Tag Archives: DOD

How to get people to trust artificial intelligence

Vyacheslav Polonski’s (University of Oxford researcher) January 10, 2018 piece (originally published Jan. 9, 2018 on The Conversation) on phys.org isn’t a gossip article although there are parts that could be read that way. Before getting to what I consider the juicy bits (Note: Links have been removed),

Artificial intelligence [AI] can already predict the future. Police forces are using it to map when and where crime is likely to occur [Note: See my Nov. 23, 2017 posting about predictive policing in Vancouver for details about the first Canadian municipality to introduce the technology]. Doctors can use it to predict when a patient is most likely to have a heart attack or stroke. Researchers are even trying to give AI imagination so it can plan for unexpected consequences.

Many decisions in our lives require a good forecast, and AI agents are almost always better at forecasting than their human counterparts. Yet for all these technological advances, we still seem to deeply lack confidence in AI predictions. Recent cases show that people don’t like relying on AI and prefer to trust human experts, even if these experts are wrong.

The part (juicy bits) that satisfied some of my long held curiosity was this section on Watson and its life as a medical adjunct (Note: Links have been removed),

IBM’s attempt to promote its supercomputer programme to cancer doctors (Watson for Onology) was a PR [public relations] disaster. The AI promised to deliver top-quality recommendations on the treatment of 12 cancers that accounted for 80% of the world’s cases. As of today, over 14,000 patients worldwide have received advice based on its calculations.

But when doctors first interacted with Watson they found themselves in a rather difficult situation. On the one hand, if Watson provided guidance about a treatment that coincided with their own opinions, physicians did not see much value in Watson’s recommendations. The supercomputer was simply telling them what they already know, and these recommendations did not change the actual treatment. This may have given doctors some peace of mind, providing them with more confidence in their own decisions. But IBM has yet to provide evidence that Watson actually improves cancer survival rates.

On the other hand, if Watson generated a recommendation that contradicted the experts’ opinion, doctors would typically conclude that Watson wasn’t competent. And the machine wouldn’t be able to explain why its treatment was plausible because its machine learning algorithms were simply too complex to be fully understood by humans. Consequently, this has caused even more mistrust and disbelief, leading many doctors to ignore the seemingly outlandish AI recommendations and stick to their own expertise.

As a result, IBM Watson’s premier medical partner, the MD Anderson Cancer Center, recently announced it was dropping the programme. Similarly, a Danish hospital reportedly abandoned the AI programme after discovering that its cancer doctors disagreed with Watson in over two thirds of cases.

The problem with Watson for Oncology was that doctors simply didn’t trust it. Human trust is often based on our understanding of how other people think and having experience of their reliability. …

It seems to me there might be a bit more to the doctors’ trust issues and I was surprised it didn’t seem to have occurred to Polonski. Then I did some digging (from Polonski’s webpage on the Oxford Internet Institute website),

Vyacheslav Polonski (@slavacm) is a DPhil [PhD] student at the Oxford Internet Institute. His research interests are located at the intersection of network science, media studies and social psychology. Vyacheslav’s doctoral research examines the adoption and use of social network sites, focusing on the effects of social influence, social cognition and identity construction.

Vyacheslav is a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University and a Global Shaper at the World Economic Forum. He was awarded the Master of Science degree with Distinction in the Social Science of the Internet from the University of Oxford in 2013. He also obtained the Bachelor of Science degree with First Class Honours in Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2012.

Vyacheslav was honoured at the British Council International Student of the Year 2011 awards, and was named UK’s Student of the Year 2012 and national winner of the Future Business Leader of the Year 2012 awards by TARGETjobs.

Previously, he has worked as a management consultant at Roland Berger Strategy Consultants and gained further work experience at the World Economic Forum, PwC, Mars, Bertelsmann and Amazon.com. Besides, he was involved in several start-ups as part of the 2012 cohort of Entrepreneur First and as part of the founding team of the London office of Rocket Internet. Vyacheslav was the junior editor of the bi-lingual book ‘Inspire a Nation‘ about Barack Obama’s first presidential election campaign. In 2013, he was invited to be a keynote speaker at the inaugural TEDx conference of IE University in Spain to discuss the role of a networked mindset in everyday life.

Vyacheslav is fluent in German, English and Russian, and is passionate about new technologies, social entrepreneurship, philanthropy, philosophy and modern art.

Research interests

Network science, social network analysis, online communities, agency and structure, group dynamics, social interaction, big data, critical mass, network effects, knowledge networks, information diffusion, product adoption

Positions held at the OII

  • DPhil student, October 2013 –
  • MSc Student, October 2012 – August 2013

Polonski doesn’t seem to have any experience dealing with, participating in, or studying the medical community. Getting a doctor to admit that his or her approach to a particular patient’s condition was wrong or misguided runs counter to their training and, by extension, the institution of medicine. Also, one of the biggest problems in any field is getting people to change and it’s not always about trust. In this instance, you’re asking a doctor to back someone else’s opinion after he or she has rendered theirs. This is difficult even when the other party is another human doctor let alone a form of artificial intelligence.

If you want to get a sense of just how hard it is to get someone to back down after they’ve committed to a position, read this January 10, 2018 essay by Lara Bazelon, an associate professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law. This is just one of the cases (Note: Links have been removed),

Davontae Sanford was 14 years old when he confessed to murdering four people in a drug house on Detroit’s East Side. Left alone with detectives in a late-night interrogation, Sanford says he broke down after being told he could go home if he gave them “something.” On the advice of a lawyer whose license was later suspended for misconduct, Sanders pleaded guilty in the middle of his March 2008 trial and received a sentence of 39 to 92 years in prison.

Sixteen days after Sanford was sentenced, a hit man named Vincent Smothers told the police he had carried out 12 contract killings, including the four Sanford had pleaded guilty to committing. Smothers explained that he’d worked with an accomplice, Ernest Davis, and he provided a wealth of corroborating details to back up his account. Smothers told police where they could find one of the weapons used in the murders; the gun was recovered and ballistics matched it to the crime scene. He also told the police he had used a different gun in several of the other murders, which ballistics tests confirmed. Once Smothers’ confession was corroborated, it was clear Sanford was innocent. Smothers made this point explicitly in an 2015 affidavit, emphasizing that Sanford hadn’t been involved in the crimes “in any way.”

Guess what happened? (Note: Links have been removed),

But Smothers and Davis were never charged. Neither was Leroy Payne, the man Smothers alleged had paid him to commit the murders. …

Davontae Sanford, meanwhile, remained behind bars, locked up for crimes he very clearly didn’t commit.

