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TAGLIATELA COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

Meanwhile, the two Tech Talent Accelerator grants from the New England Board of Higher Education — one for $30,000 and a second one for $40,000 — are helping to support the College’s new Game Design and Development concentration in the Computer Science program.

As part of the project, the University developed collaborative relationships with other leading tech companies, such as SphereGen,  Arsome, and Pleiadian, whose representatives attend mini conferences with faculty and students to discuss the dynamic game design and development industry, its current state, and its future in Connecticut and the New England region. 

The idea we presented from the University was to use our Game Design and Development concentration and embed credentials issued by Unity. This would be an important way for students to not just learn technologies and obtain a degree but to leave the University with professional, industry-recognized credentials.”

The second grant — Tech Talent Accelerator 2.0 — will take the achievements of the original initiative and run with them.  First order of business is to refine and enhance the curriculum.  In the process, Mekni hopes to make the Game Design & Development concentration in Computer Science so attractive that it will stimulate some cross-college migration — that is, pull students from other colleges over the border to the Tagliatela College of Engineering.

Also earmarked: funds for participation in gaming-related events, such as the Game Developers Conference, for the outside-the-classroom experience that jumpstarts the metamorphosis of student to professional.

Game Design and Development: A Serious Business

Learn More About Camps

The GenCyber Teacher Academy was the result and became a dynamic partner to the student camp. The program, which is free to participants thanks to the NSA/NSF grant, covers topics such as social engineering, Python, cybersecurity awareness, and network fundamentals.  Teachers leave the program with lesson plans and other materials they can use in their high-school classes.


The camp for high-school students — the GenCyber Student Academy — is a unique and rigorous summer camp that gives students intensive, hands-on learning in how to protect the nation from cyber attacks.  The camp, which was launched in 2021 with 40 students, was the brainchild of a former colleague of Mehdi Mekni’s, professor of Computer Science and a member of the University’s Connecticut Institute of Technology.  Mekni continued his predecessor’s student initiative and then quickly made the mental leap to high-school teachers with STEM backgrounds, reasoning that by educating teachers, he could reach more students.


The University of New Haven is doing something about that, and fast.  The Tagliatela College of Engineering is engineering a veritable tech-talent pipeline to deliver job-ready tech professionals to the State’s private and public sectors.


Well, maybe not in kindergarten — but soon after.  In fact, elementary school is where the passion for understanding the ins and outs of technology usually starts, and high school is where the tech-passionate get serious, often taking college-level courses — for college credit — before they even start their higher-education career.

How Do You Fill a Skills Gap in the Tech Workforce?  You Start Early. Very Early.


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Embryonic development.  Wound healing.  Tissue regeneration. Cancer metastasis.  They all depend on — or arise from — collective cell migration.

Armed with the $377,255 award, Principal Investigator and Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering Shue Wang will use novel nano-biosensing techniques and an engineered 3D biomimetic (synthesized to emulate a biochemical process) micro-environment to study compression and mechanobiology — that is, how cells detect and react to physical forces in our bodies.  Cells feel these forces and can change their behavior based on them.  Wang hopes to clarify how compressive stress and matrix stiffness interact with non-coding RNAs in collective cell migration.

We might find a special kind of marker that reacts to physical forces, which could be used both to identify conditions and serve as a target for treatment,” she said. 

Cancer metastasis is absolute intolerance on the part of cells for pressure.  As a tumor grows and takes up more and more space, it’s subject to squeezing from other cells, to being pulled, pushed, and rubbed against by its surroundings. Under such “claustrophobic” conditions, tumor cells will seek out a new neighborhood, where the local microenvironment is more spacious and less hostile.

Wang hopes that the knowledge gained through the project will help in understanding the basic rules of how cells move in a controlled way both during normal development and cancer growth.

That could take a lot of the pressure off for all of us.

How Does Compression Affect Cell Migration? A New NSF Grant Will Help in Studying Cells on the Move.

What does that mean?  It means they can generate electric current and act as mini power plants for things like small-scale robotics, gripping mechanisms, prosthetics, and wearable devices.  They’ve become energy harvesters.


