Davis, Yu, Subrahmanian finalists at Invention of the Year Awards

Three ISR-affiliated faculty members were finalists for the 2011 University of Maryland Invention of the Year Award. The awards are presented annually by the University of Maryland Office of Technology Commercialization to honor outstanding inventions and inventors from the previous year.

Each year a panel of judges made up of both University of Maryland personnel and industry experts selects one winner from groups of finalists in each of three categories: life science, information science, and physical science. The winners are chosen based on the creativity, novelty, and potential benefit to society of each of the inventions. This year’s awards were presented at a gala reception on April 12.

ISR-affiliated Professor Christopher Davis (ECE), Civil Engineering Research Professor Stuart Milner, and ECE alumnus Jamie Llorca, were finalists in the Information Sciences category for “Self-Optimization, Dynamic Positioning and Mobility Management in Wireless Networks.” The inventors developed novel models and methods for controlling and positioning directional wireless backbone platforms to guarantee coverage of mobile and user devices, while ensuring that backhaul bandwidth and quality of service are maximized.

Massimiliano Albanese and ISR-affiliated Professor V.S. Subrahmanian (CS/UMIACS) were finalists in the Information Sciences category for “ATTUNE (Automatic Terrorists’ Technology Usage Networked Environment),” a novel framework for automatically analyzing how terrorist groups use social media on the Internet. ATTUNE performs complex quantitative analysis of terrorist groups’ internet usage, specifically YouTube. The software can determine how internet savvy a group is, whether members of the group are actively using specific social networking sites, if spikes in a group’s social network usage can be linked to events, and whether a social network user is affiliated with a terrorist organization.

“Fly Ear-Inspired Miniature Acoustic Sensor System” by ISR-affiliated Assistant Professor Miao Yu (ME) and Haijun Liu is a miniature acoustic sensor system. Mimicking the fly’s highly accurate directional hearing, the sensor can be tailored to work at any chosen frequency to achieve maximum directional sensitivity and minimum nonlinearity. Performance is comparable to a conventional directional microphone 20 times larger in size. The invention can be readily extended to a very sophisticated device for sound localization in three dimensions. This invention was a finalist in the Physical Science category.

| Read the full story about this year’s Invention of the Year Awards. |

Published April 19, 2011