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Potomac – UMBC Collaboration to develop novel manufacturing techniques for microfluidic devices shows early, promising results.
Thermistor heating of the underside of a microfluidic structure (cross-section view). The electrical interconnect layer carries electrical connections to the thermistors and provides optimized thermal insulation from the heat sink.
Microfluidics is the science of designing, manufacturing, and developing devices and processes that deal with extremely small volumes of fluid for many types of applications, including sensing, drug discovery, alternative energy, and point-of-care diagnostics. Testing and analysis processes, that would normally be performed in a lab, have now been miniaturized and can be conducted on a single chip in order to enhance efficiency and mobility, as well as, reducing sample and reagent volumes. Recently, Potomac and its partners at UMBC and Potomac Mesosystems have embarked on several projects to develop novel microfluidic manufacturing technologies.
Surface mount thermistors for heating and sensing
In our first study, we’re investigating the use of submillimeter thermistors as combined heat sources and temperature sensors. We’re using the smallest negative temperature coefficient thermistors with a footprint of 0.3 mm x 0.6 mm (0201 size).
When thermistors are used for temperature sensing, great care is normally taken to avoid self heating of the thermistors by the sensing current. In our case, we’re purposely self-heating the thermistor and monitoring its resistance to infer its temperature. This gives us a tiny heat source with an easily measured temperature that can be placed in close proximity to a microfluidic channel.
3-D temperature distribution model of a thermistor heater embedded in a microfluidic structure heat source with an easily measured temperature that can be placed in close proximity to a microfluidic channel.
Because of the complex heat flow patterns in a typical microfluidic structure, it is very helpful to use a 3D modeling program to estimate temperature distributions, required power input, cooling time constants and other important parameters. The sketches to the left show a cross-section of a simple thermistor heater layout and the results of a Comsol model of the corresponding temperature distribution. We are now constructing and modeling several single-thermistor configurations.
A “hot thermistor” flow sensor for microfluidics
A large variety of microfluidic flow sensors based on micromachined heaters and RTD’s have been reported in the literature. Hot wire flow sensors – the analog of hot wire anemometers — are among the simplest of these, since they can be fabricated with a single heater with a well-defined relationship between resistance and temperature. Implementation requires only a resistive heater fabricated from a very narrow and thin conductor that is placed near a microfluidic flow stream. The heater is positioned near a heated with a drive current, and its temperature isinfluenced by the cooling effect of the nearby fluid flow. Higher flow provides more cooling and lower heater temperatures. Calibration of temperature (i.e. resistance) vs. flow results in a simple flow monitor. Heater dimensions are typically such that fabrication is by photolithographic patterning of a metal film of submicron thickness. For good sensitivity, the heater should have a high thermal coefficient of resistivity.
Hot thermistor flow sensor.
We’ve recently shown that a small, surface-mount NTC thermistor can be substituted for the patterned thin metal film, with significant implications for reduction of process steps and costs associated with fabrication, and increased speed and simplicity of rapid prototyping of integrated flow sensors. The very high temperature coefficient of thermistors provides good flow sensitivity, and use of surface mount electronic assembly techniques simplify fabrication.
In work carried out in the Potomac laboratory, Amir Harandi, a Ph.D. student at UMBC, fabricated a hot thermistor flow sensor like that shown at the right. The microfluidic channel had a cross-section of 300 microns x 600 microns, and a 2Kohm NTC thermistor with a 0201 package size was used in the experiments. Experimental results are summarized below, and demonstrate the relatively large electrical output variation produced by flow rates between 0 and 50 ul/min.
Voltage signal vs.Flow
Comparison of measurement and Comsol modeling results.
Availability of microfabrication tools at Potomac, such as lasers, micromills, plastics bonding, hot embossing, dispensing, and pick-and-place equipment, allows fabrication of of microfluidic prototypes that incorporate electronics in just a few hours.
