Solutions for Technology & Science
The University of North Texas has a growing reputation as a public research university that makes a difference. UNT’s College of Engineering is becoming a research and academic powerhouse, adding new programs and nationally recognized faculty. Discovery Park, UNT’s nearly 290-acre research park, is home to centers for science and technology exploration, including the federally funded CART (Center for Advanced Research and Technology) that boasts unique, high-powered microscopes and other high-tech machines for testing and analyzing materials. With its expanding research, UNT is fulfilling its destiny as an economic engine and an intellectual property and business incubator.
Alan Needleman, a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from Brown University, will join UNT as a full-time professor of materials science and engineering in fall 2009. He has been a visiting faculty member since 2007, and he will be heavily involved with ISES.
Improving Industries
By sharing its intellectual talent, UNT is helping to create a stronger military jet fleet while improving technology for the entire aviation industry. UNT’s new multimillion-dollar federally funded ISES (Institute for Science and Engineering Simulation) will assist the U.S. Air Force in maintaining and extending the life of its aging aircraft. Eight researchers from the departments of materials science and engineering and chemistry will couple modeling and simulation with critical experimentation to study the causes of jet engine failure and develop strategies for building more durable engines. This research is critical to better understand how specific materials-related issues reduce the risk of catastrophic failure in aircraft components.
Anticipating Problems
As the use of Internet-based phones rises, so does the risk of delayed emergency services because the phones are tied to an Internet address rather than a physical location. Seeing the potential for problems, Ram Dantu, associate professor of computer science and engineering, is leading colleagues from Columbia and Texas A&M in creating a platform for future research on next-generation 911 services. He also will devise methods for securing 911 call centers from attacks and enhancing 911 services for people with hearing impairments. His work, which has received numerous grants from the National Science Foundation, is leading to the first major overhaul of the 911 system since the 1970s.
Breaking Language Barriers
William Moen, associate professor of library and information sciences, is developing software to digitize labels on plant specimens with the Botanical Research Institute of Texas. The information will go into an online database.
Computer search engines that find information or translate web pages must understand the meanings of words for effective information retrieval and translation. These language-processing applications use a dictionary or thesaurus to understand word meanings, but distinctions differ from one resource to another and across languages. Rada Mihalcea, associate professor of computer science and engineering, is working to build word meaning representations that are adaptable to specific applications. She plans to integrate these models into educational applications and use them to build a tool to help Spanish-speaking students comprehend English texts by providing simpler English synonyms and translations into Spanish. Mihalcea earned a highly prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award for her work.
Expanding Knowledge
The dried plant specimens in Fort Worth’s Botanical Research Institute of Texas may be the final record of existence for species from bygone habitats and will be valuable to researchers of global climate change. Digitizing images of the plants and the data from their labels will make them more widely accessible, but the older labels are difficult for computers to decipher. Led by William Moen, associate professor of library and information sciences and director of the Texas Center for Digital Knowledge — in partnership with BRIT — graduate students will develop software to digitize the labels into a computer-readable format, and the labels will become part of a research database. A $738,000 grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services is funding the two-year project.