About CAKE
In 2009, Florida Atlantic University received a five-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create the site of the Center for Advanced Knowledge Enablement (CAKE) as an Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC) that will provide a framework for interaction between university faculty and industry in the critically important areas of information technology, communication, and computing. There are only 15 NSF-supported centers in these areas in the United States. Our Center operates as a site of the Florida International University center whose director is Dr. Naphtali Rishe.
The NSF I/UCRC has proven to be a win-win situation both for our university and our industry and government partners. We are thrilled with the opportunity to conduct industrially relevant research, receive additional funding for it, and moreover, benefit from the recognition and prestige of being an NSF research center.
Our Center is successfully building a bridge linking academia, industry, and government in a coordinated research initiative, which this region desperately needed. The Center, representing the combined efforts of FAU and FIU researchers, now has the critical mass to serve the information technology industry and to help South Florida IT mature into the top tier.
The research focus of the Center is in the field of advanced knowledge enablement with the focus on areas of big data analytics, multimedia and data mining, video and multimedia processing, and cloud computing systems, sensors and networks. These are all synergetic activities needed to complete the applied research projects that we are planning to propose. Research projects will be interdisciplinary in their nature with the focus on applications in medical and healthcare, environmental, and mobile, public, and industrial applications. Figure 1 illustrates the research sub-areas and related vertical applications.
The FAU research team consists of 15 professors, who were all involved in I/UCRC industry projects during Phase I. They are experts in various sub-areas of the proposed research. A large number of high-quality graduate and undergraduate students will be recruited to work on the Center projects. The Center is well positioned to expend recruitment of industrial members.