Emon’s project using advanced 3D printing techniques for functional polymers was the impetus behind his selection as a University Research Scholar.


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Right now, the University of New Haven team is over the moon with excitement, but back here on Earth, they will take their Rover to the southern Utah desert this summer.

A Landing in Utah Before Mars


A Landing in Utah Before Mars (cont.)

The happy news came in late March.  The University of New Haven team has qualified for the finals — in a year that, according to the URC, is one of their most competitive years to date.  


A Landing in Utah Before Mars

What is driving the team to put in countless hours on creating a better Rover to assist astronauts?  The Mars Society’s University Rover Challenge (URC), held annually in Hanksville, Utah.  This premier competition attracts teams from all over the world.  Each team submits an entry that includes project details such as mission approach, readiness, and the science involved in their prototype.  Judges evaluate the entries to determine which teams will make the finals.


Included in its package of features is a powerful arm — which can lift the Rover and push it in the unlikely event it gets stuck on some Martian speed bump — autonomous navigation capabilities, AI-based object-detection capabilities, and the ability to generate 3D maps of the area.  The students used the state-of-the-art machining capabilities of the University’s Makerspace as well as 3D printing techniques to create their vehicle.


The all student-designed prototype is no all-wheel vehicle. Instead — in a departure from the Rovers that NASA has been using since 1988 — it moves about on tank treads. The tread material, however, is flexible — unlike traditional rigid tank-tread material. The treads provide a huge area of contact with the surface and allow the Rover to float lightly over particulates and climb obstacles with aplomb.  


The test drive was conducted on a beach in West Haven. There, the multi-disciplinary engineering team that put together their vision of a better Mars Rover took it through its paces. 


Making AI a Tool, Not a Tyrant


When Deception Is Ethical (cont.)

Piazza performed additional work on cyber deception in an area known as Adversary Engagement — the strategic use of cyber deception to increase the cost and decrease the value of an adversary’s cyber operations. Thanks to a grant from the MITRE Corporation — a not-for-profit that operates federally funded R&D centers — the team at SAIL, with Piazza as a key member, developed an effective Adversary Engagement Ontology. For Piazza, the research has served as a springboard to international recognition. She was selected to participate in the prestigious Cooperative AI Foundation summer school in London, joining an elite cohort of students from leading AI labs around the world. She is also part of a collaborative effort between SAIL and King’s College London, investigating the theory of mind approaches to the detection of deceptive behavior in multi-agent systems.


When Deception Is Ethical (cont.)

AI, of course, is a multi-agent learning system. Multiple autonomous agents interact and collaborate to solve problems and complete tasks.  (The autonomous automobile is one example.)


When Deception Is Ethical

Hackers use deceptive techniques to wreak havoc on cyber systems. But, there’s a way to deceive the deceivers and beat them at their own game — or at least throw a monkey wrench into their plans. What does that have to do with AI?


 
AI Ethics Formation in the Lab (cont.)

The Group’s initial mandate concluded in February.  As a result, a new bill has been proposed in the CT State Senate that extends the scope of the previous bill’s approved regulations.  Among other new mandates, the bill instructs each developer of a general-purpose AI model to maintain technical documentation that includes specifics such as the task the model is intended to perform, acceptable use policies, and the methods by which such general-purpose AI model is distributed.


Thanks to his all-encompassing perspective on the technology and his expertise in artificial intelligence research, Behzadan was appointed to a task force last year — the Connecticut Artificial Intelligence Working Group — with the mission to bring his findings to Connecticut policymakers.

 
AI Ethics Formation in the Lab (cont.)


Because good decisions often involve knowing what bad decisions look like and then not doing that, his work focuses on analyzing decisions made by both humans and machines, including AI.  Behzadan hopes that by helping AI to become better at critical “thinking,” it will benefit the whole of society.  


 
AI Ethics Formation in the Lab (cont.)

State Lawmakers Take a Close Look at AI. 

TCoE 

Newsletter of the Tagliatela College of Engineering, 

Spring 2024

University of  New Haven

University of  New Haven

The Tagliatela College of Engineering has been ranked in the top tier of undergraduate engineering programs nationwide by
U.S. News & World Report.