With the rise of elaborate supply chains and the growing need for collaboration among companies, organizations that have invested heavily in their security infrastructures are now being asked to open them up. Yet, they also need to keep sensitive operations secure from competitors and malicious hackers.

Arif Ghafoor, professor of electrical and computer engineering, has an answer for this dilemma in the form of new security models for federated cyber-based systems. His research enables more flexible multi-domain, federated collaboration policies for supporting large-scale business processes that do not expose critical data to unauthorized individuals.

Ghafoor has been a pioneer in multimedia databases and multimedia networking, and he continues as the director of Purdue’s Distributed Multimedia Systems Laboratory. Yet over the last decade, his research has focused on information authorization and security.

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The team has developed a system that searches videos for specific types of objects and activities without any special labeling or annotations. “Think of it like Googling for video,” Siskind says.

Searching 10 Hollywood movies in the genre of Westerns, his team was able to find a variety of horse-related images and video segments.

“Our system has an object detector for people and for horses, and it has semantic definitions of concepts like riding a horse, leading a horse, approaching a horse,” Siskind says. “It has concepts like toward and away from, leftward and rightward, and quickly and slowly.”

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Neural networks promise future robots, drones and other “edge devices” the capability to automatically inspect elements of the infrastructure for cracks and corrosion and providing life-saving emergency-management services.

“Civil infrastructures constantly face aging issues, natural hazards, poor usage and extreme weather conditions,” says Mohammad R. Jahanshahi, assistant professor of civil engineering. “This causes degradation in the service life of the infrastructure, and the damage or defects may propagate over time and potentially be harmful or dangerous. For instance, potholes, corroded underground sewer pipelines and cracks in building or bridge columns could lead to serious deterioration and even catastrophic events if not detected early.”

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At the heart of Purdue’s research and education efforts is the role the University plays in equipping the future leaders and skilled workforce in advanced manufacturing.

“If you want to have a significant impact as a land-grant university, you need a vision to translate the discoveries in the research laboratory to the marketplace, particularly in manufacturing,” says R. Byron Pipes, the John L. Bray Distinguished Professor of Engineering and executive director of the Composites Manufacturing and Simulation Center (CMSC). The center is based within the $50 million Indiana Manufacturing Institute in Purdue Research Park, opened in 2016, where it shares space with the Indiana Next-Generation Manufacturing Competitiveness Center, as well as other public and private organizations with related missions.

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Labeled MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), this education format has revolutionized not just how courses are taught but also who can access them.

Purdue’s own investment in nanoHUB, a global resource for nanotechnology simulation, collaboration, and education, is based on such a promise.

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