PE&RS November 2000

HIGHLIGHT ARTICLE

NASA’s Affiliated Research Center Program: Bridging Basic Research and Quality of Life

Background

Remote sensing and related technologies have traditionally been the tools of scientists and government agencies. The expanding availability of satellite and aerial imagery with higher spatial, spectral, and temporal resolution is leading industry to adopt these tools for a broad range of applications, including land use and urban planning, infrastructure development, facilities siting, agriculture, transportation, natural resources, and environmental quality. To bridge the critical gap between the laboratory bench and the marketplace in fostering these applications – that is, to take the discoveries of science and engineering to innovative yet practical solutions – NASA’s Commercial Remote Sensing Program (CRSP) at the John C. Stennis Space Center established a special partnership program called the Affiliated Research Center (ARC) program.1  In the ARC program, world-class, university-based research centers team with selected U.S. companies to share technology and applications development and to move remote sensing into the commercial venue. As of 2000, CRSP has competitively designated nine nationally and internationally ranked universities for the ARC program (Box 1).
 

The ARC Program has four key goals: (1) to introduce U.S. companies to spatial information and to foster their use of the most promising advanced remote sensing technologies; (2) to integrate university research with industry requirements and support for advanced remote sensing technologies and applications; (3) to leverage extensive university facilities in remote sensing and geographic information systems (GIS) while exposing students to real-world, problem-solving situations; and (4) as an essential part of NASA’s Earth Science Enterprise, to evolve relevant directions for the agency’s continued investment in new remote sensing technology and research to contribute to a state-of-the-art spatial information industry. Since its inception, the ARC network has worked with over 100 companies, both large and small. Box 2 lists the companies that participated in the 1999 ARC projects.
 

Implementation

Through their ARC affiliations, partner companies investigate the component pieces of remote sensing technology (i.e., hardware, software, and data) in the context of an application project designed to determine if and how these tools can improve their specific business applications. The university provides a learning laboratory in which faculty and students work with company representatives at the university’s research facility. Projects result in a technology validation or prototypical application. The partnerships generally last from six to nine months and thus are small, short-term projects intended to stimulate further development and use of remote sensing technology. These projects are not intended to be full-scale develop-ment projects aimed toward a shrink-wrapped product, nor will they directly fill a company’s customer orders. Rather, successful projects stimulate the partners to improve and expand their existing product lines and customer bases through subsequent adoption and development of the technology or the purchase of services to accomplish the same.

Measuring the Contribution to a World-class Industry

CRSP earnestly seeks ARC projects that make a difference. To this end, CRSP requires that projects develop performance measurements relevant to the company, the university, NASA, and the taxpayer to demonstrate the projects’ real-world benefits. To illustrate, companies report quantitatively how the project has improved their productivity, typically by reducing development costs, person-hours, or data, hardware, or software requirements. In other cases, the ARC project has advanced or enabled an altogether new product or service. Figure 1 shows the approach to these business metrics at a conceptual level. This “wiring diagram,” from an ARC project conducted by Ogden Environmental and Energy Services at San Diego State University, indicates the steps traditionally involved in vegetation mapping. The ARC project in this case involved a key innovation that reduced processing costs significantly along one of the “wires.” By quantifying the sizes of the wires in terms of labor hours, processing costs, data requirements, and other resources, the diagram suggests how this innovation gave rise to a multiplier effect and brought about a significant gain in productivity in the overall mapping process.

Box 3 further illustrates company benefits derived from ARC, including the advance of an entirely new line of business. In several projects, companies have initiated standards, protocols, customer-friendly iconography, and processing methods that have subsequently become adopted industry-wide, thus promoting the efficiency and performance of the industry as a whole. In addition, companies are exposed to talented students who work side-by-side with company researchers on the projects. These students have special skills in remote sensing and related geospatial technologies that may be required for the company to incorporate the derived methods and carry them into a product or service offering. The ARC program creates an environment that permits companies to access and evaluate talent that they would otherwise not find. For emerging applications, this function is critical. ARC companies learn to recruit the correct skill mix for their new technology, and in many cases the students recognize the nucleus of a new product or service while developing an ARC project’s application or component technology. The knowledge gained during the process of discovery by both student and company is much greater than if the project had been conducted by an outside organization and presented as a “black box” solution, which is why the ARC program uses the learning laboratory approach to working with companies.
 

