NSF Award
2113870
The global economic impact of Global Positioning System (GPS) use is estimated at ~$1B/day. GPS and resulting geospatial location information (i.e., georeferencing) serves a diverse ecosystem of companies across the spectrum of users including manufacturers, system integrators, service providers, and end users. It is a technology that has exploded in recent decades with the private sector superseding the historic dominance of U.S. federal agencies in geospatial technology development and deployment. However, this proliferation has revealed vulnerabilities due rapidly advancing technology and data analytics for both commercial and government entities. The resulting evolution and fragmentation of geospatial technologies has precipitated a need for strategic investment in foundational elements related to GPS and georeferencing. To address this issue, funding is being provided for The Ohio State University, Purdue University, and Saint Louis University to explore the formation of a three-Site industry-university cooperative research center: The Center for Accurate Georeferencing of the Environment (CAGE). The Center will generate and disseminate new foundational knowledge in three interrelated areas of potential strong interest to prospective Members. These include foundational research on GPS-based and alternative AI-based navigation and mapping technologies to advance geospatial data referencing platforms upon which commercial innovation depends; refine and work with industry to codify and adopt geospatial data standards and best practices for functions such as acquisition of multi-sensor/multi-platform/multi-temporal geospatial data such that diverse members will be able to build interoperable systems; and develop new AI-based methods for the reconstruction and labelling of physical locations/object space from diverse geospatial data will unlock significant potential for geospatial data analytics. Through a Center planning meeting, The Ohio State University, Purdue University, and Saint Louis University faculty and administrators will engage a broad spectrum of public and private entities to identify and discuss collective needs with the goal of creating a viable research roadmap and associated research thrusts in which partners are willing to participate and invest. Topics and potential Center research thrusts will be discussed at the meeting, and those of highest importance to industry will be identified upon which a viable Center can be created. Broader impacts of the work include increased economic productivity and integration of the economic sectors that use or wish to use georeferencing; workforce training where students participate in industry-relevant, basic, pre-competitive research projects proposed by university faculty; the engagement of underrepresented groups via various partnerships with institutional entities focused in recruiting and retraining students from underserved populations; and outreach to the public and K-12. <br/><br/>Industry-university cooperative research centers, like the three-Site Center jointly proposed to be focused on georeferencing in the environment and geospatial techniques and applications by The Ohio State University, Purdue University, and Saint Louis University are powerful partnerships between universities; the private sector; government; non-profits; and local communities. These Centers operate as consortia where university faculty and students perform fundamental research that addresses collective industry and community needs and where projects are funded by membership fees and other financial contributions from Center members. In this construct, the intellectual power; infrastructure; and student talent of universities is focused on real world problems of critical interest of a segment of the economy in need of innovation to overcome conceptual and technological hurdles that individual entities are unable to overcome themselves. The planning meeting proposed will bring together interested parties to hear proto-Center leadership describe the Center’s value proposition and potential return-on-investment of those entities wishing to become members of the Center. Those at the planning meeting will also help the Center create a research road map and research thrusts that best address the most pressing needs of the collective membership in the Center.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
