We are selected to be the awardee of the 2018 Engineering Research and Innovation Seed Funding (ERISF) by the College of Engineering at the University of Arkansas (UA). “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.”

The primary research objective of this interdisciplinary research is to significantly increase the scale of network modeling and analysis using GPU platform in supporting complex systems design. To achieve this objective, we will design new parallel and scalable methodologies with the ambition of manipulating and analyzing large-scale graphs (of millions of nodes) on GPU computer clusters in minutes. This project will be carried out through a collaborative effort with  Dr. Miaoqing Huang from the Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering at the UA.

The design challenge is coming! The System Integration and Design Informatics (SiDi) Laboratory in the Department of Mechanical Engineering will conduct another round of the design challenge on solar systems design. This semester, the topic is Solarize Our UARK Parking Lots. You can get rewards by participation and you can get bonus rewards based on the quality of your final design. Minimum earning of $15 is guaranteed if you finish the complete session of the design challenge.

Multiple dates and times are available and you can make a selection on the registration page https://goo.gl/forms/4zRHs8F0jh5QsmTc2. The upcoming three sessions will be held on Apr. 25th, 26th and 27th, 2-4pm at MEEG 228. For detailed information, please see the flyer. Note: If you would like to take the challenge at a different time, just indicate your available time slots on the registration page, and we will run a special session just for YOU.

You are eligible to participate in this challenge if you are over 18 years old. No experience in design is needed. So come to join this exciting challenge and get rewards! We look forward to seeing you!

Congratulations to the PhD student Molla Rahman! His paper titled “Automatic Clustering of Sequential Design Behaviors Based on Function-Behavior-Structure Ontology” is accepted by the ASME 2018 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE 2018). The conference will be held at Quebec City, Canada this year from August 26-29. Molla will go to the conference and present his research on sequential decision making and system thinking in engineering design.

In addition, we have two more papers accepted. The first one is titled “Modeling Participation Behaviors in Design Crowdsourcing Using A Bipartite Network-Based Approach“. This study was conducted in collaboration with the research assistant Ashish Chaudhari and Prof. Panchal from Purdue University.

The second one is titled “Modeling Spatiotemporal Heterogeneity Customer Preferences in Engineering Design“. This study was conducted in collaboration with the postdoctoral fellow Dr. Youyi Bi and Prof. Wei Chen from Northwestern University.

For more information, please visit our publication page.

Our PhD student Laxmi Poudel has received the NSF-sponsored Student Travel Awards to attend the NAMRC 46/MSEC 2018 conference in College Station, Texas from June 18 to June 22, 2018. Laxmi will present his research in understanding the “Mechanical Strength of Chunk-Based 3D Printed Parts for Cooperative 3D Printing“. This paper will appear on the journal, Procedia Manufacturing, soon. Congratulations to Laxmi!