Man on a Mission
Alumnus Aims to Keep Mars Rover Safe
By Matt Windsor
An artist's rendering of NASA's Curiosity rover examining a rock on Mars with its tool-studded arm, which can extend up to seven feet. Curiosity relies on two key instruments on the arm: a drill that collects samples from rocks and a scoop that picks up soil samples. UAB physics alumnus Luther Beegle is part of a team responsible for the safety of both instruments. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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merica’s latest Mars probe is called Curiosity, but as the car-size spaceship hurtled toward the Red Planet on August 5, Luther Beegle’s 10-year-old son, Ryan, was experiencing a different emotion: anxiety.
Beegle, who holds a master’s degree in physics and a doctorate in astrophysics from UAB, was a little antsy himself. A safe touchdown meant he would finally get a shot at a mission after more than a decade as a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). It would also be a neat follow-up to the Mars rover missions undertaken by his UAB mentor, Thomas Wdowiak, Ph.D., in the mid-2000s.
Luther Beegle is a part of NASA's
Mars Science Laboratory team,
which is directing the Curiosity
rover in a search for signs of life
on the Red Planet. Above, Beegle poses with the rover pre-launch in NASA's Mars test bed.The Big Dig
“Five minutes before the rover landed, my son came up to me and said he was really nervous,” Beegle says. “He and my daughter, Abigail, have been to the lab many times and saw the rover being made, but it didn’t become real to them until the landing. I gave him a hug and said it would be OK.”
It was. Curiosity landed safely, drawing cheers from the crowd. In a conversation a month later, Beegle was still elated, even though the pressure has, if anything, intensified.
Beegle’s role on this mission is to be something of an interplanetary safety inspector. “I am one of three surface sampling systems scientists,” he says. “We’re in charge of Curiosity’s drill and scoop”—which are crucial to the mission goal of “finding traces of organics and understanding the habitability potential of Mars,” Beegle says. “It’s our job to let the engineers know if it’s safe to drill into something. If the drill fails, then the two analytical instruments can’t work, so we’re very conservative in what targets we choose.”
For the first 90 days of the Curiosity mission, Beegle and the entire team are working on Mars Time. Since a day (or “sol”) on Mars lasts 24 hours and 39 minutes, that means his shift begins roughly 40 minutes later each day. (Beegle and most other team members track the shifting clock using a NASA smartphone app, which has largely replaced the “Mars watches” used by earlier crews.) After three months, “we go to a more reasonable 8:00-to-6:00, seven-day-a-week schedule,” Beegle says. “It sounds horrible, but it’s really not; I’m doing such interesting work.”
Green Lantern
A Student Voice for Sustainability
By Matt Windsor
Dexter Forbes
President, UAB Green Initiative
Student member, UAB Sustainability
Committee Dexter Forbes came to UAB because of the city scene, but he found his niche as an advocate for the land. As a high school senior in Auburn, Maine, Forbes earned an Alabama G.I. Dependents’ Scholarship. (His parents, both members of the United States Navy, were stationed in Maine; his father was originally from Anniston, Alabama.) He visited several schools in the state, but “I chose UAB because of its urban campus and diverse environment,” he says. “And I really liked the gym.”
Looking for a way to get involved on campus, Forbes discovered the UAB Green Initiative, a student organization “that works toward a more sustainable community,” he says. Forbes, now a junior majoring in African-American studies and English, says he enjoyed the opportunity to learn about local and national environmental issues—and the chance to make a difference in his own backyard. He is now the group's president.
The Green Initiative “started a recycling program at Glen Iris Elementary School”—just off UAB's campus—“where we put bins in the hallways and the teachers’ lounge and transport their paper recycling over to the UAB Recycling Center,” he says. On Mondays, group members volunteer at the recycling center. Regular training sessions and trips to national conventions such as Power Shift give members inspiration and ideas they can bring back to campus, Forbes says.
Crunching Letters
Computer Scientist Uses Language to Fight Crime
By Matt Windsor
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olice detectives track criminals using fingerprints.
UAB computer scientist Thamar Solorio, Ph.D., wants to do the same with words. Her research team is bringing artificial intelligence technology to bear on the field of stylometry, which aims to figure out who wrote a piece of text by analyzing word choice and other idiosyncrasies.
Thamar Solorio is developing software that can identify a writer based on tiny snippets of text from Twitter, Facebook, and chat rooms. Her research could help identify terrorist threats and combat cyberbullying; it also may shed light on the mysteries of language processing.
“Our goal is to see if we can generate a ‘writeprint’ to identify a document with its author,” Solorio says. The UAB group is developing algorithms that can sift through tiny snippets of style from Twitter updates, Facebook posts, and chat transcripts to discover common elements. Several other research teams are working on automated “authorship attribution,” Solorio notes, but her lab is one of the first to tackle social media.
Solorio’s work, funded by the National Science Foundation and the United States Office of Naval Research, among others, could help identify the authors of terrorist plots from conversations in Internet chatrooms. The same algorithms could also be used to combat cyberbullying among schoolkids and provide valuable information in many other applications, Solorio says. She and fellow UAB researcher Ragib Hasan, Ph.D., are now investigating ways to use authorship attribution techniques to combat a major problem facing Wikipedia—namely, the altering, or defacing, of pages on controversial topics by partisans supporting different sides.
The Clue’s in the Comma
Solorio’s research group, the Computational Representation and Analysis of Language (CoRAL) lab, specializes in natural language processing. This branch of artificial intelligence drives everything from Google’s sorting of search queries to the speech-recognition software used by your bank.
Whether you’re aiming to teach a computer to recognize customers’ voices or a cyberbully’s threats, “you’re trying to design a program that can generalize beyond the examples that you give it so that it can make accurate predictions about new data,” Solorio explains.
The trick is to generate useful predictions when you have only a handful of characters to study—such as the dozen or so words in a typical Twitter post. To succeed, “you need to move beyond word choice and frequency,” Solorio says. “You need to look at syntax, what kinds of word classes are being used, and the length of the sentences, for example. On the Web, you can look at emoticon use and capitalization, too.” Punctuation marks can also hold clues, Solorio says—“there are definite patterns in how people use semicolons, for instance.”
