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A new technique developed by Elisa Konofagou, associate professor of biomedical engineering and radiology at Columbia Engineering, has demonstrated for the first time that the size of molecules penetrating the blood-brain barrier can be controlled using acoustic pressure—the pressure of an ultrasound beam—to let specific molecules through. This innovative method, published in the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow & Metabolism, may help improve drug delivery to the brain.

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Qi Wang, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, recently won the prestigious 2014 Early Career Achievement Award from the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS). EMBS, the world's largest society of biomedical engineers, cited his “contribution to neural engineering and biomedical instrumentation, including measuring biomechanical properties of skin and tissue, building a tactile display for a virtual Braille system, and discovery of a neural basis for sensory adaptation in behavior.“

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Columbia Engineering researchers have discovered a crucial security problem in Google Play, the official Android app store. The study is the first to make a large-scale measurement of the huge marketplace, using PlayDrone, a tool they developed to circumvent Google security to successfully download Google Play apps and recover their sources.

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Columbia Engineering professor Elizabeth M. C. Hillman has identified a new component of the biological mechanism that controls blood flow in the brain, demonstrating that the vascular endothelium plays a critical role in the regulation of blood flow in response to stimulation in the living brain. Understanding how and why the brain regulates its blood flow could provide important clues to understanding early brain development, disease, and aging.

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Researchers at Columbia Engineering and the University of Maryland Carey School of Law recently published a study in the New York University Journal of Law & Liberty that examines how advances in machine learning technology may change the way courts treat searches, warrants, and privacy issues.

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Using computer vision and machine learning techniques, Columbia Engineering researchers have developed Birdsnap, a free new iPhone app that's an electronic field guide featuring 500 of the most common North American bird species. The app enables users to identify bird species through uploaded photos, + accompanies a comprehensive website.

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Columbia Engineers have successfully grown—for the first time—fully functional human cartilage in vitro from human stem cells derived from bone marrow tissue. Their study, which demonstrates new ways to better mimic the enormous complexity of tissue development, regeneration, and disease, is published in the April 28 Early Online edition of PNAS.

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For more than two years, Marshall Cox PhD’13 and John Kymissis, associate professor of electrical engineering, have been working on their startup Radiator Labs. Their first consumer product—the Cozy—is now in production and set for delivery next fall, just in time for winter’s cold blasts. And also just in time to win Popular Science Magazine's Annual Invention Awards as one of the most exciting innovations the PopSci editors have seen this past year.

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Researchers led by Ken Shepard (electrical engineering and biomedical engineering professor, Columbia Engineering) and Lars Dietrich, biological sciences assistant professor, Columbia University) have shown integrated circuit technology can be used for a most unusual application—the study of signaling in bacterial colonies. They have developed a chip based on CMOS technology that enables them to electrochemically image the signaling molecules from these colonies spatially and temporally—they’ve developed chips that “listen” to bacteria.

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A Columbia Engineering team has won a $3 million ARPA-E grant for research targeted at developing next-generation power conversion devices to transform how power is controlled and converted throughout the grid. The researchers are developing a new method to fabricate vertical gallium nitride devices in a low-cost matter compatible with traditional silicon semiconductor manufacturing.

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A team of Columbia Engineering researchers, led by Mechanical Engineering Professor James Hone and Electrical Engineering Professor Kenneth Shepard, has taken advantage of graphene’s special properties—its mechanical strength and electrical conduction—and created a nano-mechanical system that can create FM signals, in effect the world’s smallest FM radio transmitter. The study is published online on November 17, in Nature Nanotechnology.

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Columbia Engineering researchers have developed a new approach to designing novel nanostructured materials through an inverse design framework using genetic algorithms. The study, published in PNAS’s October 28 Early Online edition, is the first to demonstrate the application of this methodology to the design of self-assembled nanostructures, and could help speed up the materials discovery process. It also shows the potential of machine learning and “big data” approaches.

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A team of researchers led by Columbia Engineering Professor Jingyue Ju has won a three-year $5.25 million NIH grant to develop a novel integrated miniaturized system for real-time single molecule electronic DNA sequencing. This will help them develop their approach into a robust miniaturized platform that will allow the entire human genome to be deciphered for about $100, creating an ideal platform for personalized medicine and basic biomedical research.

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Researchers from Columbia Engineering and Brookhaven National Laboratory have identified a series of clues that particular arrangements of electrical charges known as “stripes” may play a role in superconductivity, using a method to detect fluctuating stripes of charge density in a material closely related to a superconductor.

