About the Study

Journal: Nature

Title: “Infrared nanosensors of piconewton to micronewton forces.”

Authors: Natalie Fardian-Melamed^1*, Artiom Skripka^2,3, Benedikt Ursprung¹, Changhwan Lee¹, Thomas P. Darlington¹, Ayelet Teitelboim², Xiao Qi², Maoji Wang⁴, Jordan M. Gerton⁴, Bruce E. Cohen^2,5, Emory M. Chan², P. James Schuck¹

1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Columbia University
2. The Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
3. Nanomaterials for Bioimaging Group, Departamento de Física de Materiales, Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad Autόnoma de Madrid
4. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Utah
5. Division of Molecular Biophysics and Integrated Bioimaging, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, 

Acknowledgments: N.F.-M. gratefully acknowledges support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 893439, the US Department of State Fulbright Scholarship Program, the Zuckerman-CHE STEM Leadership Program, the Israel Scholarship Education Foundation (ISEF) International Fellowship Program, and the Weizmann Institute’s Women’s Postdoctoral Career Development Award. B.U. and P.J.S. acknowledge support by the National Science Foundation under grant no. CHE-2203510. A.S. acknowledges the support from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 895809 (MONOCLE). Work at the Molecular Foundry was supported by the Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, of the US Department of Energy under contract number DE-AC02-05CH11231. X.Q., B.E.C., and E.M.C. were supported in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) ENVision program under contract HR0011257070, and C.L. and P.J.S. under DARPA ENVision contract HR00112220006. T.P.D. and P.J.S. also acknowledge support for the scan-probe measurements from Programmable Quantum Materials, an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the US DOE, Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences (BES), under award DE-SC0019443. 

The authors declare no financial or other conflicts of interest.

Columbia and Tau have been longtime partners. The two have collaborated through Preindl, a leader in designing next-generation power converters, and his Motor Drives and Power Electronics Laboratory (MPlab) to design modern power electronic converters and motor drive solutions that are not only high-performance, but also scalable. 

Their groundbreaking collaborative work has been recognized across academia and industry for pioneering the field of software-defined power conversion, dating back in part to Preindl’s NSF CAREER Award. The collaboration has been celebrated through a number of awards including Autotech Breakthrough’s V2X and V2I Innovation of the Year Awards, Fast Company World Changing Ideas recognition, and Fast Company’s Best Workplace for Innovators (2023, 2024). The Center provides a platform to further advance their work together at a new scale. 

“Our vision is to ‘electrify humanity,’” Preindl said. “Our Center will build advanced energy conversion technologies that enable electrification of energy systems and scale electrification at unprecedented levels.”

Focus of the Center

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The Center will focus on research in electric energy conversion and leverage advanced power electronics, novel topologies for power converters, modern and distributed control, and machine learning/artificial intelligence to enable reliable and resilient solutions that facilitate a circular economy. In doing so, researchers are also actively working to limit the use of materials adversely affecting the environment, such as rare earth elements or critical minerals.

The Center will engineer solutions for sustainable electric transportation and energy systems. Target applications include electric drivetrains, propulsion systems, and electric supply infrastructure; distributed energy resources such as renewable energy and battery storage for the electric grid; and emerging electric loads including data centers and heating electrification.

The Center also intends to support the translation of outcomes to industrial applications to maximize the impact through strategic technology development and transfer. 

Finally, the Center plans to support the training of highly qualified engineers and scientists in the field and provide mentorship and career development for students and researchers engaging with the Center. 

“We are excited to deepen our partnership with both Columbia and Dr. Preindl through the founding of the Center alongside Tau,” said Wesley Pennington, Tau’s founder and CEO. “We have an established and celebrated history of leading research and innovation together with the university and look forward to deepening our collaboration to further accelerate the electrification of the world. The Center of Advanced Electrification in collaboration with Tau Motors will provide a larger platform to continue to invent, develop, translate, and deploy technologies that accelerate the energy transition, as well as train and build future leaders to extend our mission as we solve some of the world’s most pressing challenges.”

Future Center activities

The Center team is already planning a broad range of activities rooted in scientific innovation and technical advancement of the field. In addition to research and innovation activities, the Center is developing programs including the organization of an annual symposium to foster technical discussions and interactions between faculty and industry. They are also developing a seminar series with invited external speakers, as well as student activities, such as recruiting events.

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More than a thousand attendees packed into Lerner Hall for Columbia’s fourth annual Data Science Day, eager to hear from experts from across the university who are transforming disciplines and industries through thoughtfully applied data. Columbia Engineering faculty showcased innovative research ranging from blockchain security to extracting speech from brainwaves, while professors from the Law School, Journalism School, School of International and Public Affairs, Medical Center, and more discussed work in areas like protecting data security, understanding online radicalization, and improving patient outcomes.

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In lightning talks throughout the April 3 daylong summit, affiliates of Columbia’s Data Science Institute (DSI) shared their work applying machine learning to an impressive variety of challenges. In a panel moderated by Professor Garud Iyengar, chair of Columbia Engineering’s Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR) department, electrical engineering Professor Nima Mesgarani discussed his ground-breaking work in brain-computer interfaces and acoustic signal processing. Recently, he managed to reconstruct intelligible speech from brain activity—a potential game-changer for those who’ve lost the ability to speak—and is also addressing the “cocktail party problem” in hearing aids, which currently amplify more audio than listeners wish to hear.

