Author: Michelle Magcalas

Cal Poly Pomona has earned a three-year National Science Foundation (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps) grant to identify promising research and development projects on campus and help find ways to commercialize them. The university is only one of three CSUs and one of 10 institutions in California to be awarded the grant.

The grant provides opportunities for students to collaborate with faculty and industry to bring their ideas and research to market by forming I-Corps teams. The teams will tap into technical, entrepreneurial and mentorship expertise to generate products the public can use.

The grant also provides Cal Poly Pomona students, faculty and staff with access to NSF’s National Innovation Network. The network’s resources include about $50,000 each year in funding to assist successful I-Corps teams to determine the feasibility of launching successful ventures and participation in a national network of I-Corps teams and mentors to aid their success.

I-Corps has a strong track record in successfully translating research into products and services with commercial appeal. In the past five years, approximately half of the 1,000 I-Corps teams have gone on to start new ventures.

“Cal Poly Pomona’s strategic aspiration, to quote President Coley, is ‘to be the epicenter of creativity, innovation and discovery,’ said Business Professor Olukemi Sawyer, founding director of the Student Innovation Idea Lab (iLab). “I believe our participation in the NSF National Innovation Network will contribute to our ability to attain our aspiration as an institution.”

According to Sawyerr, one of the many reasons Cal Poly Pomona earned the grant was due to the existing “infrastructure to support innovation and entrepreneurship in the iLab.”

Sawyerr will serve as principal investigator on the grant and will work with an interdisciplinary team of faculty members. Co-principal investigators are Winny Dong, chemical and materials engineering professor and founding director of the Office of Undergraduate Research (OUR), and Sadiq Shah, associate vice president for Research, Innovation and Economic Development.

Faculty members Yu Sun from the College of Science, Trayan Kushev from the College of Business Administration and Olive Li from the Huntley College of Agriculture join Sawyerr, Dong and Shah on the teaching team. They will be responsible for teaching and training Cal Poly Pomona I-Corps teams.

“NSF is looking for ways to support the culture of entrepreneurship and innovation of our academic experience to better prepare the 21st century workforce for start-ups or corporate career paths, and translating ideas into products or services,” said Shah.

Cal Poly Pomona is launching a Cyber Security Instructional Research Project (CSIRP) that will promote innovative teaching, research and collaboration.

The project, which integrates existing campus IT services, will be a cross-disciplinary hub that offers collaborative lab and office space, equipment and high-performance computing resources to faculty and students for cyber-security research and teaching.

Cyber security is a critical topic worldwide, with daily news reports of data breaches.

“Our faculty and students are working with large technology organizations to explore the essential themes of cyber security — how we design, develop and support IT systems that are reliable, effective and secure,” said John McGuthry, chief information officer and vice president for information technology & institutional planning. “Our new initiative leverages the university’s resources and the expertise of our faculty and students to address pressing challenges in today’s connected world.”

The CSIRP is launching with these initial services:

• Collaborative research space for faculty and shared spaces for students
• A cyber security student lab for teaching and research
• Cloud-based virtual computing, storage and lab infrastructure
• Access to high-performance computer cluster services for teaching and research

While other universities may offer similar resources, integrating a variety of services into a single hub on campus is unique, according to Peter Deutsch, chief technology officer.

Deutsch envisions CSIRP benefiting faculty and students from numerous disciplines, not just those in engineering, computer science and computer information systems.

“If you think about the wide range of types and volume of data that is out there — patient medical records, credit card info, social media accounts – these are all cross-disciplinary issues,” he said. “The cyber-security work we’re doing is very hands-on and prepares students for work in a high-demand industry.”

The first project housed by CSIRP is a student-run security operations center and malware analysis lab funded by Northrop Grumman and led jointly by computer information systems Professor Ron Pike and computer science Professor Mohammad Husain. The cross-disciplinary project involves students from both disciplines who work together to learn in the hands-on environment, prepare for the workforce, and also give back to the campus as student assistants in the information security office, according to Pike and Husain.

“IT is a service and support partner for faculty and students,” said Carol Gonzales, chief information security officer and associate vice president for IT security and compliance. “This new instructional research project provides an opportunity for our campus staff to work with faculty and students to address current and future security challenges.”

The CSIRP is launching this fall. CSIRP will have dedicated offices in Building 91 and on the fifth floor of the classroom side of the CLA Building.

For more information, contact Carol Gonzales at carolhg@cpp.edu or Peter Deutsch at peterd@cpp.edu or visit www.cpp.edu/it/initiatives/cybersecurity/.

A group of 65 Cal Poly Pomona students accepted the NASA eXploration Systems and Habitation (X-Hab) Academic Innovation Challenge and designed and built a functional, innovative prototype that increases functionality for human space exploration missions.

The Mars habitation module (CPP-HAB), created by students in architecture and civil engineering classes, was inspired by a ‘roly poly’ bug and funded by a $30,000 competitive NASA grant.

The CPP-HAB “was selected for demonstration with virtual reality and a physical mockup because it showcased a unique strategy for mobility and transformation of the surface habitat,” according to the NASA X-Hab website.

Cal Poly Pomona was one of only four teams that “conducted studies and developed partial system mockups featuring commonalities among Mars transit and surface habitat designs.”

Since it was completed in May, CPP-HAB has been presented at five professional conferences. Its final stop was the 2018 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Space Forum in Orlando, Fla., in mid-September.

The challenge was to design a strategy for commonality between an interplanetary vehicle (IPV) spaceship and a Mars surface habitat accommodating the planet’s partial gravity. The CPP-HAB has fully adaptable and reconfigurable parts contained within a lander-sized canister. Once the canister is deployed on the Martian surface, four pod-shaped modules are released and can roll themselves to the designated site. The crew arrives in a separate lander as the pods open. Once pressurized, the crew will move from the lander to the pods.