Police failed to turn over all the relevant information in Smothers’ confession to Sanford’s legal team, as the law required them to do. When that information was leaked in 2009, Sanford’s attorneys sought to reverse his conviction on the basis of actual innocence. Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy fought back, opposing the motion all the way to the Michigan Supreme Court. In 2014, the court sided with Worthy, ruling that actual innocence was not a valid reason to withdraw a guilty plea [emphasis mine]. Sanford would remain in prison for another two years.

Doctors are just as invested in their opinions and professional judgments as lawyers  (just like  the prosecutor and the judges on the Michigan Supreme Court) are.

There is one more problem. From the doctor’s (or anyone else’s perspective), if the AI is making the decisions, why do he/she need to be there? At best it’s as if AI were turning the doctor into its servant or, at worst, replacing the doctor. Polonski alludes to the problem in one of his solutions to the ‘trust’ issue (Note: A link has been removed),

Research suggests involving people more in the AI decision-making process could also improve trust and allow the AI to learn from human experience. For example,one study showed people were given the freedom to slightly modify an algorithm felt more satisfied with its decisions, more likely to believe it was superior and more likely to use it in the future.

Having input into the AI decision-making process somewhat addresses one of the problems but the commitment to one’s own judgment even when there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary is a perennially thorny problem. The legal case mentioned here earlier is clearly one where the contrarian is wrong but it’s not always that obvious. As well, sometimes, people who hold out against the majority are right.

US Army

Getting back to building trust, it turns out the US Army Research Laboratory is also interested in transparency where AI is concerned (from a January 11, 2018 US Army news release on EurekAlert),

U.S. Army Research Laboratory [ARL] scientists developed ways to improve collaboration between humans and artificially intelligent agents in two projects recently completed for the Autonomy Research Pilot Initiative supported by the Office of Secretary of Defense. They did so by enhancing the agent transparency [emphasis mine], which refers to a robot, unmanned vehicle, or software agent’s ability to convey to humans its intent, performance, future plans, and reasoning process.

“As machine agents become more sophisticated and independent, it is critical for their human counterparts to understand their intent, behaviors, reasoning process behind those behaviors, and expected outcomes so the humans can properly calibrate their trust [emphasis mine] in the systems and make appropriate decisions,” explained ARL’s Dr. Jessie Chen, senior research psychologist.

The U.S. Defense Science Board, in a 2016 report, identified six barriers to human trust in autonomous systems, with ‘low observability, predictability, directability and auditability’ as well as ‘low mutual understanding of common goals’ being among the key issues.

In order to address these issues, Chen and her colleagues developed the Situation awareness-based Agent Transparency, or SAT, model and measured its effectiveness on human-agent team performance in a series of human factors studies supported by the ARPI. The SAT model deals with the information requirements from an agent to its human collaborator in order for the human to obtain effective situation awareness of the agent in its tasking environment. At the first SAT level, the agent provides the operator with the basic information about its current state and goals, intentions, and plans. At the second level, the agent reveals its reasoning process as well as the constraints/affordances that the agent considers when planning its actions. At the third SAT level, the agent provides the operator with information regarding its projection of future states, predicted consequences, likelihood of success/failure, and any uncertainty associated with the aforementioned projections.

In one of the ARPI projects, IMPACT, a research program on human-agent teaming for management of multiple heterogeneous unmanned vehicles, ARL’s experimental effort focused on examining the effects of levels of agent transparency, based on the SAT model, on human operators’ decision making during military scenarios. The results of a series of human factors experiments collectively suggest that transparency on the part of the agent benefits the human’s decision making and thus the overall human-agent team performance. More specifically, researchers said the human’s trust in the agent was significantly better calibrated — accepting the agent’s plan when it is correct and rejecting it when it is incorrect– when the agent had a higher level of transparency.

The other project related to agent transparency that Chen and her colleagues performed under the ARPI was Autonomous Squad Member, on which ARL collaborated with Naval Research Laboratory scientists. The ASM is a small ground robot that interacts with and communicates with an infantry squad. As part of the overall ASM program, Chen’s group developed transparency visualization concepts, which they used to investigate the effects of agent transparency levels on operator performance. Informed by the SAT model, the ASM’s user interface features an at a glance transparency module where user-tested iconographic representations of the agent’s plans, motivator, and projected outcomes are used to promote transparent interaction with the agent. A series of human factors studies on the ASM’s user interface have investigated the effects of agent transparency on the human teammate’s situation awareness, trust in the ASM, and workload. The results, consistent with the IMPACT project’s findings, demonstrated the positive effects of agent transparency on the human’s task performance without increase of perceived workload. The research participants also reported that they felt the ASM as more trustworthy, intelligent, and human-like when it conveyed greater levels of transparency.

Chen and her colleagues are currently expanding the SAT model into bidirectional transparency between the human and the agent.

“Bidirectional transparency, although conceptually straightforward–human and agent being mutually transparent about their reasoning process–can be quite challenging to implement in real time. However, transparency on the part of the human should support the agent’s planning and performance–just as agent transparency can support the human’s situation awareness and task performance, which we have demonstrated in our studies,” Chen hypothesized.

The challenge is to design the user interfaces, which can include visual, auditory, and other modalities, that can support bidirectional transparency dynamically, in real time, while not overwhelming the human with too much information and burden.

Interesting, yes? Here’s a link and a citation for the paper,

Situation Awareness-based Agent Transparency and Human-Autonomy Teaming Effectiveness by Jessie Y.C. Chen, Shan G. Lakhmani, Kimberly Stowers, Anthony R. Selkowitz, Julia L. Wright, and Michael Barnes. Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science May 2018. DOI 10.1080/1463922X.2017.1315750

This paper is behind a paywall.

Neuristors and brainlike computing

As you might suspect, a neuristor is based on a memristor .(For a description of a memristor there’s this Wikipedia entry and you can search this blog with the tags ‘memristor’ and neuromorphic engineering’ for more here.)

Being new to neuristors ,I needed a little more information before reading the latest and found this Dec. 24, 2012 article by John Timmer for Ars Technica (Note: Links have been removed),

Computing hardware is composed of a series of binary switches; they’re either on or off. The other piece of computational hardware we’re familiar with, the brain, doesn’t work anything like that. Rather than being on or off, individual neurons exhibit brief spikes of activity, and encode information in the pattern and timing of these spikes. The differences between the two have made it difficult to model neurons using computer hardware. In fact, the recent, successful generation of a flexible neural system required that each neuron be modeled separately in software in order to get the sort of spiking behavior real neurons display.

