Public and/or Private: It's Still Research to Me

There's nothing new about public-private partnerships that involve public or private universities, and public or private businesses. What's interesting about them is that some of the projects are, well, interesting.

Take the project that the University of Manchester and Rolls-Royce recently unveiled. They're building a £1 million facility to boost the development of ultra-compact and intelligent electrical networks for use in a range of devices, including Uninhabited Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs). Police and fire services are becoming increasingly interested in uninhabited air vehicles for surveillance purposes. They could save the emergency services valuable time and money and also allow access to situations too dangerous for manned craft.

According to Stephen Long, facility project manager at Rolls-Royce: "In the future we will see a rapid growth in the use of uninhabited land, sea and air vehicles for military, civil and public use. The electrical systems requirements for these platforms are particularly demanding because they need to be compact, flexible and intelligent" and will hopefully replace the pneumatic and mechanical systems used today.

Then there is MIT's new $3.5 million W. M. Keck Foundation Center for Extreme Quantum Information Theory (xQIT), funded by $1.63 million from the Keck Foundation and other sponsors. The new center enables a major push by MIT researchers to determine the ultimate capabilities of quantum information systems. Establishing these theoretical capabilities would be a step towards being able to exploit quantum effects for novel applications, including computers, communication networks, and global positioning systems. MIT's research team will pursue theoretical problems in three key areas: adiabatic quantum computing, quantum channel capacity and quantum sensing and control.

Said MIT's Vice President for Research Claude R. Canizares, "One of the most exciting things about the Keck Foundation's support for the new center is that it creates a locus of interdepartmental and interdisciplinary common purpose among MIT's researchers in quantum information theory. Our individual, world-leading efforts in quantum information science can now be integrated in a way that will improve the chances of success in the three important research areas of xQIT."

Even the U.S. Army is in the funding game, with its $105 million, five-year grant to a multi-institution consortium led by Stanford University to build a new home for the Army High-Performance Computing Research Center, the details of which Deirdre Blake described in this recent podcast. The facility will enable advanced simulations to develop new materials for military vehicles and equipment, improve wireless battlefield communication, advance detection of biological or chemical attacks and stimulate innovations in supercomputing itself.

"Modeling and simulation today play an equal role to theory and physical experimentation in discovery-driven engineering research," says Charbel Farhat, a professor of mechanical engineering and expert on supercomputer simulation who is also a member of the Stanford School of Engineering's Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. "Using the most advanced high-performance computing resources, a research center of this magnitude has great potential for innovating technology and reducing design-cycle time."

Posted by Jon Erickson at 10:35 AM  Permalink