Boeing and Carnegie Mellon University to set up new aerospace data analytics lab

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Boeing will invest $7.5 million over the next three years to establish an aerospace data analytics lab as part of a joint venture with Carnegie Mellon University.

Image credit: Carnegie Mellon University
Image credit: Carnegie Mellon University

The new aerospace data analytics lab will be focused on analysing complex data collected from Boeing’s aircraft and defence technologies in order to boost design, construction, maintenance and operation of modern planes.

The new Boeing/Carnegie Mellon Aerospace Data Analytics Lab will be housed in the University’s School of Computer Science that will be staffed with about 20 faculty members and graduate students.

“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. This new agreement will extend this relationship even further, leveraging the distinctive intellectual strengths of CMU to benefit everyone who steps onto an airplane,” said Subra Suresh, president of Carnegie Mellon.

Image credit: Carnegie Mellon University
Image credit: Carnegie Mellon University

According to Ted Colbert, Boeing’s chief information officer, the lab is a one-of-a-kind aerospace partnership which will address the company’s evolving business needs.

“We’re aiming to push the technology envelope,” Colbert said.

“We have the best and the brightest faculty at a leading institution focused on how we can innovate and solve business challenges for today and into the future.”

Jaime Carbonell, the Allen Newell University Professor of Computer Science and director of the Language Technologies Institute, will spearhead the new research endeavour, which will tap world-class expertise from across the School of Computer Science and the CMU campus at large.

“The mass of data generated daily by the aerospace industry overwhelms human understanding, 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 endeavours,” Carbonell said.

“We couldn’t be more excited to engage with and leverage the research power and incredible knowledge of a premier academic institution,” added Nancy Bailey, vice president, Boeing IT Business Partners.