For over 30 years, Potomac Photonics has been a leader in microfabrication and small hole drilling. Potomac’s contract services span prototyping to production, helping clients develop miniature products and bring them to market. Using cutting-edge manufacturing technology, Potomac has been recognized by both commercial and government agencies for innovation in areas such as medical device, electronics, aerospace, and automotive manufacturing. Potomac’s high-tech facility, located at bwtech@UMBC Research and Technology Park , is ISO 9001 and ISO 13485 certified. Visit the website at www.potomac-laser.com
]]>SAN DIEGO, CA (Marketwired - Mar 4, 2014) - DB Networks, an innovator of behavioral analysis in database security, today announced it has partnered with AMP Tech Solutions (AMP Tech), which sells technology solutions to the Federal Government in affiliation with Alvarez & Associates, a Service Disabled Veteran Owned Small Business (SDVO/SB). Through this partnership, DB Networks' IDS-6300 next-generation Core IDS will be offered through the NASA Solutions for Enterprise-Wide Procurement (SEWP) IV contract and is available to all government agencies for effective identification of advanced database attacks.
DB Networks' IDS-6300 Core IDS detects rogue SQL statements and operates passively and transparently as a physical or virtual appliance. It creates a unique model of how an application creates SQL statements to converse with the database and evaluates these statements against the model for proper behavior. Any rogue SQL statement, such as a SQL injection, causes the system to alarm and show an attack in real-time. This behavioral learning and model creation is automated, making it much faster and more accurate than what is currently available through manually generating signatures or the tuning of signatures to suppress false alarms.
AMP Tech is a marketing and sales IT solutions company that solves big technology problems by delivering economical, leading-edge technologies quickly and economically to government agencies.
"Though our partnership with AMP Tech, we can more easily reach government customers and help them with their security and compliance requirements through continuous core monitoring and behavioral analysis of network activity," said Brett Helm, CEO of DB Networks. "Our technology and products along with their systems integration expertise provide the opportunity to address advanced database security threats at the government agencies, where cyber security and compliance is of critical importance."
"DB Networks behavioral analysis technology has been field proven as a highly effective approach for database security and is truly unique in the industry," said Kirk Hanson, President of AMP Tech Solutions. "We're excited to offer DB Networks' Core IDS to our government customers, so they can mitigate risk and finally identify advanced database attacks in real-time."
PALO ALTO, CA (Marketwired - Mar 4, 2014) - Ayasdi (www.ayasdi.com) today announced that it continues to strengthen its executive bench, adding industry leaders Harnish Kanani, as Vice President of Customer Success, and Thomas Schaeffer, as Vice President of Human Resources, to its leadership team. Ayasdi enables organizations to automatically find insights in complex data and to discover answers to questions they did not know to ask. By eliminating the need to formulate initial hypothesis and write queries, Ayasdi's approach allows data scientists and domain experts to reveal breakthroughs in minutes. Kanani will report to Dr. Pek Lum, Chief Data Scientist and VP of Solutions and Schaeffer will report to Gurjeet Singh, Co-Founder and CEO of Ayasdi.
Kanani will help build and lead Ayasdi's Customer Success group. He is an entrepreneurial leader with 20-plus years of experience selling and delivering enterprise software products and services globally. Most recently, Kanani was the VP and GM within Oracle's Cloud Applications Consulting team. He has also previously overseen global customer success programs and services operations at Taleo (now part of Oracle), Cognizant Technology Solutions, SumTotal Systems, Emagia, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, and TATA. He holds a B.E. in Electronics and Electrical Engineering from India's Birla Institute of Technology and Science.
"It is a rare gift to work at a company where you can really make a difference in the world and Ayasdi is doing just that," said Harnish Kanani, Vice President of Customer Success, Ayasdi. "With Ayasdi's award-winning technology widely recognized as one of the most innovative platforms in Big Data and a team passionate about helping companies find breakthrough insights, we are going to build a world-class customer success team that will help solve our clients' most complex problems."
As Vice President of Human Resources, Schaeffer will manage the human resources function and continue to grow Ayasdi's team. Schaeffer has been a human resources executive in the high tech industry for more than 25 years. He has been a participant and strategist in five successful technology initial public offerings (IPOs), including YuMe, Juniper Networks, Megatest, Synopsys, and Daisy Systems. Schaeffer is also an expert in the human resource elements of corporate acquisition strategies, working on Cisco's acquisition of StrataCom, one of the largest technology acquisitions to date. Schaeffer holds a B.A. in Business Administration from the University of San Francisco and an M.A. in Organizational Development from Chapman University.
Big Data Expo Early Bird Savings here!
