We’re in the Navy now

Indiana University and Purdue University are joining the Navy.

In a three-way alliance, the two universities, along with Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division (NSWC Crane), have requested $5 million from the U.S. Department of Defense. The funding would support a project focused on development, testing and implementation of electronic and tele-support (E&T) technologies for today’s increasingly complicated military ships.

As in most areas of U.S. society, the Navy is doing more with less while racing to keep up with technological advances. While its new “smart” ships are increasingly complex, the staffs operating on board are smaller and often lacking in the most current technological expertise. Smaller staffs also mean there is a need to meet quality of life issues—such as medical consulting, ministry services and continuing education—of crews on board deployed ships.

This project proposed by IU, Purdue and NSWC Crane would research and develop advanced E&T technologies to enable a ship’s personnel to interface with shore-based expertise and talent in various fields. An educational initiative also is incorporated into the proposal to provide training in the use of the new technologies to both military and civilian personnel.

A real-life example of tele-support occurred last October after the U.S.S. Cole was attacked by terrorists in the Port of Aden in Yemen. Tele-support technology was used to access the ship’s condition, allowing ship builders in the United States to view damages in real time and plan a course of action that would allow the disabled ship to return to its home port for repairs.

The project would create an integrated multidisciplinary science and engineering team from IU, Purdue and NSWC Crane. Initial research and development of next generation and/or improved technologies would be organized into seven project areas:

1—secure networks and satellite communications;

2—knowledge/data management and discovery;

3—distributed and secure multimedia documents;

4—scalable and distributed multimedia servers;

5—total ownership cost models;

6—human/computer interfaces and visualization; and

7—integrated tele-support systems.

Project 1 would develop secure and efficient communication links between ships and shore activities. Projects 2 and 5 would develop data mining, knowledge management and knowledge discovery technologies for assessing the health status of a ship’s equipment and maintenance recommendations to provide quick and intelligent support to help engineering personnel with repair strategies. Projects 3 and 4 would develop efficient and secure support for multimedia documents and expert knowledge. Projects 6 and 7 would provide user interface and human factor aspects of the program, as well as realize and deploy the proposed tele-support services for beta testing.

Purdue University would act as the coordinating institution for this electronic and tele-support project. NSWC Crane would focus on military applications, providing requirement gathering services, user-level testing, and evaluation and feedback on tele-support.