Student researchers seek answers to solar power, clean water, battlefied injuries, earthquakes, calf muscles, cancer, rice farming and more.

ENGINEERING

If the Shoe Fits
Nike, Inc. liaisons asked Mudders to kick around the idea of cleatless soccer shoes with traction properties similar to cleats. The team found that people who play soccer with bare feet have much more control over the ball. Each of their designs sought to increase the feel for the ball, on any playing surface, while protecting feet from injury.

Under the direction of adviser and engineering faculty member Nancy Lape, the team tried a variety of materials, while keeping within the parameters of protrusions less than three millimeters. A prototype made from rubber dog brush material placed in a hexagonal pattern did the best job of mimicking barefoot running. But, they decided that their prototype with a tennis lacing mesh pattern (with small plastic beads woven in) was the best model because its design increased the feel for the ball and offered protection from injury when players are stepped on. Further testing is needed with the lacing pattern before students will be able to conclusively determine whether their laced mesh pattern is superior to plastic cleats.

Water and Sun
Some stood back to admire the glistening solar panels, others carefully wiped a dusty area here and there. On May 13, the team of five students, their adviser and liaisons enjoyed the culmination of their efforts to plan and install the first solar panelsfor Three Valleys Municipal Water District. The water district, which serves 10 cities, runs the Miramar Facility, located on 25 acres in north Claremont. They use hydroelectric generators to power the water treatment facility, and return the excess electricity to the grid. But Three Valleys was looking at more ways to increase the amount of renewable energy they generate and began investigating photovoltaic solar panels. A student team, advised by professor of engineering Donald S. Remer, determined the best location on the Miramar site for a photovoltaic solar panel system, the number of panels needed, the best product (tilted rack mounts), the cost and the proper installation angle (18 degrees). They worked with contractor RCC Solar to install a pilot system costing $14,200 that will provide 2 kW of power. This initial installation will allow the company to see how well it works, team members explained.

The team also developed an expansion plan so that the water district can install a total of 100 kW, which will produce about 176,000 kWh per year. While the installation cost for the entire system will be about $700,000, the team pointed out the many long-term benefits to include the value of displaced electricity, rebates, reduced carbon footprint, early adopter benefits and educational value. Three Valleys is also fulfilling a part of their mission, the team pointed out: “… to meet customers’ needs for high-quality water in a cost-effective and environmentally sound manner.”

Mission accomplished.

Rx for Medics
This year, combat medics—those who provide first aid and frontline trauma care on the battlefield—had a team of Mudders working on their behalf. Advised by engineering Professor Patrick Little, seven students worked with the Oregon-based Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT) to develop an integrated clinical environment supervisor (ICES). The portable device is carried by a medic, who monitors patients’ conditions by communicating with medical devices such as a pulse oximeter and blood
pressure monitor. The goal of the Engineering Clinic team was to provide a device that was durable, transportable and safe for the medic and patient. Team members interviewed fire paramedics and army doctors who supplied them with a wealth of information used to redesign the graphical user interface.

Using a Panasonic Toughbook, the team created software that allowed two-way communication between the device and the medic, who could receive vital information from the medical devices and could send commands to activate the devices attached to the ICES. Ultimately, the ICES will deliver decision support for suggested treatments and direct the medical devices to administer treatments to multiple patients.

The team’s device will now begin the journey through the Food and Drug Administration’s approval process and then must meet necessary military standards. Team members are already looking to the future of the ICES system with recommendations that include adding more devices, creating a wireless version and devising a version that could be used in a civilian mass casualty situation.

My Music
Fox Interactive Media, parent company to many popular sites like Photobucket and MySpace, is in search of a new application that will recommend music to their MySpace users. The Clinic team of Hannah Hoersting ’09, Heather Justice ’10, Shaun Wallace ’10 and Tyler Wolf ’10 developed three different algorithms to provide recommendations. Two algorithms were based on clustering (k-means and hierarchical) which identifies groups of people who like the same types of music. The third method was a “trust network” which approximates the “trust” between pairs of users. For example, if person A and person B have similar tastes in music and A likes a particular artist, the algorithm predicts that B will too.

