Conference Program

Academic research has the power to change lives and advance our society. The idea that almost everyone would be carrying around a computer in their pockets that is 5,000 times faster than a Cray-2 supercomputer from 1985 or 900 million times faster than the Apollo 11 guidance computer would have been unthinkable not long ago. Yet the process of getting those ideas out of the lab and into the hands of everyday people remains a daunting challenge. Innovative ideas have the potential for the greatest impact when they leverage insight from external partners such as manufacturers, industry organizations, and end-users.

WiSys is an innovation support organization that has been on an evolving journey for 25 years to develop a model for centering innovative people and their impactful ideas with a cohesive ecosystem to develop great ideas from academia in partnership with aligned cross-sector partners and bring those ideas into the commercial marketplace. This talk will explore ways that researchers can connect with a variety of stakeholders and will explain why connecting to those partners can lead researchers to more relevant research questions, potentially new funding opportunities, and more meaningful, real-world impact.

Modern data centers operate at extraordinary scale, requiring massive electrical infrastructure, multimegawatt power distribution, and increasingly complex strategies for cooling and heat rejection. Yet building a modern data center is not just about adding more power and more cooling—it is about understanding how much useful computing work the facility can support, often measured in queries, inferences, or tokens. As computing density and AI workloads increase, successful designs that maximize compute increasingly depend on aligning IT hardware choices, workload patterns, and cooling strategies from the very beginning.

This presentation examines the technical demands behind these facilities and highlights the engineering realities of building and operating data centers that support today’s digital and AI-driven applications.

Reliable knowledge of propellant location, fill fraction, and ullage behavior remains a major challenge in low gravity, where conventional level sensors fail and fluid configurations depend on vehicle dynamics, wetting, and thermal state. This talk presents work on sensor fusion for microgravity propellant management, centered on Modal Propellant Gauging (MPG) and related test platforms. By combining structural-acoustic measurements, pressure and temperature data, and vehicle dynamics information, we improve inference of tank conditions relevant to spaceflight operations.

The presentation will address the underlying physics, the use of piezoelectric transducers to interrogate tank dynamics, and the challenge of extracting fluid-state information from coupled structural and fluid responses. It will also connect laboratory experiments, flight testing, and NASA mission needs as a case study in sensing architectures for autonomous operation where direct measurement is not possible.