In his session at 5th Big Data Expo, Anthony Bak, Senior Data Scientist and Mathematician at Ayasdi, will discuss how Ayasdi uses Topological Data Analysis to solve complex problems for companies, foundations and academics. He will start with an overview of the core algorithm used in TDA and describe how it forms a unifying framework for many machine learning and data analysis tasks. He will demonstrate how Ayasdi turns this idea into a product with uses cases and a live demonstration of the software.
Explore Big Data Expo Sponsorship & Exhibit Opportunities !
Speaker Bio:
Anthony Bak is a Senior Data Scientist and Mathematician at Ayasdi, a data analytics startup based in Palo Alto, CA. Prior to Ayasdi, Anthony was a post doc at Stanford University where worked with Ayasdi co-founder Gunnar Carlsson on new methods and applications of Topological Data Analysis.
A Rock Star Faculty, Top Keynotes, Sessions, and Top Delegates!
Big Data Expo 2014 New York, June 10-12, at the Javits Center in New York City, New York, will feature technical sessions from a rock star conference faculty and the leading Big Data industry players in the world.
The growth and success of Big Data will be on display at the upcoming Big Data Expo conference and exhibition in New York City, New York, June 10-12, 2014.
All main layers of the Big Data ecosystem will be represented at the 5th International Big Data Expo - the infrastructure players, the platform providers, and those offering applications, and they'll all be here to speak, sponsor, exhibit and network.
Sponsorship Opportunities
for Big Data Expo 2014 New York
Big Data Expo 2014 New York "show prospectus" has shipped. Sponsorship, exhibit, and keynote opportunities can be obtained from Carmen Gonzalezby email at events (at) sys-con.com, or by phone 201 802-3021.
Early Bird Registration Options
for Big Data Expo 2014 New York
Big Data Expo delegates can pre-register for Big Data Expo New Yorkwith Early Bird Savings here.
About SYS-CON Media & Events
SYS-CON Media (www.sys-con.com) has since 1994 been connecting technology companies and customers through a comprehensive content stream at www.sys-con.com - featuring over forty focused subject areas, from Cloud Computing to Web Security - interwoven with market-leading full-scale conferences produced by SYS-CON Events. The company's internationally recognized brands include among others Cloud Expo® (www.CloudComputingExpo.com), Big Data Expo (http://BigDataExpo.net), Virtualization Conference & Expo (www.VirtualizationConference.com), DevOps Summit (http://DevOpsSummit.sys-con.com), Internet of @ThingsExpo (http://www.ThingsExpo.com), WebRTC Summit (http://WebRTCSummit.net), Government IT Conference & Expo (www.GovITExpo.com), Cloud Computing Bootcamp (www.CloudComputingBootcamp.com), and UlitzerLive! New Media Conference & Expo (http://events.sys-con.com).
Cloud Expo® is a registered trademark of Cloud Expo, Inc.
- by Elizabeth White
]]>With O'Reilly's Fluent Conference right around the corner, I felt it was a good time to catchup with Peter Cooper who helps chair the event. In case you didn't know, Fluent is one of the premier developer events in the world, bringing together top speakers like Brendan Eich, Paul Irish, Lea Verou, Burke Holland and many others to delve out amazing presentations on modern web development.
Peter himself is a household name built on his contributions in the Rails world and his awesome set of email newsletters (really worth checking out!).
I got an opportunity to ask him a few questions about managing such a huge conference and the state of the Web Platform. Let's check it out.
Let's start off with an intro. Mind telling us a bit about yourself, Peter?
Hi Rey! I'm Peter Cooper, general Internet busy body, Reddit and YouTube addict, and perhaps best known for my work in publishing a variety of newsletters for programmers, like JavaScript Weekly and HTML5 Weekly. I live in the UK but ultimately spend the majority of my time living on the Internet.
One of your big yearly initiatives is helping drive O'Reilly's Fluent Conference. Why is this such an important thing for you and the developer community?
On the surface, I'm an unusual person to chair an event like Fluent. I tend not to go to many conferences as they aren't a natural fit for the hermit-like way I like to learn and network. I'm about as introverted as it gets. When the opportunity came up, however, I simply had to get involved for the learning experience and to help flex my social muscles a bit.
