Dr. Tony McCaffrey presenting his project Innovation Enhancement and Semantic Network Representation in Design

Graduate student Jeffrey McPherson presenting his project Integration of e-Design Ontologies and Methods into Commercial Design Processes

Graduate student Douglas Eddy presenting his project A Semantic Knowledge Management System for Sustainable Product Design

Graduate student Vivek Premkumar presenting his project A Semantic Knowledge Management System for Laminated Composites

Go Cyclones!!

Please read Dr. Anthony McCaffrey’s new blog on the Harvard Business Review. In it, he discusses the appeal of his new innovation tool called Analogy Finder.

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2013/03/your_next_innovation_is_right.html

McCaffrey, last featured here addressing the related matter of “functional fixedness” – the mental block that stops us seeing alternative uses for everyday objects – begins with an observation: most creative breakthroughs arise through analogy. Alexander Graham Bell modelled the telephone on the human ear. A hitch with the Hubble space telescope was fixed when a Nasa engineer taking a shower in a German hotel saw how he might borrow the design of the shower head. Enter the problem you’re trying to solve, and McCaffrey’s “analogy finder” software, already released in initial form, will hunt patent databases, research libraries, et cetera, for analogous solutions. He cites the example of a ski company, beset by a major problem: at high speeds, their skis vibrated, lost contact with the snow and sent skiers out of control.

The key to a solution lies in how you state the problem. You need to strip it of context and colour; more technically, McCaffrey argues, you need to reduce it to a specific form: “verb, noun-phrase, prepositional-phrases”. What the ski firm really needed to do was to “reduce vibrations over 1,800 hertz”. From there, it’s an easier leap from one domain to another: similar vibrations, it turns out, play havoc with violins, causing sound distortion. Violin designers address this by using a metal grid; the ski designers, finding the analogy, adapted it: problem solved.

-Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian

Illustration by Phil Wrigglesworth for the Guardian

For more of this article, visit:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/jan/11/change-your-life-creative-thinking

Dr. Sundar Krishnamurty and Dr. Tony McCaffrey of the University of Massachusetts Center for e-Design, along with Karen Utgoff of the University of Massachusetts, have been granted a 2012 National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps) award. Below is an excerpt from the article on the University of Massachusetts Mechanical and Industrial Engineering news page http://mie.umass.edu/news/krishnamurty-and-collaborators-get-nsf-grant-support-innovation-accelerator.

Sundar Krishnamurty, the director of the Center for e-Design and a professor in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department, leads a multidisciplinary team that received a 2012 National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps, or I-Corps, award. The I-Corps program aims to prepare scientists and engineers to extend their focus beyond the laboratory and broadens the impact of select NSF-funded projects. It is one of 100 awards for this year and the first such grant awarded to UMass Amherst. The project funded by the NSF builds upon a fundamental new way of thinking about innovation, tentatively called an “Innovation Accelerator” (AI), and replaces the minimally successful artificial intelligence techniques from the 1980s that were unable to get machines to be innovative by themselves.

Post-doctoral researcher Tony McCaffrey of the Center for e-Design is the team’s entrepreneurial lead, while Karen Utgoff, a market-oriented strategist, serves as a mentor from the business perspective.

The grant will support the Center for e-Design’s project entitled “Innovation Accelerator: A New Web-based Portal Software Tool to Find Disruptive Innovative Solutions.” The grant is aimed at helping to commercialize a product based on research done at the center: a human-machine synergism in which humans and machines complement each other during the innovation process.

Please read more at: http://mie.umass.edu/news/krishnamurty-and-collaborators-get-nsf-grant-support-innovation-accelerator

This year’s October IAB Meeting was a great success. Growth of the Center for e-Design was on full display; faculty and students from the participating universities met with representatives from the partner-industries. Students were able to collect feedback from industry partners that would help them tailor their projects to address real-world problems, and industry partners were able to view projects from other universities in the Center.

Vivek Premkumar, Doug Eddy, and Jeffrey McPherson, three of the students who represented the University of Massachusetts Amherst at the meeting, are pictured below standing next to their project posters.

Vivek Premkumar presenting his project “A Semantic
Knowledge Management System for Laminated
Composites”

Doug Eddy presenting his project “A Semantic
Knowledge Management System for Sustainable
Product Design”

Jeffrey McPherson presenting his project
“Integration of e-Design Ontologies and Methods
into Commercial Design Processes“

Semantic Awareness in Product Lifecycle Management Systems

Large enterprises turn to Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems to organize product development and to reduce time to market. Semantic awareness has the potential to enrich PLM systems, yet semantic functionality has not gone mainstream. The goal of this research was to discover the barriers to and opportunities for adopting semantic functionality. A case study was preformed with a widely used PLM system (PTC’s Windchill), in which the PLM system was used to help with the design and fabrication of a product. Windchill’s functionality and limitations were observed as the product was realized. It was observed that simple and intuitive features trump cluttered or complex ones. Additionally, users are more likely to use a simple feature which can easily be understood rather than a confusing or obscure feature, no matter how great the potential gain. These findings suggest that usability is crucial to new software features in general, but especially to the adoption of new semantic functionality in PLM systems.

