UARC Scientists Recognized at Ames Honor Awards

June 2009

Congratulations to the following recipients on the recognition in the program for the 2009 Ames Honor Award ceremony:

Brett Cruden - contribution to the CEV Aerospace Project Team
Ben Sim - contribution to the SMART Rotor Test Team
Carl Sorenson - contribution to the ARCTAS Team
Dennis Gearhart - contribution to the NOVICE Team
Bob Kanefsky - contribution to the Phoenix Science Interface Team
Tom Dayton - contribution to the JSC MOD ITA with ARC
Cori Schauer - contribution to the JSC MOD ITA with ARC
Jack Hodges - contribution to the JSC MOD ITA with ARC
Dan Berrios - contribution to the JSC MOD ITA with ARC

Thank you for bringing credit and prestige to the UARC!

Ames Scientists Win Prestigious Award

May 2009

Under the keen leadership of Alan Cassell with the UARC, the Nanotechnology branch at NASA Ames has been presented with the “Most Highly Cited Paper Awards 2008” by Plasma Sources Science and Technology Journal. This is a significant accomplishment since it was their paper which received the highest number of citations in the 5 years since publication. Congratulations to Alan and his team on this achievement.

UARC ATM Team Building Event

July 2008

The UARC hosted a day-long team building event with the Air Traffic Management Team at Cuesta Park in Los Altos. Fifty-three attendees participated in various activities, which incorporated communication and cooperation, collaborative problem-solving and decision-making.

UARC Earns NASA Public Service Group Achievement Award

June 2008

The outstanding performance of the University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) was recognized with the prestigious NASA Ames Public Service Group Achievement Award on June 11, 2008.

"Winning the NASA Group Achievement Award is quite an honor, and it is due to the outstanding efforts of many people," said UCSC Chancellor George Blumenthal. "Through their excellent work, the UARC team is helping to establish UCSC as a strong and vital presence in Silicon Valley."

In a letter announcing the award, NASA Ames Research Center director Pete Worden said, "This is one of the most prestigious awards a group can receive, and is presented to selected groups who have distinguished themselves by making outstanding contributions to the NASA mission."

William Berry, UARC director, accepted the award on behalf of the UARC team at an Honor Awards ceremony. The award citation is "for outstanding performance in fundamental research and collaborations to support NASA missions."

"NASA Ames gives several group achievement awards to teams that work on specific projects, but this one is extraordinary in that the entire UARC team was named for our overall performance," Berry said. "It means that NASA views the partnership with UCSC embodied in the UARC as very successful and productive."

In announcing the award, NASA officials noted that the UARC management team has done an excellent job of staying within budget and working hard to leverage UC's capabilities to enhance performance under the terms of the UARC contract. The UARC has continued to receive an "Excellent" rating in the award-fee process since the beginning of the contract. Through the UARC's Aligned Research Program to support collaborative efforts of university faculty and NASA researchers, UC has been awarded over $2 million in research funding to date.

"The UARC team is part of a vanguard helping to enable a permanent UCSC presence in Silicon Valley," said Joseph Miller, vice provost of Silicon Valley Initiatives. "The team has worked very hard to lay the groundwork for a lasting and productive partnership with NASA Ames and our future major campus center in the NASA Research Park."

The award was given to both UARC staff and UARC subcontractors, including those from ACI; Aerospace Computing, Inc.; Eloret, San Jose State University Research Foundation; Spectrum Software Technology; Technology Horse, LLC; and Timucin Consulting Team.

Earth Sciences Team Receives Two NASA Honor Awards

June 2008

The UARC Earth Sciences Team received two awards at the NASA Honor Awards Ceremony on June 11, 2008. The prominent awards were given for the following:

Tropical Composition, Cloud and Climate Coupling
John Bush, Roseanne Dominguez, Kent Dunwoody, Michael Fitzgerald, Eric Fraim, Dennis Gearhart, Patrick Grant, Jeff Myers, Frank Newman, Haiping Su.

Wildfire Research and Applications Partnership
Bob Billings, Rose Dominguez, Ken Dunwoody, Eric Fraim, Dennis Gearhart, Pat Grant, Ted Hildum, Jeff Myers, Haiping Su.

Space Act Board Award to Greg Hornby

June 2008

Greg Hornby was awarded a Space Act Board Award by the Inventions and Contributions Board for ARC-15568-1. The Award, titled 'Stochastic Electromagnetic Design and Optimization Method' (ADSS: AI Software that Automatically Designs and Optimizes Spacecraft Systems), was given at the Space Act Board Award ceremony in June.

