| NSF Org: |
ITE Innovation and Technology Ecosystems |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | August 20, 2020 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | June 22, 2021 |
| Award Number: | 2033615 |
| Award Instrument: | Cooperative Agreement |
| Program Manager: |
Linda Molnar
ITE Innovation and Technology Ecosystems TIP Directorate for Technology, Innovation, and Partnerships |
| Start Date: | September 1, 2020 |
| End Date: | May 31, 2021 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $5,000,000.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $1,470,935.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
2550 NORTHWESTERN AVE # 1100 WEST LAFAYETTE IN US 47906-1332 (765)494-1055 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
585 Purdue Mall west lafayette IN US 47907-2088 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): | CA-FW-HTF: Convergence Acceler |
| Primary Program Source: |
01002021DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT 01002122DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT |
| Program Reference Code(s): | |
| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.084 |
ABSTRACT
The broader impact and potential societal benefits of the SkillXR Convergence Accelerator Phase II project are training, pre- and upskilling, remote skilling, and enabling new insights in the manufacturing and education sectors. There is a multiplier effect on job growth in the national economy through expansions in manufacturing. As jobs and skills change and evolve, retraining and upskilling will become necessary steps towards economic sustainability, more importantly so as we recover during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of the SkillXR platform is to disrupt current modes of workforce development by eliminating the current need for expensive software development and consulting intermediaries to create and maintain augmented, virtual and mixed reality (XR) applications. Through our partnerships within the small and large manufacturing industry and workforce education, we will transition the future workforce from acquisition of apprenticeships to real-world profitable skills in emerging industries over the next decade. Our focused partnerships with small businesses, minority entrepreneurs, play museums, and rural education promotes equitable access. The general-purpose nature of SkillXR will amplify the impact beyond our initial planned manufacturing education area to become ubiquitous across many other fields including robotics, construction, plant operations, education, and eventually everyday spatial cognitive assistance. Our pre-upskilling and learning analytics platform is planned to impact tens of thousands in five to six years and millions within a decade. Rural communities especially will benefit, as manufacturing represents twice the amount of earnings there, versus non-rural areas.
The highly interdisciplinary team brings knowledge spanning manufacturing, computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI), spatial interfaces and interactions, learning sciences, learning analytics, cognitive psychology, and visual gamified interfaces. We will collaborate closely with key partners using a design-research driven convergence framework to develop and transform research-based prototypes into products and services to impact our skilled workforce and economy. The two sides of our emerging product platform will (1) enable the authoring of AI-based XR personalized training applications by subject matter experts (coaches, teachers, trainers), without the need for prior knowledge in programming or sophisticated applications, and (2) a low-cost AI-based hardware approach to get personalized user analytics of tasks ?on-the-job? for scalable workforce assessment and optimization. Our approach permits extreme flexibility for various industrial use cases, reusability through plug-and-play for millions of applications, as well as tracking end-user spatial and performance analytics across time. By combining both basic and applied research our team will develop several high-fidelity collaborative cloud-based architectures, and a series of reconfigurable and widely applicable workflows.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
There is a multiplier effect on job growth in the national economy through expansions in manufacturing. As jobs and skills change and evolve, retraining and upskilling has become a necessary step towards economic sustainability, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. The aim of the SkillXR platform is to disrupt current modes of inefficient workforce development based on an age-old one-on-one training model. Although augmented and virtual reality offer possible solutions they need expensive software development and consulting intermediaries to create and maintain augmented, virtual and mixed reality (XR) applications. The societal benefits of the SkillXR Convergence Accelerator Phase II project are training, pre- and upskilling, remote skilling, and enabling new insights in the manufacturing and education sectors by developing accessible means of augmenting humans. Through our partnerships within the small and large manufacturing industry and workforce education, our convergence team developed and tested many proof of concept minimum viable prototypes. Our focused partnerships with small businesses, minority entrepreneurs, play museums, and rural education promoted equitable access. The general-purpose nature of SkillXR is now positioned to amplify the impact beyond our initial planned manufacturing education area to become ubiquitous across many other fields including robotics, construction, plant operations, education, and eventually everyday spatial cognitive assistance. Our pre-upskilling and learning analytics platform has been prototyped to demonstrate impact at scale. Rural communities especially will benefit, as manufacturing represents twice the amount of earnings there, versus non-rural areas.
The highly interdisciplinary team brings knowledge spanning manufacturing, computer vision and artificial intelligence (AI), spatial interfaces and interactions, learning sciences, learning analytics, cognitive psychology, and visual gamified interfaces. We collaborated closely with key partners using a design-research driven convergence framework to develop and transform research-based prototypes into products and services to impact our skilled workforce and economy. The two sides of our emerging product platform (1) enabled the authoring of AI-based XR personalized training applications by subject matter experts (coaches, teachers, trainers), without the need for prior knowledge in programming or sophisticated applications, and (2) a low-cost AI-based hardware approach to get personalized user analytics of tasks ?on-the-job? for scalable workforce assessment and optimization. Our approach permitted extreme flexibility for various industrial use cases, as well as tracking end-user spatial and performance analytics across time. By combining both basic and applied research our team developed several low to high-fidelity collaborative cloud-based architectures, and a series of reconfigurable and widely applicable workflows, and proved increase in productivity within our partners use cases as well as ability to author virtual and augmented reality in low-cost and scalable manner.
Last Modified: 09/29/2021
Modified by: Karthik Ramani
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