Industry and Academia Connect at the ISR Research Forum

This spring saw the re-launch of the ISR Research Forum, a one-day event designed to encourage industry-academia interactions, collaborative research, and technology transition.  Revamped with a new format featuring an ‘open house’ and quick 20 minute faculty research talks, the 2012 Forum was an enthusiastic success! 

Industry attendees were drawn from a wide range of companies – from commercial software development, to consulting firms, to defense contractors and FFRDCs – including Boeing, Emida, Google, Health Focus, IBM, InfoLogic, JPL, MSC Software, Northrop Grumman, Samsung, The Aerospace Corporation, and more.  

The program featured eight faculty talks providing an introduction to research of strategic import to industry.  Topics included: the COAST architectural style, Computer Games and Virtual Worlds, Runtime Bloat Analysis, Federations, Architectural Degradation, Software Sketching and Early Design, Socio-technical Dependencies and Software Architecture, and Managing Digital Information in the Workplace.  

The clear-cut hit of the day was the open house, new this year.  Attendees were able to visit faculty research labs in multiple buildings, view research demonstrations in an interactive environment, and engage students and researchers directly as they presented their work via posters.  

Prof. André van der Hoek remarked: “The Open House was a highlight, with up-close and personal interactions between ISR students and faculty and attendees about our research and its potential in industry.  It was particularly gratifying to see attendees try out the Calico whiteboard sketching software and the Code Orb themselves, showing we just may be reaching ISR’s objective of producing research of importance to industry and that can be transitioned to actual use.”

The event closed with an engaging keynote talk on “Model-based Development of High-Assurance Dynamically Adaptive Systems” by guest speaker Prof. Betty H.C. Cheng of Michigan State University. 

For more information, including presenters’ slides and a video of the keynote, visit the 2012 Forum website.