Ultimately I've got to learn a lot about conference organization, what makes attendees tick, and what makes an event work (or not). One thing I've learned is that for most conference attendees, events like Fluent help make the amorphous online “communities” around languages and technologies “real.” People get to meet folks they admire, whose Twitter accounts they follow, and whose tools and code they use. Most attendees also devote themselves to getting involved with on-site events, interacting with speakers, and learning in a way that so few people can do purely with blog posts or online video.
Real life events only seem to be becoming more popular in the developer community, and in an increasing number of forms, both formal and informal. Anyone who can provide the right people, the right venues, and the right activities to the right attendee base is going to be successful.
Conferences are always positioned as an opportunity to learn something new. From an educational standpoint, what are the challenges you face with a conference of this size for ensuring you're getting relevant and up-to-date presentations in place?
Our biggest challenge is timing. Being a company of a certain size, O'Reilly has a variety of processes in place to make sure that the organization of their conferences runs smoothly. Part of this means we have to run our CFP (Call For Speakers) several months in advance and this can be problematic in a fast moving area like Web development as some speakers aren't allowed to disclose things they're working on yet or they might not know when certain features will be publicly usable or not (Web Components and Polymer are key examples this year).
Big conferences can be overwhelming to attendees. What have you found to be the best way for someone to learn something new while they're at an event?
It's hard to say, as people seem to learn in such different ways. To a certain extent, I think attendees self select themselves to the variety of ways we offer up content. Rather than offer fixed, three hour workshops and 50 minute talks this year, we've opened up the format a bit with a variety of shorter and longer workshops, shorter talks, and various on-site events and meet-ups, giving people a better chance of finding the approaches that work for them.
Ultimately, though, I don't think the key point of conferences is to formally learn things, although that's a good point to lean on, particularly when convincing bosses to let you attend! Being inspired, getting a feel for what's going on in the field, and networking are all more important and likely to have a bigger effect on attendees' careers, and we aim to provide all three.
Along the lines of education, developer tooling and workflow has evolved quite a bit and continues to change frequently with new tools sprouting up daily. What can developers do to stay on top of this evolution and not get left behind?
As someone who publishes a variety of developer newsletters, I should be quick to recommend weekly newsletters as a great way to stay up to date, but really there are a ton of ways from following interesting people on Twitter and subscribing to interesting publications (like yours!) through to podcasts and YouTube channels.
Perhaps the best mechanism for keeping up to date in a broad sense nowadays is Twitter. Whereas publications and newsletters might have their own agendas or biases, following a wide variety of people in your industry on Twitter is a guaranteed way to get a feel for what public opinion is, what tools people are using, and what's going on. It takes time and a lot of patience to use Twitter properly, but it can be very rewarding, especially when you participate yourself.
With modern browsers becoming more powerful, what are the new technologies you see that will have a dramatic impact on how we build web applications in the future (for example, Polymer, Web RTC)?
The technologies behind Web Components are looking very promising as a way to give developers more direct power over what their pages do without resorting to extraneous JavaScript and cruft, but it's all still a good way away from being broadly useful without using polyfills or frameworks like Polymer.
A variety of multimedia and graphical APIs seem to be having a bigger impact in the mid-term, including WebGL (now finally supported by all major desktop browsers except Safari), HTML5 Canvas, the video and audio tags, and WebRTC's getUserMedia. These are having a huge impact in terms of taking over in a variety of popular areas that Flash has been the dominant technology, for the past decade.
What remains to be seen (and enjoyed!) is how developers will tie all of these technologies together because in terms of commercial examples, we've mostly been seeing reproductions of Flash-level approaches so far, but the widespread proliferation and availability of all of the exciting Web Platform APIs under development is going to open up a wide variety of new opportunities.
Both of the frameworks I've mentioned above have opinionated workflows. Shouldn't some of their patterns and components just be a part of the Web Platform itself so we can have some level of standardization?
You could argue that many libraries and frameworks are essentially large-scale ‘polyfills' for gaps in the Web Platform, but I personally believe it's necessary for them to fight for survival and thrive as external, third party systems because that's the only way good ideas get proven and bad ideas die. I certainly don't think bodies like the W3C and WHATWG should be the principal drivers of innovation on the Web, instead of responding to and augmenting the innovation already taking place.
There's been a lot of debate about whether we need JavaScript libraries or not. Are we at a point, especially with regards to browsers nuances, where plain old JavaScript can solve everything without the use of libraries?