Detection and Mapping of Seismic Faults Project results: Mapping of suspected faults is feasible using remote sensing Remote sensing added up to 25% more information than traditional field survey methods (regional and local) Significant potential for improving location of trenching sites with 10-25% cost savings Multiple, integrated remote sensing sources provide the best data – 25% increase in understanding; 25-35% overall cost saving compared to traditional methods Use of remote sensing will continue within the firm, but image processing and data integration will need to be outsourced

Box 3. Illustration of Company Benefits

From the perspective of the ARC universities, benefits from the program are largely obtained from opportunities for faculty and students to engage in real-world problem solving, enhancing student experience, faculty research, and university curricula. For example, students who have participated in ARC projects are intensively recruited by industry. Faculty members have reported the advantages of feedback when questions raised in practical application suggest new research directions. To date, ARC activity has stimulated new course curricula, including master’s degree programs and interdisciplinary graduate studies. Figure 2 illustrates these developments at the University of Wisconsin’s ARC program.

From the perspective of the ARC universities, benefits from the program are largely obtained from opportunities for faculty and students to engage in real-world problem solving, enhancing student experience, faculty research, and university curricula. For example, students who have participated in ARC projects are intensively recruited by industry. Faculty members have reported the advantages of feedback when questions raised in practical application suggest new research directions. To date, ARC activity has stimulated new course curricula, including master’s degree programs and interdisciplinary graduate studies. Figure 2 illustrates these developments at the University of Wisconsin’s ARC program.

Of key importaqnce to NASA in managing the nation’s public investment in spatial information technology, ARC illuminates unmet gaps in basic understanding, critical tools, and other fundamentals to better guide the agency’s future research directions. For example, ARC directly complements CRSP’s data verification and validation (V&V) activities by highlighting commercial performance specifications to which high-quality V&V can be directed. And finally, but most importantly, taxpayers benefit from the cost-effective attainment of all of these achievements, such as:

• industry productivity enhancements,
• new products and services,
• a highly skilled labor force,
• enriched university environments, and
• cutting-edge NASA investment in basic research and technology.

The Future

The ARC program now includes some of the nation’s leading university-based centers of excellence in remote sensing. Most of these schools operate their academic programs in remote sensing at the masters or doctorate level. As new applications emerge and technological innovations allow greater use of image data in routine business operations, private industry needs a qualified workforce capable of basic data processing and analysis. Extending the ARC concept to community colleges, to vocational and technical schools, and to undergraduate institutions offers the opportunity to further enhance nationwide understanding of the promise and relevance of spatial information and the technologies required to maximize its use. In addition, the ARC corporate affiliations to date have largely been individual companies with specific questions or issues related to the use of remote sensing. However, this approach limits the impact of NASA’s investment and results in improvement to one company at a time. While this approach has yielded many successful projects, a more aggressive approach to incorporating image data into entire industry sectors requires that NASA and its ARC universities develop an implementation plan with associations of companies.

Through a series of projects, one or more ARC universities would work in partnership with an industry association to determine the utility of remote sensing and related technologies. If the utility of the technology was established against performance specifications agreed to by both NASA and the company, then a follow-on series of projects would be undertaken to implement the methods within the operational processes of the company. The number of projects and universities working on them would be related to the potential payoff in terms of improvements to quality of life or economy resulting from the investment. Both of these extensions to the ARC program are on the CRSP’s agenda in the coming years.

CRSP’s ARC program is a new model for cooperation and partnership between government, industry, and academia. As the cost of new technology investigation continues to rise, the ARC program provides a model that effectively allows companies to pursue new technologies at a reasonable cost and provides universities with funding to support this investigation while engaging in interesting research. Furthermore, the ARC model of partnership with industry is dynamic. The existing ARC program has evolved from its first version, and CRSP will continue to modify the program as new partnership approaches are developed – as long as those approaches do not compete with or hinder the progress of an emerging remote sensing industry. The success of NASA’s ARC partners, both academic and commercial, is the CRSP’s prime objective, because a healthy remote sensing industry and applications research environment is critical to NASA’s accomplishing its own mission.

1  Further information about CRSP activities, including the ARC Program, is provided at http://www.crsp.ssc.nasa.gov/. Some of the material in this article is based on information found at this website.

Bruce Davis
Chief Scientist for NASA’s Commercial Remote Sensing Program Office
Building 1100
Stennis Space Center. MS 39597
Molly Macauley
Senior Fellow at Resources for the Future
1616 P Street, NW
Washington, DC 20036