Through the Orb project, that was in part designed to explore matching industry needs and expertise, I developed a business relationship with the Virginia Newport News’ Tech Center Research Park Executive Director Jeff Johnson and a NASA Langley Research Center’s (LaRC) Regional Economic Development Lead Christie Funk. As a result, Jeff and Christie contacted me in the fall 2017 with a follow-up project designed to challenge the current NASA’s patent search portfolio’s push model with an innovative approach to matching patents to regional industry’s needs. The project’s relatively modest budget of $17,000 was primarily destined towards two interns who would be working on this project. Through a series of discussions I proposed a different approach to the newly imagined pull model that offered a search system built out of a combination of parallel search modules. As a result, I was offered the Project Manager position and recruited two Computer Science interns who worked on this project from January until May 2018. The resulting prototype built from the ground-up was showcased to the NASA Langley Director, key State officials, and Angel investors. Its reception was overwhelmingly positive, resulting in the team filing a disclosure through the NASA LaRC. Further, the system is currently being considered as the replacement for the existing NASA-wide Patent search portal. Given NASA’s ownership of this project, no publications are planned at this point in time.

Research Team:
Ivica Ico Bukvic (Project Manager)
Christie Funk (Regional Economic Development Lead, NASA Langley Research Center)
Jeff Johnson (Tech Center Research Park)

Students:
Alec Helyar (CS)
Justin Rhee (CS)