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A new semester means a new opportunity to join Pitts more than 400 student organizations anything from club sports to Knittsburgh, a knitting and crochet group.

With so many clubs on campus, students might find it hard to learn about them all and decide which ones to join. Pitts Student Organization Resource Center facilitates registration, manages business transactions and provides resources such as event planning and training. SORC is also hosting its annual activities fair on Aug. 28 outside the William Pitt Union from 12 p.m. to 2 p.m. and from 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. so students can find clubs that interest them.

For students interested in dancing, the Ballet Club at Pitt performs twice a year and offers a weekly masterclass for different dance styles and levels. Members performing in upcoming shows attend weekly rehearsals with a student choreographer.

Leah Mrozek, a senior marketing and supply chain management major and the clubs artistic vice president, said the club is for dancers, or those interested in dancing, who want to continue performing in college.

To join the club, you must fill out a form at the beginning of the semester to let us know about your dance experience, Mrozek said. The next step is to attend no-cut auditions so we can place each dancer in a piece. Join our email list to get the latest updates from the club!

Mrozek said the club will host a kickoff meeting at the beginning of the semester, along with a technical rehearsal and dress rehearsal later in the semester. An added perk, she said, is that club members can attend shows by the Pittsburgh Ballet Theater for a discounted price.

Pitt also has a variety of clubs for students looking to volunteer. Pitt Best Buddies, a chapter of a global nonprofit organization, pairs students with members of the Pittsburgh community with intellectual and developmental disabilities for one-on-one friendships. They also host events like trips to the Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium and participate in fundraisers like the Best Buddies Friendship Walk.

Its main goal is to be inclusive. Pitt Best Buddies holds meetings at least once a month, and students can get involved by visiting our Instagram and emailing us to be put on the email list, said Maddie Kuzdzal, a junior biology major and vice president of the group.

Camp Kesem helps support Pittsburgh families with cancer patients through fundraising, outreach and volunteering. Pitts chapter also hosts a weeklong free summer camp for children.

Lauren Charlon, a senior neuroscience major and the clubs co-director, said general body members meet every two weeks. She said the coordinator board also is currently accepting applications for various committees.

Therapy Dogs, a new club at Pitt, raises money and resources for the Humane Animal Rescue of Pittsburgh and strives to be a place where all dog lovers can meet and connect. They also advocate for the continuation of Therapy Dog Tuesdays, when therapy dogs from the Western Pennsylvania Humane Society stop by the Cathedral of Learning at 7 p.m. to visit with students.

As a new club, we are testing out the frequency of meetings that work best for us. As of now, we are hoping to meet at least once a month. In these meetings, we plan to discuss our upcoming events that may include anything from service to fundraising opportunities, said Omkar Betsur, a junior biology major and the clubs president.

There are also groups that are more oriented to specific majors, such as the Computer Science club. The computer science club hosts socials and informational events to connect students with each other and industry professionals. They also host workshop events to assist students with assignments, resumes and applications.

Jamir Grier, a junior computer science major and club president, said prospective club members dont have to be a computer science major or pay dues to join. He said meetings are typically held on Wednesdays, while corporate events are held on Mondays. Hackathons are occasionally held on the weekends or over a span of time.

CSC aims to be the largest CS organization on campus and has seized that goal by working hard to guarantee that the merit of our events, programs and avenues of communication (i.e., discord, newsletter) are good enough to drive members to participate when and how they can, he said.

And if students cant find a club that fits their interests, they can form one if they have 10 students willing to join the group and can secure a full-time faculty or staff member as an advisor. The new organization registration period occurs from Oct. 1-15 and Feb. 1-15.

No matter what type of club a student joins, Barbara Kucinski, a lecturer and faculty advisor at Pitts psychology department, said they offer friendship and spaces to figure out your interests with a diverse group of people.

Student organizations are a good place for students to develop and hone communication and listening skills, engage with a diverse group of people and make friends, Kucinski said.

