Nuclear power is a vital component of a low-carbon, sustainable energy future. The United States already is the largest supplier of nuclear power, with 99 reactors in 30 states. But our nation has an aging infrastructure, and inspection is crucial to keep current with maintenance, catch issues at the earliest stages, and remediate them for safety and performance.

My Purdue research team is applying deep neural networks to improve inspections.

Traditional inspection is a tedious, time-consuming, subjective — and intermittent — approach that depends on an inspector’s experience and focus on the task. Nuclear reactors are submerged in hot water…

Electric vehicles (EVs) are expected to become dominant in the automobile market in the foreseeable future. This development will require not only a network of charging stations along highways and roads but also faster charge-ups at those stations. In turn, quicker charge-ups will necessitate a significant increase in the electrical current passing through the charging cable — which unfortunately goes hand in hand with a tenfold or more increase in heat. …

Autonomous and connected systems have captured the imagination and are driving advances in many fields, from mobility to agriculture, robotics, space, and other areas. As the physical world, computing, and networking converge increasingly, it is important to distinguish between autonomous and connected as they relate to vehicles.

Although there is a lot of interest in the efficiencies and opportunities that can be gained through autonomous, or “driverless,” vehicles, there are huge near-term opportunities involving big data coming from connected vehicles driven by humans. …

The idea behind a brain-machine interface is simple. Normally, movements are planned in parts of the brain called the premotor cortex and the motor cortex, sending signals to the spinal cord that activate the muscles needed to make precise, controlled movements. People with spinal cord injury, stroke, or neurodegenerative diseases may experience paralysis because that signal stream is interrupted at some stage. Yet these people often have most of their brain areas, including the premotor and motor cortices, intact.

A brain-machine interface (BMI) involves recording the neural signals associated with movement intention directly from those parts of the brain. You…

The coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated how crucially important it is to bring new and innovative medical products to market as quickly as possible, while still ensuring they are safe and effective and perform as intended. If new discoveries and products linger in the lab or in research, they provide no benefit to patients. Taking too long to reach market also can starve a startup of funding or make an established company cancel a project, with the promise of the research never realized.

Take as an example medical devices. These range from tongue depressors and exam gloves to implanted defibrillators and…

One of the many pluses of the virtual world is the ability to model before taking an irreversible action. Combining that modeling with medical imaging is a powerful combination of both worlds: the predictive powers of a virtual tool with the real-world images of the subject.

Take, for example, brain aneurysms — the local dilations of arteries in the brain that are estimated to affect 2 to 5 percent of the U.S. adult population. …

Mobile health (mHealth) technologies will play a key role in digital initiatives to improve healthcare delivery and outcomes, reduce cost and inequality, and enhance the patient experience. These mHealth applications depend on the ubiquity and simplicity of the smartphone. But numerous mHealth apps require accessories and complex attachments to the phone — weakening user acceptance and hampering practical translation from research to use.

We’re taking a different approach — to completely minimize the complicated hardware and avoid smartphone attachments. Current smartphones already sport high-performance, built-in sensors and cameras. …

Humans are— if they want to be, Neera Jain writes in a Forbes opinion piece published April 30, 2021. The Purdue assistant professor of mechanical engineering maintains that humans need to exercise agency when it comes to how technology shapes how we live and work.

A common trope in our literature and pop culture is when a creation takes on a life of its own, growing so uncontrollable that its creator can no longer manage it. As far back as Frankenstein and his monster to more modern examples such as Ultron in “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” we’ve all seen some…