1995 — 2000 |
Smith, Alice |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Faculty Early Career Development: Resampling Approaches to Neural Model Validation |
0.915 |
1998 — 2004 |
Smith, Alice |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
U.S.-Turkey Cooperative Research: Design of Communications Networks Using Computational Intelligence, and Study of Women in Engineering in the U.S. and in Turkey |
0.915 |
2000 — 2003 |
Smith, Alice Johnson, R. Wayne |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Relating Field Data to Accelerated Life Testing
EEC-0002669 Smith
This project brings together two NSF I/UCRC's to improve accelerated life testing (ALT) of vehicle electronics. The Center for Advanced Vehicle Electronics (CAVE) of Auburn University with partner with the Quality and Reliability Engineering (QRE) Center of Rutgers University and Arizona State University to investigate the relationship between wear, degradation and failure of vehicle controllers as experienced in the field with that expected by the results of ALT conducted in the laboratory. DaimlerChrysler Electronics of Huntsville, Alabama supplies the test bed. Vehicle electronics are subject to stress due to temperature, humidity, cycling and other environmental hazards. The materials that comprise the controllers are susceptible to the effects of corrosion and oxidation. The solder that connects the controller components can crack due to fatigue and creep under high temperature and thermal cycling stresses. These failures affect the performance of the vehicle from slightly to severely. The research of this project will develop a general methodology for specifying accelerated life tests so that they result in an accurate characterization of the degradation and failures that will be experienced in the filed. The failure mechanisms for the assembly materials in field units will be investigated in the development of the accelerated life tests. ALT standards, which new units must pass prior to marketing, will be adequate without being overly conservative, potentially allowing new designs and new materials to be used in vehicle electronics.
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0.915 |
2001 — 2006 |
Smith, Alice |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Advance Leadership Award
The proposed activity aims to improve the recruitment and retention of women in engineering academia and to enhance career development of women engineering academics by addressing publications in refereed scholarly journals.
This project will develop a CD ROM that demystifies the journal publication process. The CD ROM will contain both text material and digital video. An overview of how the system works and the differences, both in procedure and in impact, of journal articles, journal short papers, journal notes, refereed proceedings and book chapters will be documented in clear and general terms. How the editorial board of a journal operates from editor-in-chief down to individual reviewers will be explained with suggestions on how to become involved with a journal in an editorial capacity. Then, a set of best practices case studies that follow engineering papers from first submittal through publication will be included. These will take the user through the review and revision process step by step and at least one case study will involve a rejected paper that is successfully transformed for another journal. The video clips will provide comments and discussion by article authors, journal editors and reviewers, using women engineering academics where possible. While the focus is on journal papers, this CD ROM will assist the users in developing other peer reviewed publications including proposals. Dissemination will be in two phases and will be aligned with assessment efforts involving surveys and interviews. This project will benefit a large number of women academics and potential academics by addressing an issue vital to scholarly success.
This project is supported by the NSF ADVANCE Program. The overall mission of the ADVANCE Program is to increase the participation of women in the scientific and engineering workforce through the increased representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers.
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0.915 |
2003 — 2005 |
Smith, Alice Nettleship, Ian (co-PI) [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Collaborative Research: Enhancing the Fracture Strength of Advanced Ceramics by Process Control At the Microstructural Scale
The wide application of advanced structural ceramics is limited by the problems related to structural reliability that are common to all brittle materials. Ceramics do not yield before fracture and therefore fracture strength is often the basis for the prediction of a design limit. Unfortunately, the strength of ceramics is found to be very sensitive to processing variables in ways that are difficult to predict. In recent years much effort has gone into toughening ceramics using mechanisms that result in the need for complex microstructures. Such work is usually isolated from studies in process control resulting in relatively few systematic and quantitative evaluations of the relationships between processing conditions and fracture behavior. This project uses a closely integrated interdisciplinary approach to determine the relationships between ceramics processing variables and fracture behavior of alumina. For this first year effort, correlations will be made between the distribution of microstructural heterogeneities and the structure of both polished and ground surfaces along with a limited number of fracture strength measurements. Ceramics processing, microstructural evolution, hardness distributions and fracture behavior will be linked through quantitative neural network based process models at the microstructural level combined with image analysis. The end result will be an improved quantitative understanding of the effects of processing variables on the fracture of advanced ceramics -- an understanding based on sound statistical analysis of microstructure evolution, and one which can be used to properly manufacture these ceramics.