Essentially, the transformation via the pods unrolling makes it possible for the habitat used to travel to Mars to be used as living space on the planet, just in a different configuration. In this way, the crewmembers will be familiar with the layout, function and location throughout the expedition.

The design addresses critical aspects such as the structural integrity and a sound propulsion system necessary to withstand space travel; functionality on zero-gravity and in the Martian gravitational environment; mobility on the planet surface; radiation shielding and weightlessness response, said Professor Michael Fox, who taught the Architecture Topic Studio and served as the project lead.

Each pod unrolls to 30.4 meters in length, 4 meters in width and 4.5 meters high. Once connected, the habitat encompasses a greenhouse, laboratory, medical bay, kitchen, gym, hygiene room, two bedrooms, a leisure/conference room, the control room and life support system. The pods can be connected in various ways including end-to-end or perpendicular to each other to make a larger connected habitation system.

Small-scale robotics were used on a miniature scale model to test unrolling and mobility on a “replicated” Martian terrain. Finally, a full-scale prototype was constructed using hollow section tubes, plywood sheathing, and polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) fabric – a durable, weather-resistant woven fiberglass membrane coated in Teflon.  The prototype was then developed using an immersive Augmented Reality (AR) and refined with full Virtual Reality (VR) models of the rolled and unrolled habitats.

The CPP-HAB project team included Assistant Professor Marc Schulitz, from the architecture department as co-principal investigator and Lecturer Mikhail Gershfeld from civil engineering department, with mentoring from the firms Astrotecture Gehry Technologies and Design Technology/HNTB Architecture. For more information about CPP-HAB at the AIAA Space Forum, visit https://space.aiaa.org.

Innovation Orchard is a new open-space environment for student startup teams to discuss ideas, collaborate, and reach their entrepreneurial goals. Founded by the Cal Poly Pomona iLab and located at Ganesha High School, the space gives students the resources to implement their ideas.

The 2,100-square-foot Innovation Orchard has 25 pieces of equipment, multiple maker stations, and tables and seating for collaborating and brainstorming. Some of the equipment includes 3D printers, laser cutters, soldering irons, table saws, belt sanders, and a CNC router and mill. Innovation Orchard also has a large conference room for students to present their prototypes or marketing strategies.

The space can house up to eight to 12 startup teams at one time and around 80 people for larger events. Armando Cordero, an Innovation Orchard lab technician, says he hopes to continue to see an increase of Ganesha high and CPP student partnerships at the lab to utilize its full potential for innovation.

For more information, visit the IO website or watch the video.

A new center at Cal Poly Pomona will offer students an opportunity to take a deeper look at important issues facing Californians.

The California Center of Ethics and Policy (CCEP) was launched with the financial support of a university emeritus faculty member and will be fully operational in spring 2019.

The CCEP held its first event on Oct. 9 – an election fair that included a voter registration drive and representatives for and against propositions on the Nov. 6 ballot.

Philosophy Professor Michael Cholbi, director of the CCEP, said that while many universities have similar centers, Cal Poly Pomona’s is distinct in that it focuses on ethics and political issues in which California has a role to play. The center plans to tether its program to a different theme each year.

For the 2018-19 academic year, the focus will be on healthcare access and healthcare justice. The 2019-20 session will grapple with war and the military in California culture and the economy.

“We want to try to help students and other members of our campus community be more engaged and think more deeply about the ethical issues we face,” Cholbi said. “We feel the center fits well into the university’s Strategic Plan and has the potential to create students who are effective leaders and reflective citizens.”

Components of the program include a semester-long three-unit advanced seminar, in which students must apply to be fellows, and a student conference that will feature original research. Experts also will come to campus to give public lectures related to the seminar’s focus.

“What we’re doing is a strong fit for the direction the university is heading,” he said. “Of course, we need to train people to be engineers and for other professions, but we also need to teach them to be democratic members of society.”

Last year, a donor approached Sharon Hilles, the former dean of the College of Letters, Arts & Social Sciences, about creating an ethics center that would deal with issues that affect Californians.

Iris Levine, the college’s current dean, was serving as associate dean when she and Hilles discussed the possibility of creating the center after the success of the philosophy department’s Ethics Bowl competition.

The center will offer opportunities to enhance student success, community engagement, social and environmental responsibility, and civic engagement, as well as bolster the university’s academic reputation, Levine said.

“I believe that in a very short period of time, the university will be known for the work happening at the California Center of Ethics and Policy and that we will be looked at as a beacon for discovery and discussion with respect to issues that directly impact the citizens of California,” she said.

Philosophy Professor David Adams, who will teach the first seminar, recalls that his department previously had a less formal and not as well-funded Institute for Ethics and Policy that was disbanded in 2009-10 because of budgetary cuts. The new center will be more robust in what it offers, Adams said.

“This a game-changer because we can do things with the center we weren’t able to do in previous years,” he said.

Adams’ seminar will look at the moral and social issues surrounding healthcare, such as how it should be distributed, who should and should not get access to expensive medication, and whether universal healthcare is a viable option in California.

“The students that we have at Cal Poly Pomona today are going to be the people who will increasingly be faced with these problems,” he said. “The questions addressed in this year’s seminar have to do with the allocation of healthcare and access — questions that cannot be answered without careful deliberation. It is important for our students to start thinking about these problems now because soon they are going to be the ones making the decisions.”

Students are invited to apply to the Ethics and Policy Fellows program. The application for 2019 Fellows is Nov. 1. Visit https://bit.ly/2zQfjEC for more information.