Conference: 2022 Underwater Ideas Lab

American Society For Engineering Education, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

America’s oceans and coastlines contribute greatly to the national economy, supporting several hundred thousand ocean-dependent businesses, several hundred billion U.S. dollars in economic activity annually, and millions of jobs. Therefore, advancing understanding of our oceans and coastlines is important for the national economy. Improving sensing and communication capabilities in marine, freshwater, as well as polar environments is critical for making significant discovery-based and use-inspired research advances that can lead to more accurate predictions of geohazards and harmful algae blooms, improved coastal resilience, better mitigation of climate change, and more resilient coastal infrastructure. Typical terrestrial sensing and communication technologies cannot be readily deployed in marine and freshwater environments and especially in harsh polar environments. This challenge significantly limits the scientific research and engineering developments in these environments. The objective of this Ideas Lab workshop is to foster the creation of transformative ideas and interdisciplinary teams that will advance engineering technologies to address the most pressing sensing, communication, and data transmission challenges in diverse underwater environments. These new engineering technologies will not only advance the scientific research of the diverse underwater environments, but also contribute to the growth of the economy and benefit the society. This Ideas Lab workshop is designed with a collaborative, action-oriented agenda to facilitate innovative team-building and foster the development of novel interdisciplinary proposals with transformative approaches to address the technological challenges of conducting research and building cyberinfrastructure for water and ice environments, specifically in the areas of sensing, communications, localization, energy harvesting, while considering miniaturization and minimizing environmental impacts. The expected outcome of this workshop is to create new collaborations between engineers, data scientists and domain experts across disciplinary boundaries to address critical sensing and communication challenges underwater, under-ice, below the seafloor, and across the ice-water-air interfaces. The mission of this workshop aligns well with the NSF’s strategic goal of creating new knowledge about our world, advancing the frontiers of research and accelerating discovery through strategic investments in ideas, people and infrastructure, and with the United Nation's Ocean Decade initiative. 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.