Whether you miss working at your Research Park office or simply want to represent the Research Park, use these backgrounds during your Zoom calls. Learn how to upload these backgrounds into Zoom by visiting the Zoom Help Center.
The U.S. Small Business Administration’s 17-state SBIR Road Tour will transition to an online format for its October program in the Midwest. Oct. 19-22 will be known as SBIR Week in the Midwest. Panels and presentations will be held on Monday, Oct. 19 – all online . On Thursday, Oct. 22, the Research Park/Champaign-Urbana small businesses will have access to one-on-one meetings with SBIR program managers, all held virtually. To get information and updates about this event, sign up for our SBIR Road Tour email list. The Road Tour connects entrepreneurs working on advanced technology to one of the country’s largest source of early stage funding – the Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer programs. This event was originally scheduled for June. More information, including a detailed agenda and registration, will be released in August. “SBA is focused on helping small businesses grow and expand. The $4 billion in federal early stage funding is often a critical piece to maturing an entrepreneur’s research idea into a product or service. The Road Tours bring the federal managers to the entrepreneur and target areas and individuals that are underrepresented when it comes to receiving federal R&D funding,” said SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza. “This tour reflects our continued commitment to ensure those innovators are aware of SBIR/STTR program resources.” This will be the sixth year of the SBIR Road Tour, led by the SBA’s Office of Investment and Innovation together with 11 participating federal agencies. NATIONAL SBIR ROAD TOUR SCHEDULE 2020: The Midwest Tour will run from October 19-23, with “stops” in Omaha, Nebraska; St. Louis, Missouri; Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, and Bloomington, Indiana. Small technology firms, innovators, scientists or researchers seeking more information on the SBIR Road Tour, including a schedule of stops and participating agencies should visit: https://www.sbirroadtour.com/. For more information about SBIR/STTR programs, please visit https://www.sbir.gov/. About SBIR/STTRSBA coordinates the SBIR/STTR programs, also known as America’s Seed Fund, which each year provides more than $3.7 billion in early stage seed capital totaling over 5,000 awards to small businesses. Eleven participating federal government agencies announce funding opportunities as either grants or contracts to address their research and development needs. Companies supported by the SBIR/STTR programs often generate some of the most important breakthroughs each year in the U.S. Additional information about the programs, as well as past and current topics can be found at www.sbir.gov. About the U.S. Small Business AdministrationThe U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) was created in 1953 and is a Cabinet-level agency of the federal government to aid, counsel, assist and protect the interests of small business concerns, to preserve free competitive enterprise and to maintain and strengthen the overall economy of our nation. The SBA helps Americans start, build and grow businesses, and recover from disasters. Through an extensive network of field offices and partnerships with public and private organizations, the SBA delivers its services to people throughout the United States, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and Guam. To learn more about SBA, visit www.sba.gov.
SBIR Road Tour Stop in Champaign-Urbana Rescheduled for October Read Post »
With the exception of essential workers, Research Park companies are primarily working from home. What hasn’t come to a halt: construction. Below is a video of the walls rising at 1907 S. Fourth Street, the newest building in the Research Park. It is scheduled to open for occupancy in August. In addition to work on 1907 S. Fourth Street, the Illinois Conference Center expansion building walls will go up the week of April 13. The Gates Greenhouse — a very specialized build — will arrive from the plant on April 20. We are grateful to Fox/Atkins Development and all of its subcontractors for their commitment to forward progress on these projects.
Watch the Research Park Grow: Construction on Three Building Projects Continues Read Post »
A team led by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Grainger College of Engineering and Carle Health has produced a prototype emergency ventilator to help address the expected surge in the need for respiratory care associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. The Illinois RapidVent, as the emergency ventilator is known, would plug into the oxygen source available in most hospital rooms or could plug into a tank of oxygen. The prototype has run for more than 75 hours, which is more than 125,000 breathing cycles. Over this time, the device delivered the amount of oxygen necessary and the pressure that patients would need when they are unable to breathe well enough on their own. So far, focused testing in the laboratory shows equivalent performance to commercial products—which are in very short supply. Partners in the Illinois RapidVent project include faculty and researchers from across the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, its Grainger College of Engineering, its Siebel Center for Design, its Applied Research Institute, Carle Health, Tekmill, and Creative Thermal Solutions, Inc. TEKMILL, the Applied Research Institute, and Carle all have facilities in the Research Park. Read the full article on the Grainger College of Engineering’s website here.
