2006 News___________________________________________

Kicking off the JRI Newsletter

March 23, 2006

The Jisan Research Institute is proud to announce the publication of the first issue of the JRI Newsletter. Called Adage and Anecdote, the Newsletter is meant to provide news, stories, and information to the entire JRI community about things going on at the Institute and things going on in the lives of members of the JRI community. The hope is that the entire community will benefit from the contents.

All JRI community members are invited to write articles, commentaries, letters to the editors, etc. Please submit your entries in electronic format to the JRI office.

Crescenta Valley Senior Helps Invent New Technology

March 2, 2006

"What are you working on?" is a typical question Debby Chung's friends asked her over the past few months. "I can't really talk about it." was Debby's typical answer. Secretly, however, Debby wished that she could.

What Debby was keeping quiet for the past several months was work that she was doing under the guidance of Dr. Sanza Kazadi at the Jisan Research Institute in Pasadena. The work that she was so tight-lipped about was the development of a new technology which had been designed by Dr. Kazadi and which Debby had been helping to fabricate for the first time.

The work wasn't easy. Debby had to figure out how to fabricate a device that had never been built before, and she didn't even know how to use the machines that she was using to build the device! Inside the JRI robotics laboratory, Debby found a lathe and a vertical mill. These devices became her best friends over the seemingly endless weeks as she struggled to pick up the skills that she needed to do the precision machining work needed to build the new device. After almost four months of trying to get the device built, Debby was able to build a very primitive prototype of the device Dr. Kazadi had envisioned years earlier. The device worked better than Dr. Kazadi had expected, and was patented on March 1^st of this year.

The device Debby had worked on for these months is a rather ingenious magnetic tool. The tool allows one to hold an axle suspended on one end in the air. The axle doesn't touch any support mechanism other than the suspended device, allowing it to literally float in the air. Because it is floating in the air, the axle experiences no friction as it spins, and therefore does not break down over time. While this functionality can be achieved using magnetic bearings, the current device uses permanent magnets. This means that devices using this technology can have this part of the device completely unpowered. Such an improvement will allow those devices using magnetic bearings to be simplified because their bearings can be replaced by unpowered versions, which are simpler and cheaper to buy and to use.

Debby has been doing this work at the Jisan Research Institute, which is a small private research laboratory specializing in swarm engineering and evolutionary computation. It is the only laboratory of its kind, providing long term research opportunities to high school aged students. All students are expected to publish their work in an international scientific journal or international scientific conference before going on to college. The goal of the Institute is to help students find their way to careers in medicine, science, mathematics, and engineering. So far, 86% of JRI's graduates have gone on to Ph.D., MD, or O.D. programs after college. This is the most successful program of its kind anywhere.

While Debby has enjoyed her work on this device and is still working on secondary devices based on this first one, she has been dying to tell her friends about her work. "They always plan days to hang out, but I would never be able to go because of JRI." says Debby. "My friends would always say, 'Why do you work so hard there? What are you working on?' I could never tell them anything, but I would tell them [that] if I succeeded, I would take them all out to an expensive dinner."

When asked what this device might be used for, Dr. Kazadi grins and says, "Almost everything." Because the device makes it possible to remove ball bearings from devices, it simplifies a lot of devices. Moreover, some devices that couldn't possibly be built because of the friction involved in their design can now be built using this device. "The first products using this technology are already under development," Dr. Kazadi says. "Our hope is that they will be in the hands of consumers by the end of the year. We fully expect these devices to continue to be thought up in lots of fields for at least the next ten years."

In addition to her great experience, Debby takes home one other benefit of the research. "We didn't know whether or not this technology would work before the project started. As a result, it's a wonder that Debby participated. Had she not done it, years might have passed before we got to this point. She has earned her right to share in whatever our lab might earn as a result of this development." explains Dr. Kazadi. "If everything goes well, Debby's portion might be more than enough to pay for her entire education."

As for Debby, she is rather nonchalant about the whole thing. "If it works, it works, but if it doesn't, oh well. I'll just have to start over. I didn't want to get too excited about something that might not work." While the current use of the technology allows one side of the axle to be held in the air, Debby and Kazadi believe that it may be possible to completely suspend the axle in the air. "I really want to see the completely frictionless axle. That would be really cool!"