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Computer Science Professor Shree Nayar has launched Bigshot, a kit that features a build-it-yourself digital camera designed to serve as both a creative tool and a medium for education. It’s accompanied by an in-depth website that includes an interactive textbook with engaging demos of science and engineering concepts related to the camera. Nayar will use some of his royalties to donate cameras to kids in underprivileged communities through his program Bigshots for Good.

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Columbia University researchers have won a $1 million 3-year grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation to advance their research in combining biological components with solid-state electronics, creating new systems that exploit the advantages of both.

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Christine Fleming has been named to MIT Technology Review’s annual list of 35 top young innovators for her research in the field of biotechnology and medicine. Fleming, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Columbia Engineering, is working on giving cardiologists a powerful new tool: high-resolution films of the living heart, available in real time during cardiac procedures.

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Innovative machine learning technology developed by Columbia Engineering is the driving force—in effect, the brain—behind Di-BOSS™, a new digital building operating system that integrates all building operating systems into one, easy-to-use cockpit control interface for desktops and portable devices. The system has been successfully piloted in NYC by Rudin Management, saving them energy costs and resources.

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Columbia Engineering researchers demonstrate that graphene, even if stitched together from many small crystalline grains, is almost as strong as graphene in its perfect crystalline form. This resolves a contradiction between theoretical simulations, which predicted grain boundaries can be strong, and earlier experiments, which indicated they were much weaker than the perfect lattice.

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Columbia Engineering researchers have used miniaturized electronics to measure the activity of individual ion-channel proteins with temporal resolution as fine as one microsecond, producing the fastest recordings of single ion channels ever performed.

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Columbia University researchers have grown high-quality crystals of molybdenum disulfide, the world’s thinnest semiconductor, and studied how these crystals stitch together at the atomic scale to form continuous sheets, gaining key insights into the optical and electronic properties of this new “wonder” material.

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Researchers have directly observed—through moiré-patterned graphene—a rare quantum effect that produces a repeating butterfly-shaped energy spectrum, confirming the longstanding prediction of this quantum fractal energy structure called Hofstadter’s butterfly. The study is published in Nature’s May 15 Advance Online Publication.

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Harish Krishnaswamy, assistant professor of electrical engineering at Columbia Engineering, has generated a record amount of power output—by a power of five—using silicon-based nanoscale CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) technology for millimeter-wave power amplifiers. Power amplifiers are used in communications and sensor systems to boost power levels for reliable transmission of signals over long distances as required by the given application. Krishnaswamy’s research will be reported at the June 2013 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium.

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Columbia Engineering researchers have developed a new computational model that is highly predictive of breast cancer survival and, they hope, perhaps all cancers. Their work won the Sage Bionetworks/DREAM Breast Cancer Prognosis Challenge, a crowd-sourced effort for accurate breast cancer prognosis using molecular and clinical data.

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Researchers at Columbia Engineering and Boston University have developed the first method to map evaporation globally using weather stations, which will help scientists evaluate water resource management, assess recent trends of evaporation throughout the globe, and validate surface hydrologic models in various conditions.

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Columbia Engineering’s new “plug-and-play” method to assemble complex cell microenvironments is a scalable, highly precise way to fabricate tissues with any spatial organization or interest—like those found in the heart or skeleton or vasculature. The PNAS study reveals new ways to better mimic the enormous complexity of tissue development, regeneration, and disease.

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A new Columbia Engineering study finds that the infant brain does not control its blood flow the same way as the adult brain, that the control of brain blood flow develops with age. These findings could change the way researchers study brain development in infants and children.

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Columbia Engineering and Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that certain volatile organic gases can promote cloud formation in a way never considered before by atmospheric scientists. They say this is the first time gases have been shown to affect cloud formation in this way and will “improve our ability to model cloud formation, an important component of climate.”

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Columbia Biomedical Engineering Professor Samuel Sia has taken his innovative lab-on-a-chip and developed a way to not only check a patient’s HIV status anywhere in the world with just a finger prick, but also synchronize the results automatically and instantaneously with central health-care records—10 times faster than the benchtop ELISA.

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Columbia Engineering researchers have found vulnerabilities in Cisco VoIP telephones, recently demonstrating how they can insert malicious code into a Cisco VoIP phone (any of the 14 Cisco Unified IP Phone models) and start eavesdropping on private conversations—not just on the phone but also in the phone’s surroundings—from anywhere in the world.