Feature-Based CAD Interoperability- Ryan Szeto

Accurate and efficient feature data exchange between computer-aided design (CAD) systems is critical in collaborative engineering environments. This research applies concepts of computer science to an engineering problem; specifically, it explores the advantages of a programming language approach to the exchange of feature information between commercial CAD systems. In our approach, feature-based representations of CAD models correspond to programs or abstract syntax trees (ASTs) in the language modeling the CAD systems. Previously, a software tool was created to convert some 2D features from a Pro/Engineer part file to a SolidWorks part file through intermediary open XML representations. This summer, the functionality of this tool was extended by completely converting additional 2D features such as arcs, constraints, and angle dimensions. Additionally, work was done toward implementing a converter from SolidWorks to Pro/E.

Siemens has been recognized by the University of Massachusetts College of Engineering for their generous software grant to the Center for e-Design. The article from the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering news page can be seen below.

University of Massachusetts Amherst Receives In-kind Software Grant from Siemens PLM Software with a Commercial Value of Nearly $2.3 Million

The University of Massachusetts Amherst Center for e-Design in the College of Engineering announced today that it has received an in-kind software grant fromSiemens PLM Software, a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) software and services, with a commercial value of nearly $2.3 million. The grant was provided by Siemens PLM Software’s Global Opportunities in PLM (GO PLM™ initiative), a program that delivers PLM technology to more than one million students yearly at more than 11,000 global institutions, where it is used at every academic level – from grade schools to graduate engineering research programs.

The grant includes Teamcenter® software, the world’s most widely used digital lifecycle management system, and NX™ software, a leading integrated solution for computer-aided design, manufacturing, and engineering (CAD/CAM/CAE).

The UMass Amherst Center for e-Design is a National Science Foundation supported Industry/University Cooperative Research Center, whose mission is to serve as a nucleus of excellence for the creation and dissemination of a systematic body of knowledge in intelligent e-design and product realization.

By using the software in their classrooms, UMass Amherst students will work with the same technology that leading global companies and professional engineers around the world depend on every day. This, in turn, enables students to position themselves as heavily-recruited graduates as the need for workers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields continues to grow.

“The UMass Amherst College of Engineering is most grateful to Siemens PLM Software for this generous grant of advanced engineering software, as it enables our students to better prepare for successful engineering careers,” said UMass Amherst College of Engineering Dean Ted Djaferis. “By using this technology in the Center for e-Design, our students will now be working with the same tools used by industry experts and gaining important real-world experience during their studies.”

“Partnering with the Center for e-Design once again is certainly a benefit for us because it enables us to have a part in tomorrow’s innovations and work with top design talent,” said Bill Boswell, senior director, partner strategy, Siemens PLM Software. “As product complexity continues to grow, students who are able to use PLM technology are expected to be highly recruited upon graduation. UMass Amherst is educating the next generation of engineers and to be part of that effort enables us to support the country’s endeavors to revitalize manufacturing.”

Of note, the grant continues a long association between the Center for e-Design and Vistagy, Inc., which was purchased in the fall of 2011 by Siemens PLM Software and is now the Specialized Engineering Software business segment of Siemens PLM Software. In 2009 and 2010, Vistagy, co-founded by university alumni Steve Luby (B.S. ’84, M.S. ’86) and Ralph Verrilli (B.S. ’85, M.S. ’87), granted software licenses for the company’s Fibersim^™ portfolio that is used for composites engineering, a very sophisticated and specific piece of software which is integrated into popular 3D  (CAD) systems.

“This ongoing partnership with Siemens PLM Software is going to help our center move forward,” explained Sundar Krishnamurty, professor of  Mechanical and Industrial Engineering and site-director of the UMass Amherst Center for e-Design. “It’s also going to allow us to extend our work to a multitude of platforms, which is exactly what we were looking for when we started the Center for e-Design. This generous grant from Siemens gives us a unique opportunity to showcase the design framework we are developing and build relationships with technology developers like Siemens PLM Software and technology end users, such as the customers of Raytheon. It also enables us to showcase our work to the eight universities that are members of the Center for e-Design plus about 30 industrial partners we work with frequently.” (July 2012)

Taken from: http://mie.umass.edu/news/university-massachusetts-amherst-receives-kind-software-grant-siemens-plm-software-with-commerc

Scientific American Mind Article

McCaffrey is a cognitive psychology researcher who has studied common roadblocks to problem-solving. He recently won a two-year, $170,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to turn his technique into software with a user-friendly graphical interface. Initial users will likely be engineers.

Article taken from http://mie.umass.edu/news/mccaffrey-featured-atlantic 

Please read the full article by following the link.