The Clinic team evaluated the algorithms in a variety of ways including through user testing on the Harvey Mudd campus. More than 100 students received and assessed over 1,000 recommendations. Results showed that the trust network outperformed the clustering algorithms but all did much better than recommending a random top artist to users.

GLOBAL CLINIC

Rusty Nails and Clean Water
The Cambodian Children’s Fund states that nearly 80 percent of all deaths in Cambodia come from water borne diseases and that nearly 40 percent of the Cambodian population does not have access to an adequate supply of clean water. Arsenic levels there are nearly 100 times greater than the World Health Organization’s standard of 10 parts per billion. A Global Clinic team made up of student researchers from HMC and Nanyang Technological University in Singapore sought to develop a culturally relevant treatment method that utilized inexpensive and local materials.

Working with the Lien Institute for the Environment (LIFE), the collaborators—including mathematicians, engineers, biologists and chemists—developed a filtration system based on the fact that arsenic binds to iron oxides. Students placed rusted nails in water and discovered that 50 percent of the arsenic precipitated within an hour. Filtration through laterite (iron-rich rock) and sand helps filter out even more arsenic particulates. The actual cost to treat 20 liters of water was $10.24 USD (before factoring in the cost for a bucket with a water control valve).

Though their water had significantly less arsenic, students acknowledged that it might contain high amounts of iron and other inert particulates that might affect taste. The team recognized that comprehensive water testing was needed before their method could be an adequate solution to the arsenic problem. LIFE plans to perform such testing in Singapore before implementing the team’s design in Cambodia.

PHYSICS

Uplifting News

High atop the San Gabriel Mountains, about 15 miles from campus, in areas accessible only by four-wheel vehicles, two GPS receivers can often be found recording the mountains’ movements. Physics professor Greg Lyzenga has been positioning and monitoring these devices for 13 years and his research students accumulate GPS measurements of tectonic deformation in the region. Physics major Matthew Lawson ’09 recently took data and displayed it three dimensionally. Findings show that the mountains are moving up (vertical deformation velocities), and the valley below­—Claremont included—is moving down. “Ours is the only existing Southern California dataset with vertical velocities, data essential for testing models which might eventually lead to earthquake prediction for the Southern California region,” said Lawson.

Search and Destroy

“Build the best, destroy the rest” was the siren song that lured willing students into building software robots that battle one another onscreen with “radars and weapons.” Students representing each dorm created the robots using Robocode, an Open Source educational game that helps users learn Java, a programming language.

The robots are given artificial intelligence-based strategies and fight in an open arena until “death.” Robots with more sophisticated programming tend to fare the best. They fight for 10 rounds at a time and the robot with the greatest score presumably has the best intelligence strategy.

At the presentation in Pryne Auditorium, students’ eyes were fixed upon the big screen while physics Professor Vatche Sahakian displayed the races. Students jeered and cringed at the loss of their robots. In the end, East and West dorm robots duked it out until wormholex.over9000, a robot programmed by Akash Rakholia ’09 of East, dominated the virtual arena for several rounds. Robots GeneralMisconception and ShirtlessScottsman were defeated in a few merciless seconds.

“While many of the robots had similar targeting methods which extrapolated enemy position based on their current velocity, what really set mine apart from other robots was a fixed objective and evasive movement patterns,” said Rakholia. While this resulted in his robot not necessarily being the top survivor, survivability was only one factor in the way points were allocated. Wormholex.over9000 received bonus points for “bullet damage and kills” while also retaining decent survivability.

