The Ticker Sticker: Monitoring Vital Signs | PNNL

In the erratic environment of a mass casualty incident, first responders can apply this wearable sticker to patients for continuous monitoring of vital signs. The sticker detects and transmits information related to blood pressure, pulse rate, arterial oxygen levels, and electrocardiogram data to calculate a shock index based upon PNNL’s patented technology. It sends an alert when vital signs change. The results help medical personnel monitor critically injured patients and conduct triage. The sticker could also be used to monitor patients evacuated from hospitals or long-term care facilities, disaster shelter residents who are medically vulnerable, or highly infectious patients. At SciTech Northwest, you can see the prototype sticker and hear from a former first responder about how it works. We invite commercialization partners.   

Smart Device-Based Activity Recognition for Health Assessment  | WSU 

Researchers at Washington State University have developed machine learning techniques for recognizing a user’s activities based on sensor data collected from the user’s smart devices. Studies have shown that clinical health assessment scores are correlated with a user’s activities. Various aspects of a user’s health could be assessed based on their activities, as recognized using smart devices. These smart device-based health assessments provide a unique ability to assess health in an on-going and unobtrusive way, and can automatically and in real-time send the information to a caregiver, while reaching a larger proportion of traditionally underserved populations. The initial target population is elderly people, living at home. At SciTech NW, you will be able to see the smart phone app that the team is moving from a research version to commercial sector. 

SilentAlarm: Malware Beware | PNNL

Adversaries are constantly developing new malware to attack computer systems. Many of today’s cyber security solutions will not detect these novel attacks because these defenses are designed to look for signatures of known malware. SilentAlarm goes beyond signature-based detection to identify adversarial behavior in a network based on abnormal traffic generated by malicious software. This patented technology uses inference-based reasoning to correlate distinct events across a network to pinpoint and subdue potential malware. At SciTech Northwest, you’ll see how SilentAlarm reasons about events that it is observing and takes action to cut off an offending machine when it concludes that it has been infected. This software is continuing to be enhanced, and we are seeking partners to transition it to commercialization.

Finding Patterns in Streaming Data | PNNL

Organizations are increasingly looking for ways to detect precursor events and patterns as they emerge. StreamWorks looks for patterns in near-real-time streaming data. This patent-pending technology enables analysts to visually specify a pattern they want to detect in a data stream, then examine the resulting patterns as soon as they happen. When compared with competing products, test results with a particular Internet traffic flow dataset showed up to 100 times improvement in runtime when StreamWorks was used. SciTech Northwest participants will see how patterns are queried and generated. We are seeking collaborators to pilot this technology for real-time monitoring in cyber security, finance, and Internet of Things applications. Video. More Information. News. 

Opportunities and challenges in big data high-throughput phenotyping | WSU

Currently, farmers and plant breeders have to walk through acres of fields to manually inspect and monitor crop health. WSU researchers combine the power of high-tech sensors and camera systems with mechanized platforms to detect plant health characteristics more quickly and accurately than the human eye. Dr. Sindhuja Sankaran and her team are in the early development of this technology which harnesses data to identify plants producing the most desirable traits (disease resistance, better water use efficiency, crop yield, etc.). One of the challenges is the big data generated using high-tech sensors. Robust data mining processes are required to convert data to transformative information in a language that can be understood by farmers and breeders. The team is working towards developing high-throughput phenotyping data management approaches to achieve this goal. 

Advances in proximal and remote sensing relevant to precision agriculture | WSU

Dr. Lav Khot works on emerging technologies for real-time monitoring and management of crops. These technologies include, low-cost thermal and RGB color imaging sensors that are integrated on an Internet-of-Things (IOT) compatible computing unit for on-board data collection, storage and processing. The invention will aid growers mainly in site-specific crop, water and (fruit) loss management. This futuristic system will help growers to remotely monitor fruit surface characteristics (e.g. wetness, temperature, cuticle stress) and can be used to actuate preventative control measures that will avoid losses. It also allows for remote, indirect monitoring of crop water stress which can be used by farmers for irrigation scheduling of their crops. At SciTech NW, you will be able to see the sensors used for various data collection applications, both proximal and remote, and the unmanned aerial system (drone) used for the remote sensing applications.  

Rashomon: “Digital Vault” Protects Your Cyber Data | UW

Hackers want to steal your secrets! Usually they do that by gaining access to a disk drive or sometimes by intercepting your secrets as they pass across a network. With the growth of cloud computing, the disk drive or network probably is not even under your own physical control. In fact, you probably have no idea how many drives in the cloud have copies of your secrets or where those drives are, physically.  Rashomon is a unique patented software technology from the University of Washington Privacy and Security Lab that protects your secrets from creation through destruction. When you store your secrets with Rashomon, your secrets never exist on any disk anywhere, and never transit any network intact. The applications for this technology are endless, of course! Come see how Rashomon makes this possible through a unique application of Shamir's Secret Sharing. 

FLOWER: Deep Insight into Network Traffic | PNNL

Cyber defenders need insights to prevent breaches and identify potential insider threats. FLOWER, a patented turnkey software solution, collects network data that can be used to generate alerts and support forensic investigations into incidents and attacks.  At SciTech Northwest, you will see how FLOWER allows cyber defenders to target resources to monitor, quickly deploy, and incrementally scale as needed. We are also seeking partners to support a pilot of a customized FLOWER app in their enterprises. FLOWER has been non-exclusively licensed and is available for licensing by others. More Information.

