Purdue Polytechnic’s Abdul Salam is developing a network of underground devices to help farmers respond to climate change and environmental concerns. The new technology tracks conditions in the fields, allowing the agricultural industry to conserve water.

Â鶹¾«Æ·graduate research assistants Rey (Alex) Gonzalez, Yifei Hu and Damin Zhang are members of a student research team competing in Amazon’s international Alexa Prize TaskBot Challenge, developing multimodal (voice and vision) conversational agents that assist customers in completing tasks requiring multiple steps and decisions. Julia Rayz, professor of computer and information technology, is their advisor.

An effort to facilitate collaboration and research related to cyberinfrastructure (CI) has been awarded $7.5 million by the National Science Foundation (NSF). The effort was conceived by a national team of researchers including Purdue Polytechnic’s Paul Parsons.

Undergraduate and graduate students are invited to participate in the Airport Cooperative Research Program’s University Design Competition for Addressing Airport Needs. Students from Purdue have placed first, second and/or third in one or more competition categories every year since 2014.

Purdue Polytechnic’s Sudip Vhaduri and Siva Sahitya Simhadri received the best paper runner-up award at the IEEE/ACM international conference on Connected Health: Applications, Systems and Engineering Technologies (CHASE) conference for their research into audio-based health monitoring smartphone apps.

Purdue Polytechnic’s Jason Ostanek is collaborating with colleagues at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division (NSWC Crane) on research to establish laboratory testing capability, enhance performance and improve the safety of lithium-ion batteries.

Purdue Polytechnic’s Jennifer Linvill is co-principal investigator of SCALE (Scalable Asymmetric Lifecycle Engagement) research. Linvill and her colleagues received new funding from the Department of Defense that will allow the project to extend for five years and expand significantly. They aim to develop a next-generation workforce that can return the United States to prominence in global microelectronics manufacturing.

An interdisciplinary research team including Purdue Polytechnic’s Richard Voyles and Haoguang Yang created the Purdue Campus Patrol Robot, an autonomous robot to disinfect classrooms. The robot incorporates an entirely new air filtering system which they call the Bernoulli Air Filtration Module.

Rua Williams, assistant professor of user experience design, has been selected for the Social Science Research Council’s inaugural Just Tech Fellowship.

Purdue Polytechnic’s Umit Karabiyik is researching how ordinary citizens willingly share data with law enforcement, including photos, videos, text messages, and other data from cell phones — and how to collect this data in a way that maintains personal privacy and security.