While it's possible to accomplish many of the basic features jQuery provides by leaning on JavaScript and the increasingly-standardized DOM APIs, jQuery still does a lot to smooth the process of dealing with multiple browsers on multiple platforms. We're certainly not at a stage where it's trivial to have a broad level of support by using entirely standardized, vanilla JavaScript approaches.
In terms of the Web Platform, it seems we can ask a similar question about standards support. We're still being held back in some respects by browser fragmentation, especially in mobile. How long do you see this persisting, requiring continued use of polyfills and shims? Should we just forget about older browsers?
One of the biggest effects on rolling out new technologies has come along with browsers that automatically update, a feature now mainstream in Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. People are stuck on older browsers for a rapidly decreasing amount of time, although there'll still be an un-shiftable percentage of hold-outs, particularly those forced to be on older versions under enterprise policies or due to aging hardware.
Polyfills are a great way around the problems on modern browsers, since even relatively simple things like strong JavaScript support and HTML5 Canvas can be used to patch over the lack of support of other things, but it's ultimately a temporary (and often low performance) fix.
Progressive enhancement has been repeatedly pitched as a partial solution to the problem. If someone's working on an older browser, the features that their browser can support will still be available, for example. In reality, though, progressive enhancement is hard and many developers and companies are finding it easier to draw lines in the sand of what browsers they'll support (like Google's recent announcement that they're dropping support for IE9 in their apps).
Part of this browser fragmentation is driven by the enterprise community's slower update cycles. Being respectful of their needs for stability, how do we help nudge them along so they can not only leverage the new and exciting capabilities of the Web Platform but also not hold back the platform?
Being what they are, enterprises are likely to remain relatively conservative, but auto update features are still making it into companies where strict adherence to versioning policies isn't mandated. A big lever, is that enterprises are now more likely to rely on third party apps like Google Apps or 37signals' Basecamp rather than internal intranets, so the control over which browsers get used increasingly comes down to a tug-of-war negotiation between SaaS providers and their customers, rather than solely down to the customers.
I honestly don't know how he does it. Between running a monster event, managing an incredibly popular weekly set of mailing lists (they need to be curated) and of course, actually doing work, it's incredible how he has time to even have a meal. So Peter, I'm grateful for you spending some time answering our questions, especially with Fluent approaching quickly.
I'll be at the conference myself and hopefully you can join Tuts+ at Fluent 2014. Save 20% by registering here with code TUTS+20. See you there!
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The Treehouse Show is back for another week! In episode 80 of The Treehouse Show, Nick and Jason (@jseifer) talk about iFrame sandboxing, translation in angular js, progress bars, screenshots, and much more. There’s also the usual round up of bad jokes from Jason with Nick doing his best to ignore them.
The post Sandboxed iFrames, Progress Element, Responsive Screenshots | The Treehouse Show Episode 80 appeared first on Treehouse Blog.
]]>A West Coast software company is expanding to Baltimore to tap into the area’s growing cyber security industry.
ParaTools, based in Eugene, Ore., has opened a Baltimore office at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s bwtech@UMBC research and technology park. The company’s software was designed to make complex supercomputers run more efficiently. Now, ParaTools wants to use the same efficiency software to improve cyber operations.
“With our skills in optimizing software and computer performance we think there’s a lot of opportunity in the cyber,” said John Linford, who is heading up the company’s Baltimore office.
ParaTools’ software attaches itself to a system and creates a profile that shows how and where time is being spent. The information can be used to rewrite code in trouble spot and make the system run more smoothly.
The company’s first cyber contract will focus on improving efficiency of drone aircraft that scans for suspicious vehicles. Previously, the drones collected data and brought it home to be analyzed. With ParaTools’ technology, the drones will be able to send data real-time, so they can more quickly address any problems identified.
ParaTools currently has four employees and reported almost a million in profit last year. The company’s two founders, professors at the University of Oregon, are based in Eugene. Linford and a UMBC professor work out of Baltimore.
The new industry focus will hopefully mean steady growth for the company over the next few years. ParaTools hopes to add five employees in Baltimore and grow revenue over the next several years.
“We’re not looking for huge growth or rapid growth, but we are looking for steady growth,” Linford said.
- Sarah Gantz, Reporter, Baltimore Business Journal
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