Ted Hildum, Greg Hornby

November 14, 2007

Ted hildum and Greg Hornby received awards at Ames Contractor Council's Excellence Awards Ceremony.

Ted Hiludm
Dr. Hildum led the development and implementation of NASA's new Autonomous Modular Sensor System, used on an un-piloted aerial vehicle to help fight wildfires across the Western United States.

Greg Hornby
Dr. Hornby defined the Age-Layered Population Structure (ALPS), that has been recognized as one of the most significant new ideas in the field of Genetic Programming.

NASA Group Achievement Award to Earth Sciences Team: Jeff Myers, Ted Hildum, Bob Billings, Kent Dunwoody, Eric Fraim, Haiping Su

September 2007

The NASA Ames Research Center has honored six UCSC employees at the University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) as part of a Group Achievement Award for a multiagency team that helped firefighters battle the deadly Esperanza fire in Southern California last year.

The Wildfire Research and Applications Partnership (WRAP), which includes UARC Earth Sciences researchers, used the Altair Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) to provide valuable real-time fire information to the Esperanza Fire Incident Command Center. Those honored in the NASA award include Jeff Meyers, technical area manager of the UARC Earth Sciences research team; Ted Hildum, staff scientist; Bob Billings, senior field engineer; Kent Dunwoody, senior field engineer; Eric Fraim, remote sensing data analyst; and Haiping Su, staff scientist.

The operation during the Esperanza firestorm in October 2006 was the first time that an umanned aerial system operating in national airspace was used to provide real-time fire condition information. Acting in response to an emergency request from the California Governor's Office of Emergency Services, the multi-agency WRAP team was deployed to southern California. The team provided valuable information about the fire perimeter, hot spots, and fire behavior to the Esperanza Fire Incident Command Center within 24 hours of the governor's request.

During the mission, real-time data was gathered by sensors aboard the unmanned aerial system, telemetered to ground-based computers, hosted on GoogleEarth, and delivered to the command center for the fire. It was particularly important to map the fire's quickly changing behavior and detect hot spots that had jumped fire lines. Four firefighters died in the Esperanza Fire, which burned more than 40,000 acres in Riverside County.

The efforts of the WRAP team members on the Esperanza Fire Emergency UAS Mission led to an improved understanding of critical fire information by the fire management services, showcased a first-time use of UAS capabilities on a disaster event, and opened the doors to future uses of sensors, UAS platforms, and real-time decision-support systems for national emergencies.

AAMAS 2007 Best Paper Award to Adrian Agogino

June 11, 2007

Adrian Agogino, a research scientist with the UARC, and Kagan Tumer, a NASA Civil Servant, received the best paper award at AAMAS 07 (International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems), which is the premier scientific conference for research in autonomous agents and multiagent systems.

This year, there were 531 submissions to AAMAS, of which 119 were accepted after a double-blind review of the full papers. Their paper, titled "Distributed Agent-Based Air Traffic Flow Management," shows how learning agents can be used to set the separation required at fixes along the individual aircraft routes to reduce air traffic congestion. This was truly an "application" paper as the authors used FACET (developed at Ames) to simulate the full system.

AIAA Award to Kenny Cheung and Sean Shan-Min Swei

May 2007

Kenny Cheung and Sean Swei are members of a team being recognized with an award from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). The citation for their award reads, "For developing CONDUIT, a revolutionary concept for integrated control system software design and for achieving its acceptance by the aerospace industry."

The 2007 AIAA Aerospace Software Engineering Award was presented at the AIAA Infotech@Aerospace 2007 Conference and Exhibits Awards Dinner in Rohnert Park, CA, on May 8, to the CONDUIT team of Mark Tischler, Kenny Cheung, Sean Shan-Min Swei, and Chad Frost. The award, which is given odd years only, is presented for an outstanding technical and/or management contributions to aeronautical or astronautical software engineering. The citation for their award reads, "For developing CONDUIT, a revolutionary concept for integrated control system software design and for achieving its acceptance by the aerospace industry."

Cheung, Principal Software Engineer and Task Manager, is the software lead for CONDUIT. He has participated in various flight control design projects using CONDUIT and has coauthored several papers on its applications.

Swei was one of the developers of CONDUIT and has used it in many flight control design projects. His research interests include advanced control systems design and analysis and air traffic system identification and modeling.

