UC IMS Center Recognized for Technological Innovation

The Center for Intelligent Maintenance Systems (IMS) was selected as this year’s winner of the Alexander Schwarzkopf Prize for Technological Innovation.

The Award was presented on Thursday, Jan. 9, at the National Science Foundation’s Industry/University Cooperative Research Centers (I/UCRC) annual meeting.

The I/UCRC program develops long-term partnerships among industry, academe and government. As the National Science Foundation's first centers program, it has more than 30 years of documented outcomes, increasing the innovation capacity of the United States, according to the I/UCRC website.

The IMS Center was selected for its exemplary research contribution to technology innovation and its positive impact on technology, industry and society as a whole.

IMS Center Director Jay Lee, PhD, who was presented with the prize at the I/UCRC award luncheon, is a fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, as well as a founding fellow of the International Society of Engineering Asset Management (ISEAM).

The IMS Center, an NSF I/UCRC, opened in 2001, consisting of the University of Cincinnati, the University of Michigan, Missouri University of Science and Technology and the University of Texas at Austin. Since then, the center has conducted more than 100 projects in partnership with more than 100 international organizations and was ranked the best on the 2012 NSF I/UCRC Economic Impact Study.

According to the center’s mission statement, the center envisions the future of maintenance as a system that enables equipment to achieve and sustain near-zero breakdown performance with self-maintenance capabilities, and ultimately to realize the autonomous transformation of raw data to useful information for improved reliability, productivity and asset utilization.

The center is focused on frontier technologies in embedded and remote monitoring, prognostics technologies and intelligent-decision support tools.