The National Science Foundation's (NSF) FIU-FAU-Greenwich Industry/University Cooperative Research Center for Advanced Knowledge Enablement (CAKE) was established to develop long-term partnerships among industry, academe and government. The Center is supported primarily by industry center members, with NSF taking a supporting role in its development, evolution, and core funding.

The Center's mission is to conduct industry-relevant studies and deployments in the representation, management, storage, analysis, search and social aspects of large and complex data sets, with particular applications in geospatial location-based data, disaster mitigation, healthcare, transportation, and town planning.

The Center's Director, Naphtali Rishe, is the inaugural Outstanding University Professor of FIU and the principal investigator of $55M in grants. The FAU Site Director, Borko Furht, is the Chairperson of the FAU Department of Computer & Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

The Center also performs R&D on Computational Transportation (Computational Transportation Lab) and Health Information Technology, including COVID-19 data analytics and Precision Medicine.

Center affiliation is open to industrial members and government agencies. Affiliation benefits include early access to the Center's research innovations, twice-yearly meetings on a university campus, and opportunities to interact with faculty, students, and industry peers. Benefits include:

— Access to students trained in industry and government relevant research challenges

— The University waives almost the entire overhead on industrial contributions to the Center, so contributions go further

— Affiliate representatives form an Industrial Advisory Board which has a voice in the Center's research direction and long-term strategy

— Members direct which I/UCRC research projects their membership fees are to be invested in

— Members can utilize at no charge I/UCRC technology, including its mapping engine TerraFly and its applications suitable for the member's activities.

— Members have access to and benefit from the results of all I/UCRC projects funded with any membership fees. This creates a multiplier effect — a member paying a fee of $50,000 benefits from at least $600,000 worth of research.

— The Center can accept funds from any government agency, normally without a bidding process and almost without overhead, via an intra-government transfer mechanism facilitated by NSF. These funds can be directed to any aspect of the Center's research, including work beneficial the Center's industrial members, and can also be used for collaborative research with industrial members.

Member Commitment

a. a regular industrial member committing a first-year membership fee of $50K or more
b. a small business member committing a first-year membership fee of $5K

Selected Publications

Industrial Advisory Board (IAB)

Chairperson of the Board: Radha Ratnaparkhi, IBM Vice President

Vice-Chairperson: Jaime Borras, Mobile Technology Consortium

Executive Committee: Sapan Bafna (CoreLogic), John Ciampa (Alta), Jeffrey Horstmyer (NSCFF)

Center Faculty

FIU Faculty: Naphtali Rishe (Center Director), Malek Adjouadi, Mark Finlayson, Francisco Ortega, Armando Barreto, Bogdan Carbunar, Shu-Ching Chen, Peter Clarke, Scott Graham, Martha Gutierrez, S.S. Iyengar, Sakhrat Khizroev, Tao Li, Christine Lisetti, Jason Liu, Raju Rangaswami, Naphtali Rishe, Masoud Sadjadi, Francisco Lima.

FAU Faculty: Borko Furht (FAU Site Director), Ankur Agarwal, Daniel Raviv, Hari Kalva, Imad Mahgoub Ionut Cardei, Shihong Huang.

University of Greenwich Faculty: Liz Bacon (Greenwich Site Director), Lachlan MacKinnon, Ed Galea.

Member companies: Coordinated via FIU: ADCi, AnthroTronix, BlueRisc, CVISION, Condo.com, Content Creators, Corelogic Spatial Solutions, Guiedwire, IBM, IHMC, ISCA Tech, Independence Science, JM Family, LTMB, Litstrat, Neuroscience Centers of Florida Foundation, New Span Opto-Technology, Numedion, OverIT S.p.A., RAM, Streamline Automation, The Miami Herald, Vcom3D, ViewPlus. Coordinated via FAU: Adventure Automation, Avocent/Emerson, Aware Technology, CGC.com, Hillers Electrical Engineering, ILS Technology, Jansyl Technologies, LastBestChance, LexisNexis, NOA Inc, Omega Optics, ProntoProgress, Relli Technologies, SmartVCR, Soren Technologies, Tecore Networks, Tecore Wireless Systems, Video Semantics.

Contact: Naphtali David Rishe
Director, NSF FIU-FAU-Greenwich Industry-University Cooperative Research Center

Florida International University
University Park, ECS-243, Miami, FL 33199
CAKE's FIU Office: (305)348-1706; Fax: (305)348-1707

Presented by National Science Foundation's Industry-University Cooperative Research Center for Advanced Knowledge Enablement at Florida International and Atlantic Universities (I/UCRC-CAKE). This material is based in part upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Numbers IIP- IIP-1338922, IIP-0934339, and IIP-1464537. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.