Ive known students who got internships, jobs and volunteer positions by attending group meetings and meeting people, she added. Those that go on to hold leadership positions in a club/organization learn how to work with a team (which employers value) and gain leadership and management skills. Furthermore, it is simply fun.

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Simply fun: Students find interests, friends with Pitts more than 400 clubs - The Pitt News

image:ORNL's Gremlin software, shown above in use by CARLA, an open-source simulator for autonomous driving research, is designed to improve weaknesses in machine learning. view more

Credit: CARLA

Researchers at the Department of Energys Oak Ridge National Laboratory and their technologies have received seven 2022 R&D 100Awards, plus special recognition for a battery-related green technology product.

R&D Worldmagazine has announced the winners from theirselection of finalistswho will be recognized at the organizations 60thawards ceremony on Nov. 17 in Coronado, California.

Established in 1963, the R&D 100 Awards, dubbed the Oscars of Innovation, annually recognize 100 accomplishments in research leading to new commercial products, technologies and materials from around the world notable for their technological significance. This years wins bring ORNLs total R&D 100 Awards to 239 since the awards inception.

"Each day, ORNL strives to deliver scientific breakthroughs for the benefit of society," ORNL Director Thomas Zacharia said. "The R&D 100 Awards are a tremendous recognition of the hard work and dedication required by our researchers to develop these impactful technologies."

Among nine ORNL finalists, the winning ORNL researchers and technologies include:

DuAlumin-3D: An Additively Manufactured Dual-Strengthened Aluminum Alloy Designed for Extreme Creep and Fatigue Resistance,developed by ORNL, General Motors and Beehive3D.

In response to a need for more resilient, lightweight aluminum alloys,ORNL researchers designed DuAlumin-3D, an aluminum alloy with a combination of tensile, creep, fatigue and corrosion properties superior to all known cast, wrought and printable aluminum alloys.

DuAlumin-3D is designed to take advantage of the unique thermal conditions that occur during the laser additive manufacturing process. The alloy takes its name from dual strengthening mechanisms: a nanoscale microstructure that forms during printing and precipitates that form upon heat treatment. Because of these microstructural features, the alloy retains more than half its strength at high temperatures of 300 to 315 degrees and is stable up to 400 degrees C.

Funding for this project was provided by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energys Vehicle Technologies Office and Advanced Manufacturing Office.

Principal investigators for this research include ORNLs Alex Plotkowski, GMs Qigui Wang and Beehive3Ds Jonaaron Jones; GMs Andy Wang, Devin Hess, Dan Wilson and Dale Gerard; Beehive3Ds Devon Burkle, Rachel Jones and Charles Stansberry;andORNLs Amit Shyam, Ryan Dehoff, Allen Haynes, Richard Michi, Sumit Bahl, Ying Yang, Larry Allard, Jon Poplawsky, Bill Peter, Derek Splitter and Jiheon Jun.The University of Tennessee's Kevin Sisco also contributed to the development.

Gremlin: Adversarial Discovery of Weaknesses in Machine Learners,developed by ORNL.

Weaknesses in machine learning technology can have serious consequences, such as improperly trained facial recognition artificial intelligence yielding inaccurate identification.To improve machine learning, ORNL researchers developed Gremlin, a learning system designed to identify and address the worst-performingneural network feature sets.

Gremlin identifies problems within a machine learning system, often through inverting a models training metrics. For example, a model may be trained to drive a virtual autonomous car, so a simple training metric for that model might be maximizing the length of time before crashing; Gremlin would invert that metric to discover scenarios where the model crashes the soonest.

The system can then be used to update the model training data with more examples of those poor performing scenarios, and the model is retrained using that updated data.

Gremlin decreases time needed to address machine learning model weaknesses and can be scaled for application from laptop computers to machines like ORNLs Summit supercomputer.

A flexible framework improving upon comparable systems, the technology can be used on machine learning models designed for most any application.

Funding for this project was provided by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energys Vehicle Technologies Office and the DOE Office of Sciences Advanced Scientific Computing Research.