But researchers may have figured out a way to create a chip that spikes. The people at HP labs who have been working on memristors have figured out a combination of memristors and capacitors that can create a spiking output pattern. Although these spikes appear to be more regular than the ones produced by actual neurons, it might be possible to create versions that are a bit more variable than this one. And, more significantly, it should be possible to fabricate them in large numbers, possibly right on a silicon chip.

The key to making the devices is something called a Mott insulator. These are materials that would normally be able to conduct electricity, but are unable to because of interactions among their electrons. Critically, these interactions weaken with elevated temperatures. So, by heating a Mott insulator, it’s possible to turn it into a conductor. In the case of the material used here, NbO2, the heat is supplied by resistance itself. By applying a voltage to the NbO2 in the device, it becomes a resistor, heats up, and, when it reaches a critical temperature, turns into a conductor, allowing current to flow through. But, given the chance to cool off, the device will return to its resistive state. Formally, this behavior is described as a memristor.

To get the sort of spiking behavior seen in a neuron, the authors turned to a simplified model of neurons based on the proteins that allow them to transmit electrical signals. When a neuron fires, sodium channels open, allowing ions to rush into a nerve cell, and changing the relative charges inside and outside its membrane. In response to these changes, potassium channels then open, allowing different ions out, and restoring the charge balance. That shuts the whole thing down, and allows various pumps to start restoring the initial ion balance.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the research paper described in Timmer’s article,

A scalable neuristor built with Mott memristors by Matthew D. Pickett, Gilberto Medeiros-Ribeiro, & R. Stanley Williams. Nature Materials 12, 114–117 (2013) doi:10.1038/nmat3510 Published online 16 December 2012

This paper is behind a paywall.

A July 28, 2017 news item on Nanowerk provides an update on neuristors,

A future android brain like that of Star Trek’s Commander Data might contain neuristors, multi-circuit components that emulate the firings of human neurons.

Neuristors already exist today in labs, in small quantities, and to fuel the quest to boost neuristors’ power and numbers for practical use in brain-like computing, the U.S. Department of Defense has awarded a $7.1 million grant to a research team led by the Georgia Institute of Technology. The researchers will mainly work on new metal oxide materials that buzz electronically at the nanoscale to emulate the way human neural networks buzz with electric potential on a cellular level.

A July 28, 2017 Georgia Tech news release, which originated the news item, delves further into neuristors and the proposed work leading to an artificial retina that can learn (!). This was not where I was expecting things to go,

But let’s walk expectations back from the distant sci-fi future into the scientific present: The research team is developing its neuristor materials to build an intelligent light sensor, and not some artificial version of the human brain, which would require hundreds of trillions of circuits.

“We’re not going to reach circuit complexities of that magnitude, not even a tenth,” said Alan Doolittle, a professor at Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Also, currently science doesn’t really know yet very well how the human brain works, so we can’t duplicate it.”

Intelligent retina

But an artificial retina that can learn autonomously appears well within reach of the research team from Georgia Tech and Binghamton University. Despite the term “retina,” the development is not intended as a medical implant, but it could be used in advanced image recognition cameras for national defense and police work.

At the same time, it would significantly advance brain-mimicking, or neuromorphic, computing. The research field that takes its cues from what science already does know about how the brain computes to develop exponentially more powerful computing.

The retina would be comprised of an array of ultra-compact circuits called neuristors (a word combining “neuron” and “transistor”) that sense light, compute an image out of it and store the image. All three of the functions would occur simultaneously and nearly instantaneously.

“The same device senses, computes and stores the image,” Doolittle said. “The device is the sensor, and it’s the processor, and it’s the memory all at the same time.” A neuristor itself is comprised in part of devices called memristors inspired by the way human neurons work.

Brain vs. PC

That cuts out loads of processing and memory lag time that are inherent in traditional computing.

Take the device you’re reading this article on: Its microprocessor has to tap a separate memory component to get data, then do some processing, tap memory again for more data, process some more, etc. “That back-and-forth from memory to microprocessor has created a bottleneck,” Doolittle said.

A neuristor array breaks the bottleneck by emulating the extreme flexibility of biological nervous systems: When a brain computes, it uses a broad set of neural pathways that flash with enormous data. Then, later, to compute the same thing again, it will use quite different neural paths.

Traditional computer pathways, by contrast, are hardwired. For example, look at a present-day processor and you’ll see lines etched into it. Those are pathways that computational signals are limited to.

The new memristor materials at the heart of the neuristor are not etched, and signals flow through the surface very freely, more like they do through the brain, exponentially increasing the number of possible pathways computation can take. That helps the new intelligent retina compute powerfully and swiftly.

Terrorists, missing children

The retina’s memory could also store thousands of photos, allowing it to immediately match up what it sees with the saved images. The retina could pinpoint known terror suspects in a crowd, find missing children, or identify enemy aircraft virtually instantaneously, without having to trawl databases to correctly identify what is in the images.

Even if you take away the optics, the new neuristor arrays still advance artificial intelligence. Instead of light, a surface of neuristors could absorb massive data streams at once, compute them, store them, and compare them to patterns of other data, immediately. It could even autonomously learn to extrapolate further information, like calculating the third dimension out of data from two dimensions.

“It will work with anything that has a repetitive pattern like radar signatures, for example,” Doolittle said. “Right now, that’s too challenging to compute, because radar information is flying out at such a high data rate that no computer can even think about keeping up.”

Smart materials

The research project’s title acronym CEREBRAL may hint at distant dreams of an artificial brain, but what it stands for spells out the present goal in neuromorphic computing: Cross-disciplinary Electronic-ionic Research Enabling Biologically Realistic Autonomous Learning.

The intelligent retina’s neuristors are based on novel metal oxide nanotechnology materials, unique to Georgia Tech. They allow computing signals to flow flexibly across pathways that are electronic, which is customary in computing, and at the same time make use of ion motion, which is more commonly know from the way batteries and biological systems work.

The new materials have already been created, and they work, but the researchers don’t yet fully understand why.

Much of the project is dedicated to examining quantum states in the materials and how those states help create useful electronic-ionic properties. Researchers will view them by bombarding the metal oxides with extremely bright x-ray photons at the recently constructed National Synchrotron Light Source II.

Grant sub-awardee Binghamton University is located close by, and Binghamton physicists will run experiments and hone them via theoretical modeling.

