Reengineering Engineering
After seven years, Northeastern's Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems has a new name and two new missions -- affirming the D in R&D, and teaching talented engineers to become skilled leaders.

By Karen Feldscher

Since 2000, Northeastern’s Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems (CenSSIS) has been figuring out the best ways to locate all kinds of hard-to-find things: malignant tumors, land mines, roaming schools of fish. To accomplish this high-tech sleuthing, center researchers combine and leverage their expertise in optics, ultrasound, radar, sonar, signal processing, and computational science.

Last year, the work got even more exciting. CenSSIS was awarded a $20 million gift, given by the foundation established by entrepreneur Bernard M. Gordon—who started the technology firms Analogic and NeuroLogica—and his wife, Sophia.

The gift changed the name of the center, which is now the Gordon Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems. And it’s allowing the trailblazing outfit to expand even further into uncharted territory.

Two goals are uppermost. Along with continuing its scientific and technological research, the center is going to develop strong academic-industrial partnerships capable of quickly launching new products and systems into the marketplace.

Perhaps even more exciting, the center will seek to become the nation’s number-one training spot for engineering leaders. “There are not enough engineers who can complete projects on a timely, and economic, and technically successful basis,” says Gordon. “Northeastern officials are committed to changing this.”

The Gordon Center’s new goals, says director Michael Sile­vitch, E’65, ME’66, PHD’71, address a weighty concern: The United States may be close to losing its technological edge in the world.

“We are grappling with a major national problem,” says Silevitch, who started CenSSIS with roughly $16 million, awarded to Northeastern and its partners.

“Our children aren’t being guided into math and science careers,” he says. “They’re being vectored into fields that are purported to be more lucrative, like law and finance. As a result, we’re becoming a country that is not innovating. In forty years, are we going to see the United States take a back seat in terms of technological leadership globally?”

By aiming research more squarely at practical applications, fostering working partnerships with a variety of companies, and producing farsighted engineering leaders, Silevitch believes his center can energize U.S. technological innovation, and not a moment too soon.

The center’s new real-world, leadership-oriented approach is stirring up enthusiasm from observers, Silevitch says.

“We’re getting very strong vibes from both industry and government that this is the thing to do.”

The gathering storm
In October 2005, a National Academies committee on science, engineering, and public policy produced a report titled “Rising above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future,” which examined what needs to happen to keep American science and technology second to none.

Increasingly, the American workforce competes for technological jobs with lower-wage workers around the globe. Likewise, leading-edge scientific and engineering advances are happening all over the world. This strengthening of science and technology output overseas is good for the planet, the report says. But it may not be so good for the United States.

America, the report urges, must act to “preserve its strategic and economic security.” Its authors write, “We fear the abruptness with which a lead in science and technology can be lost and the difficulty of recovering a lead once lost—if indeed it can be regained at all.”

The solution? “The United States must compete by optimizing its knowledge-based resources,” the report says, “particularly in science and technology, and by sustaining the most fertile environment for new and revitalized industries and the well-paying jobs they bring.”

Silevitch and his colleagues and industrial partners are convinced the Gordon Center can be one of these fertile environments.

Partners like Lianne Ing, for instance. Ing is the vice president of business development at Canada’s Bubble Technology Industries, located in Chalk River, Ontario. Bubble worked with Northeastern researchers to develop an “advanced spectro­scopic portal,” or ASP—a tollbooth-like device that can detect radiation at airports, seaports, or border crossings.

Speaking at a CenSSIS conference last fall, Ing explained that present-day technological ventures “really need multipartner teams.” It’s increasingly rare, she said, to have one company “do it all” when it comes to bringing a product to market.

“We think the Gordon program can really make a difference to industry,” she said.

And if new technologies are created by partnerships, the partnerships must be led by hard-driving visionaries.

Lynn Preston, who directs the National Science Foundation’s Engineering Research Center (ERC) program, which provided the initial funding for CenSSIS, says, “The ERC program and CenSSIS are dedicated to developing engineering leaders who understand how to take on high-risk technological opportunities and work with industry to speed their entry into the marketplace.”