COMPUTER SCIENCE

Math on the iPhone
For their software design and implementation project, Wynn Vonnegut ’11 and Joshua Ehrlich ’11 created and designed software that could display on an iPhone the math tutorials used in Professor Francis Su’s Math 11 and 12 courses. Vonnegut and Ehrlich took the web-based calculus tutorials (HTML files) and put them through a parser that converted them into xml files (readable by the application they created). Their application downloads these files and displays them on the iPhone. It also allows users to take notes by clicking on any section and adding a text blurb that can be displayed inline.

Learning to code in a language neither of them were familiar with (Objective-C) proved to be a bit frustrating, they shared. The hardest part of the project was learning to write for another platform. “On computers, we have full flexibility. We can import any library we need and code in any language we are familiar with. On the other hand, coding for another platform really limits the tools we have available. Coding for the iPhone really felt like we were given a whole bunch of high-level tools that weren’t quite right. So we took these, abstracted them into basic components, and put them back together into our own high level code.”

The application awaits the development of further features before being made public.

MATHEMATICS

Cancer Modeling
Curing cancer with mathematics—a research area of Lisette de Pillis, professor of mathematics—involves the use of mathematical models to address the complex interactions of growing tumors with the body’s immune system. De Pillis uses differential equations—mathematical sentences—to define the variables involved in tumor growth rates, to identify the effects of different concentrations of immune cells and drugs on tumors, and to anticipate the tumor decay patterns. One aspect of that research involves the evaluation of two important immune cell types: the more generalized natural killer cells, and T-cells, which are specific to a disease.

One of the students working alongside her in the lab this year was mathematics major Ben Fogelson ’09, who studied the complex interactions between chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) cells and healthy immune cells (B lymphocytes and T lymphocytes). CLL is the most common form of leukemia found in adults in Western countries, and typically affects older adults.

“Interactions between cancer cells and cells that we would normally call healthy are necessary for the cancer to survive, grow and potentially kill the host,” said Fogelson. “In a healthy immune system, the B and T cells work together to fight off an infection. In chronic lymphocytic leukemia, T cells stay healthy, but just like in an ordinary immune system where the B and T cells interact to fight off an infection, the CLL cells co-opt this interaction in order to survive and grow.”

Fogelson developed a partial differential equation model of CLL and showed how it interacts with a subset of the immune system. He also produced numerical simulations of cancer growth that made predictions about how CLL cells interact with their micro-environment and how that interaction allows them to either grow into a clinical disease or die off.

Fogelson remarked that future mathematical work could incorporate other cell types to see if cancer growth could be modeled in a more realistic way.

Profitable Pairs
Building on work done by the 2007-08 Clinic team, seven students worked with Citadel Investment Group liaison Michael Schubmehl ’02 to develop an automated strategy for quantitatively constructing a portfolio of pairs, or companies whose stock prices tend to move together. They studied pairs trading strategy, which allows traders to profit from a wide array of market conditions. Automation is key to respond quickly to market movements.

The focus for the previous year’s Clinic team was implementing a pairs trading strategy and optimizing parameters, while this year’s team emphasized controlling risk while maximizing expected returns. They looked for strategies to maximize the Sharpe ratio, used to characterize how well the return of an asset compensates the investor for the risk taken. The greater a portfolio’s Sharpe ratio, the better its risk-adjusted performance has been.

Working with adviser Francis Su, professor of mathematics, the team used an algorithm called profit profiling as one of their strategies for maximizing returns. They found that the use of change point detection with profit profiling produced the highest Sharpe ratio and concluded that a good exit strategy can have a huge impact on the ratio as well.

Shubmehl, a quantitative analyst at Citadel, one of the world’s largest hedge fund managers, said, “The team pulled together techniques from different disciplines to produce a creative solution to the problem. They tackled a large data set and overcame significant computational challenges in order to turn their ideas into quantitative results. They learned a lot, but the best part of the project was that I learned a lot from them too.”