‘Sea of lithium’

The neuristors are created mainly by the way the metal oxide materials are grown in the lab, which has advantages over building neuristors in a more wired way.

This materials-growing approach is conducive to mass production. Also, though neuristors in general free signals to take multiple pathways, Georgia Tech’s neuristors do it much more flexibly thanks to chemical properties.

“We also have a sea of lithium, and it’s like an infinite reservoir of computational ionic fluid,” Doolittle said. The lithium niobite imitates the way ionic fluid bathes biological neurons and allows them to flash with electric potential while signaling. In a neuristor array, the lithium niobite helps computational signaling move in myriad directions.

“It’s not like the typical semiconductor material, where you etch a line, and only that line has the computational material,” Doolittle said.

Commander Data’s brain?

“Unlike any other previous neuristors, our neuristors will adapt themselves in their computational-electronic pulsing on the fly, which makes them more like a neurological system,” Doolittle said. “They mimic biology in that we have ion drift across the material to create the memristors (the memory part of neuristors).”

Brains are far superior to computers at most things, but not all. Brains recognize objects and do motor tasks much better. But computers are much better at arithmetic and data processing.

Neuristor arrays can meld both types of computing, making them biological and algorithmic at once, a bit like Commander Data’s brain.

The research is being funded through the U.S. Department of Defense’s Multidisciplinary University Research Initiatives (MURI) Program under grant number FOA: N00014-16-R-FO05. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of those agencies.

Fascinating, non?

‘Mother of all bombs’ is a nanoweapon?

According to physicist, Louis A. Del Monte, in an April 14, 2017 opinion piece for Huffington Post.com, the ‘mother of all bombs ‘ is a nanoweapon (Note: Links have been removed),

The United States military dropped its largest non-nuclear bomb, the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB), nicknamed the “mother of all bombs,” on an ISIS cave and tunnel complex in the Achin District of the Nangarhar province, Afghanistan [on Thursday, April 13, 2017]. The Achin District is the center of ISIS activity in Afghanistan. This was the first use in combat of the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB).

… Although it carries only about 8 tons of explosives, the explosive mixture delivers a destructive impact equivalent of 11 tons of TNT.

There is little doubt the United States Department of Defense is likely using nanometals, such as nanoaluminum (alternately spelled nano-aluminum) mixed with TNT, to enhance the detonation properties of the MOAB. The use of nanoaluminum mixed with TNT was known to boost the explosive power of the TNT since the early 2000s. If true, this means that the largest known United States non-nuclear bomb is a nanoweapon. When most of us think about nanoweapons, we think small, essentially invisible weapons, like nanobots (i.e., tiny robots made using nanotechnology). That can often be the case. But, as defined in my recent book, Nanoweapons: A Growing Threat to Humanity (Potomac 2017), “Nanoweapons are any military technology that exploits the power of nanotechnology.” This means even the largest munition, such as the MOAB, is a nanoweapon if it uses nanotechnology.

… The explosive is H6, which is a mixture of five ingredients (by weight):

  • 44.0% RDX & nitrocellulose (RDX is a well know explosive, more powerful that TNT, often used with TNT and other explosives. Nitrocellulose is a propellant or low-order explosive, originally known as gun-cotton.)
  • 29.5% TNT
  • 21.0% powdered aluminum
  • 5.0% paraffin wax as a phlegmatizing (i.e., stabilizing) agent.
  • 0.5% calcium chloride (to absorb moisture and eliminate the production of gas

Note, the TNT and powdered aluminum account for over half the explosive payload by weight. It is highly likely that the “powdered aluminum” is nanoaluminum, since nanoaluminum can enhance the destructive properties of TNT. This argues that H6 is a nano-enhanced explosive, making the MOAB a nanoweapon.

The United States GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB) was the largest non-nuclear bomb known until Russia detonated the Aviation Thermobaric Bomb of Increased Power, termed the “father of all bombs” (FOAB), in 2007. It is reportedly four times more destructive than the MOAB, even though it carries only 7 tons of explosives versus the 8 tons of the MOAB. Interestingly, the Russians claim to achieve the more destructive punch using nanotechnology.

If you have the time, I encourage you to read the piece in its entirety.

“Breaking Me Softly” at the nanoscale

“Breaking Me Softly” sounds like a song title but in this case the phrase as been coined to describe a new technique for controlling materials at the nanoscale according to a June 6, 2016 news item on ScienceDaily,

A finding by a University of Central Florida researcher that unlocks a means of controlling materials at the nanoscale and opens the door to a new generation of manufacturing is featured online in the journal Nature.

Using a pair of pliers in each hand and gradually pulling taut a piece of glass fiber coated in plastic, associate professor Ayman Abouraddy found that something unexpected and never before documented occurred — the inner fiber fragmented in an orderly fashion.

“What we expected to see happen is NOT what happened,” he said. “While we thought the core material would snap into two large pieces, instead it broke into many equal-sized pieces.”

He referred to the technique in the Nature article title as “Breaking Me Softly.”

A June 6, 2016 University of Central Florida (UCF) news release (also on EurekAlert) by Barbara Abney, which originated the news item, expands on the theme,

The process of pulling fibers to force the realignment of the molecules that hold them together, known as cold drawing, has been the standard for mass production of flexible fibers like plastic and nylon for most of the last century.

Abouraddy and his team have shown that the process may also be applicable to multi-layered materials, a finding that could lead to the manufacturing of a new generation of materials with futuristic attributes.

“Advanced fibers are going to be pursuing the limits of anything a single material can endure today,” Abouraddy said.

For example, packaging together materials with optical and mechanical properties along with sensors that could monitor such vital sign as blood pressure and heart rate would make it possible to make clothing capable of transmitting vital data to a doctor’s office via the Internet.

The ability to control breakage in a material is critical to developing computerized processes for potential manufacturing, said Yuanli Bai, a fracture mechanics specialist in UCF’s College of Engineering and Computer Science.

Abouraddy contacted Bai, who is a co-author on the paper, about three years ago and asked him to analyze the test results on a wide variety of materials, including silicon, silk, gold and even ice.

He also contacted Robert S. Hoy, a University of South Florida physicist who specializes in the properties of materials like glass and plastic, for a better understanding of what he found.

Hoy said he had never seen the phenomena Abouraddy was describing, but that it made great sense in retrospect.

The research takes what has traditionally been a problem in materials manufacturing and turned it into an asset, Hoy said.