ORNLs Mark Coletti led the development. ORNLs Robert Patton and Quentin Haas also contributed to the development.

RapidCure: High-Speed Electron Beam Processing of Battery Electrodes,developed by ORNL. This technology also received the Silver Award in the Special Recognition: Green Tech category.

In typical lithium-ion battery electrode production, materials are mixed in N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone, an organic solvent, to form a slurry during manufacturing. There are several drawbacks to this method: the solvent is toxic and explosive, the process requires long-drying ovens and solvents must be recovered after manufacturing.

To address the disadvantages of this production process, ORNL researchers developed a cleaner and more efficient method to manufacture electrodes. A high-speed electron beam essentially replaces the long-drying ovens to evaporate the solvent, serving as the energy source to chemically polymerize and crosslink small molecules into high molecular weight polymers.

Additionally, this technology produces electrodes faster seconds to minutes compared with the solvent method and reduces the energy and equipment necessary for manufacturing. When the process is complete, no recycling unit is required, unlike the mandatory recovery when using the solvent.

Funding for this project was provided by DOEs Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

ORNLs Zhijia Du led the development. ORNLs Chris Janke, David Wood and Jianlin Li and Carrier Global's Claus Daniel also contributed.

SolidPAC: A Comprehensive Solid-State Battery Design Tool, developed by ORNL.

Solid-state batteries, or SSBs, are composed of solid electrolytes, as opposed to the liquid electrolytes in lithium-ion batteries. With high energy and power density levels, SSBs have the potential to be an effective way to electrify the transportation sector.

However, the lack of an existing framework for constructing SSBs poses a barrier to their economic feasibility.

To overcome this problem, ORNL researchers developed SolidPAC, a traditional spreadsheet and graphical user interface-based tool for examining and developing SSB properties. The open source toolkit includes general design guidelines to predict cell-, module- and pack-level energy densities based on user-defined parameters for the battery system.

SolidPAC offers specific design rationales for building highly energy-dense SSBs and will help determine battery metrics needed for SSBs to become comparable to lithium-ion batteries.

Funding for this project was provided by DOEs Laboratory Directed Research and Development program.

ORNLs Ilias Belharouak led the development. ORNLs Marm Dixit, Nitin Muralidharan, Ruhul Amin, Rachid Essehli and Mahalingam Balasubramanian also contributed to SolidPAC.

Ultraclean Condensing Gas Furnace,developed by ORNL.

Commercial and residential condensing natural gas furnaces contribute to climate change by releasing acidic water and harmful gas emissions, all capable of causing long-term harm to soil, water and air.

To mitigate damage from these pollutants, ORNL researchers developed the Ultraclean Condensing Gas Furnace, which utilizes monolithic acidic gas reduction, or AGR, as the catalyst to remove more than 99.9% of acidic gases and other emissions, such as carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and methane, from furnaces.

This leads to not only neutral condensate that is highly environmentally friendly, but also ultraclean flue gas that meets future emissions regulations. Neutral condensate enables a simpler and less expensive furnace design, which yields a higher efficiency ultrahigh furnace and a reduction in installation costs.

AGR functions like a catalytic converter in a car, passing the exhaust over metals to reduceacidic gasesand pollutantemissions that contribute to global climate change.

Ultraclean can be integrated into current furnace designs without altering manufacturing processes and applied to other gas-driven devices like gas boilers, commercial natural gas equipment, industrial furnaces and natural gas water heaters.

Funding for this project was provided by the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energys Building Technologies Office.

ORNLs Zhiming Gao led the development. Research contributors included ORNLs Kyle Gluesenkamp, Kashif Nawaz, Anthony Gehl, Josh Pihl, Dino Sulejmanovic, Tim LaClair, Mingkan Zhang, Lingshi Wang, Van Baxter, Bo Shen, Xiaobing Liu, Jeff Munk and Jim Parks.