This project will be a timely application of image analysis and computational intelligence in the processing of advanced materials and will contribute to the emerging paradigm of studying materials as complex systems. Furthermore, the successful demonstration of process modeling of high strength ceramics will motivate a shift of the emphasis in ceramics processing to a quantitative understanding of microstructural control. Finally, the educational outcomes will provide resources to teach materials processing as an interdisciplinary subject to university students, and engage young middle school students in the realms of material science and image processing.
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0.915 |
2004 — 2009 |
Smith, Alice Jones, Peter (co-PI) [⬀] Evans, John Weatherby, Dennis (co-PI) [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Next Generation of Manufacturing Engineers For the Automotive Sector
The Next Generation of Manufacturing Engineers Program for the Automotive Sector Program awards scholarships to mechanical and industrial engineering students at the bachelors, masters and doctoral levels who desire to prepare for careers in automotive manufacturing. A total of 29 scholarships per year for four years are awarded. Scholarships are awarded based on financial need and academic promise with attention to developing a diverse workforce of automotive engineers.
The intellectual merit focuses on an interdisciplinary and vertically integrated approach, that is, approaching manufacturing from a total supply chain perspective that considers the vehicle from design through assembly to customer delivery.
Broader impacts includes outreach to K-12 students and teachers, and energetic recruitment and retention of women and African-American undergraduate and graduate students. Student recruitment, support and mentoring are be provided by the BellSouth Minority Engineering Program and the local student chapters of the Society of Women Engineers, the National Society of Black Engineers, the Institute of Industrial Engineers, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Society of Automotive Engineers. This project ensures a supply of well-trained engineers in the growing automotive industry in the Southeast and helps encourage further development of this industry within the region, which has historically been economically and educationally disadvantaged.
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0.915 |
2006 — 2011 |
Svyantek, Daniel (co-PI) [⬀] Sollie, Donna (co-PI) [⬀] Stroup-Gardiner, Mary Smith, Alice Wooten, Marie (co-PI) [⬀] Jenda, Overtoun (co-PI) [⬀] Curtis, Christine (co-PI) [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Advance Partnerships For Adaptation, Implementation and Dissemination: Sem Transformation Through "Small Wins"
ADVANCE Auburn: SEM Transformation through "Small Wins" will develop, adapt, and implement the "small wins" approach for producing lasting change for increasing the representation, participation, advancement and success rate of women faculty in science, engineering and mathematics (SEM) disciplines. The "small wins" approach (Meyerson and Fletcher, 2000) advocates transforming a workplace through a series of small positive changes used to improve the working environment for those who are disproportionately affected by unsupportive and oftentimes inconsiderate practices in the workplace. Since the changes produced by "small wins" are incremental and locally driven, the approach is non-threatening and more easily accepted by an entrenched culture such as often exists in the SEM academic disciplines. Successive "small wins" build upon themselves such that substantive and lasting changes in the work environment and culture are achieved and assimilated over time. This award will develop and apply the "small wins" approach to transform the SEM disciplines at Auburn University and, subsequently, at other institutions.
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0.915 |
2006 — 2007 |
Smith, Alice |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Us-Turkey Planning Visit For a Workshop On Industrial Engineering Women in Academia in the U.S. and the Middle East
0549304 Smith
This award funds a summer 2006 planning visit to Turkey for Dr. Alice Smith and Ms. LuAnn Sims, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama. The purpose of the visit is to work with Dr. Berna Dengiz of Baskent University in Ankara, Turkey to co-organize a regional workshop to take place in Turkey in the summer of 2008. The workshop will focus on women in academic industrial engineering and related fields such as systems engineering, engineering management and manufacturing engineering. Discussions will center on the current environment for women academics in this field in the regions involved, and to formulate workable solutions to problems of recruitment and retention. Participants will be drawn from the U.S. and from Middle Eastern countries. The long lead-time for planning and organizing this workshop enhances the likelihood that it will fully explore the rich diversity of practices, challenges, institutions, and solutions across the countries involved.
While women form a relatively large proportion of industrial engineering undergraduate students in the U.S. (their number approaches 50% at many institutions), female women academics in the same field are a minority. Because Turkey has a relatively large proportion of women academics in this field, it is an ideal place to hold such a workshop and an ideal source of successful practices and models for consideration by U.S. and Middle Eastern universities. Such a workshop has the potential to stimulate positive research interactions between the U.S. and the Middle East, to increase the number of qualified women who choose to pursue advanced industrial engineering degrees and enter academia in all countries involved in the workshop, and to improve the retention and advancement of current women academics in the field.