“Dr. Abouraddy has found a new application of necking” –  a process that occurs when cold drawing causes non-uniform strain in a material, Hoy said.  “Usually you try to prevent necking, but he exploited it to do something potentially groundbreaking.”

The necking phenomenon was discovered decades ago at DuPont and ushered in the age of textiles and garments made of synthetic fibers.

Abouraddy said that cold-drawing is what makes synthetic fibers like nylon and polyester useful. While those fibers are initially brittle, once cold-drawn, the fibers toughen up and become useful in everyday commodities. This discovery at DuPont at the end of the 1920s ushered in the age of textiles and garments made of synthetic fibers.

Only recently have fibers made of multiple materials become possible, he said.  That research will be the centerpiece of a $317 Million U.S. Department of Defense program focused on smart fibers that Abouraddy and UCF will assist with.   The Revolutionary Fibers and Textiles Manufacturing Innovation Institute (RFT-MII), led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will incorporate research findings published in the Nature paper, Abouraddy said.

The implications for manufacturing of the smart materials of the future are vast.

By controlling the mechanical force used to pull the fiber and therefore controlling the breakage patterns, materials can be developed with customized properties allowing them to interact with each other and eternal forces such as the sun (for harvesting energy) and the internet in customizable ways.

A co-author on the paper, Ali P. Gordon, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering and director of UCF’s Mechanics of Materials Research Group said that the finding is significant because it shows that by carefully controlling the loading condition imparted to the fiber, materials can be developed with tailored performance attributes.

“Processing-structure-property relationships need to be strategically characterized for complex material systems. By combining experiments, microscopy, and computational mechanics, the physical mechanisms of the fragmentation process were more deeply understood,” Gordon said.

Abouraddy teamed up with seven UCF scientists from the College of Optics & Photonics and the College of Engineering & Computer Science (CECS) to write the paper.   Additional authors include one researcher each from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and the University of South Florida.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Controlled fragmentation of multimaterial fibres and films via polymer cold-drawing by Soroush Shabahang, Guangming Tao, Joshua J. Kaufman, Yangyang Qiao, Lei Wei, Thomas Bouchenot, Ali P. Gordon, Yoel Fink, Yuanli Bai, Robert S. Hoy & Ayman F. Abouraddy. Nature (2016) doi:10.1038/nature17980 Published online  06 June 2016

This paper is behind a paywall.

Northwestern University’s (US) International Institute for Nanotechnology (IIN) rakes in some cash

Within less than a month Northwestern University’s International Institute for Nanotechnology (IIN) has been granted awarded two grants by the US Department of Defense.

4D printing

The first grant, for 4D printing, was announced in a June 11, 2015 Northwestern news release by Megan Fellman (Note: A link has been removed),

Northwestern University’s International Institute for Nanotechnology (IIN) has received a five-year, $8.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense’s competitive Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) program to develop a “4-dimensional printer” — the next generation of printing technology for the scientific world.

Once developed, the 4-D printer, operating on the nanoscale, will be used to construct new devices for research in chemistry, materials sciences and U.S. defense-related areas that could lead to new chemical and biological sensors, catalysts, microchip designs and materials designed to respond to specific materials or signals.

“This research promises to bring transformative advancement to the development of biosensors, adaptive optics, artificially engineered tissues and more by utilizing nanotechnology,” said IIN director and chemist Chad A. Mirkin, who is leading the multi-institution project. Mirkin is the George B. Rathmann Professor of Chemistry in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.

The award, issued by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, supports a team of experts from Northwestern, the University of Miami, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Maryland.

In science, “printing” encodes information at specific locations on a material’s surface, similar to how we print words on paper with ink. The 4-dimensional printer will consist of millions of tiny elastomeric “pens” that can be used individually and independently to create nanometer-size features composed of hard or soft materials.

The information encoded can be in the form of materials with a defined set of chemical and physical properties. The printing speed and resolution determine the amount and complexity of the information that can be encoded.

Progress in fields ranging from biology to chemical sensing to computing currently are limited by the lack of low-cost equipment that can perform high-resolution printing and 3-dimensional patterning on hard materials (e.g., metals and semiconductors) and soft materials (e.g., organic and biological materials) at nanometer resolution (approximately 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair).

“Ultimately, the 4-D printer will provide a foundation for a new generation of tools to develop novel architectures, wherein the hard materials that form the functional components of electronics can be merged with biological or soft materials,” said Milan Mrksich, a co-principal investigator on the grant.

Mrksich is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Chemistry and Cell and Molecular Biology, with appointments in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, Weinberg and Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

A July 10, 2015 article about the ‘4D printer’ grant  by Madeline Fox for the Daily Northwestern features a description of 4D printing from Milan Mrksich, a co-principal investigator on the grant,

Milan Mrksich, one of the project’s five senior participants, said that while most people are familiar with the three dimensions of length, width and depth, there are often misconceptions about the fourth property of a four-dimensional object. Mrksich used Legos as an analogy to describe 4D printing technology.

“If you take Lego blocks, you can basically build any structure you want by controlling which Lego is connected to which Lego and controlling all their dimensions in space,” Mrksich said. “Within an object made up of nanoparticles, we’re controlling the placement — as we use a printer to control the placement of every particle, our fourth dimension lets us choose which nanoparticle with which property would be at each position.”

Thank you Dr. Mrksich and Ms. Fox for that helpful analogy.

Designing advanced bioprogrammable nanomaterials

The second grant, announced in a July 6, 2015 Northwestern news release by Megan Fellman, is apparently the only one of its kind in the US (Note: A link has been removed),

Northwestern University’s International Institute for Nanotechnology (IIN) has been awarded a U.S. Air Force Center of Excellence grant to design advanced bioprogrammable nanomaterials for solutions to challenging problems in the areas of energy, the environment, security and defense, as well as for developing ways to monitor and mitigate human stress.

The five-year, $9.8 million grant establishes the Center of Excellence for Advanced Bioprogrammable Nanomaterials (C-ABN), the only one of its kind in the country. After the initial five years, the grant potentially could be renewed for an additional five years.

“Northwestern University was chosen to lead this Center of Excellence because of its investment in infrastructure development, including new facilities and instrumentation; its recruitment of high-caliber faculty members and students; and its track record in bio-nanotechnology and cognitive sciences,” said Timothy Bunning, chief scientist at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Materials and Manufacturing Directorate.

Led by IIN director Chad A. Mirkin, C-ABN will support collaborative, discovery-based research projects aimed at developing bioprogrammable nanomaterials that will meet both military and civilian needs and facilitate the efficient transition of these new technologies from the laboratory to marketplace.

