Big data is changing nearly every industry, from agriculture to automobiles.
Now, Boeing is placing a big bet to improve the aerospace industry through the use of data, announcing that it has donated $7.5 million to establish the Boeing/Carnegie Mellon Aerospace Data Analytics Lab in Pittsburgh.
The new lab is designed to tap the university’s expertise in machine learning, language technologies and data analytics with the goal of improving the flight experience, everything from aircraft maintenance to design.
For example, data analytics could be used to create a maintenance schedule determined by the actual flight history and component performance for each airplane, rather than via historic norms. More than half a dozen projects have been identified for the lab, taking advantage of the enormous amount of data generated by on-board computers and sensors.
“Researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Boeing have enjoyed a collaborative relationship for more than 30 years and we’re proud of the fact that hundreds of our graduates are working at Boeing,” said Subra Suresh, president of Carnegie Mellon. “This new agreement will extend this relationship even further, leveraging the distinctive intellectual strengths of CMU to benefit everyone who steps onto an airplane.”
Jaime Carbonell, the Allen Newell University Professor of Computer Science and director of the Language Technologies Institute, will lead the new research center. John Vu, a former Boeing chief software engineer who now works at the university, also is playing a key role. About 20 other researchers also will be engaged in the lab.
“The mass of data generated daily by the aerospace industry overwhelms human understanding,” Carbonell said in a press release. “But recent advances in language technologies and machine learning give us every reason to expect that we can gain useful insights from that data. The new algorithms and methods should create a stronger aerospace industry and be applicable to many other important endeavors.”
Carnegie Mellon is well regarded in technological fields, one of the reasons why Uber recently raided the university for many of its top minds as it relates to the development of self-driving cars.
