We are awarded the Engineering Research and Innovation Seed Funding (ERISF) by the College of Engineering at the University of Arkansas (UA). As introduced on the program website, “The overarching goal of the ERISF program is to assist engineering researchers in developing new innovative research programs that have strong potential for significant future support from government agencies, corporations, industry, consortia, or foundations.”

In this interdisciplinary research project, we aim to understand engineering design thinking in complex systems design. In particular, we are interested in quantitatively characterizing and computationally modeling designers’ thinking in three aspects: the divergent-convergent reasoning, the system thinking and the sequential decision-making in engineering design. The accomplishment of this project will lay the foundation for our future study towards realizing artificial intelligence assisted design (AIAD). This project will be carried out through a collaborative effort with  Dr. Michael Gashler from the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at the UA, and Dr. Charles Xie from Concord Consortium. See more introduction on our Research Project page.