MIME-Version: 1.0 Server: CERN/3.0pre6 Date: Monday, 25-Nov-96 00:29:01 GMT Content-Type: text/html Content-Length: 15361 Last-Modified: Thursday, 22-Feb-96 16:22:13 GMT About the Design Research Institute

Design Research Institute

Overview

The Design Research Institute is an organization of collaborating industry and academic scientists and engineers devoted to research bringing computer science and computation technology to bear on problems of engineering design.

DRI was established in 1990 by Cornell University and Xerox Corporation and is located in the Center for Theory and Simulation in Science and Engineering on the Cornell campus in Ithaca, New York.

The Institute was founded on the principle that American research universities represent a major resource that can and should be employed in America's effort to improve its industrial global competitiveness.

At present, five Xerox scientists form the nucleus of DRI, collaborating in research with Cornell faculty, students, post-doctoral fellows, and visiting scientists in the College of Engineering. Research problems are motivated by industry but solved through the pooled talents and expertise of the combined DRI community. It is anticipated that additional companies and Cornell units will participate as the Institute grows.

The DRI mission is Pace to Product, that is, to develop technologies and methodologies for accelerating the design and engineering of technology-based products. DRI research currently encompasses three themes:

Since the issues of engineering productivity addressed by DRI are of concern to much of American industry, a goal is to secure federal or other outside funding to support the Cornell associates of DRI. Industry staff are supported by their companies.

Most DRI research is non-proprietary. Software prototypes are implemented to demonstrate concepts and show feasibility, and results are published in technical reports and journals. As appropriate, technology is expected to be freely transferred into partner companies.

DRI Partners

The Design Research Institute is a partnership of industry, academia, and government.

Industry. Corporations can participate in the Institute by engaging in the research of DRI, generally by establishing groups of research scientists and engineers on campus. Companies take the lead in setting the research agenda and have access to the research results of all of DRI.

Academia. Cornell University is the host institution for the Design Research Institute. Faculty, staff, and students in the College of Engineering work closely with industry scientists in collaborative research. DRI offices and laboratories are located in the Center for Theory and Simulation in Science and Engineering and in the Department of Computer Science, and collaboration extends to the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Theoretical and Applied Mechanics. Future involvement is expected in other units of the College of Engineering as well as the School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the Johnson School of Management.

Government. It is anticipated that government or other external organizations will fund part of the research of DRI since the research goal of the Institute is to develop technologies that will enhance the competitiveness of all of American industry. Such funding will support Cornell affiliated staff, not industry staff.

Mission: Accelerating the Pace of Product Development

The research mission of the Design Research Institute is to develop technologies and methodologies for increasing the pace of development of technology-based products such as aircraft, computing and communications equipment, automobiles, machine tools, office equipment, and composite materials.

DRI research is expected to lead ultimately to shorter product development cycles. This focus on the time element of engineering reflects the importance of time to market in today's global competitive environment.

Research projects seek to leverage massive computation, multimedia, networks, and heterogeneous database technologies to enable more effective engineering by both individuals and work groups.

Three themes form the heart of the DRI research agenda: information capture and access, computational prototyping, and collaboration technology. Research in these areas is directed toward facilitating more effective engineering decision-making and developing means to eliminate or accelerate engineering tasks.

Information Capture and Access

One goal of DRI is to develop technologies for an enriched information and document environment that enables increased worker productivity in project-oriented tasks, especially that of engineering design.

DRI research in information capture and access involves a multitude of technologies: distributed databases and persistent object storage, document image processing and management, multimedia and user interface technology, information science for heterogeneous data, and knowledge representation and organization.

A centerpiece for this work is a vision of a Corporate Memory of Design, a distributed collection of all the information pertaining to product development: documents, drawings, schedules, catalogs, field service records, minutes of meetings, records of decisions, and histories of past projects.

Initial contents of the DRI prototype Corporate Memory will be engineering reports in scanned and synthetic document form, engineering drawings, photographs of engineers along with records of their areas of expertise and project assignments, and computational prototyping programs, complete with documentation and sample visualization output. The Corporate Memory will not be centralized, but rather will be spread across many computers in many sites linked by network. It will be closely integrated with public information sources such as electronic libraries and national online databases.

The Corporate Memory will support a wide variety of uses through specialized interfaces tailored to various applications. For example, an engineer may receive automatic notification of any engineering change on his project by electronic mail. A manager may have a permanent project status window on his or her workstation refreshed by a program that continuously queries the Memory for schedule references. A departmental document scanner may automatically file in the Memory all documents pertinent to a particular project. Parametric design programs may sift through previous designs for best matches to new requirements.

The application-specific clients of the Memory will all share a layer of intelligent access capabilities such as near-miss querying, browsing, natural language interfaces, and self-organization of the content of the Memory.

An information capture and access testbed is now being implemented. It is based on several existing information and document systems ranging from an electronic notebook system to network document and database access systems to information filters and interfaces. These systems will be integrated into a unified environment supporting experiments with and development of enabling technologies for the Corporate Memory.