Among a panel moderated by Professor Shipra Agrawal of IEOR were computer science Professors Michael Collins and Tim Roughgarden. Collins walked the audience through his research in natural language processing and speech recognition, highlighting dramatic improvements thanks to new neural methods, while Roughgarden talked about his investigations of online automated auction reserve pricing, an area with vast implications for sponsored search results. In another panel, fellow computer science faculty member Ronghui Gu discussed his work using mathematical methods to improve the security and reliability of blockchain technology.

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Amid all the potential of cutting-edge data science, there are also potential pitfalls, argued the day’s keynote speaker Brad Smith ’84LAW, president and chief legal officer of Microsoft. Unchecked, “mass surveillance at an unprecedented scale” could quickly turn societies Orwellian, he said, unless nations institute rigorous new legal standards to protect privacy, promote transparency, and ensure accountability.

“We are the first generation of people in the history of this planet to give machines this kind of power,” Smith said. “We’re basing our lives on all of this technology, we’re basing our societies on all of this technology, so more than ever the world needs to be able to trust this technology… Ultimately, we need a global conversation about these issues.”

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Later, attendees explored dozens of demos and posters from students and faculty, ranging from full-duplex wireless enabling simultaneous transmission and reception to software analyzing indices to predict outcomes of complex global events such as Brexit. A research team from computer science Professor Steven Feiner’s Computer Graphics and User Interfaces Lab was voted best demo for their augmented/virtual reality system that allows multiple users to explore an immersive computer-generated 3D urban model of New York City.

“This new system is about multiple users collaborating in either AR or VR as they explore, organize, and share data associated with an urban environment in the context of that environment,” said Carmine Elvezio, a researcher in Feiner’s lab. “We place users in a virtual scale model where they see tweets, Yelp reviews, and NYC 311 complaints relative to the locations from which they are generated.”

Introducing proceedings, Avanessians Director of the Data Science Institute and computer science Professor Jeannette Wing noted that the collective’s overarching mission is “to use data for good.”

“Data Science Day is our moment to showcase our pioneering research and celebrate our engagements with industry,” she said.

Among M2’s device “transformations” are fusing device data from multiple devices to provide a multi-headed display scenario for a better “big screen” viewing or gaming experience. By converting accelerometer sensor data to input touches, M2 can transform a smartphone into a Nintendo Wii-like remote to control a game on another system. Eye movements can also be turned into touchscreen input, a useful accessibility feature for disabled users who cannot use their hands.

For audio conferencing without having to use costly specialized equipment, M2 can be deployed on smartphones across a room to leverage their microphones from multiple vantage points, providing superior speaker-identifiable sound quality and noise cancellation. M2 can redirect a display to a camera so that stock camera apps can record a Netflix or YouTube video and can also enable panoramic video recording by fusing the camera inputs from two systems to create a wider sweeping view. One potentially popular application would let parents seated next to each other record their child's wide-angled school or sports performance.

“Doing all this without having to modify apps means that users can continue to use their favorite apps with an enhanced experience,” AlDuaij says. “M2 is a win-win—users don’t need to worry about which apps would support such functionality and developers don’t need to spend time and money to update their apps.”

Using M2 is simple—all a user would have to do is to download the M2 app from Google Play or Apple’s App Store. No other software is needed. One mobile system runs the unmodified app; the input and output from all systems is combined and shared to the app.

“Our M2 system is easy to use, runs efficiently, and scales well, especially compared to existing approaches,” Nieh notes. “We think that multi-mobile computing offers a broader, richer experience with the ability to combine multiple devices from multiple systems together in new ways.”

The Columbia team has started discussions with mobile OS vendors and phone manufacturers to incorporate M2 technologies into the next releases of their products. With a few minor modifications to current systems, mobile OS vendors can make multi-mobile computing broadly available to everyone.

Columbia Engineering

Columbia Engineering, based in New York City, is one of the top engineering schools in the U.S. and one of the oldest in the nation. Also known as The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, the School expands knowledge and advances technology through the pioneering research of its more than 220 faculty, while educating undergraduate and graduate students in a collaborative environment to become leaders informed by a firm foundation in engineering. The School’s faculty are at the center of the University’s cross-disciplinary research, contributing to the Data Science Institute, Earth Institute, Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, Precision Medicine Initiative, and the Columbia Nano Initiative. Guided by its strategic vision, “Columbia Engineering for Humanity,” the School aims to translate ideas into innovations that foster a sustainable, healthy, secure, connected, and creative humanity.

About the Study

The study is titled “Heterogeneous Multi-Mobile Computing.”

Authors are: Naser AlDuaij, Alexander Van’t Hof, and Jason Nieh, Department of Computer Science, Columbia Engineering.

This work was supported in part by a Google Research Award, and NSF grants CNS-1717801 and CNS-1563555.

The authors declare no financial or other conflicts of interest.