Partnerships between universities and industry can yield important research and commercial breakthroughs. ATLAS professor Ellen Do has worked to cultivate relationships between CU Boulder and industry players, including as a聽member of the Pervasive Personalized Intelligence (PPI) Center, to support graduate students and enhance opportunities for commercialization of ATLAS research.
The , which recently concluded its tenure, was founded 鈥渨ith a mission of bringing industry and university talent together to solve the intelligence challenges faced by software and computer engineers in Internet of Things systems." It operated under the supervision of the National Science Foundation and included members from NEC, Intel and Trimble.
鈥淚t鈥檚 been such a good experience. We鈥檝e learned a lot. Ellen Do and her team have helped to expand our thinking and encouraged us to explore new areas.鈥� - Dr. Haifeng Chen, Head of Data Science Department at NEC Laboratories, and his colleague Kai Ishikawa, Principal Researcher聽(PPI Center event recap)
The PPI Center鈥檚 in Portland, OR, included a research poster session, and ATLAS students were honored with three of the four awards industry attendees voted on at the event.聽
- Suibi Che-Chuan Weng, PhD student, won "Most Industry Ready" for Editing Reality: Empowering Users to Manipulate Reality through Addition, Erasing, and Modification with Speech to Prompt in Mixed Reality.
- Rishi Vanukuru, PhD student, won "Most Impactful" for Asynchronous spatial guidance using mobile devices and Augmented Reality.
- Ada Zhao, MS student, won "Most Impactful" for The WizARd and Apprentice: Augmented Reality Expert Capture for Training Novices.
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2 more ATLAS PhD students participated: Krithik Ranjan presented PuppetGuide: Tangible Personalized Museum Tour Guides using LLMs and David Hunter presented Tangible Interaction with Object Detection and Large Language Models.
As for the experience participating in the PPI Center, Do says, 鈥渋t is good to know that the industry is interested in supporting research and considers our research relevant.鈥� She sees ways ATLAS could form partnerships within several industry sectors on a range of themes due to the multidisciplinary nature of the research conducted here.
Since their involvement in PPI started, Do and her team have had a series of meetings with mentors from global technology firms, discussing collaborative research opportunities.
Vanukuru is currently doing an internship at Microsoft Research Cambridge focused on spatial computing in its VR/AR group. Weng and Zhao are working on research in the ACME Lab this summer, extending the Editing Reality (and PuppetGuide), and WizARd and Apprentice projects with interns from the CU SPUR program. Zhao is also conducting a pilot study, interviewing laser cutter operating experts about how they would demonstrate operations and how they can annotate their demonstration using the WizARd prototype for novice learners. Hunter has embarked on an internship with Trimble this summer, while he and Ranjan are also working in the ACME Lab.
