Exploiting and Exploring Low Earth Orbit: Small Satellites, Hitchhikers, and Smart Links
Breakthroughs the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) made in small satellites and hosted payloads in 2010–2020 are helping to pave the way for the future in ubiquitous sensing from space. Leveraging its extensive knowledge of space engineering, advanced miniaturization techniques, and a proven capability to meet new challenges, APL is making important contributions that enable a future in which our planet can be managed with prognostic sensing and communication at spatial and temporal scales heretofore unheard of. Small satellites will usher in this new era of utilizing space assets for improving life on Earth and extending humanity’s reach into the cosmos, with APL positioning itself to help lead the way with stand-alone, rideshare, and constellation mission concepts.
Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and the Promise of Precision Medicine: A Johns Hopkins Collaboration to Develop the Precision Medicine Analytics Platform
Despite advances in knowledge and technology, approaches to health care discovery and delivery have not broadly kept pace with those advancements. While there have been notable improvements in shaping diagnosis and treatment resulting from knowledge made available through advances in technology, the field generally uses broad population characteristics as the basis for determining the health of, and how to treat, individuals. Today, with the confluence of big data and artificial intelligence (AI), we have an opportunity to tailor diagnoses and treatments precisely as needed for an individual—in other words, to practice precision medicine. The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and Johns Hopkins Medicine (JHM), in partnership with the Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins Information Technology, and others across the institution, are working to usher in this new paradigm. These organizations jointly developed the Precision Medicine Analytics Platform (PMAP). This platform pulls data from many sources, aggregates the data, and then provisions needed data to approved researchers in a secure environment where they can apply advanced techniques and other tools to analyze the data. The guiding vision is to create and sustain the ability to accelerate gaining knowledge and value from data and from closing the loop between discovery and delivery, ultimately reducing health care costs and improving patient outcomes.
Optical Noninvasive Brain–Computer Interface Development: Challenges and Opportunities
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Revolutionizing Prosthetics program demonstrated the potential for neural interface technologies, enabling patients to control and feel a prosthetic arm and hand, and even pilot an aircraft in simulation. These landmark achievements required invasive, chronically implanted penetrating electrode arrays, which are fundamentally incompatible with applications for the able-bodied warfighter or for long-term clinical applications. Noninvasive neural recording approaches have not been as effective, suffering from severe limitations in temporal and spatial resolution, signal-to-noise ratio, depth penetration, portability, and cost. To help close these gaps, researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) are exploring optical techniques that record correlates of neural activity through either hemodynamic signatures or neural tissue motion as represented by the fast optical signal. Although these two signatures differ in terms of spatiotemporal resolution and depth at which the neural activity is recorded, they provide a path to realizing a portable, low-cost, high-performance brain–computer interface. If successful, this work will help usher in a new era of computing at the speed of thought.
Creating Defining Innovations—Great Ideas Overcoming Inertia: Guest Editor’s Introduction
The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) has embarked on a decade-long strategic effort to enhance its level of innovation in an increasingly turbulent world. These initiatives and associated critical contributions reflect a vibrant organization that can look to its future with excitement. Through these pursuits, APL staff members have learned that just having great ideas is not enough. Good ideas are almost never immediately appreciated; persistence is needed to implement those innovative ideas in the face of inertia to maintain the status quo. This article first reviews APL’s efforts to overcome inertia in achieving some of its defining innovations. It recalls the persistence and deep expertise that APL has pursued to establish these inflection points in history. It then introduces the variety of articles in this special issue looking toward APL at its centennial in 2042. The expectation is that the breakthroughs these articles describe represent the Lab’s future defining innovations.
Inside Back Cover
To provide insight into whether the literature (news articles) suggests benefits of XR, Digital Transformation, and Industry 4.0, APL’s Christina K. Pikas (BS, MLS, PhD, Librarian and Service Manager) did some analysis in January 2020 using Quid. Quid reveals “connections, trends, and insights that will help you understand the story behind your customers, competitors, markets . . . and brand[s]” (https://quid.com/). A search on the terms (“Digital Transformation” OR “XR” OR “augmented reality” OR “virtual reality” OR “mixed reality” OR “Model-based design” OR “Model-based engineering” OR “Industry 4.0” ) AND (“success” OR “ROI”) resulted in the two maps above. The lower, more colorful one is a map of the news article network with 4277 stories colored by clusters and sized by degree. The upper map traces sentiments related to those same news articles colored by sentiment and sized by degree. The striking revelation in this analysis is the overwhelming positivity of the discussion around XR.
ESCAPE with PARTNER: Experimental Suite for Cooperatively Achieved Puzzle Exercises with the Platform Assessing Risk and Trust in Nonexclusively Economic Relationships
Trust is a socio-emotional construct used to explain why one is willing to be vulnerable to the variable and unpredicted actions of another independent actor. Virtual reality (VR) provides an excellent test platform for allowing researchers to assess trust, because it provides a safe environment yet participants can be made to feel vulnerable. In the research described in this article, we developed a VR-based game to assess trust between humans and robots in a collaborative task. This article describes the development of and first experiments with this experimental platform developed to explore humans’ trust of bots.
CONVEY: Connecting STEM Outreach Now Using VIE Education for Youth
As part of the CONVEY (Connecting STEM Outreach Now Using VIE Education for Youth) program, a multidisciplinary Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) team designed a mixed reality workshop to provide experiential instruction to children in families with wounded warriors. The goal of the workshop was to improve participants’ understanding of their family members’ conditions; of specific topics in biology, anatomy, and engineering; and of current and future rehabilitative technologies. The hope was that this increased and personalized understanding might motivate them to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This effort, commissioned by the Office of Naval Research, leveraged both traditional learning methods and immersive technologies. Using a modified version of the VIE (which stands for Virtual Integration Environment)—the virtual training platform APL developed to help amputees quickly adapt to operating its revolutionary Modular Prosthetic Limb—the team created a number of scenarios in virtual and mixed reality to enhance the lesson-based activities. This article outlines the approaches for developing these immersive scenarios, documents the technologies and capabilities used, and presents the program’s measures of effectiveness.
Architectural Design in Virtual Reality
B201, one of the most recent construction efforts at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), is a 263,000-square-foot building with a 647-person occupancy. As part of change management efforts, the Research and Exploratory Development Department (REDD) created an application allowing future B201 occupants to lead themselves on a virtual tour through the under-construction building. Beginning in late 2018, the team did a road show of the final product, which offered staff members the option to either point and click through the space on their computers or to take a virtual reality (VR)-based tour of their new accommodations.
ARMOUR X: Augmented Reality Mission Operations UseR eXperience
When developing ARMOUR X (Augmented Reality Mission Operations UseR eXperience), a Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) team set out to explore whether mixed reality technologies can help military space professionals realize a common operating picture. Through an independent research and development (IRAD) grant from APL’s National Security Space Mission Area, the team sought to address the present-day problem of communicating large quantities of data and information with outdated presentation and visualization modalities. Through the use of mixed reality technologies (e.g., augmented reality and virtual reality) to create immersive experiences, the system aims to facilitate effective decision-making in operational environments with narrowing tactical timelines, such as space. During its three consecutive years of funding (FY2017–2019), the ARMOUR X team accomplished most of its engineering objectives, created a portable demonstration system for stakeholder engagement, and acquired stakeholder community feedback to inform system design decisions and future directions.