CONDUIT is a computer software package that assists engineers in the design of aircraft control systems. For more information on CONDUIT, please visit http://uarc.ucsc.edu/flight-control/conduit/.

Jacob Wilson

January 17, 2007

Jacob Wilson was recognized for developing a unique hotwire calibration and measurement system for the U.S. Army 7-by 10-ft wind tunnel along with a complex static pressure measurement and acquisition system.

Yun Zheng

January 17, 2007

Yun Zheng was recognized for developing and implementing a new nodal airport capacity model that eliminated the artificial flight delays in the original ACES airport capacity model.

IEEE Award to Bin Yu

January 2007

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has conferred the honor of IEEE Fellow to senior research scientist, Bin Yu.

Yu conducts research in the nanotechnology research and development group at NASA Ames. Nanotechnology is one of several core areas in which UCSC is managing research projects for NASA through the UARC partnership.

The IEEE Board of Directors recognized Yu "for contributions to scaling of silicon common metal oxide semiconductor transistors." This is a forefront technology for incorporation of nanoscale features in advanced semiconductors.

The honor of IEEE Fellow is bestowed upon a very limited number of senior members of the organization who have made outstanding contributions to the electrical and information technologies and sciences for the benefit of humanity and the profession.

Beth Ann Hockey Participates in the NextFest Program

October 2006

Beth Ann Hockey, a visiting professor of linguistics, was invited to participate in a special program at NextFest, the four-day technology festival organized by Wired magazine.

Hockey leads NASA's Clarissa project to develop a voice-activated computer program that talks astronauts through complicated procedures in space.

Performing complex tasks in zero gravity is no easy feat, and flipping the pages of a manual or scrolling through online instructions only adds to the difficulties. Clarissa reads instructions to astronauts and responds to spoken commands. The spoken-dialogue system is one of many NASA projects being carried out through the UARC partnership between UCSC and NASA Ames Research Center.

Hockey and astronaut Stephanie Wilson gave a demonstration of Clarissa as part of the "Dr. Next" show for students during the NextFest education day. Clarissa was also featured along with other interactive exhibits in the NASA pavilion at the NextFest event. NextFest took place in New York from September 29 to October 1 and was attended by more than 30,000 people.

NASA Software of the Year Award to FACET

August 2006

A team of researchers at NASA Ames Research Center and the University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) has received the NASA Software of the Year Award for 2006. The researchers are being recognized for their development of the Future Air traffic management Concepts Evaluation Tool (FACET), which models the National Airspace System for both research and operational use.

"This award is a clear example of the benefits of the UARC partnership," said Banavar Sridhar, leader of the FACET team and chief of the Automation Concepts Research Branch at NASA Ames.

Principal scientist and task manager Kapil Sheth leads the UARC team of scientists and engineers working closely with NASA researchers to develop the FACET software. Software engineer Daniel Mulfinger and principal scientist Gano Chatterji are the other UARC members of the award-winning team.

FACET is a key component of NASA's overall air traffic management research effort, one of many NASA programs supported by UARC, a partnership between UCSC and NASA Ames Research Center. The overall goal of NASA research in air traffic management is to contribute to the development of the Next Generation Air Transportation System and provide decision-support tools that will help the Federal Aviation Administration and airline personnel operate today's system more efficiently.

"The UARC is honored to be part of this prestigious recognition, and we are especially proud of Kapil Sheth and his team, who have been so committed to the development, enhancement, demonstration, and distribution of FACET for the benefit of all as a tool for improving the National Airspace System," said UARC associate director Larry Hogle.

Beth Ann Hockey Book Signing

June 2006

Beth Ann Hockey, UARC Project Scientist and UCSC Visiting Professor of Linguistics, will be at Leigh's Favorite Books (121 S. Murphy Ave., Sunnyvale, CA 94086) on June 17, 2006 at 5:00 pm for a book signing.

Along with co-authors Manny Rayner, a Research Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center and Geneva University, Switzerland, and Pierrette Bouillon, a Professor at Geneva University, Switzerland, they recently authored the book, "Putting Linguistics into Speech Recognition" which presents a detailed description of the Regulus Grammar Compiler. The book contains an Open Source toolkit for building speech enabled systems that has been developed over the last four years. Regulus has already been used in several major projects. Among these are NASA's Clarissa, which in 2005 became the first spoken dialogue system to be deployed in space, and MedSLT, an Open Source medical speech translator developed at Geneva University.