Bioprogrammable nanomaterials are structures that typically contain a biomolecular component, such as nucleic acids or proteins, which give the materials a variety of novel capabilities. [emphasis mine] Nanomaterials can be designed to assemble into large 3-D structures, to interface with biological structures inside cells or tissues, or to interface with existing macroscale devices, for example. These new bioprogrammable nanomaterials and the fundamental knowledge gained through their development will ultimately lead to the creation of wearable, portable and/or human-interactive devices with extraordinary capabilities that will significantly impact both civilian and Air Force needs.

In one research area, scientists will work to understand the molecular underpinnings of vulnerability and resilience to stress. They will use bioprogrammable nanomaterials to develop ultrasensitive sensors capable of detecting and quantifying biomarkers for human stress in biological fluids (e.g., saliva, perspiration or blood), providing means to easily monitor the soldier during times of extreme stress. Ultimately, these bioprogrammable materials may lead to methods to increase human cellular resilience to the effects of stress and/or to correct genetic mutations that decrease cellular resilience of susceptible individuals.

Other research projects, encompassing a wide variety of nanotechnology-enabled goals, include:

Developing hybrid wearable energy-storage devices;
Developing devices to identify chemical and biological targets in a field environment;
Developing flexible bio-electronic circuits;
Designing a new class of flat optics; and
Advancing understanding of design rules between 2-D and 3-D architectures.

The analysis of these nanostructures also will extend fundamental knowledge in the fields of materials science and engineering, human performance, chemistry, biology and physics.

The center will be housed under the IIN, providing researchers with access to IIN’s strong entrepreneurial community and its close ties with Northwestern’s renowned Kellogg School of Management.

This second news release provides an interesting contrast to a recent news release from Sweden’s Karolinska Intitute where the writer was careful to note that the enzymes and organic electronic ion pumps were not living as noted in my June 26, 2015 posting. It seems nucleic acids (as in RNA and DNA) can be mentioned without a proviso in the US. as there seems to be little worry about anti-GMO (genetically modified organisms) and similar backlashes affecting biotechnology research.

Manufacturing innovation in the US and the Institutes for Manufacturing Innovation (IMI)

The announcement from US President Barack Obama about creating a National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI) resulting in 45 Institutes for Manufacturing Innovation (IMI) seems to have been made a while back as one of the technical focus areas mentioned in the current round of RFIs (request for information) has closed. Regardless, here’s more from a Sept. 18, 2014 news item on Azonano,

The President of the United States has launched a major, new initiative focused on strengthening the innovation, performance, competitiveness, and job-creating power of U.S. manufacturing called the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation (NNMI).

The NNMI is comprised of Institutes for Manufacturing Innovation (IMIs) and the President has proposed establishing up to 45 IMIs around the country.

A Sept. ??, 2014 National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) news release, which originated the news item, describes the program and the RFIs in more detail,

The IMIs will be regionally centered public private partnerships enabling the scale-up of advanced manufacturing technologies and processes, with the goal of successful transition of existing science and technology into the marketplace for both defense and commercial applications. The purpose of the RFI is for DOD to consider input from industry and academia as part of an effort to select and scope the technology focus areas for future IMIs. The RFI originally sought information about the following technical focus areas:

  • Flexible Hybrid Electronics
  • Photonics (now closed)
  • Engineered Nanomaterials
  • Fiber and Textiles
  • Electronic Packaging and Reliability
  • Aerospace Composites

Submissions received to date relevant to the Photonics topic have been deemed sufficient and this topic area is now closed; all other areas remain open. The RFI contains detailed descriptions of the focus areas along with potential applications, market opportunities, and discussion of current and future Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs).

The National Nanotechnology Coordination Office encourages interested members of the nanotechnology community to view and respond to the RFI as appropriate. [emphasis mine] The IMI institutes have the potential to provide game-changing resources and foster exciting new partnerships for the nanotechnology community.

The current closing date is 10 October 2014. Additional details can be found in the RFI and its amendments.

(I’m highlighting the nanotechnology connection for discussion later in this posting.)

You can find the official RFI for the Institutes for Manufacturing Innovation here along with this information,

The Department of Defense (DoD) wishes to consider input from Industry and Academia as part of an effort to select and scope the technology focus areas for future Institutes for Manufacturing Innovation (IMIs). These IMIs will be regionally centered Public Private Partnerships enabling the scale-up of advanced manufacturing technologies and processes with the goal of successful transition of existing science and technology into the marketplace for both Defense and commercial applications. Each Institute will be led by a not-for-profit organization and focus on one technology area. The Department is requesting responses which will assist in the selection of a technology focus area from those currently under consideration, based upon evidence of national security requirement, economic benefit, technical opportunity, relevance to industry, business case for sustainability, and workforce challenge.

There is also some information about this opportunity on the US government’s Advanced Manufacturing Portal here.

This National Network for Manufacturing Innovation is a particularly interesting development in light of my Feb. 10, 2014 posting about a US Government Accountability Office (GAO) report titled: “Nanomanufacturing: Emergence and Implications for U.S. Competitiveness, the Environment, and Human Health.”

Later in 2014, the NNI budget request was shrunk by $200M (mentioned in my March 31, 2014 posting) and shortly thereafter members of the nanotech community went to Washington as per my May 23, 2014 posting. Prior to hearing testimony, the representatives on the subcommittee hearing testimony were given a a 22 pp. précis (PDF; titled: NANOMANUFACTURING AND U.S. COMPETITIVENESS; Challenges and Opportunities) of the GAO report published in Feb. 2014.

I’ve already highlighted mention of the National Nanotechnology Coordination Office in a news release generated by the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI) which features a plea to the nanotechnology community to respond to the RFIs.

Clearly, the US NNI is responding to the notion that research generated by the NNI needs to be commercialized.

Finally, the involvement of the US Department of Defense can’t be a huge surprise to anyone given that military research has contributed greatly to consumer technology. As well, it seems the Dept. of Defense might wish to further capitalize on its own research efforts.

Harvest water from desert air with carbon nanotube cups (competition for NBD Nano?)

It’s been a while since I’ve seen Pulickel Ajayan’s name in a Rice University (Texas) news release and I wonder if this is the beginning of a series. I’ve noticed that researchers often publish a series of papers within a few months and then become quiet for two or more years as they work in their labs to gather more information.