BIOLOGY

Head over Heels
Using the same cool technology that maps movements on human subjects for video game developers, Marissa Quitt ’10 and three other student researchers studied human calf muscles and gait patterns. The legs and feet of 11 young adults were tagged with electric markers so that walking patterns could be examined on an electrocardiogram machine. With adviser Anna Ahn, assistant professor of biology, Quitt spent 10 weeks examining the relationship between the variability of gait patterns and neural control patterns with differences in calf muscle morphology, in particular, the medial gastrocnemius (MG) and lateral gastrocnemius (LG) muscles.

“In half the subjects (MG-biased), MG activity levels were three to six times that of the LG, whereas the other subjects (unbiased) showed roughly equal activity,” she said. “The MG-biased group had larger MG muscles and shorter heels, but was no difference in joint kinematics.”

Quitt and the research team determined that the skeletal system seems to drive the motor recruitment patterns of walking as well as calf muscle size in humans.

She determined that there are basically two types of walkers: MG-biased and unbiased. The MG-biased walkers activated their medial calf muscles much more strongly, whereas unbiased walkers activated their calf muscles equally. The MG-biased pattern of muscle recruitment also correlated with significantly larger calf muscles and shorter heels.

Speech and DNA
The parents of a nine-year-old child who is unable to communicate using language sought the help of biology major Leslie Mallinger ’10. With the guidance of faculty adviser Catherine McFadden, professor of biology, Mallinger looked for a genetic reason for the child’s inability to speak. Specifically, she studied the FOXP2 gene that is associated with human language development because mutations in this gene have been found in individuals with language disorders.

“I investigated the possibility of a mutation in her FOXP2 gene by sequencing the FOXP2 coding exons belonging to her and to her parents and then comparing the resultant sequences to each other and to those published in public databases,” said Mallinger.

As a result of the DNA-sequencing reaction, she found two mismatches, but neither mismatch provided an explanation for the language impairment. Mallinger determined that a more thorough search on a larger area of the genome might yield important results.

“The possibility still exists for a genetic cause for language difficulties,” she said, “perhaps a gene associated with autism.”

HUMANITIES, SOCIAL SCIENCES AND THE ARTS

Rice Aplenty
For three billion people, rice is the main meal. It is the main source of food for the majority of subsistence farmers in Bangladesh and India. There, and in eight other top rice-producing countries, severe flooding has frustrated rice farmers for centuries. Between 10 to 100 percent of a rice crop can be lost to flooding, resulting in 4 million tons of grain wasted each year. Even though rice is water tolerant, typical strains can only survive up to three days underwater. Rachel-Mikel ArceJaeger ’10, whose study was part of Paul Steinberg’s Public Speaking for Science and Citizenship class, explained that rice runs out of energy if it is underwater too long. Researchers have worked during the last half century to produce submergence-tolerant rice plants.

ArceJaeger explained how current researchers Pamela Ronald (UC Davis), David Mackill, (International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines) and Julia Bailey-Serres (UC Riverside) are dealing with the problem. The researchers are using a genetic process called precision breeding to introduce a flood-tolerant (Sub1A) gene into rice varieties already known for their great taste, high yield and durability. The resulting plants can withstand being submerged underwater for up to 17 days.

The precision breeding method and introduction of the Sub1 gene is set to make a huge impact in flood-prone countries. Farmers are able to reduce their use of herbicides since they can deliberately flood their fields to kill weeds. And the biggest benefit, ArceJaeger pointed out, is that farmers are experiencing rice surpluses, a benefit to today’s growing populations.

ArceJaeger described some of the other rice varieties being developed, including salt tolerant, insect tolerant and drought tolerant. “These developments will have a huge impact that will allow rice to be grown in almost any region on earth,” she said. “The potential of this research to revolutionize the food industry while avoiding the genetically modified label is as momentous and far-reaching as the potential of adult stem cell research to revolutionize medicine while avoiding moralistic debate.”

For PDF documents with descriptions of all 2008-09 student projects, go to www.hmc.edu/presentationdays09 or (for Clinic Project descriptions) www.hmc.edu/clinics09.