February 3, 2025

Goats may very well be the greatest of all time — GOATs, literally and figuratively! — when it comes to controlling the spread of invasive buckthorn. Easy to transport, able to access dense growth areas where humans and machines can't easily go, goats are a nontoxic replacement for harsh chemicals used in eradication efforts.

Invasive buckthorn — a woody shrub/small tree that produces large amounts of seeds and outcompetes many native species — is particularly tough to address because it has few natural deterrents, says Sigrid Resh, research assistant professor in the College of Forest Resources and Environmental Science and coordinator of the Keweenaw Invasive Species Management Area.

Resh says goats can play an important role in glossy buckthorn remediation in the understory. "They eat almost anything, so they're perfect in those areas where native plants struggle in dense infestations."

Read about KISMA's strategic goat deployment in the 2024 Re:Generations Magazine.

Students brought groundbreaking ideas that spanned technology, sustainability, and social impact to the latest Husky Innovate Pitch Competition.

“The competition highlighted the transformative power of innovation,” said Jonathan Leinonen, director of Husky Innovate and assistant dean and teaching professor of management in the College of Business. “We’re incredibly proud of all the participants. We strive to help every student take their ideas into the world.”

Kiran Sapali, a graduate student in engineering management, secured the top spot with an innovative solution for vaccine storage challenges.

Find the full list of winners on the College of Business Newsblog.

Michigan Tech's Institute of Computing and Cybersystems (ICC) and its Center for Artificial Intelligence are excited to announce a new event series: the Artificial Intelligence Colloquium Series.

This series will showcase cutting-edge research, applications and developments in artificial intelligence from Michigan Tech students and faculty. Each session is designed to foster collaboration, inspire innovation and build a vibrant AI research community at Michigan Tech.

If you would like to present in the series, or have any questions about the event, you can email Vinh Nguyen at vinhn@mtu.edu. Food and refreshments will be provided.

The first session in the series is this Wednesday, Feb. 5, at noon in EERC 216. Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) Ph.D. student Nazanin Mahjourian will present “LabelAlchemy: Refining Dataset Labels Using Vision-Language Models.”

From the abstract:
The success of AI in industrial applications is heavily dependent on the quality of the datasets used to train models. However, large-scale datasets often suffer from label noise, inconsistencies, and errors, which can negatively impact model performance. This problem is particularly pronounced in industrial domains, where obtaining high-quality labels is costly and time-consuming. In this presentation, we discuss a method named LabelAlchemy to sanitize the labels of a large industrial dataset, FactoryNet, which contains both human-generated and web-scraped labels using CLIP vision-language model. The CLIP model is a state-of-the-art vision-language model that has a dual-encoder architecture with separate encoders for images and text based on transformers, which employ multi-head self-attention mechanisms to model complex relationships within sequences. The text encoder processes tokenized input sequences and captures contextual nuances of words within a sentence. Similarly, the image encoder processes visual features extracted from input images. The resulting embeddings are mapped to a common latent space, allowing CLIP to measure the similarity between image-text pairs effectively. LabelAlchemy is shown to sanitize the FactoryNet dataset and improve the performance of classification algorithms.

Save the Dates: Following Wednesday's session, the remaining dates of the Artificial Intelligence Colloquium Series for the spring semester are:

• Wednesday, Feb. 19, at noon in EERC 216
• Wednesday, March 12, at noon in EERC 216
• Wednesday, March 26, at noon in EERC 216

The Friends of the Michigan Tech Library will be holding our annual Winter Carnival Book Sale in the lobby of the Van Pelt and Opie Library on Saturday, Feb. 8, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Hundreds of books will be available at $2 or less each — along with free hot chocolate and snacks. Come in and warm up while visiting the statues.

Cash, cards and checks accepted. All sales benefit the library. Happy Winter Carnival!

Please join the Department of Computer Science (CS) next Monday, Feb. 10, at 3 p.m. in Rekhi G005 for a research presentation by tenure-track faculty candidate Evan Lucas, following the social hour in Rekhi 218 (coffee and snacks).

The title of Lucas' presentation is "Detecting watermarks in large language models."

From the abstract:
Dr. Lucas works in the areas of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision. His specific areas of interest are applied computer vision to enable environmental science, building chatbots for educational purposes, and large language model watermarking. In this talk he will focus on model watermarking. Large language models are being used for an increasing number of applications and many released models use (or are theorized to use) different forms of watermarking. Watermarking can be used to assert ownership over generated content, aid in detection of model-generated context, or detect unauthorized use of training data. In this talk, Evan will discuss an attack to detect watermarks that he developed and presented at an Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) workshop, the countermeasure that was developed to mitigate this attack, and future research on evolving the attack to overcome this countermeasure. If time permits, he will discuss some of his other research interests.

Lucas is a research scientist in the Institute of Computing and Cybersystems at Michigan Technological University. His research interests fall within deep learning, specifically computer vision and natural language processing. He has co-authored 13 peer-reviewed papers, with seven published in top-tier machine learning venues, including the Association for Computational Linguistics, Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision.

