ISE team chosen for NSF I-Corps inaugural class

A research team from the Department of Industrial and Systems Enterprise Engineering (ISE) at Illinois is one of 21 teams for the inaugural class of National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps) awards.

“NSF's core mission is to fund basic research in all fields of science and engineering,” explained Subra Suresh, director of the National Science Foundation. “I-Corps supports this mission by helping to transform scientific output into technological innovation. Innovation Corps awards will help to strategically identify nascent science and engineering discoveries, and will leverage NSF's investment in basic research for technology innovation.”

While the knowledge gained from NSF-supported basic research frequently advances a particular field of science or engineering, some results also show immediate potential for broader applicability and impact in the business world. These results may be translated into technologies with near-term benefits for the economy and society.

As one of the first projects chosen for this new initiative, the Illinois team’s IDecideFast is a web-based application for effective decision making for the layperson.

“Our proposal will enable widespread use of decision analysis and will incorporate it into daily lives of individuals,” explained Ali Abbas, an associate professor in the ISE department, and principal investigator for the project.  “Anyone who is interested in making a decision—personal, financial, medical and bidding—will have the ability to log on to the web system and receive up-to-date methods for preference and belief elicitation, and interact with other decision makers facing similar decisions. The decision platform will also provide a unifying framework for experienced decision modelers to upload their templates for dissemination.”

According to the NSF website, the I-Corps program will initially support up to 100 projects annually, selecting up to 25 teams on a quarterly basis to assess the commercial viability of their previously-supported basic research. Spanning a broad range of target products, geographic locales and research fields, the teams will receive guidance from private- and public-sector experts, participate in a specially designed training curriculum, and receive $50,000 to begin assessing the commercial readiness of their technology concepts. In total, the awards were representative of six NSF directorates: Engineering; Computer and Information Science and Engineering; Biology; Mathematics and Physical Sciences; Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences; and Education and Human Resources.
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Contact: Ali Abbas, Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 217/265-7578.

If you have any questions about the College of Engineering, or other story ideas, contact Rick Kubetz, writer/editor, Engineering Communications Office, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; 217/244-7716.