During the planning visit, the PI and her colleagues will visit at least 8 Turkish universities with strong industrial engineering programs in order to explore candidate venues for the workshop and to meet with potential participants to solicit their support and ideas to make the workshop successful. One of the principals for the workshop, Dr. Rym M-Hallah, a Tunisian-born female industrial engineering professor on the faculty at Kuwait University, will join the U.S. visitors and Dr. Dengiz during the planning visit. She will help contact women professors and advanced doctoral students in other countries in the region, including Egypt and Lebanon.
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0.915 |
2007 — 2008 |
Smith, Alice |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Us-Turkey Workshop: Women in Industrial Engineering Academia - U.S. and Middle East
0728947 Smith
Scope: This project is to support the "US-Turkey Workshop: Women in Industrial Engineering Academia-U.S. and the Middle East", to be held in Istanbul and in Ankara, Turkey during June, 2008. The organizers are Dr. Alice E. Smith, Department of Industrial Engineering, Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama and Dr. Berna Dengiz, Baskent University, Ankara, Turkey as well as Dr. Rym M'Hallah, Kuwait University, Kuwait. The workshop will focus on the current environment for women academics in this field in the regions involved and formulate workable solutions to problems of recruitment, retention and advancement. While women form a relatively large proportion of industrial engineering undergraduate students, female women academics in the same field are an overwhelming minority. However, Turkey has a relatively large proportion of women academics in this field, and therefore is in an ideal position to host this workshop. Related departments and majors to industrial engineering will also be included. The workshop is expected to last five full days and will take place in both Istanbul and Ankara. Within Ankara and Istanbul there are multiple industrial engineering departments (at different institutions of higher learning). Two industrial plant trips are planned, one in Izmit and the other near Ankara. Topics of discussion include obtaining a faculty position, advancement through academic ranks, enhancing research capability and productivity, publishing in scholarly journals, international collaborations, and combining family issues with an academic career. While the workshop will be in Turkey the workshop is regional. Dr. M'Hallah is a Tunisian woman industrial engineering professor who is currently on the faculty of Kuwait University. Besides Turkey and Kuwait, support has been secured by academic institutions in Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia and Oman. The U.S. attendees to be supported, other than the PI and her senior assistant, comprise six senior academics, four junior academics and two doctoral students who plan an academic career. Expected attendance from Turkey and other Middle East countries will total about 30 and be divided similarly among those categories with possibly more attendance from the junior rank and doctoral students. Thus, total attendance will be about 45, all or nearly all female. The PI has a long relationship with Middle Eastern, especially Turkish, scientists including research on women in engineering
INTELLECTUAL MERITS: The intellectual merit of the workshop is to provide a forum to bring together a diverse and highly qualified set of academics to focus on the important issues surrounding women in industrial engineering academia. The broader impacts of the workshop are to stimulate positive interactions between the U.S. and the Middle East, increase the number of qualified women who choose to pursue advanced industrial engineering degrees and enter academia, and to improve the retention and advancement of current women academics in the field.
BROADER IMPACTS: This workshop should contribute to a better understanding of the issues affecting the recruitment, retention, and success of women faculty in industrial engineering, and also should directly impact the success of participants and the students and colleagues with whom they interact. It should help stimulate positive interactions between the U.S. and the Middle East increase the number of qualified women who choose to pursue advanced industrial engineering degrees and enter academia. A proceedings of the Workshop will be published on CD ROM and also be available from the Workshop website. The proceedings will include papers, presentations, films and pictures. Portions of the Workshop will be carried on live satellite television through the capabilities of Baskent University.
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0.915 |
2010 — 2013 |
Smith, Alice Twomey, Janet |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Us-Turkey Workshop: Empowering Women in Industrial Engineering Academia - International Collaborations For Research and Education, Ankara, Turkey, March 2012
1042980 Smith
Description: This award is to support a US- Turkey workshop on Empowering Women in Industrial Engineering Academia, to be held in Istanbul, Turkey in March 2012. The organizers are Dr. Alice E. Smith, Department of Industrial Engineering (IE) at Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama and Dr. Dr. Zeki Ayag of Kadir Has University (KHU) in Istanbul, Turkey. The workshop builds upon a highly successful prior workshop held in Turkey in 2008. It allows broader participation by women from the Middle East, and provides emphasis on both research and teaching. There will be pre-workshop activities to help participants interact leading to a more productive and more effective meeting. A website will be developed to sustain the collaboration efforts. Significant support is provided by KHU for the logistics of the meeting. A planned tour at Mercedes-Benz facility in Turkey will provide a good perspective to the workshop participants as the majority of students that they mentor enter the field of industry as opposed to academia. Assessment of the workshop will occur at the conclusion of the workshop and 12-18 months afterward which will provide valuable insight.
