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CTS-IGERT Discloses Inventions - Applies for Patents

Achievement/Results

Faculty and students associated with the Computational Transportation Science (CTS)-IGERT at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) have filed three disclosures of invention with the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Office of Technology Management (OTM). Two provisional patents have been applied for.

The first is developed by Daniel Ayala, Bo Xu, both CTS-IGERT trainees, and Drs. Ouri Wolfson, Bhaskar Dasgupta, and Jane Lin of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Their provisional patent application was filed for System and Methods for Improved Selection of a Resource Among Available Resources on October 2012.

Leon Stenneth, CTS-IGERT associate, Bo Xu, IGERT trainee, and Drs. Ouri Wolfson and Philip Yu of the University of Illinois at Chicago submitted a provisional patent application in October, 2012 for System and Methods for Activity Identification. These will result in more efficient ways of finding parking in congested cities, reduce congestion caused by cruising for parking, and reduce environmental impact. The invention extends the concept of a car navigation system to parking. In other words, a smartphone app will direct drivers to a free parking slot on the street or in a garage, in the same way that a car navigation system directs drivers to a destination (but do not help with parking once there). The invention treats parking slots as entities that exert a gravitational force on vehicles, and the direction of travel for parking is the result of these gravitational forces.

Coordinated by the Office of Technology Managment, the IGERT team has had several meetings with potential commercialization partners. IGERT trainees (Bo Xu and Daniel Ayala) participated in the meetings. The trainees presented scientific results to non-academic industrial audience. The inventions have been licensed to industry.

Address Goals

Utilizes interdiscipliany approaches to achieve novel scientific results that can be transferred to “real world” applications. These will impact the way people travel.