Computational Prototyping

Computational prototyping involves the simulation by computer of complex physical systems and visual display of their behavior to engineers. This process, enabled by high-speed network access to supercomputers, high-performance graphics workstations, scientific visualization technology, and new parallel computing algorithms, will replace some of the time consuming building of hardware prototypes with interactive design at the workstation.

Successful simulations have to date been achieved in several key physical domains, including flow of fluid and heat in a thermal ink jet print-head, free surface ejection of a droplet from an acoustically excited pool of liquid, electrostatic interactions of toner particles in a xerographic development system, lubricant flow in bearings, and charge transport in semiconductors. New methods have been developed to solve these problems on supercomputers. Ultimately the simulations will run fast enough for interactive use by engineers.

An emerging focus area in Computational Prototyping is Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems. In collaboration with departments of Electrical Engineering and Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, computational tools are being developed that will lead to an improved understanding of MEMS electromechanical behaviors. Specific areas of research include reliability and failure modes in these structures, as well as techniques for sensitivity analysis and optimal design of MEMS. This project is being funded by the NSF's MEMS program.

A research goal is to develop a flexible, powerful, yet friendly environment supplying computational and graphics resources that enable an engineer to employ simulation as an everyday design tool. The DRI vision is of an integrated environment providing easy-to-use simulation and visualization capabilities for engineers at Xerox and other partner companies driven by Cornell supercomputers. Intelligent browsing capability and online documentation are key components of the vision.

Building toward this goal is Protolab, a computing environment for engineering simulation featuring automatic generation of simulation programs from high-leVel descriptions and an object oriented library of models and methods. A research proposal on the development of Protolab, submitted jointly with General Electric and Cornell Computer Science, has been selected as a potential funding candidate by ARPA.

Collaboration Technology

The Design Research Institute recognizes that the way engineers work together as a team is as important as their individual contributions. Thus collaboration technology forms the third component of the DRI research agenda. DRI activities in this area are in providing shared access to objects in the Corporate Memory and in enabling effective communication among engineers. Toward the latter, a cooperative engineering environment is under development featuring structured dialog among members of a team to facilitate resolution of engineering changes during product design.

Research in this area is just beginning, but is expected to grow to involve analysis of engineering processes and development of additional tools to facilitate collaboration. Of special interest is enabling effective teamwork among engineers separated by several time zones.

Corporate Participation

Companies joining the Institute typically will participate by locating research staff on campus. In the case of Xerox, the founding partner, a group of seven scientists within the Corporate Research Group was permanently established at Cornell. Xerox provides to Cornell a yearly grant which offsets the cost of its offices and support services.

Corporate partners benefit from participation in DRI in several ways.

The companies leverage both their intellectual investment and their financial investment through participation in collaborative research with university faculty and students as well as scientists from other partner companies. Government or other external funding is expected to support the Cornell affiliates.

Through on-site collaboration, partner companies have direct involvement in establishing the research agenda of the Institute. Problems can be drawn from an industrial context and distilled into fundamental research questions. This approach provides a new scale and perspective that is unusual in academic research, but which promises exceptional synergy.

Partner companies also have convenient first access to research developments in DRI, including research involving scientists from other companies. There are many avenues of technology transfer, including joint projects with off-campus company units and hosting of visiting scientists on campus.

Intellectual Property Rights

Most research in the Design Research Institute is intended to be open and non-proprietary. Results will be available for use by partner companies as developed and will be published in scientific journals as appropriate.

To cover ownership rights to inventions deriving from current DRI research, an intellectual property rights agreement has been reached in principle between Cornell and Xerox. It provides that rights to inventions of a Xerox employee shall be covered by standard Xerox policy and that rights to inventions of a Cornell employee shall be covered by standard Cornell policy. In the case of a joint invention by Xerox and Cornell employees, rights shall be jointly owned. Joint ownership generally implies that each party has the right to use or license the invention independently as either party wishes. In the case of DRI, joint ownership has been redefined by the parties for the mutual benefit of both parties.

When additional corporate partners join DRI the issue of intellectual property rights will be revisited, but it is expected that agreements developed to cover the new partners will be similar to the Xerox-Cornell model.

Steering Committee and Institute Organization

Policy for the Institute is established by a Steering Committee, whose membership includes representatives of Cornell and each of the partner companies. At present the committee consists of three Cornell members and five Xerox members.

When additional corporate partners join DRI, an Institute office will be created to augment the offices of the individual companies. A director is expected to be named at that time. Until then, Cornell and Xerox are sharing in the administration of DRI.

As the Institute grows, it is envisioned to include separate branches focusing on key areas of DRI research. The branches will engage various units of Cornell, and partner companies and government agencies may participate in any or all of the branches as they choose.


Design Research Institute
502 Engineering and Theory Center
Cornell University
Ithaca NY 14853-3801
607-255-4933