Intellectual merit: Articulation of and answers to the issues surrounding international collaborations and advancement in industrial engineering academia from a female perspective is needed. From the U.S. perspective, insights and approaches can be learned from Middle Eastern counterparts, who for the most part are more progressive in recruiting and advancing women in engineering academia despite their more traditional cultural heritages. From the Middle Eastern perspective, participating successfully in the international scholarly research arena and enabling international collaborations are areas where benefits can be gained from the U.S. participants. IE research, practice and education would benefit greatly from having successful female role models in the field and internationally, and the linkage between research and teaching is essential for success in academia. Many of the richer and more interesting industrial engineering research topics such as sustainable engineering lend themselves to a broader, more international examination, and this workshop will help to facilitate this need.
Broader impacts: The workshop targets a very wide segment of industrial engineering women in academia from the U.S. and several Middle Eastern nations. Increasing the rate of female PhD production and recruitment into engineering would impact both engineering education and practice. The Turkish experience in terms of the fraction of female faculty is an interesting phenomenon and the creation of a strong education a research bond between US academics and their Turkish counterparts can encourage this development. The workshop will be an unusual opportunity for in depth interaction among the U.S. participants and Turkish and Middle Eastern academics, and will enhance future collaboration and sharing among the countries and will promote advancement of the important topic of women in engineering academia. This project is being funded by the Diversity and Outreach Prrogram in ENG and by the Office of International Science and Engineering.
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0.915 |
2012 — 2014 |
Smith, Alice Valenzuela, Jorge |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Pasi On Modeling, Simulation, and Optimization of Globalized Physical Distribution Systems; Santiago, Chile, July 2013
This Pan-American Advanced Studies Institutes (PASI) award, jointly supported by the NSF and the Department of Energy (DOE), will take place in July 2013 at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago, Chile. Organized by Dr. Alice E. Smith, Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Dr. Jorge F. Valenzuela, Professor and Chair of Industrial and Systems Engineering, both at Auburn University, the institute will focus on the transport and distribution of manufactured goods to customers, known as physical distribution systems. Managing distribution systems in globalized business environments is challenging due to the increasing complexity of production systems and supply networks, traditional efficiency concerns, quality, storage and transport aspects, and holistic approaches involving sustainability, security, and human factors. Thus, the modeling and design of physical distribution systems require a mastery of cutting edge technical tools and understanding of new approaches to design and operation. The PASI will provide participants with educational modules on various aspects of physical distribution systems, with an emphasis on multinational distribution systems at both the micro and macro levels. The micro level addresses such topics as warehousing, material handling, and facility layout while the macro level refers to facility location, supply networks, routing optimization, and collaborative logistics.
This PASI brings together outstanding scholars and students from throughout the Americas to learn about many technical facets involved with complex distribution systems. It encompasses traditional small classroom experiences, hands-on group projects taken from actual distribution systems, and intensive field experiences. Knowledge will be disseminated widely through first hand contacts and through an open access web page of all educational materials and project outcomes. As such, it will benefit many other students and early career researchers in the fields of industrial engineering, systems engineering, operations research, operations management, applied mathematics and logistics. Additionally, the PASI will promote sustainable international collaborations among senior and junior researchers of different countries and regions.
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0.915 |
2012 — 2016 |
Smith, Alice Gue, Kevin (co-PI) [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Collaborative Research: Non-Traditional Designs For Order Picking Warehouses
The objective of this collaborative research award is to investigate new methods for designing warehouses that support order picking operations, in which workers visit many locations to build a customer order. The designs will permit picking aisles and cross aisles to take on a number of configurations and angles, which is quite different from current practice, in which picking aisles are parallel and cross aisles are orthogonal to the picking aisles. Warehouse designs will be represented as an encoding of real numbers in an array, which allows for easy manipulation. A significant challenge of the research is to estimate the expected travel distance to retrieve a random order, given a design. A two-stage process will be developed, consisting of a "rough cut" meta-model and a more detailed, simulation-based model. The search space will be explored with particle swarm optimization.
