We presented two papers at the CIEC conference in February 2013 that expanded on our approach:
- Impact of Motorola’s Vision on the development of an innovative curriculum. During 2003-2008, we were funded on a six year $1.0 M R&D grant from Motorola. It had the vision, as put forward by Jaime Borras, Senior Motorola Fellow and the then CTO of Motorola, of increasing engineering design productivity by 700+ fold, from 24 months to 24 hours. Audacious goals result in substantial gains. At the end of the funding period, we had achieved a six fold improvement, reducing the design and development period to about 3 months. The presentation slides lists many other domains where even more dramatic improvement has been achieved. Two engineering related ones are found here: ITRS on the fields of IC technology, chip design, and engineering design software, and auto assembly plants . This paper shows how we morphed concepts from engineering design productivity to build a self-sustaining Eco system in academics in three different areas: smart phones, robotics, and the semantic web. All involve/will involve faculty members and students from multiple colleges. More information can be found at corresponding websites. Most scholarly publications and comprehensive student reports can be found at our CSI research site. Note: Two of the links in the presentation do not work. Here are those two links: University Presentation (2012) and Personal Semantic Web.
- Impact of the Mobile Technology Consortium (MTC): MTC was founded by Jaime Borras, Motorola Senior Fellow and formerly CTO of Motorola, upon his retirement from Motorola in 2008. This was conceived by Mr. Borras in collaboration with Dr. Shankar, as a way to bring together industry engineers, entrepreneurs, faculty members, and students as both researchers and entrepreneurs, in an attempt to build a strong foundation for economic growth and technological innovation in the mobile technology area, locally in the south Florida area. MTC has held semi-annual conferences since 2008 and all the presentations may be viewed at this website. Much has been achieved by MTC: Our courses have had professionals act as judges and mentors; five student-led businesses have been launched and three are thriving; and most importantly, a NSF I/UCRC center has been formed under the supervision of Dr. Furht, our department Chair, which leverages the MTC infrastructure to bring business and academic partners together to address technology challenges. It has funding of about $1.4 M today. Please see the website for this center here: Center for Advancement of Knowledge Enablement (CAKE). Here are the paper and presentation slides from the CIEC conference. This paper discusses how teaching, research, and service (via MTC) can benefit each other.
We also believe that faculty members who involve themselves in such industry R&D need to be recognized for their efforts. Publications and patents may not materialize from such a collaboration; further, even for our multi-college joint courses, it is highly demanding for our professors to manage student teams across multiple disciplines and to ensure that these teams meet the expectations of the industry mentors and judges. I have proposed that the service aspect of our annual evaluation be elevated to the level of research and teaching. Interestingly, many objective metrics (for a faculty member’s service) can be obtained based on the application of ABET’s Criteria 3 (a-k), which are used for student outcomes. Here is a paper draft that discusses this.
Our approaches match well with the vision articulated by Dr. Nancy Zimpher, Chancellor, The State University of New York, in a keynote speech at the CIEC conference. She talked about anchor institutions addressing ‘systemness’ and bringing to the fore the concept of ROEI (ROI with Education). For SUNY, they have set the following objectives, some of which we are accomplishing with our collaboration: Entrepreneurial Century, Seamless Education Pipeline, Healthier NY, Vibrant Community, The World, and Energy Smart.