How Purdue College Commercializes Its Analysis

For Yung-Hsiang Lu, enhancing the power effectivity of pc know-how to offer real-world advantages has been a lifelong focus.

“After I was studying knowledge buildings, I started to see issues from a distinct viewpoint—methods to make issues environment friendly,” says Lu, a professor {of electrical} and pc engineering and a college college scholar at Purdue University’s Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, in West Lafayette, Ind.

The IEEE Fellow’s analysis focuses on creating energy-efficient computing methods. Improved effectivity is more and more important for duties like pc imaginative and prescient and imaging actions. It’s notably important the place battery weight, dimension, and capability is a valuable useful resource, reminiscent of in small and cell gadgets like distributed sensor networks, autonomous robots, wi-fi communication, and real-time methods.

Over the previous a number of years, his analysis has included amassing and analyzing knowledge from networked cameras in department shops, optimizing how they place their merchandise, and assessing COVID-19 lockdown compliance based mostly on multinational digicam knowledge.

Lu can be guiding the subsequent era of researchers—each graduate and undergraduate college students.

“I used to assume I simply wished to write down analysis papers,” Lu says. However after a number of of his college students gained the 2014 Schurz Innovation Challenge at Purdue, the place college students introduced ideas for Net and cell purposes, Lu says he wished to assist college students go from “analysis to know-how switch and commercialization. I need to see analysis outcomes get utilized in the true world.

“I nonetheless do analysis, in fact,” Lu notes. “In actual fact, I acquired three analysis grants final yr.”

Lu was impressed to conduct analysis in enhancing effectivity when he was an undergraduate pupil on the National Taiwan University, in Taipei, the place his research included programs in algorithms and knowledge buildings.

“Algorithms are very relevant to actual life,” he explains. “I exploit them each morning to determine how I need to set up my day.”

After incomes his bachelor’s diploma in electrical engineering from the varsity in 1992, Lu went on to obtain a grasp’s diploma in EE in 1996 and a Ph.D. in EE in 2002, each from Stanford.

Lu has additionally written a number of books. His Intermediate C Programming (CRC Press, 2015) covers programming ideas, debugging, and the connection between programming and discrete arithmetic. He additionally coedited Low-Power Computer Vision: Improve the Efficiency of Artificial Intelligence (Chapman and Corridor/CRC, 2022), which collected strategies for enhancing power effectivity for pc imaginative and prescient on battery-powered methods.

All through the previous decade Lu’s focus has been more and more increasing past conducting analysis to incorporate educating real-world-relevant objectives, serving to college students commercialize their applied sciences, and studying methods to begin and develop firms. He says he realized that he “wished to assist transfer our discoveries within the lab out to the world for impression by means of patents and know-how switch commercialization alternatives.

“For the 2014 Schurz competitors, I’d given some recommendations to assist the scholars develop the enterprise plans and win the competitors, after which helped them pursue commercialization, together with creating SBIR [Small Business Innovation Research] proposals,” he says.

In 2015, Lu turned a principal investigator for the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program, which helps NSF-supported professors perceive the industrial worth of their analysis.

That very same yr, Lu helped begin the now-international IEEE Low-Power Computer Vision Challenge, an annual competitors that goals to enhance the power effectivity of pc imaginative and prescient (CV) for working on methods with stringent useful resource constraints. Pc imaginative and prescient, Lu says, “stays one of many grand challenges in AI. Up to now, the competitors has acquired greater than 500 options for CV issues from over 100 groups around the globe.”

Lu additionally helps undergraduates conduct analysis in relation to real-world issues by means of his involvement in Purdue’s Vertically Integrated Projects (VIP) program. For his work, Lu acquired the 2019 Outstanding VIP-Based Entrepreneur Award.

He has additionally been concerned in a number of know-how problem occasions. He is among the organizers of this yr’s IEEE Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) Competition, which challenges groups to see which of their UAVs can efficiently observe a shifting goal with out a teleoperator.

Lu was appointed the inaugural director of Purdue’s John Martinson Entrepreneurial Center in 2020—which, Lu factors out, is considered one of many entrepreneurial applications and actions at Purdue.

One vital remark Lu says he made in the course of the NSF I-Corps program is that “the issues individuals in the true world face will not be those we at universities imagined.” He says it’s vital for researchers to speak with individuals outdoors of academia as a result of “they have a look at issues in another way.”

Lu additionally encourages college students to attempt to become involved in a challenge that lasts a couple of semester and for professors to offer these alternatives.

“If you find yourself engaged on a one-semester challenge, it’s so quick you don’t take into consideration penalties for dangerous choices,” he says. “If you’re in a challenge for one yr, loads of dangerous choices will come again and harm you, which you study from.”