Research Institute for Safety and Security in Transportation

Director: Professor Colin Drury

Location: 435 Bell Hall

Website: http://www.eng.buffalo.edu/Research/RISST/

The mission of this center is to improve maintenance and inspection of aircraft through research that combines human factors and technical expertise. We have over 15 years of research and development leadership in aviation inspection and maintenance human factors. Our successful innovation in cooperation with major airline research partners has assisted the FAA, through the Office of Aviation Medicine and Sandia National Laboratories. Close links are maintained to quality assurance and maintenance in other manufacturing and transportation industries. Cooperation is close with other innovative resources, such as the Center of Multisource Information Fusion (CMIF). The center has an established research laboratory in 435 Bell Hall.

Center for Excellence in Global Enterprise Management

Interim Director: Professor Li Lin

Location: 436 Bell Hall

Website: http://wings.buffalo.edu/gemc/

The Center for Excellence in Global Enterprise Management (GEM) was established in 1998 to deliver leading-edge research, driven by industrial need, with results that have immediate practical impact. During the process, GEM also delivers technology know-how that enables enterprises to not only benefit from the improvement of their operations, but also manage the improvements with the necessary knowledge and skills. The combination of the core competencies leveraged in such academic disciplines as engineering, management, computer science, etc., through the GEM center and the functional competencies of its enterprise partners form win-win strategic relationships.

GEM provides an arena for collaborative efforts leading to frontier academic research and high-impact industrial developments in both fundamental research with a long-term impact and applied work with significant near-term impact. Joint industrial and academic ventures include e-business, supply chain management, and traditional manufacturing system design that will forge the charter for this new millennium's approach to synergistic Big-M Manufacturing, covering all aspects of enterprise management.

Past projects have included assistance in the design of manufacturing facilities at American Axle and Delphi Harrison automotive facilities, activities to identify appropriate e-business approaches in automobile manufacturing, as well as supply-chain management projects at Lockheed Martin and General Motors. To date, approximately ten ISE graduate students and five ISE faculty have participated in projects through this center. The center has an established research laboratory in 342 Bell Hall.

Center for Multisource Information Fusion

Director: Professor James Llinas

Location: 339 Bell Hall

Website: http://www.infofusion.buffalo.edu/

The Center for Multisource Information Fusion (CMIF) is a joint government+industry+university initiative originally created through an Air Force-sponsored contract to the Calspan-University at Buffalo Research Center (CUBRC) in October of 1996. The specific original USAF sponsors were Rome Laboratory (Rome, NY) and Wright Laboratory (Dayton, OH), who shared equally in the center's support. While the contract was purposefully implemented through CUBRC (in part to allow for occasional research opportunities involving classified information), the bulk of the (unclassified) work at present is occurring at the University at Buffalo (UB). The center's research focus is on basic and applied research in multiple-source information processing environments, such as in multiple-sensor or multiply-instrumented systems. Such environments occur frequently in defense applications for advanced surveillance and reconnaissance systems but also in robotics, civil infrastructure systems, medical monitoring systems, intrusion detection systems, intelligent transportation systems, and in environmental monitoring applications, among others.

While the initial focus has necessarily been on Air Force and defense-type problems, this highly multidisciplinary technology is broadly applicable to many problems as mentioned above, and the center is in fact conducting research in "Condition-Based Maintenance" with Penn State, and in "Multi-Spectral Mammography" for the National Institutes of Health. In addition to three baseline tasks started under the initial CUBRC grant, CMIF has received numerous additional grants since its inception, sponsored the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research, the Army, and the National Security Agency, among others. Industrial partners are also being cultivated, and the center has just signed a nondisclosure agreement with Lockheed-Martin Corporation, is exploring possibilities with Sterling Software, and has already received funding from Boeing. The center's activities of course fluctuate over time, and student support has ranged from about four to thirteen students and faculty support from three to seven faculty members. The center has an established research laboratory in 421 Bell Hall.

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