Throughout his graduate studies, current position and industry work, he has mentored 12 students and interns. He enjoys teaching and has taught as an adjunct professor for seven semesters at Michigan Tech, Gogebic Community College and Western Carolina University. He earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Michigan Tech, with his dissertation research focusing on natural language processing.

Please join the Center for Innovation in Sustainability and Resilience (CISR) for a research discussion with Jungyun Bae (MAE), who will be presenting "Sustainable Autonomy: Multi-Robot Systems for Marine and Agricultural Resilience."

The discussion will be held Feb. 12 at noon in person in GLRC 202 and virtually via Zoom.

Join the CISR Research Discussion on Zoom.

This talk explores cutting-edge advancements in autonomous multi-robot systems for marine and agricultural applications, focusing on sustainability and resilience. It showcases research in marine autonomy using T-AUV (tethered autonomous underwater vehicle) systems with centralized coordination algorithms and wave energy charging, as well as agricultural automation for small farms using ground robots to address labor shortages and climate change challenges. The presentation will highlight how these technologies can minimize human intervention in marine and agricultural operations, provide cost-effective solutions for tasks such as lavender harvesting, and demonstrate potential implications for broader agricultural automation.

Michigan Tech student Nina Mendez (biomedical engineering) was mentioned by WLUC TV6 in a story about her winning pitch at the Peak25 Mini Pitch event. Mendez won the college category with her business idea “Biobots” — animal-inspired robots designed to help address environmental issues.

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WLUC TV6 quoted Michigan Tech seniors Zach Whitton (civil engineering) and Jakob Christiansen (construction management) in a story about the 10th anniversary of St. Albert the Great University Parish’s ice chapel. Both students have helped build multiple ice chapels and shared their thoughts on the experience and the community it fosters.

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The Traverse City Record-Eagle mentioned Michigan Tech student Will Haapala (geospatial engineering) in a story about his journey from growing up in Traverse City to becoming a student at Michigan Tech. Haapala is now in his third season as the student manager of the MTU Nordic ski team.

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Michigan Tech hockey forward Isaac Gordon was featured on The Reporter’s Corner podcast episode titled “Isaac Gordon, Michigan Tech,” which aired on Jan. 30. Gordon discussed his early playing days, his junior hockey career, his journey to Michigan Tech and what makes Houghton a special place to play college hockey.

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The Daily Mining Gazette mentioned Michigan Tech Nordic skier Wes Campbell in a story about his recent competition for Team USA in the IBU Junior Cup and IBU Junior Open European Championships in Poland and Germany. Campbell competed in multiple events, earning top finishes, including a ninth-place result in the 12K mass start in Poland.

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WLUC TV6 mentioned Michigan Tech in a story about Dave Holli receiving the 2024 Carl V. Pellonpaa Lifetime Achievement Award. Holli was recognized for his groundbreaking work in the forest and wood product industry, including his contributions to forest harvesting technologies. Holli is a longtime supporter of MTU, serving on the curriculum advisory board for the College of Forest Resources and Environmental Science and the Michigan Tech Fund Board.

CISR Accepting Applications for Sustainable & Resilient Communities Early Career/New Research Directions Award

The Center for Innovation in Sustainability and Resilience (CISR) is accepting applications for the Sustainable & Resilient Communities Early Career/New Research Directions Award.

These awards are designed to complement start-up packages for early-career faculty or to support established researchers who are pursuing new ideas or topics around sustainability and resilience themes. Funds are provided by the Tech Forward Initiative on Sustainability and Resilience. Award eligibility requires being an affiliate of CISR (open to anyone on campus) and contributing to the CISR research community through future external funding proposal submissions.

The spring 2025 application deadline is April 1, but rolling submissions and inquiries are encouraged.

Awards are targeted in the range of $3,000-$5,000. The timing and types of expenditures are flexible, but generally should occur before June 30 and support student hourly work, obtaining seed data, professional development, and/or pilot/proof-of-concept work, etc., with an emphasis on activities that can contribute to future research proposal development.

In your application, please include the following:

• A title indicating whether the submission is to be considered for an Early Career or New Directions award.
• A brief description of your proposed work and how it relates to sustainability and/or resilience. Please include a paragraph that describes how this award will propel future research productivity in sustainability and resilience research.
• A detailed budget and budget justification, including project start and end date, and details on what additional resources, if any, are being leveraged for the proposed project. These additional resources may include other sources of funding, other data or laboratory needs, etc.

Proposal narratives, budgets and budget justifications should be submitted as a single document via email to Chelsea Schelly at cschelly@mtu.edu. Potential submitters are encouraged to reach out with questions or to pitch ideas before developing a proposal.

CISR looks forward to receiving your inquiries and applications!

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GSG Announces 2025 Graduate Research Colloquium

The Graduate Student Government (GSG) is pleased to announce its annual Graduate Research Colloquium (GRC), which will be held on March 25. The annual GRC Awards Banquet will follow on March 26.

