Assembly funds new engineering chair
Position is seen as first step toward establishment of advanced engineering center

By ELLEN GOLDBAUM
News Services Editor

The New York State Assembly has allocated $175,000 to support the establishment of a Chair for Competitive Product and Process Design at UB, a position that is seen as a first step toward establishing at the university the New York State Center for Engineering Design and Industrial Innovation (NYS-CEDII) proposed in the current state budget.

The new chair is expected to be appointed at the start of the Fall 2000 semester by Mark Karwan, dean of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Both the chair and the proposed center are seen as major assets that will leverage existing computational and engineering strengths at UB and those in local and regional industry into significant economic development and growth.

Sixteen local companies have written letters of support for the center, many describing in detail just how important UB's resources are to their continued commercial success, and how their own client needs will be well-served by the new chair and proposed center.

One local chief executive officer, for example, called NYS-CEDII "an essential step for future growth and investment in our area" and another vowed that his company would "be among the first to seek their engagement through interactive projects, involving a significant investment on our part."

The new chair and center are dedicated to advancing new integrated approaches that allow for rapid development of cost-and-performance-optimized designs. They would enable the application of powerful visualization, animation and multi-sensory virtual reality capabilities that can be used simultaneously by geographically distributed work teams.

"This chair will provide the university with an opportunity to enhance its growing strength in the area of advanced engineering design and to become a leader, not just regionally but nationally in this critical technology for the 21st century," said Karwan.

"Both the chair and the proposed center will allow us to leverage our academic expertise with industrial partners to foster economic development in the region and across the state."

Through its Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, UB already has established itself as a leader in the field of multidisciplinary design and optimization, which is dedicated to optimizing the design and performance of complex systems, whether they are cars, airplanes or power plants. Such systems involve multiple disciplines, such as structures, control and aerodynamics.

Last spring, the Third World Congress of Structural and Multi-disciplinary Optimization, the field's major international conference, was held at and co-sponsored by UB, the first time it was held in the United States. Among the papers presented at that meeting were those demonstrating how these concurrent engineering practices have influenced the bottom line in several Western New York companies.

"This is a prime region to develop these kinds of capabilities because we have a broad base of technology companies that are growing," said Karwan. "The kinds of jobs these companies bring to the region are not service sector jobs, but good jobs in manufacturing, research and engineering, as well as in information technology."

He added that NYS-CEDII would capitalize on the university's Center for Computational Research, one of the nation's top 10 academic computational centers, whose mission also involves high-end visualization.

"Given that one of our research focuses at UB is in virtual reality, and that the proposed center will feature significant new investments in that area, this combination of resources opens up brand new opportunities in terms of multidisciplinary activities and for attracting media, digital arts and entertainment companies here-the Pixars of the world," he continued.

Christina Bloebaum, associate professor and chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and an internationally known researcher in the field, agreed.

"Visualization, ranging from flat screen 2D to fully immersive techniques, enable a designer, engineer or manager to better understand the design from a variety of perspectives," she said. "These technologies also allow for virtual rapid prototyping, which makes it possible to create a virtual prototype that is true to the final product in size, shape, color and performance. One also can visualize information about the analysis of the design; that is, for example, how will an airplane wing deflect under some sort of gust loading? You could actually see the plane wing deform under different loads."

These capabilities would require full funding of the proposed center, which calls for the construction of a six-wall CAVE (trademark) that represents the state of the art in immersive environments. Only the University of Illinois at Chicago and Iowa State University have or are building such a facility, and each has had extensive collaborations with such companies as Ford, Proctor and Gamble and John Deere.

Other key features include:

- The Dynamic Vehicle Motion Base Immersive Simulator, which will enable researchers to test new designs of new automobiles, aircraft and other vehicles and virtually "drive" them under a variety of weather conditions

- The Distributed Computing Visualization System, which provides a testbed for exploring the feasibility of lower cost immersive environments for industry

- The Powerwall, which will enable large groups of individuals to interact in a three-dimensional environment collaboratively; it is essential for industrial training workshops.

Bloebaum said that a key advantage of the new chair and proposed center is their emphases on "clustering," the creation of industries that use similar technologies in a given geographic area, such as Silicon Valley or Boston's Route 128.

"The idea is that if you get a 'cluster' of high-tech companies and research entities, they will leverage off one another so as to increase development," she said. "Our 'cluster' would extend even into Canada, since there are centers of excellence in this area that are not only compatible with our center, but synergistic. Such a clustering here will enable companies and research centers to do much more than they could individually."