Flash-X, a Multiphysics Simulation Software, developed by Argonne National Laboratory, ORNL, Michigan State University, University of Chicago, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and RIKEN Center for Computational Science, Japan.

Flash-X is a highly flexible software instrument that uses a combination of partial and ordinary differential and algebraic equations to simulate different types of physical phenomena, including astrophysics, computational fluid dynamics and cosmology.

The technology is highly accessible; Flash-X has a performance portability layer that is language agnostic, making it compatible with a variety of computer systems. The open-source software features components in an easily customizable plug-and-play mode for most scientific applications. The configuration of specific applications is divided into smaller portions so that each individual configuration tool remains relatively simple. Flash-X also publishes its auditing and quality control processes and features.

A previous version of the software, FLASH, was employed for a variety of scientific discovery purposes over the past decade but is no longer fully compatible with state-of-the-art computing systems and supercomputers, especially hybrid CPU-GPU systems like the Frontier and upcoming Aurora supercomputers at ORNL and ANL, respectively. FLASH was used as a tool to teach astrophysical concepts, and Flash-X could be employed for teaching purposes, as well.

Funding for this project was provided by the DOE Office of Sciences Advanced Scientific Computing Research program as part of the Exascale Computing Project, a joint effort of two DOE organizations, the Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration.

Argonnes Anshu Dubey led the development. Research contributors included ORNLs Bronson Messer, J. Austin Harris, Thomas Papatheodore, Eirik Endeve and William Raphael Hix; Argonnes Klaus Weide, Jared ONeal, Akash Dhruv, Johann Rudi, Tom Klosterman, Rajeev Jain, Paul M. Rich and Katherine M. Riley; Michigan State Universitys Sean M. Couch; RIKEN Center for Computational Sciences Mohammed Wahib; the University of Illinois Paul Ricker; the University of California Santa Cruzs Dongwook Lee; Googles Muralikrishnan Ganapathy; California Institute of Technologys Michael Pajkos; the University of Tennessees Ran Chu; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratorys Christopher Steven Daley and Katie Antypas; Amazons Shravan Kumar Gopal; Nvidias John Bachan; and the University of Alabamas Dean M. Townsley.

GridEye: A Wide-Area Power Grid Real-Time Situational Awareness System, developed by the University of Tennessee and ORNL.

As climate change causes frequent major weather events and power grids rely increasingly on renewable energy sources, the need for greater situational awareness and event monitoring continues to grow.

To quickly detect and provide information about major events across the North American power grid, researchers at UT and ORNL developed a monitoring system, GridEye.

GridEye uses more than 300 frequency disturbance recorders monitors that can be installed anywhere with an 110V outlet, Ethernet and GPS access to collect data on frequency variation across the grid. Sudden changes in frequency indicate an unusual event, such as an electric generator shutdown.

Within seconds, GridEye can detect anomalies within the system to pinpoint their locations and the size of the power loss. The technology then sends out alerts with email event analysis reports featuring incident details and location information to power companies, grid operators and other stakeholders, so affected parties can take the proper actions, such as ramp up additional power generation.

GridEye is the first and only monitoring solution for electric power grids across North America and allows power companies to see outside their own service areas.

Funding for this project was provided by DOE, the National Science Foundation, Dominion Energy, Tennessee Valley Authority, North American Electric Reliability Corporation and Electric Power Research Institute.

UT-ORNL Governor's ChairYilu Liu and UTs He Yin and Wenpeng Yu led the research.Contributors to GridEyes development include ORNLs Thomas J. King Jr. and Lingwei Zhan; UTs Shutang You, Yi Zhao, Jiaojiao Dong, Yuru Wu, Zhihao Jiang, Xinlan Jia, Wei Qiu, Chengwen Zhang, Chang Chen, Chujie Zeng and Hongyu Li; Dominion Energys Matt Gardner; and Electric Power Research Institutes Lin Zhu.

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energys Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visitenergy.gov/science. Alexandra DeMarco

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Seven ORNL technologies win R&D 100 research awards - EurekAlert