UA Translates A.I. Into Business

Everything is alive in Craig Thompson’s world.

The light switch. The shrubbery. The ladybug-looking robots roaming the halls of the University of Arkansas’ College of Engineering. They can all talk to him, and to each other. No, he’s not nuts, and this isn’t science fiction.

The professor and Acxiom Database Chair in Engineering of the Computer Science & Computer Engineering Department, Thompson is working on turning artificial intelligence (AI) into practical applications. It’s one example of how the UA is working to transfer technology from the research world to the commercial one.

“I saw a funny headline about 15 years ago in the Weekly World News tabloid that said, ‘Heaven is full,'” Thompson said. “Well, now I sort of tell my students the same thing. The world is filling up with data. Only 100 years ago, we hardly recorded anything about a person. We were lucky to know they lived and died.

“Now, we’re in the age where everything is recorded, and we work on ideas about what the world will be like in 10 years when computing has really left the desktop and moved into the real world.”

Computer engineering is not the college’s traditional stock-in-trade. But it’s exactly the kind of burgeoning technology that’s key to UA Chancellor John White’s mission of making the school a top-tier research university.

The UA could be the birthplace of sprinkler systems that interact with sensors, or “agents” in flower beds, and verbal or digital weather reports to decide whether or not to water. Imagine having the ability to say, “OK, light switch, turn off. OK, temperature, set to 65,” and the room going dim and cool.

Quantifying the commercial markets for pervasive computing is nearly as unfathomable as another scenario that’s closer than most think — grid computing, or a white-hot emerging technology centered on megadatabases so large they must be housed on hundreds or thousands of servers. Applications could include elaborate supply-chain management systems for retailers or something that’s peaked the interest of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — building what Thompson calls a “Fort Knox of digital data,” a seamless information-sharing architecture across the nation’s 22 traditional federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

“There’s great opportunities and great threats,” Thompson said. “We want to make sure we make the most of information, it’s what makes the world go around. But at the same time we have a responsibility to not infringe on civil liberties.”

IBM Inc., Oracle Corp., Microsoft Corp. and other major vendors are all interested in grid computing strategies like the ones being developed at the UA.

Thompson’s research team, which includes four professors and both graduate and undergraduate students, is primarily focused on “middleware.” It’s that software that’s sandwiched between end-user applications and computer operating systems. Middleware is basically a collection of reusable chunks of software, that when combined, can build higher level applications such as grid computing.

At the other end of the middleware spectrum, the UA computer engineering team is working on building software agents that will enable people, trees, vehicles, computers or really any objects to interact. The team is creating “plug-ins” or reusable services and helping develop natural language interfaces (NLIs). Those high-tech tools could, for instance, enable a truck to back up to a loading dock where a worker or machine either communicates with the vehicle digitally or even by speaking English.

He also hopes to help develop Web pages with NLI menus that can make Internet connectivity not only wireless but hands free.

Thompson, 54, spent 23 years doing industrial research before returning to academia. He holds six patents related to NLI and object database and middleware technologies.

Thompson was on the team at Texas Instruments that made scientific and complex math calculators an early 1980s sensation and has worked extensively with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

College of Change

Ashok Saxena, dean of the engineering college, said the quality and quantity of research being done by Thompson and others is changing the school. Upon his arrival last summer, Saxena established new goals, and early data already shows the college is chasing the chancellor’s mission.

For the first time ever, this year U.S. News and World Report ranked two UA College of Engineering graduate programs — civil and industrial engineering — among the best in America. They were ranked No. 30 and No. 65, respectively, overall by the 185 universities that responded to the survey.

The number of engineering doctoral degrees awarded is up 36 percent year-over-year, and the number of entering freshman with an ACT score of 30 or higher is up 44 percent.

“Dr. Thompson is a good example of what’s going on here,” Saxena said. “He’s a very special individual who has started companies and has a lot of experience in the business world. At the same time, he’s kept one foot on the research side. It’s exciting to see the potential we have because of the quality of our faculty and students.”

Saxena said he has identified five sectors with tremendous commercial potential that the college will target for research: homeland security, nanotechnology and nanoscience, microelectronics and photonics, biomedical engineering and environmental engineering.

“One of the best ways we can get the university’s intellectual property into the commercial domain is to have the faculty be involved with more startups at the Genesis Technology Incubator,” Saxena said. “We’re also talking to the Walton College of Business about starting a program that will allow Ph.D. engineering students to get a minor in entrepreneurship.”

The Next Step

Bob Friedman, director of Genesis, which is housed at the UA Engineering Research Center in Fayetteville, said academic research on campus is spawning more high-tech and engineering-based startups than ever. The number of Genesis clients has more than doubled since 2000 (see chart) and the number of their employees have almost doubled.

He cited Genesis graduate Process Dynamics Inc., maturing TrestleTree Inc. and federal grant phenom Arkansas Power Electronics Inc. as companies that are transferring technology into business.

“We’re getting companies in here that are winning jobs and Small Business Innovation Research backing,” Friedman said. “The guys in government are saying, we want technologies that are commercial. Genesis offers a good starting point, and the firms with some commercial ambiance are attracting attention. Of course, Dr. Saxena is world renowned in his field and he’s bringing a lot of interest, too.”

Thompson said although it will be years before much of these new technologies are brought to bear on the market, getting engineering students involved right now is the key to building tomorrow’s companies. He envisions the UA as a factory of learning that can crank out knowledge-based businesses by spawning entrepreneurism in its students.

“Taking an integrated approach, working with industry to improve Northwest Arkansas is what our college should be doing,” Thompson said. “There’s more than just book learning to be done, and getting students involved in hands-on research energizes them and makes them better prepared for the business world.

“We have to do things like not just segregate certain material to one course, but to teach students how it applies across the board. Problems in the real world have a nasty habit of spanning multiple subjects, and that’s what we’re preparing them for.”

Genesis of Growth

The Genesis Technology Incubator at the University of Arkansas’ Engineering Research Center in Fayetteville has more than doubled its number of clients in the last four years plus graduated five additional firms that are not listed.

2000

No. — Company — Employees

1 — Global Concepts Inc. — 12
2 — Challenge Environmental Laboratories LLC — 9
3 — Space Photonics Inc. — 8
4 — Process Dynamics Inc. — 7
5 — Integral Wave Technologies (formerly AMDC) — 6
6 — Waylink Systems Corp. — 3
7 — Arkansas Power Electronics International Inc. — 2
8 — John Gilmour Inc. — 2
9 — Advanced Visual Systems — 1

Total — 50

2004

No. — Company — Employees

1 — Global Concepts — 12
2 — Cal-Zark — 11
3 — Challenge Environmental Group — 10
4 — Space Photonics Inc. — 9
5 — Integral Wave Technologies — 8
6 — NN Labs — 8
7 — Arkansas Power Electronics — 5
8 — Arkansas Manufacturing Extension Network — 3
9 — Lynguent — 3
10 — Moducell — 3
11 — Moments — 3
12 — Nano Labs — 3
13 — Waylink Systems Corp. — 3
14 — Agricultural Research Incentives (ARI) — 2
15 — Arkansas Capital Corporation Group — 2
16 — Logical Dynamics — 2
17 — NanoMech — 2
18 — Xanodics — 2
19 — Small Business Association — 1

Total — 92

Source: Genesis Technology Incubator