AHS Award to Jacob Wilson

April 2006

The American Helicopter Society (AHS) International has awarded the 2006 Robert L. Lichten Award to programmer/analyst, Jacob Wilson. This honor is awarded each year for the best paper submitted to the AHS by a first-time author of a nationally distributed technical publication.

Wilson provides engineering support for research on rotorcraft (i.e., helicopters) at NASA Ames Research Center. He works on a UARC project called the Rotor Comprehensive Analysis System (RCAS), a large, multidisciplinary computer software system designed to analyze the performance, stability and control, aeroelastic stability, loads and vibration, aerodynamics, and acoustics characteristics of rotorcraft. RCAS was developed to improve rotorcraft analysis capability and to support rotorcraft research and development activities throughout the rotorcraft technical community.

As part of his award, Wilson will be attending the annual AHS Forum in Phoenix, May 9 to 11, where he will present his paper and receive special recognition.

Next Generation Air Transporation System Day

Dr. B. Sridhar, NASA Ames Branch Chief of Automation Concepts Branch, and Dr. K. Sheth, UARC Project Manager, represented NASA at the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NGATS) day held in March in Washington D.C. The event was sponsored by the leadership of the House Committee on Science/Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, the House Committee on Transportation and the Infrastructure/Subcommittee on Aviation.

While in Washington D.C., Dr. Sridhar and Dr. Sheth briefed the Honorable Norman Mineta, Secretary of Transportation, on the NASA Ames FACET (Future ATM(Air Traffic Management) Concepts Evaluation Tool). FACET is a simulation and analysis tool developed at NASA Ames Research Center for exploration, development, and evaluation of advanced ATM concepts. These concepts include advanced Traffic Flow Management algorithms, Distributed Air/Ground Traffic Management, and novel decision support tools for controllers working within the operational procedures of the existing air traffic control system. FACET models air traffic operations for the National Airspace System (NAS). Its architecture strikes a balance between flexibility and fidelity, which enables FACET to model airspace operations at the U.S. national level, and processes over 50,000 aircraft for a day on a single desktop computer running any of a wide variety of operating systems. It has been designed with a modular software architecture to facilitate rapid prototyping of diverse ATM concepts.

FACET-Flight Explorer Operationally Deployed

Under a non-exclusive licensing agreement, NASA's Future ATM Concepts Evaluation Tool (FACET) has been integrated and operationally deployed with Flight Dimension International's Flight Explorer (FE) product. FE is the “world's leading aircraft situation display” with an installed base of over 5,000 systems. The first two FACET features that are available for commercial use, as part of FE 6.0, are the sector and airport demand overlays that alert airspace users to forecasted demand/capacity imbalances. With this new information, airspace users will be able to develop better flight routing strategies that save fuel and reduce passenger delays. In future releases of FE, additional FACET capabilities, such as the wind optimal route generation functionality, will be incorporated into FE and made available for commercial use.

The enhancement and maintenance of FACET is provided by UCSC.

Cun-Zheng Ning

November 2005

Research by UARC scientist Cun-Zheng Ning on his work in designing the first sub-wavelength mirror than can bend light at an angle sharper than 90 degrees was cited in a news article published by the Institute of Physics' Optics.Org, http://optics.org/articles/news/11/11/18/1.

Presentations from UARC Seminars

October 12, 2005

UCSC Professors discussed their aligned NASA research in Aerospace, Information Technology, Biotechnology, Robotics/Sensors, Space Science, and Nanoscience.

Presentations from STI Seminars

For more information, see STI Seminar Series Information & Materials.

December 7, 2005
“Aeronautic & Information technology Seminar, Air Traffic Management Concepts in Aerospace Systems.”

August 25, 2005
Computing Language? Develop speech recognition tools for autronauts.

May 18, 2005
Bio-Nanotechnology: How is life science shaping nanotechnologoy?

November 18, 2004
Funding Your Research. Finding external funding to grow your research: Grant writing and funder identification.

September 30, 2004
Intellectual property, invention, disclosure and technology transfer: What students should know.

Ronald Mak

May 2004

UARC senior computer scientist Ronald Mak gave a keynote address to several thousand attendees at the BEA eWorld Conference in San Francisco on May 24, 2004. He presented his work as the architect and lead developer of the middleware for the Collaborative Information Portal, a key enterprise software system used by NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission. After over two years of continuous operation, this middleware has maintained an uptime record of better than 99.9%, and Ron described some of the software engineering principles he employed to achieve such high reliability.