The GRC offers a unique opportunity for graduate students to showcase their research across the campus community and work on their presentation skills for upcoming conferences. Students can give oral presentations, present posters or do both. All presentations will be given in person.

Oral presentations will be given on March 25 in the MUB Alumni Lounge from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Poster presentations are scheduled on March 25 in the Rozsa Lobby from 5-8 p.m. The GRC event will be capped off with the annual GRC Awards Banquet, which will be held on March 26 from 5-8 p.m.

Cash prizes are awarded to the top three presenters in both categories ($300 for first place, $200 for second, and $100 for third). The GSG will print all the posters for this year's GRC poster session.

Registration is currently open and closes on March 7 at 11:59 p.m.

Register for the 2025 Graduate Research Colloquium.

For more information regarding GRC 2025, visit the GSG website or contact gsg-research@mtu.edu.

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Student Funding Opportunities for Climate Change Leadership Development

Do you know a student who is passionate about sustainability and climate change? Please share with them the below leadership development funding opportunities, available thanks to generous gifts from Michigan Tech alumni.

For questions about either program, please reach out to Alan Turnquist at sustainability@mtu.edu.

• Frank Chernosky Climate Ambassador Award
  The Chernosky Award provides a partial tuition scholarship of $8,000 and a professional development and applied work fund of up to $1,600 to be used by August 2026. Awardees will also receive active mentorship from campus and/or external professionals to help them develop networks and skills for their future work. Upper level undergraduate students only. Applications are due March 14. Full details of the award and a link to the application are available on the Sustainability Blog.

• NextGen Climate Leaders Fund
  The NextGen Climate Leaders Fund supports current Michigan Tech students of any level (undergraduate or graduate) to pursue professional development opportunities and independent projects to build their network and skills to support climate change leadership. Students may apply for up to $1,000 of funding, with applications accepted on a rolling basis throughout the 2025 calendar year pending availability of funds. A total of $10,000 is available. The types of activities that could be funded are flexible (conference travel and independent projects are examples), but students must articulate how the funds will develop leadership skills and their capacity to make a positive impact on climate change. To apply, students should fill out the 2025 NextGen Climate Leaders Fund application form.

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15% Off Sale at the Museum Gift Shop during Winter Carnival

The A. E. Seaman Mineral Museum is celebrating Winter Carnival with a 15% Off Sale* starting today, Feb. 3, through Saturday, Feb. 8, in the gift shop. With home decor, mineral kits, games, international to local specimens and more, the gift shop has exciting items for everyone!

The museum is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Saturday. Museum admission is waived for Michigan Tech students, staff and faculty with a valid Tech ID.

*Exclusions apply. Cannot be combined with other discounts.

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SS Department Chair Candidate Seminars with Joan Brehm

The Department of Social Sciences (SS) is pleased to be hosting candidates for on-campus interviews for the position of department chair.

The third of five candidates, Joan Brehm, professor of sociology, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Illinois State University, will present a department leadership seminar today, Feb. 3, from 12-12:45 p.m. in AOB 201.

Brehm will also present a research seminar tomorrow, Feb. 4, from 12:30-1:30 p.m. in Admin 404. The research seminar is titled “Interdisciplinary and Engaged Sustainable Water Scholarship: The Value of Social Science.”

All members of the Michigan Tech community are welcome to attend. Both presentations are also available on Zoom.

Join the SS Department Chair Seminar on Zoom.

To have your event automatically appear, please submit them to the University Events Calendar.

Isle Royale Art Exhibition - Michigan Tech Art

Monday, February 3, 8 a.m.–8 p.m. | Rozsa Center for the Performing Arts, Rozsa Galleries A-Space

MICHIGAN TECH ART SERIES EVENT Enter into a world of artistic expression inspired by the wilderness of Isle Royale. The artworks showcased in this exhibition have all been...

SS Department Chair Candidate Seminars with Joan Brehm

Monday, February 3, 12:00–12:45 p.m. | Academic Office Building (AOB), 201

The Department of Social Sciences (SS) is pleased to be hosting candidates for on-campus interviews for the position of department chair. The third of five candidates, Joan...

Hot Cocoa Handout

Monday, February 3, 2–4 p.m. | Husky Statue

We offer free Hot Chocolate to all students from2 to 4pm near the Husky Statue every Monday!

Optimizing U.S. PET and PolyolefinPackaging Supply Chains in a Circular Economy

Monday, February 3, 3 p.m. | Great Lakes Research Center (GLRC), 202

Environmental Engineering Graduate Seminar Utkarsh S. Chaudhari, Department of Chemical Engineering, Michigan Technological University David Watkins, Professor, Department of...

Psalm Bible Study

Monday, February 3, 7–8 p.m. | Wads Cafe

Want to see how the bible handles emotions? How it instructs us in righteousness? Eat cafe food, talk through the psalms, learn and grow with Pastor Brandon Charbonneau.