If the research is successful, the methods developed could be used by wholesale and retail distribution centers to reduce labor costs associated with retrieving customer orders. It is estimated that U.S. firms alone spend approximately $13B annually on order picking labor costs. Even a small percentage reduction in this cost could lead to significant economic benefit. Moreover, results of this research will be promoted through an interactive warehouse design website that could be used by students, researchers, and practitioners. The research will also be disseminated by involving students in a tour of existing warehouse facilities, and by distributing teaching modules that can be used in classrooms or distributed over the Web.
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0.915 |
2018 — 2019 |
Nowak, Andrzej [⬀] Barnett, Mark (co-PI) [⬀] Norton, Robert Smith, Alice Dozier, Gerry (co-PI) [⬀] |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center For Resilient Rural Infrastructure (Rri)
The Planning Grants for Engineering Research Centers competition was run as a pilot solicitation within the ERC program. Planning grants are not required as part of the full ERC competition, but intended to build capacity among teams to plan for convergent, center-scale engineering research.
Rural areas in the U.S. are home to sixty million people, occupy 97% of the land area, and supply the bulk of the nation's food and natural resources. The overarching goal of the proposed activity is to understand and positively impact the significant physical and human infrastructure needs of rural U.S. communities through research supporting the design, development, and implementation of resilient rural infrastructure. One of the challenges in conducting large-scale research is to simultaneously ensure significant potential impact while keeping the studies tractable so as to not overwhelm resources. In this planning grant, various types of rural communities will be targeted such as: communities in the southeast U.S., Puerto Rico, and Native American communities within the Great Plains. These communities and the educational institutions that support them will be targeted in order to increase the participation of groups and geographic regions that are too often underrepresented in STEM disciplines.
The primary objective of this project is to leverage the resources of a planning grant to develop and nurture relationships with the stakeholder community in a deliberate, early-stage process in an effort to develop a research team that is well poised to successfully compete for an Engineering Research Center addressing a highly complex, high-societal impact challenge. Inadequate and failing rural infrastructure is an important though arguably overlooked problem of national significance requiring center-scale, converging engineering research. If successful, this will be the nation's first-ever center dedicated primarily to the study and improvement of rural infrastructure. The goal is to develop a convergent research team of multidisciplinary subject-matter experts to successfully reengineer the nation's rural infrastructure. However, the current team is lacking stakeholders from the target rural communities and the educational institutions that support them (largely primary and secondary schools and local junior colleges). The team will also explore additional areas of expertise needed to address the this complex challenge (e.g., public health, public policy).
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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0.915 |
2020 — 2021 |
Smith, Alice Mykoniatis, Konstantinos |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Rapid/Collaborative Research: Quantifying Social Media Data For Improved Modeling of Mitigation Strategies For the Covid-19 Pandemic
This Rapid Response Research (RAPID) grant will support research that will contribute new knowledge related to modeling social behavior and community activity during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as future pandemics with COVID-19 characteristics. The model focuses on compliance with mitigation strategies and public health guidelines, thus enabling the selection of policies that are most effective in promoting both the progress of science and advancing national health and prosperity. Various pandemic models are currently being used to predict the spread of a virus and establish which mitigation strategies are the most effective. These models are heavily based on assumptions and may include an oversimplified reality of how populations react and behave. This research will provide needed knowledge and methods for the development of a model of how individuals in the U.S. react to certain mitigation strategies, such as social-distancing, stay-at-home orders, quarantines, and travel advisories, by mining and analyzing social media data during the COVID-19 crisis. This enhanced modeling approach and its resultant model will be of great value to disaster response managers and policy/decision makers to understand human social behavior. This work allows assessment of the effectiveness of mitigation strategies and public health guidelines during pandemics (and other crises). This project will also form the basis of a publicly available case study suitable for university level students that can be widely incorporated in courses.
Although individual-based and homogeneous mixing pandemic models provide useful insights and predictive capabilities within a range of possibilities, they are highly sensitive to people?s actions. This research aims to provide an enhanced approach to model social behavior and community activity during a pandemic in terms of compliance with mitigation strategies and public health guidelines. Social media data present a brief window of opportunity for research on how, and to what extent, the public does or does not comply with the recommended mitigation strategies and public health guidelines. The research team will collect real-time data from social media related to COVID19-exposed regional populations in the U.S. The data will be analyzed using machine learning techniques to identify non-mutually exclusive clusters of people based on similarity of their demographic, geographic, and time information, and establish relationships among clusters. The analyzed data will form the basis of a data-driven multi-paradigm simulation model that captures changes in public sentiment over time, quantifies the resistance/compliance with mitigation strategies and health guidelines, and gauges overall effectiveness of various mitigation strategies and advice over time.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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0.915 |