COE / Boeing CAAS Collaboration Seed Grant Results

Dear Colleagues,

I’m delighted to share with you the outcome of the College of Engineering / Boeing Center for Aviation and Aerospace Safety collaborative seed grant funding opportunity. We had a total of 17 outstanding proposals submitted for this call, leading to some very difficult decisions. Given the high quality and large number of good ideas, Robert Sumwalt and I partnered to contribute more funding than we had originally planned. With internal funding of nearly $100,000 total, the following five projects have been selected for funding.  In alphabetical order by PI last name:

• Akbas, I, “Open-Source Validation and Verification Framework for AI-Controlled Aerial Vehicles” (EECS)
• Jiang, Y, Chen, L, and Chen, Y, “3D Printing of Continuous Carbon Fiber Composites with Programmable Thermal Behaviors: A Proactive Safety Design for Advanced Thermal Management” (AE / ME / COA)
• Liu, J and Schneider, A, “Robust Automatic Speech Recognition for Aviation Applications” (EECS / COA)
• Moncayo, H, “Deep-learning based Unobtrusive Estimation of Pilot Adverse Interactions and Loss of Energy State Awareness” (AE)
• Zhou, Y and Namilae S, “Fabrication of Copper Lithium-ion Battery Case with Integrated Cooling Channels Using Binder Jetting Additive Manufacturing” (AE)

Please join me in congratulating our faculty colleagues who were selected for funding!

These projects are all oriented towards promoting aviation safety. Our intent with this program is to incentivize, support, and catalyze ground-breaking work that will “move the needle” and have a direct, positive impact on aviation safety. Our expectation is that these funded projects will lead to follow-on proposals for extramural funding.

I’d also like to express my gratitude to each faculty member who invested energy into preparing a proposal. Each project is intrinsically important and worthy of investment – I hope that each idea will gain traction and lead to meaningful work!

Finally, I’m especially thankful to Robert Sumwalt and Kristy Kiernan of the Boeing Center for Aviation and Aerospace Safety for their partnership on this important effort. Thank you also to Seetha Raghavan for her outstanding effort and expertise to coordinate and manage all of the reviews. Thank you!

Warmly,

Jim Gregory