Accelerator Awards Give Commercialization Boost to University's Technologies

Three recipients of fast-track commercialization funding were announced Thursday, May 10 at the Accelerator Awards Workshop at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Accelerator program helps speed the transfer of technology from the University's Urbana-Champaign and Chicago campuses into the marketplace with funding of up to $40,000. The program is coordinated by the University's Technology Research, Education and Commercialization Center (TRECC), which is funded by the Office of Naval Research, and awardees are chosen in conjunction with the campuses' technology management offices. The new awardees are:

• AVIO: Developed by Urbana-Champaign Computer Science professor Yuanyuan Zhou, AVIO focuses on detecting and fixing bugs in programs that are running concurrently.
• Electrochemical deposition platform for the fabrication of nanostructures: Developed by Min-Feng Yu, a professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the Urbana-Champaign campus, this innovation provides a way to form complex nanostructures in free space at any surface location.
• Ultra-low thermal conductivity insulation: Developed by Alan Feinerman, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Chicago campus, this project addresses the critical need to conserve energy in structures and to enable military personnel to survive extreme temperatures for longer periods of time. Feinerman is developing transparent vacuum insulation panels (VIP) to reduce the heat load through windows by about 100 percent and opaque VIPs that can insulate existing structures.

For more information on the Accelerator program and on current and past awardees, see www.trecc.org/accelerator/index.html.