Into “the rough and tumble”
In its new incarnation, the Gordon Center will pursue many more high-risk technological opportunities like the ASP project.

Actually, the idea of moving CenSSIS from a “research center” to a “research and development center” was prompted by the successful development of the ASP, which is currently in production at Raytheon under a $28 million contract awarded last July by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

About four years ago, Bubble asked CenSSIS officials if they’d be interested in collaborating on a new system for detecting hidden radioactive materials. The impetus for such a system came directly from Homeland Security, which was looking for a way to prevent the smuggling of dirty-bomb components into the United States. A new kind of radiation detector was needed, one that could, for example, detect radioactive components hidden inside trucks, railcars, or shipping containers (see sidebar, this page).

Though Bubble had the technological know-how to create the ASP, it had no experience working for a U.S. government agency. It wanted CenSSIS to handle program management for the effort. Bubble and CenSSIS bid the proposal together, telling Homeland Security it would take three years to complete.

But Homeland Security liked the idea so much, it requested the work be done in a scant nine months. Thus began CenSSIS’s first foray into what Silevitch calls “the rough and tumble” of the industrial arena.

“The challenge,” says Silevitch, “was to take the project from a fairly leisurely advanced research assessment to an actual product development and delivery over a nine-month period, which was quite a different ballgame.”

With the help of two industry pros hired in 2002 and 2003—Philip Cheney, a four-decade Raytheon veteran who spent eleven years as the company’s vice president of engineering, and John Beaty, who’d worked for a number of Boston-area high-tech companies as a program manager—CenSSIS and Bubble completed the effort on time.

Now the Gordon Center is working on several other projects designed to help America stay safe from terrorist attacks.

For instance, it’s working with companies to develop a suicide-bomber detection system (see sidebar, page 35), as well as an acoustic system that detects dangerous machinery inside buildings.

According to Silevitch, Bernard Gordon took notice of the ASP success. Gordon, Silevitch says, was impressed with “the fact that we in the academic domain could take a project that had high priority, high impact, and very stringent deliverables, and oversee the completion of that project on time, so it could be passed into a production contract worth many times that of the $5 million investment the government made.

“Seeing that we actually did something that any industry would have been proud to have done gave him the confidence that we at least had the right mindset,” says Silevitch. Gordon was impressed enough to give his multimillion-dollar donation to, in part, help CenSSIS become a research and development center. Silevitch calls the Gordon gift “transformational.” President Aoun also lauds the gift, explaining that “turning promising academic research into technologies that address real-world problems is among the foremost responsibilities of a research university.”

Aoun is describing what’s known in scholarly circles as translational research—shaping basic research into practical applications. In other words, making sure the R in “research” is closely linked to the D in “development.”

High-speed leadership education
In addition to creating a premier R&D center, the Gordon gift will build a top-flight training ground for a new generation of engineering leaders.

The graduate-level Gordon Engineering Leadership Pro­gram, culminating in a master’s degree, will begin at North­eastern this fall. Its students, known as Gordon fellows, will face rigorous hurdles, program officials say. For example, each fellow will be required to complete a “challenge project” with clear deliverables.

“The projects will stress the person well beyond their comfort zone,” promises Silevitch. But that’s the whole idea: Students will experience the real-world process of bringing a technological innovation to market in a relatively short period of time.

Each fellow, supported by industrial and academic mentors, will lead a team that conducts a complex engineering project from conception to completion. Projects will stem either from emerging technologies produced by CenSSIS research or from industry-sponsored initiatives. Each project must result in the creation of a viable product for either commercial or government use.

“The challenge project, the most vital portion of the program, will really test the students’ mettle,” says Beaty.

Gordon fellows will be drawn from industry and government agencies, and from undergraduate and graduate engineering programs. They will take two core courses: scientific foundations of engineering, and fundamentals of engineering leadership.

The foundations course is meant to give students a framework with which to develop strategies for assessing product development. “The idea,” says Silevitch, “is that when you’re presented with a new concept and you need to do a rapid assessment, you will be able to make a quick calculation and come up with a judgment as to whether the concept makes sense.”