Material Frontier: Virtual Testing Platform for Composite Materials | UW

Carbon fiber composites are poised to replace metal materials in many products, including airplanes, autos, windmills, boats, sports equipment and many others. With their high strength and light weight, composites are opening new frontiers in the capabilities of all these products. Composites materials in their various forms offer the opportunity to design a material for a specific application. However, one of the barriers to widespread adoption of composite materials is a lack of modelling tools to predict how composites might fail or breander various conditions. Such tools are very well developed for metals, but there are no good modelling tools for composites. Without these tools, manufacturers must conduct extensive physical testing, which adds a tremendous amount of time and cost to the design cycle and therefore limits the applications where composites can be employed. Material Frontier provides proven, accurate failure model and virtual testing platform for composites materials, which dramatically reduces the design cost of using these important new materials. These virtual testing tools with smart analytics can also provide designers and engineers with freedom to design without the shackle of physical testing. Come see our predictions for the next Material Frontier. 

Integrated Omics: Technologies and Capabilities | PNNL

The “Omics of things” requires unique facilities and capabilities to study the identity, function, and interaction of genes, proteins, and metabolites within biological systems. Our research results aid in the development of methods and tools to solve large-scale, seemingly insurmountable problems in agriculture, medicine, and biological ecosystems, among others. You will see how our Active Data Canvas allows clinicians and scientists to share, explore, and collaborate over complex datasets to produce more groundbreaking discoveries. You will also see our small molecule database that provides detailed information on molecules analyzed through our highly sensitive instrumentation. In addition, attendees can “walk through” virtual 3D proteins whose structures were solved using the world-class instruments and data analytics at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory at PNNL.

Haptic Password for Secure Authentication | UW

In 2016, an estimated $8.6 billion was lost in e-commerce fraud—an amount expected to nearly double by 2020. Existing methods of credit card authentication are easily compromised, and current password systems have several limitations. Haptic passwords provide a solution to this problem. Haptic passwords work with a pen or finger on touch-sensitive screens. The force, velocity and position of the pen or finger on the screen is sampled and used, in combination with signal processing methods and machine learning, to uniquely represent each individual. It is not just what you write, but how you write it. Haptic passwords provide a secure authentication method which is essentially forgery proof, for any need that requires identity confirmation, including financial transactions, facilities access, document custody, and voting. 

Seto Lab Sensors: Real-Time Web Access to Air Quality Data | UW

Every year, more than six million people globally die because of diseases caused by air pollution. However, current air quality monitoring technology is expensive, limiting the number of monitors that can be deployed. To combat this, Edmund Seto, a professor in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences, and Graeme Carvlin, a PhD student, have designed a fully-calibrated networked multi-pollutant air quality monitor that can be deployed in large numbers to provide real-time web access to air quality data in communities. The system measures multiple pollutants, and provides both government agencies and the public with immediate access to these data, at a fraction of the cost of conventional air monitoring technologies. 

Find Grid Weaknesses to Avoid Power Blackouts | PNNL

Today’s power grid is vulnerable to extreme events caused by extreme weather, critical contingencies, unusual system-loading conditions, growing uncertainties, and physical/cyber-attacks. Once an extreme event is triggered, utilities and independent system operators must take quick actions to identify areas of instability that could lead to cascading failures or blackouts. The Dynamic Contingency/Cascade Analysis Tool (DCAT) uses a hybrid simulation procedure to mimic the cascading failure process during a typical power grid blackout, which can effectively identify weak spots on the grid. With this knowledge, power system planning engineers can design and implement system reinforcement plans, and system operators can take targeted actions that are designed to stop a cascading event. SciTech Northwest attendees will see how DCAT works to identify system issues during an extreme event. DCAT is available for licensing for non-commercial or commercial use. 

Converting wide-area real-time power grid data to actionable operator information | WSU

Phasor Informatics LLC, a spin out from Washington State University (WSU) develops novel software solutions for ensuring the operational reliability of the electric power grid, while the grid is transitioning into a green energy based sustainable grid of the future. Power utilities all around the world have heavily invested in synchrophasor technology which allows high-speed high-fidelity wide-area monitoring of the dynamic characteristics of large electric power grids. A few thousand synchrophasors have already been installed in the North American power systems and the number of synchrophasors is expected to grow into hundreds of thousands in the next ten years, while the power industry replaces the Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) technology of the 1970s. As of today, the power utilities around the world are collecting and archiving gigabytes of synchrophasor measurements every day without fully analyzing and utilizing them for deriving insight towards reliable real-time operation. Phasor Informatics LLC has developed unique technologies for automatically extracting critical information from thousands of synchrophasor measurements using advanced algorithms developed at WSU. These technologies can detect early signatures of impending operational problems related to power system oscillations, voltage stability, and transient stability issues. By processing the thousands of these signals together, the algorithms can pinpoint the root cause of the underlying problems. At SciTech NW, you will be able to see some of these software tools that Phasor Informatics LLC has developed for the modern grid.  

Does Your Power Plant Model Match Reality? | PNNL

The Power Plant Model Validation (PPMV) software tool automates the validation process for power plant models using phasor measurement unit (PMU) data. This makes it easier to comply with reliability standards for ensuring that such models are accurate and current. The PPMV tool contains a collection of power plant models and model validation studies, as well as disturbance recordings from a number of historical power grid events. At SciTech Northwest, you will see how the PPMV tool validates or invalidates the model for a specific power plant against its actual performance.  This tool is available under an open-source license.