Skip to main content

Highlight

CTS-IGERT Discloses Inventions - Applies for Patents

Projects:
IGERT: Graduate Program in Computational Transportation...
Institution:
University of Illinois at Chicago
Primary Strategic Goal:
Discovery: Foster research that will advance the frontiers of knowledge, emphasizing areas of greatest opportunity and potential benefit and establishing the Nation as a global leader in fundamental transformational science and engineering.
Secondary Strategic Goal:
Learning: Build the Nation's research capability through critical investments in advanced instrumentation, facilities, cyber infrastructure, and experimental tools.

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 Parking Slot Assignment Games in October, 2011. 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 April, 2012 for PhonePark: Estimating street parking availability using mobile phones. 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. They are engaged in the discussion of market opportunities and IP protection of their work on parking.

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.

Posted By:
Ouri Wolfson
Posted:
December 18, 2012