Officials hope the engineering leadership course will help speed the process of training engineering leaders.

“Usually, finding the next generation of engineering leaders takes a fair amount of time,” says Cheney.

Beaty agrees. “In industry, typically by the third year a person is in a company, you can tell if that person has leadership capability. Then you give those people additional responsibility. All told, the process could take about ten years before people have sufficient experience so that you hand off a project to them. This program is meant to shorten that time frame to about five years.”

While they’re still in school, Gordon fellows will learn the tricks of the engineering-management trade: monitoring the technical progress of a project, overseeing expenses, handling interpersonal issues, and assessing risk.

Gordon Center associate director Carey Rappaport admits that companies and organizations might be skeptical about signing their workers up for an engineering leadership program that could take from one to two years to complete, when those workers could be trained in-house instead.

“By [training them] at a university, though,” Rappaport says, “they will get faculty input and be able to toss over ideas with other students. They’ll get the benefit of working with top researchers who can bring their brain power to help solve tough problems.

“They’ll get the advantage of being in a community of thinkers,” he says.

Changing the culture
Silevitch expects the Gordon Center’s emphasis on engineering leadership will filter throughout the entire College of Engin­eering. “We hope this will create opportunities for those in other engineering disciplines besides just sensing and imaging,” he says.

He also envisions creating leadership pathways not just for graduate students, but for high-school seniors and freshmen.

In fact, he is creating an engineering-leadership feeder program that will offer awards to thirty freshmen next year. They will take specialized courses in leadership their freshman year and, in subsequent years, learn about leading both from Gordon Center mentors and from co-op jobs that hone their leadership abilities.

If all goes according to plan, each of these students will have earned a patent by the end of their undergraduate years. “If they can do this,” says Silevitch, “they would be almost a slam-dunk into the Gordon Leadership Program.”

Though the Gordon Center’s new focus on academic-industrial partnerships working toward specific products is a clear departure from the center’s genesis as a research center, officials believe the change will benefit companies, government agencies, and, of course, Northeastern.

“The basis of engineering is to make things,” says Rappaport. “On the other hand, not everybody can reduce ideas to practice and make money out of it.”

None of the center’s officials dismisses the importance of so-called pure research. “Doctoral research to create new concepts is really tougher than developing a product for the marketplace,” Rappaport says. “Still, I think the two kinds of education—academic and practical—are not mutually exclusive.

“This new program institutes a graduate-level practical research piece, in addition to pure research,” he says. “Ideally, a university should do both.”

Silevitch agrees. “Our goal is to change the culture, change the mentality. We don’t want to short-shrift the basic research. But we have to restrike the balance between basic research and research that applies to the real world.”

Karen Feldscher is a senior writer.

The Couple Behind The Gift

A 1986 National Medal of Tech­­nology recipient, Bernard M. Gordon has led an accomplished technical career, culminating with his roles as founder and chairman of Analogic, and cofounder and executive chairman of NeuroLogica. He and his teams have been responsible for dozens of engineering milestones, with several hundred patents worldwide.

Through their establishment of the Gordon Foundation, Gordon and his wife, Sophia, have distributed more than $100 million since the early 1990s, much of it to train outstanding engineers and scientists, and to support educational and medical initiatives.

The Truck Stops Here

Detecting deadly radiation is nothing new.

But detecting concealed radioactive materials, which may be hidden inside benign materials that contain small amounts of naturally occurring radiation, is something else entirely.

That’s why the Gordon Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems worked for several years alongside Canada’s Bubble Technology Industries, at the request of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, to develop a system—called an advanced spectroscopic portal, or ASP—that can detect radioactive materials hidden inside trucks, railcars, or shipping containers.

Current radiation detectors can’t tell the difference between troublesome and benign types of radiation, says Lianne Ing, Bubble’s vice president of business development. And that’s a problem, because a host of everyday products contain trace amounts of radiation that can trigger false alarms—products like bananas, ceramic tiles, kitty litter, medical isotopes, and fertilizer.

