Joshua Edelman ’14


Mind Reading BAE Systems tasked HMC students with developing an algo- rithm that translates a user’s thoughts to control a prosthetic limb. The Engineering Clinic team gathered data from more than


30 test subjects, who donned a neuroheadset and imagined doing a variety of tasks—under ideal conditions and with confounding factors such as musical distractions or thinking while nodding their heads. They developed an algorithm that, among a variety of tests, achieved its highest accuracy rate of 90 percent when identifying a user’s intentions between two tasks in an offline setting. The team also successfully classified among five possible tasks with high accuracy and developed capability for real-time analysis.


Crystal Clues to Oil Sources A Computer Science Clinic team extended “Tipsy,” a software program that helps geologists automate their analysis of apatite grains (crystals) for oil prospecting. Apatite is a common mineral that contains radioactive


Uranium-238. When U-238 decays, its spontaneous fission creates grooves, or tracks, in the apatite grains. These fission tracks reveal the crystal’s age and thermal history, valuable data needed to help identify potential oil sources. Tipsy analyzes microscopic images of apatite grains to


automatically detect and measure fission tracks. The team’s improvements for sponsor Apatite to Zircon Inc. included full-featured database storage for image data and an algorithm that “learns” to identify tracks from libraries of examples. The result: “Tipsy 2.0” detected tracks in three out of every five grains analyzed compared with the previous software version, which found tracks in only one out of 100 grains.


Customized Cooperage The world’s largest winery tapped the ingenuity of Mudders to investigate “The Livingston Cooperage Problem.” E. & J. Gallo Winery requested a program to evaluate the size, type and quantity of new tanks required to accommodate increased volume and variety of wine production at the Livingston facil- ity, one of its seven wineries. The Mathematics Clinic team modeled the allocation of storage tanks to a full harvest of different wine types and managed to achieve a solve time of a few minutes. Based on the projected harvest, costs of varying tanks and quality constraints, the team provided a customiz- able program which recommended tanks and ways to use them which could save the company planning time and hundreds of thousands of dollars.


Gas From Garbage Before Technip USA can harvest syngas from garbage, it needs raw, real-world data to verify and fine-tune its computational models of a proposed cold fluidized bed reactor. So the company asked HMC students to build a physical model to collect pressure and particle behavior data without actually burning biomass. The real reactor Technip hopes to build will combust bio-


mass from municipal waste in a low-oxygen environment to re- lease synthetic natural gas, or syngas, in the form of hydrogen, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. It has a main chamber where particles are moved upward by a steady flow of air. The particle movement is deemed “fluidized” because the solid par- ticles behave like a fluid as they move within the chamber. Team members built a 1/6th-scale physical model of the re-


actor and collected dynamic and static pressure data, along with size, density and distribution data for seven different particles. Technip will use their collected data to verify and fine-tune their computational model.


1967


Warren Wilson and Rex Mack direct first Engineering Clinics


1971 1972–73


Clinic Advisory Committee created. Consists of industry executives who provide project suggestions and operating advice


Ted Woodson is first formally appointed director of Engineering Clinic


Mathematics Clinic begins with National Science Foun- dation grant; Stavros Busen- berg supervises first project sponsored by Bell and Howell Research Laboratories; John Greever is first Mathematics Clinic director


SUMMER 2013 1974


Joint Mathematics Clinic begins with Claremont Graduate School (now Clare- mont Graduate University); co-directed by John Greever (HMC) and Jerome Spanier (CGS). Joint program contin- ues until 1980


Har vey Mudd College


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