Summer Institutes and being an Alpha Geek

While it's been longer than I realized since my last post. Part of the delay was the usual end of the semester scrambling, but also much more exciting event our first mini Summer Institute On emergency informatics at Disaster City. A Summer Institute as created by David Woods at Ohio State is and amazing innovation workshop, where the various stakeholders in a system -- in this case academics responders, agencies, and industry, give together to learn each other's language, conduct hands-on missions, and participate in envisioning exercises. We had 35 participants from TEES, TEEX, and our academic and industry partners. Faculty from 5 engineering departments (CE, CSE, ECE, ME, and ENTC) plus Architecture participated along with Carnegie Mellon, Ohio State, and TAMU Corpus Christi. TCAT led the industry affiliates program discussion- attended by 4 industries (Lockheed Martin, AirRobot, SA Technologies, and Velodyne), and the US Army Research Lab. One major outcome was a model of information flow and structural inspection tasks-- none of this had any idea how much rescue, recovery and reentry hinges on the structural specialist, building inspectors, insurance adjusters, and contractors. Look for a publication with the model soon!

But the other big news is that Damon Tabor at WIRED did a short piece on us under the Alpha Geek heading. Click the title to see. Nice job- he spent over a year on it, we had wanted him to embed with us but couldn't work it out.