Siegel (518) 276-6373, rwsiegel@rpi.edu
LIGHTING RESEARCH:
Night Lighting Measure Misleading
Students racing over curving roads in a video-game simulation are helping scientists at the Lighting Research Center (LRC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute answer a serious question: Do current lighting standards mislead us about the efficiency of roadway, parking lot, and security lighting?
Lighting efficiency is widely calculated as lumens per watt of energy, explains Mark Rea, LRC director. The lumen, a measurement defined in the 1920s, is based on the response in bright light of the fovea, the part of the retina that contains cone photoreceptors and is responsible for central, high-acuity vision. But another
part of the retina containing rod-shaped photoreceptors is important in low
light conditions and for peripheral vision. As a result, lumens per watt is
an accurate efficiency measure for tasks done in bright light, but is less accurate for tasks such as night driving, which require good peripheral vision in low light.
In fact, using lumens per watt for night-time lighting can be very misleading. High-pressure sodium lights, for example, give more lumens per watt than metal halide lamps, but in low-light conditions, metal halide lights produce better reaction times to objects seen by peripheral vision. Metal halide lamps also produce far better color-naming accuracy, a key factor in security lighting. Optimizing night lighting
is a complex question that must also consider such issues as vision during
transitional times such as twilight and response to the glare of oncoming
headlights, Rea says.
In research sponsored jointly by General Electric, OSRAM Sylvania, Philips, and the Department of Energy, the LRC is conducting experiments with the driving simulator to measure the reactions of participants under varying lighting conditions. The information produced is expected to help industry produce new lighting systems that are more efficient because they take into account the complex responses of the human
eye.
Contact : Mark Rea (518) 276-8701
CHEMICAL ENGINEERING:
Liquids Stuffed With Oxygen
Reseachers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute are helping develop a superoxygenation system that dissolves large amounts of oxygen into water. The goal is to obtain dissolved oxygen concentrations exceeding 150 parts per million, compared to a highly oxygenated stream with perhaps 10 parts per million. Potential uses include beverages, pollution abatement, and fish farming.
Life O2 of Naples, Fla., purchased the rights to the idea and hired Adirondack Resource Management Associates (ARMA) of Saratoga Springs to develop the next-generation technology. The company contracted with Howard Littman, Rensselaer professor of chemical engineering, to create a more efficient and sophisticated design for oxygenation.
When Life O2 saw Littman's design, which absorbs pure oxygen into water from large numbers of very small bubbles, the company decided to patent the approach and invest $1 million in building and testing a prototype.
ARMA contracted with the Center for Automation Technologies
(CAT) at Rensselaer to test the system. Brian Tibbetts, resident research engineer with the CAT, developed a computer algorithm to control the system and record and analyze data. This sophisticated software is helping the CAT team establish optimal operating conditions for various applications. In tests, the prototype exceeds design goals.
Life O2 already markets highly oxygenated drinking water. The CAT team believes another important use could be pollution abatement. Industries such as power companies and food processors that use large amounts of water for cooling and cleaning, heat the water, forcing out oxygen. The Environmental Protection Agency imposes heavy fines if the water discharged does not include sufficient oxygen. The Life O2 system can add more than 10 times the oxygen to the waste stream than that achieved by traditional systems such as aeration, Tibbetts said.
Waste treatment plants also could make use of superoxygenation, because the bacteria in these plants operate more efficiently with the optimum amount of oxygen. Fish or shrimp farming could be more productive if higher levels of oxygen cause the fish to grow faster.
Contacts: Brian Tibbetts (518) 276-8652, tibbetts@cat.rpi.edu; Howard Littman (518) 276-6039, littmh@rpi.edu
PARALLEL COMPUTING:
Counting Prime Numbers, 2 by 2
By seeking all the twin prime numbers up to 10 quadrillion, Rensselaer computer scientists are examining a famous hypothesis and finding new ways to quickly do millions of billions of computations.
"We have already done in three weeks what would have taken 120 weeks on a single machine," said Jeff Nesheiwa, who, with fellow doctoral student Patrick Fry and professor Boleslaw Szymanski, programmed a central computer to break up, organize, and "farm out" work to more than 150 other computers.
With distributed processing the Rensselaer researchers have been able to identify more twin prime numbers than anyone in the world.
Some prime numbers occur as pairs of two successive primes (3 and 5, 5 and
7, 11 and 13, etc.). These pairs, called "twins," appear with decreasing
frequency. Early in the 20th Century, Norwegian mathematician Viggo Brun
proved that the sum of inverses of twin pairs converges to a finite number,
called the Brun's constant. No one has found what this number is. In the
early '90s, Virginia mathematician Thomas Nicely computed the sum of the
inverses up to 71014 and arrived at 1.9021605778. Using distributed processing,
the Rensselaer team computed the sum beyond 22 decimal places and expects
to know the values up to 1 quadrillion (1015) by April. Their
ultimate goal is 10 quadrillion.
"Our program allows us to use 100,000 computers," said Szymanski. "I wish we had them. It would take just 20 minutes to get the final result!"
Contact: Boleslaw Szymanski (518) 276-2714, szymansk@cs.rpi.edu
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE:
Brutus.1-- A Silicon Hemingway
A synthetic author the likes of Proust, Joyce, or Kafka may not be in the future, but Brutus.1--an artificial agent capable of story generation--just wrote its first story. Named because the literary concept it specializes in is betrayal, Brutus.1 is the world's most advanced story generator. It can generate stories of less than 500 words based on the notions of deception, evil, and to some extent voyeurism.
Selmer Bringsjord, associate professor of philosophy and director of the Minds and Machines program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, is an internationally recognized expert in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and logic. He began working on the problem of building a sophisticated artificial author in 1991. A four-year, $300,000 grant from the Henry R. Luce foundation funded his initial attack on the problem, which led to earlier systems.
In collaboration with David Ferrucci, senior scientist at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, Bringsjord devised a formal mathematical definition of betrayal and endowed Brutus.1 with the concept. For Brutus.1 to generate stories outside the concept of betrayal, however, researchers would need to define mathematically other literary themes such as unrequited love, revenge, and jealousy.
Bringsjord's latest book, Artificial Intelligence and Literary Creativity--Brutus.1: The State of the Art in Story Generation, written with Ferrucci, will be published in August. At that time, Brutus.1 will be fully interactive on Bringsjord's Web site at http://www.rpi.edu/~brings. Visitors will be able to ask Brutus.1 to "tell me a story."
Bringsjord is featured in the cover story of the March/April issue of MITŐs Technology Review. The article, "Can Computers Create Literature?" appears at http://web.mit.edu/techreview/www/articles/ma98/bringsjord.html
Contact: Selmer Bringsjord (518) 276-8105, selmer@rpi.edu