The ASP, Ing explains, “can detect the difference between bananas and dirty bombs”—not as easy as you might think—or detect a chunk of uranium hidden inside a tub of fertilizer. It does so by measuring energy, which is then converted into electronic signals. By examining the signals, engineers are able to differentiate between the hazardous and the benign radioactive signatures.

This device, said to resemble a tollbooth, is currently in production at Raytheon.

— Karen Feldscher

Did you know?
Interesting facts about the Bernard M. Gordon Center for Subsurface Sensing and Imaging Systems

WHAT IT IS: A multi-university, multi-industry National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center (NSF-ERC), founded in 2000. One of only three NSF-ERCs in New England in 2000; one of forty-three funded nationwide since 1984.

WHAT IT DOES: Develops new technologies to detect hidden objects such as tumors, buried land mines, roaming schools of fish, underground pollution, and concealed radioactive materials.

HOW IT SOLVES PROBLEMS: Using a high-level systems approach that combines expertise in wave physics (photonics, ultrasonics, and electromagnetics), multisensor fusion, image processing, and 3-D CAT scan–like reconstruction and visualization.

HOW IT OPERATES: With the speed and agility more typical of a results-driven private company than of an academic institution, which allows it to meet the needs of its industrial and government partners.

HOW STUDENTS BENEFIT: The center’s K–12, undergraduate, and graduate programs are transforming engineering education and developing the next generation of engineering leaders.

HOW THE UNITED STATES BENEFITS: Effective academic-industrial partnerships are launching new systems and products into the high-tech marketplace.

ACADEMIC PARTNERS: Boston University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez.

CORE STRATEGIC AFFILIATES: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Massachusetts General Hospital, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

STRATEGIC INDUSTRIAL PARTNERS: Raytheon, Textron Defense Systems, Siemens Global Research.

SINCE 2000: Sixteen industrial partners. $30 million in NSF funding. $7 million in corporate funding. $10 million in research contracts. Twenty Northeastern faculty researchers. One hundred Northeastern student researchers.

DIRECTOR: Michael Silevitch, the Robert D. Black Professor of Engineering. He’s a triple Husky: E’65, ME’66, PHD’71.

YEARS PURSUINING INITIAL ERC DESIGNATION: Four.

2006 HIGHLIGHT: The Gordon Foundation’s $20 million gift establishes the Gordon Engineering Leadership Program and will support CenSSIS operations beyond 2010.

ENGINEERING FUNDING: In FY05, Northeastern was awarded more NSF funds for engineering research than any other Massachusetts university.

Bombs? Away.

Suicide bombers kill by stealth and surprise. But what if a suicide bomber could be spotted from a distance of, say, 150 feet?

It could make all the difference.

Michael Silevitch and Carey Rappaport are working on a suicide-bomber detection system they hope will someday save many lives. The Gordon Center’s director and associate director, respectively, are coprincipal investigators for the project, undertaken with colleagues at Rensselaer Polytechnic Insti­tute, American Science and Engineering, Siemens, Raytheon, and Personal Protection Technologies, with funding from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Silevitch says the system could make the danger posed by roadside bombs, bombs left in unattended packages, and suicide bombers “a thing of the past.”

“The idea is to detect something from a safe range,” explains Rappaport. “In a sense, we’re talking about X-ray vision like Superman had, where we can take ghostly images of what lies beneath clothes or a backpack and see it clearly.”

Such a system could be used in trouble spots around the world. U.S. officials might want to use it along parade routes, at stadiums, or at other venues that attract large crowds.

Creating a system that isn’t triggered by false alarms is a challenge, Silevitch and Rappaport say. It must be sensitive enough to detect explosives yet be able to differentiate them from such objects as laptops and cell phones.

How will it work? “There is no one silver bullet,” says Silevitch. “We will be trying to develop multiple sensors to identify potentially threatening signatures. Using different types of sensors provides a double check. And the system will combine computer sensors with a human in a command center who can evaluate all the information.”

— Karen Feldscher

 Illustrations by George Abe