Office for Research

Four years ago, Rensselaer and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai entered into a relationship to promote personalized medicine and medical care through collaborations in education, research, and development of new diagnostic tools and treatments. Several innovative projects on Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, diabetes, and osteoporosis have already emerged from this partnership.

Amir Hirsa, professor of mechanical, aerospace, and nuclear engineering, and a group of undergraduate and graduate students spent time last fall at Sanford International Airport in Florida— completing an experiment in zero gravity.

A team of researchers from Rensselaer is building a semi-autonomous trash collector for space, which they have fittingly named OSCaR. The acronym stands for “Obsolete Spacecraft Capture and Removal,” and it’s a creative solution to an increasingly dangerous and costly problem that is literally encompassing the globe.

Researchers envision a future in which airplanes in flight share sensor data across an “internet of airplanes” to improve safety and efficiency. But when nodes in the network move at the speed of flight, realizing that vision requires a data sharing framework adapted to the challenges and needs of the environment.

The Artificial Intelligence Research Collaboration (AIRC) is a multiyear, joint effort between Rensselaer and IBM that involves multiple graduate students, postdocs, research scientists, and faculty working closely with IBM researchers to push the frontiers of AI research and apply their results to some of the world’s key global challenges.

A wide-eyed, soft-spoken robot named Pepper motors around the Intelligent Systems Lab at Rensselaer. One of the researchers tests Pepper, making various gestures as the robot accurately describes what he’s doing. When he crosses his arms, the robot identifies from his body language that something is off.

“Hey, be friendly to me,” Pepper says.

On the second floor of the J. Erik Jonsson Engineering Center in the heart of the Rensselaer campus, a room has been created that has the potential to be almost anything. Students who enter could find themselves standing on the wing of an airplane, managing a failing nuclear reactor, or designing the crystalline structure of a molecule.

How do you observe a process that takes more than one trillion times longer than the age of the universe? The XENON Collaboration research team did it with an instrument built to find the most elusive particle in the universe — dark matter. In a paper published in the journal Nature, researchers announced that they have observed the radioactive decay of xenon-124, which has a half-life of 18 sextillion years.