The PhD student Laxmi Poudel attended The ASME 2018 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, held in Quebec City, Canada from August 26-29. He received the ASME CIE Graduate Student Poster Travel Award to participate this venue and presented his preliminary studies on Autonomous and Cooperative Digital Manufacturing.

SiDi Lab recently received the EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to conduct fundamental research into sequential decision making in engineering systems design. The primary objective of this high-risk high-reward project is to create and demonstrate a research approach centered on the acquisition and analysis of fine-grained design activity data for design research. The approach is based on an open-source research experiment platform extended from an existing computer-aided design (CAD) software, Energy3D, for renewable energy systems design. The subawardee, Dr. Charles Xie, from Concord Consortium will collaborate with Dr. Sha to 1) extend Energy3D to incorporate functionality required for a research platform, 2) demonstrate use of the new research platform to support the acquisition of fine-grained data from real-world design exercises, and 3) disseminate the platform within the engineering design research community through publications and tutorials. The research study will highlight how fine-grained data enables new research directions on sequential decision-making and system thinking, two fundamental elements of engineering design thinking. See the NSF website for more details about this project.

SiDi Lab has been working with AM3 Lab directed by Dr. Wenchao Zhou on developing the next-generation digital manufacturing systems through an integration of theories from swarm robotics, additive manufacturing, artificial intelligence and computer vision.  Our PhD student Laxmi Poudel will be in Quebec City next week to present our project on The ASME 2018 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference.

Dr, Sha was invited by Dr. Charles Xie, the Senior Scientist from the Concord Consortium, and visited the CC from August 2-9. Dr. Sha introduced the current research projects of SiDi Lab to Dr. Xie, the President & CEO Mr. Chad Dorsey, and many other research staffs at the CC. Particularly, Dr. Sha introduced the project of Mining and Modeling Engineering Design Thinking Using Big Data Analytics, which has been conducted based on Energy3D – a smart CAD tool of renewable energy systems design invented by Dr. Xie. This visit has resulted in fruitful outcomes, including identification of future forms of collaboration, joint projects, new research proposal ideas and students co-advising mechanism. SiDi is very much looking forward a new year of success in collaborating with the CC. 

On July 23rd, SiDi Lab was invited to host two sessions of engineering systems design challenges for a group of 40 high school students by collaborating with the Assistant Director of the college’s Outreach and Summer Programs, Dr. Amy Warren. This is a fun and high-impact outreach activity and a great demonstration of SiDi research and its implication to K-12 education. These students came from different states national-wide and participated in UARK’s Engineering Summer Academy program. There are four interdisciplinary tracks, including Living systems, Non-Living Systems, Modeling and Simulation, and Function and Structure. SiDi held a half-day event for the track of Modeling and Simulation, and half day for the track of Non-Living System with an extended version of the solar energy system design challenge. See media coverage on this event here for more details.