Brett Fassler received a Best Paper Award at 2nd IEEE International Conference on Machine Intelligence and Smart Innovation

Brett Fassler, a master’s student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, received one of the Best Paper Awards at the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Machine Intelligence and Smart Innovation (ICMISI 2025). His paper, “Open-Source Low-Cost Vaping Machine for Laboratory Testing of Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems,” describes work conducted as part of an NIH-sponsored project under the guidance of Dr. Edward Sazonov.

This R01 project, a collaboration with psychology researchers at SUNY Buffalo, aims to design and validate Flexible Robust Instrumentation for Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (FRIENDS)—an electronic sensor that attaches to the body of a vape device and monitors vaping activity by detecting changes in a near-field electromagnetic field.

Brett’s paper details the development of an electromechanical Vaping Machine for laboratory testing of FRIENDS sensors (VM-FRIENDS) that can produce programmable vaping patterns. VM-FRIENDS provides control over the number of puffs, puff duration, puff flow rate, and inter-puff interval, enabling flexible, human-like puffing patterns for experimentation on ENDS (Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems) devices.

The hardware and software designs of VM-FRIENDS are publicly available and may be used by other researchers in the field.