High School Student Research Commences in Fullerton

February 20, 2006

Ask many scientists and you'll receive the same answer. The work that is being done in research labs around the world is very complicated and difficult to explain. There are a lot of unanswered questions, and it takes a very serious effort to answer them. The work can't easily be done by a layman; it must be done by a trained scientist capable of putting together a research program and drawing the correct conclusions.

At the Jisan Research Institute, a research laboratory in Pasadena California, this notion is being overturned every day. At this unique research laboratory, high school students are discovering things every day. From methods of constructing things using swarms of robots to methods of moving water without using moving parts, important questions are being answered by students who don't know how to drive and cannot vote.

The research laboratory which opened in 1995 in Pasadena has expanded to Fullerton, opening a small office in November of 2004. Now, at long last, the Fullerton Branch of the Jisan Research Institute is poised to take its place alongside the Pasadena Branch as a center of research for high school students. Like its sister facility, the Fullerton Branch will begin with purely computational research. This research is to be aimed at understanding the systems that are now beginning to be built in hardware in Pasadena.

Three students at the Fullerton Branch are now commencing their research. These students are Kelsey Lau and Tenny Kim of Diamond Bar High School and John R. Lee of Marina High School. All three students completed their research preparatory work during the past year, completing work on topics in theoretical mathematics and computer programming. Now they are ready to work on real research projects, and this work has already started.

The JRI Fullerton branch was opened on November 17^th 2004. At that time, the branch had three students, and utilized a somewhat makeshift network of laptop computers and a single "base station" computer. Since that time, the branch has completed installation of a small network of computers and the number of students has increased. Now the first students to emerge from the first training cycle are poised to commence their research.

The Pasadena branch of the Jisan Research Institute has centered its research on swarm engineering. This research field examines the use of groups of individual independent agents for particular tasks which might be more efficiently carried out by groups of agents than individual agents. Some of this research will be transplanted to the Fullerton branch of JRI, as students begin to examine how to get swarms to solve three dimensional construction, how to do search similar to biological ants but which do not use pheromones, and how to theoretically design swarms in such a way that the eventual completed swarm has the desired overall behavior.

"This is exciting because this is a research lab in which the main research is carried out almost entirely by students who will be exploring projects of immediate interest to scientists around the world." says Dr. Sanza Kazadi, President of JRI. "This is an opportunity for all students in or around the Fullerton area which doesn't exist anywhere else (outside of our Pasadena branch, of course!). No other program matches our program because of the length and depth of study, and the level of expertise students reach while completing their first research cycle."

While students will be starting research soon (or have already started research), don't expect the results too soon. Normally the results take a year to a year and a half to come. The program requires this time to allow students to think up their research, define their approaches, analyze their data, and write up their results. Students then submit their results to international scientific conferences and to international scientific journals. Students are required to present their conference papers; so far JRI students have presented in four countries around the world.

JRI has been instrumental in helping students determine the direction of their life, and has been extremely important to students in their quest for the perfect college. JRI has graduates at such big name schools as Harvard (three just last year), Caltech, MIT, U. Penn, and Cornell University along with a host of other schools. JRI students have produced or are preparing 32 scientific papers, and have contributed to four new technologies, the first of which was patented on March 1^st, 2006. More impressively, more than 86% of JRI graduates have gone on to medical programs or Ph.D. programs after completing college. This rate is significantly higher than other programs providing similar experiences anywhere in the US.

Students at JRI range in ages from 13 through 22, coming from high schools and community colleges. Enrollment is ongoing, allowing students to join the Institute at virtually any time. "The idea is to allow anyone interested in science, medicine, mathematics, or engineering to participate in a related project before going on. Then, we can guide them into their Ph.D. or MD program." says Kazadi.

Next year, JRI expects to experience another milestone - the completion of research of the first research group from the Fullerton branch. "We're not sure yet what this research will tell us," muses Kazadi, "but we're really excited that we're going to find out."