This time the research from Pulickel’s lab has focused on the use of carbon nanotubes to harvest water from desert air. From a June 12, 2014 news item on Azonano,

If you don’t want to die of thirst in the desert, be like the beetle. Or have a nanotube cup handy.

New research by scientists at Rice University demonstrated that forests of carbon nanotubes can be made to harvest water molecules from arid desert air and store them for future use.

The invention they call a “hygroscopic scaffold” is detailed in a new paper in the American Chemical Society journal Applied Materials and Interfaces.

Researchers in the lab of Rice materials scientist Pulickel Ajayan found a way to mimic the Stenocara beetle, which survives in the desert by stretching its wings to capture and drink water molecules from the early morning fog.

Here’s more about the research from a June 11, 2014 Rice University news release (by Mike Williams?), which originated the news item,

They modified carbon nanotube forests grown through a process created at Rice, giving the nanotubes a superhydrophobic (water-repelling) bottom and a hydrophilic (water loving) top. The forest attracts water molecules from the air and, because the sides are naturally hydrophobic, traps them inside.

“It doesn’t require any external energy, and it keeps water inside the forest,” said graduate student and first author Sehmus Ozden. “You can squeeze the forest to take the water out and use the material again.”

The forests grown via water-assisted chemical vapor deposition consist of nanotubes that measure only a few nanometers (billionths of a meter) across and about a centimeter long.

The Rice team led by Ozden deposited a superhydrophobic layer to the top of the forest and then removed the forest from its silicon base, flipped it and added a layer of hydrophilic polymer to the other side.

In tests, water molecules bonded to the hydrophilic top and penetrated the forest through capillary action and gravity. (Air inside the forest is compressed rather then expelled, the researchers assumed.) Once a little water bonds to the forest canopy, the effect multiplies as the molecules are drawn inside, spreading out over the nanotubes through van der Waals forces, hydrogen bonding and dipole interactions. The molecules then draw more water in.

The researchers tested several variants of their cup. With only the top hydrophilic layer, the forests fell apart when exposed to humid air because the untreated bottom lacked the polymer links that held the top together. With a hydrophilic top and bottom, the forest held together but water ran right through.

But with a hydrophobic bottom and hydrophilic top, the forest remained intact even after collecting 80 percent of its weight in water.

The amount of water vapor captured depends on the air’s humidity. An 8 milligram sample (with a 0.25-square-centimeter surface) pulled in 27.4 percent of its weight over 11 hours in dry air, and 80 percent over 13 hours in humid air. Further tests showed the forests significantly slowed evaporation of the trapped water.

If it becomes possible to grow nanotube forests on a large scale, the invention could become an efficient, effective water-collection device because it does not require an external energy source, the researchers said.

Ozden said the production of carbon nanotube arrays at a scale necessary to put the invention to practical use remains a bottleneck. “If it becomes possible to make large-scale nanotube forests, it will be a very easy material to make,” he said.

This is not the first time researchers have used the Stenocara beetle (also known as the Namib desert beetle) as inspiration for a water-harvesting material. In a Nov. 26, 2012 posting I traced the inspiration  back to 2001 while featuring the announcement of a new startup company,

… US startup company, NBD Nano, which aims to bring a self-filling water bottle based on Namib desert beetle to market,

NBD Nano, which consists of four recent university graduates and was formed in May [2012], looked at the Namib Desert beetle that lives in a region that gets about half an inch of rainfall per year.

Using a similar approach, the firm wants to cover the surface of a bottle with hydrophilic (water-attracting) and hydrophobic (water-repellent) materials.

The work is still in its early stages, but it is the latest example of researchers looking at nature to find inspiration for sustainable technology.

“It was important to apply [biomimicry] to our design and we have developed a proof of concept and [are] currently creating our first fully-functional prototype,” Miguel Galvez, a co-founder, told the BBC.

“We think our initial prototype will collect anywhere from half a litre of water to three litres per hour, depending on local environments.”

You can find out more about NBD Nano here although they don’t give many details about the material they’ve developed. Given that MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) researchers published a  paper about a polymer-based material laced with silicon nanoparticles inspired by the Namib beetle in 2006 and that NBD Nano is based Massachusetts, I believe NBD Nano is attempting to commercialize the material or some variant developed at MIT.

Getting back to Rice University and carbon nanotubes, this is a different material attempting to achieve the same goal, harvesting water from desert air. Here’s a link to and a citation for the latest paper inspired by the Stenocara beetle (Namib beetle),

Anisotropically Functionalized Carbon Nanotube Array Based Hygroscopic Scaffolds by Sehmus Ozden, Liehui Ge , Tharangattu N. Narayanan , Amelia H. C. Hart , Hyunseung Yang , Srividya Sridhar , Robert Vajtai , and Pulickel M Ajayan. ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces, DOI: 10.1021/am5022717 Publication Date (Web): June 4, 2014

Copyright © 2014 American Chemical Society

This paper is behind a paywall.

One final note, the research at MIT was funded by DARPA (US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). According to the news release the Rice University research held interest for similar agencies,

The U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative supported the research.

US Air Force wants to merge classical and quantum physics

The US Air Force wants to merge classical and quantum physics for practical purposes according to a May 5, 2014 news item on Azonano,

The Air Force Office of Scientific Research has selected the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) to lead a multidisciplinary effort that will merge research in classical and quantum physics and accelerate the development of advanced optical technologies.

Federico Capasso, Robert L. Wallace Professor of Applied Physics and Vinton Hayes Senior Research Fellow in Electrical Engineering, will lead this Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative [MURI] with a world-class team of collaborators from Harvard, Columbia University, Purdue University, Stanford University, the University of Pennsylvania, Lund University, and the University of Southampton.

The grant is expected to advance physics and materials science in directions that could lead to very sophisticated lenses, communication technologies, quantum information devices, and imaging technologies.

“This is one of the world’s strongest possible teams,” said Capasso. “I am proud to lead this group of people, who are internationally renowned experts in their fields, and I believe we can really break new ground.”

A May 1, 2014 Harvard University School of Engineering and Applied Sciences news release, which originated the news item, provides a description of project focus: nanophotonics and metamaterials along with some details of Capasso’s work in these areas (Note: Links have been removed),

The premise of nanophotonics is that light can interact with matter in unusual ways when the material incorporates tiny metallic or dielectric features that are separated by a distance shorter than the wavelength of the light. Metamaterials are engineered materials that exploit these phenomena, producing strange effects, enabling light to bend unnaturally, twist into a vortex, or disappear entirely. Yet the fabrication of thick, or bulk, metamaterials—that manipulate light as it passes through the material—has proven very challenging.

Recent research by Capasso and others in the field has demonstrated that with the right device structure, the critical manipulations can actually be confined to the very surface of the material—what they have dubbed a “metasurface.” These metasurfaces can impart an instantaneous shift in the phase, amplitude, and polarization of light, effectively controlling optical properties on demand. Importantly, they can be created in the lab using fairly common fabrication techniques.

At Harvard, the research has produced devices like an extremely thin, flat lens, and a material that absorbs 99.75% of infrared light. But, so far, such devices have been built to order—brilliantly suited to a single task, but not tunable.

This project, however,is focused on the future (Note: Links have been removed),

“Can we make a rapidly configurable metasurface so that we can change it in real time and quickly? That’s really a visionary frontier,” said Capasso. “We want to go all the way from the fundamental physics to the material building blocks and then the actual devices, to arrive at some sort of system demonstration.”

The proposed research also goes further. A key thrust of the project involves combining nanophotonics with research in quantum photonics. By exploiting the quantum effects of luminescent atomic impurities in diamond, for example, physicists and engineers have shown that light can be captured, stored, manipulated, and emitted as a controlled stream of single photons. These types of devices are essential building blocks for the realization of secure quantum communication systems and quantum computers. By coupling these quantum systems with metasurfaces—creating so-called quantum metasurfaces—the team believes it is possible to achieve an unprecedented level of control over the emission of photons.

“Just 20 years ago, the notion that photons could be manipulated at the subwavelength scale was thought to be some exotic thing, far fetched and of very limited use,” said Capasso. “But basic research opens up new avenues. In hindsight we know that new discoveries tend to lead to other technology developments in unexpected ways.”

The research team includes experts in theoretical physics, metamaterials, nanophotonic circuitry, quantum devices, plasmonics, nanofabrication, and computational modeling. Co-principal investigator Marko Lončar is the Tiantsai Lin Professor of Electrical Engineering at Harvard SEAS. Co-PI Nanfang Yu, Ph.D. ’09, developed expertise in metasurfaces as a student in Capasso’s Harvard laboratory; he is now an assistant professor of applied physics at Columbia. Additional co-PIs include Alexandra Boltasseva and Vladimir Shalaev at Purdue, Mark Brongersma at Stanford, and Nader Engheta at the University of Pennsylvania. Lars Samuelson (Lund University) and Nikolay Zheludev (University of Southampton) will also participate.

The bulk of the funding will support talented graduate students at the lead institutions.

The project, titled “Active Metasurfaces for Advanced Wavefront Engineering and Waveguiding,” is among 24 planned MURI awards selected from 361 white papers and 88 detailed proposals evaluated by a panel of experts; each award is subject to successful negotiation. The anticipated amount of the Harvard-led grant is up to $6.5 million for three to five years.

For anyone who’s not familiar (that includes me, anyway) with MURI awards, there’s this from Wikipedia (Note: links have been removed),

Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) is a basic research program sponsored by the US Department of Defense (DoD). Currently each MURI award is about $1.5 million a year for five years.

I gather that in addition to the Air Force, the Army and the Navy also award MURI funds.

Florida and its Advanced Development and Manufacturing (NANO-ADM) Center

A new ‘nano’ manufacturing facility to be located in Florida state is featured in a November 25, 2013 news item on Azonano,

Nanotherapeutics, Inc. announced today that on November 20, 2013, the Company held a Type C meeting with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”), providing an opportunity for the FDA to review and provide feedback on Nanotherapeutics’ plans for its Advanced Development and Manufacturing (NANO-ADM) Center facility to be located in Copeland Park, Alachua, FL.

The review and subsequent discussions with the FDA focused on its cGMP [Current Good Manufacturing Practice] manufacturing space, which will provide Nanotherapeutics with capabilities to develop and produce bulk vaccines and biologics for the Department of Defense (DOD), other government agencies and industry. The Company expressed its appreciation to the FDA for granting the meeting, which represents the achievement of a major milestone in the ongoing design of a successful NANO-ADM Center.

You can find out more about Nanotherapeutics, Inc. here and for anyone curious about cGMPs, there’s this page on the FDA website,

Current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMPs) for human pharmaceuticals affect every American.  Consumers expect that each batch of medicines they take will meet quality standards so that they will be safe and effective.  Most people, however, are not aware of cGMPs, or how FDA assures that drug manufacturing processes meet these basic objectives.  Recently, FDA has announced a number of regulatory actions taken against drug manufacturers based on the lack of cGMPs.  This paper discusses some facts that may be helpful in understanding how cGMPs establish the foundation for drug product quality.

What are cGMPs?

cGMP refers to the Current Good Manufacturing Practice regulations enforced by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  cGMPs provide for systems that assure proper design, monitoring, and control of manufacturing processes and facilities….

Prior to this latest announcement about the NANO-ADM, there was some information offered in the company’s Oct. 23, 2013 news release about the groundbreaking event,

Nanotherapeutics, Inc. today announced that a groundbreaking ceremony for its Advanced Development and Manufacturing Center (NANO-ADM) in Copeland Park, Alachua, FL, will be held this morning [Oct. 23, 2013] at 9:00 am ET. …

The ceremony celebrates the groundbreaking of the 30-acre NANO-ADM center being constructed through privately secured financing to fulfill the contract awarded to Nanotherapeutics by the US Department of Defence (DOD) earlier this year. … The goal of the contract is to enable faster and more effective development of medical countermeasures designed to treat and protect military populations against chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear attacks and outbreaks of naturally occurring, emerging and genetically engineered infectious diseases.

Nanotherapeutics and its network of 16 world-class teaming partners and collaborators for this project are currently able to furnish core services in response to the DOD’s requirements, should the need arise. … single-use equipment of one-of-a-kind, 165,000 square foot facility. The NANO-ADM Center will integrate new biomanufacturing technologies with existing capabilities enabling the development of both small molecule and biologic products. …

The Nov. 21, 2013 news release, which originated the news item on Azonano, provided this additional detail,

Construction of the NANO-ADM Center is scheduled for completion in early 2015, with commissioning, qualification and full occupancy expected by mid-March 2015.

It seems to me that while New York State has garnered a lot of attention for its nanotechnology model, as evidenced by a book on the topic: New York’s Nanotechnology Model: Building the Innovation Economy: Summary of a Symposium (2013), and much more, Florida has been quietly establishing itself as another center for nanotechnology and innovation.