Team at the University of Illinois Develops Emergency Ventilator Read Post »
We are making continuous updates to our operations in light of the current information and policies with COVID-19. This is an unprecedented situation, and we are doing our best to be responsive to our clients, employees, and students who are all impacted by this global pandemic. The Champaign Urbana Public Health Department is the best local source for this information. We are following guidance that we are receiving from the University of Illinois and other public health sources. This is changing rapidly, so please be aware that new information is rolling out hour by hour. The latest information is being posted to the university’s COVID-19 website. On March 11, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign announced its decision to eliminate in-person classes for the rest of the Spring 2020 semester. Starting March 23, all classes will be delivered online. Governor Pritzker issued a stay-at-home order effective through April 30. This means that employees, unless those in essential jobs should work remotely. Jobs deemed essential include: Health care workers, grocery store employees, pharmacists, hardware store workers, plumbers, electricians, day care providers, bank tellers and roles that are essential to a business’ operations such as payroll and security. Police, firefighters, paramedics and sanitation workers will not be quarantined. Residents can still go to the grocery stores, put gas in their cars, take walks outside and make pharmacy runs. While this may have a major impact on the University of Illinois community, we want to make sure that everyone understands what this actually means and how it will impact Research Park operations. (Of course, this information is changing hour by hour; this is what we know TODAY.) University of Illinois is not closing; dorms remain open and while students are encouraged to return home, they are welcome to stay in place. University employees will work remotely other than those in essential jobs defined in the order, such as police, healthcare workers, power plant operators, and housing and dining personnel. EnterpriseWorks and Research Park buildings remain open. EnterpriseWorks and Research Park staff are working remotely for the remainder of the spring semester. Research Park Response to Covid-19 Following the CDC’s recommendation to cancel or postpone events of 50 or more people, the Research Park is suspending in-person events through the end of April. We will be hosting some workshops online via Zoom; please refer to our calendar for more information. EnterpriseWorks remains open by keycard access 24/7 to all tenants and their employees for the foreseeable future; extra cleaning supplies are available for tenant use. Please be respectful of others and return them when done. Starting Monday, March 23, EnterpriseWorks will be unlocked between 9 am and 2 pm to allow for couriers and USPS deliveries. This may change as we access the situation. EnterpriseWorks and Research Park staff are working remotely for the remainder of the spring semester. We will not not be signing for packages. Please email us with urgent needs; we will do our best to address remotely. Consider your company’s policies on remote work. Please communicate clearly your company’s remote work policy. If you are a tenant in another Research Park building, please refer to your property manager/landlord regarding any changes in procedures during this time. Consider if your work falls into order’s definition of an essential job. More information on the order can be found here. Here are some suggestions and information as it relates to student interns and other employees in the Research Park. Consider your company’s policies on remote work. Many companies have implemented remote work strategies, however it may not be apparent how that impacts students specifically. Communicate clearly your company’s remote work policy and requirements of in-person attendance. Anticipate that some students may want to pick up MORE hours if they are able, since they will not have to spend time traveling back and forth to classes. MANY students do not plan to leave campus. Most students, especially upperclassmen and graduate students, live in private housing. Some students will be unable to leave the community, as it may not be safe for them to travel home. Given best practices for “social distancing” provided by public health professionals, consider the density of your office and evaluate if you need to limit how many employees should be in the office at one time. Here is some guidance from the World Health Organization on healthy workplaces. https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/getting-workplace-ready-for-covid-19.pdf Student Mindset Please keep in mind, students may be experiencing a lot of emotions in light of COVID-19. The uncertainty surrounding the rapidly evolving policies may leave students scared, stressed, and saddened. This policy may leave students isolated in their dorms, and some may find solace in coming to the office for work or school. By moving to online classes, some students have expressed feeling robbed of their collegiate experience. This is especially true for graduating students who have seen their “last” of everything cancelled. Considerations for Student Workers Some students may not have the ability to travel home and many have indicated plans to stay in the Champaign-Urbana area. Anticipate that some students may want to pick up MORE hours if they are able, since they will not have to spend time traveling back and forth to classes. It is important to keep in mind that remote work and online learning is a new environment for many students. Consider strategies to best mentor students and direct them while they adapt to the remote work environment. FIND UP-TO-DATE COVID RESPONSE INFORMATION HERE.
Research Park’s Response to COVID-19 Read Post »
IntelinAir, EnterpriseWorks graduate, announced it has joined the NVIDIA Inception program as a community member. IntelinAir is an analytics company that delivers crop intelligence to farmers through aerial imagery, computer vision, machine learning, agronomic science, and intelligent user interfaces. Their goal is to organize and digitize the world’s crop information and performance – making it universally accessible and useful to deliver high yields, greater efficiencies, and sustainable farming to feed the human race. The company was founded in 2015 by Al Eisaian and Naira Hovakimyan. Hovakimyan is a Mechanical Science and Engineering Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Grainger College of Engineering. Eisain is a serial entrepreneur from Silicon Valley. IntelinAir graduated from the EnterpriseWorks incubator at the University of Illinois Research Park in December of 2019 and maintains an office in Champaign, Illinois. NVIDIA also holds an office at the University of Illinois Research Park. In 2020, IntelinAir plans to document images from close to 5M acres of farmland across nearly 50,000 fields, collecting over 1PB of raw data. Using computer vision and deep learning approaches, IntelinAir will analyze data to deliver near real-time Smart Alerts to farmers through its flagship product, AgMRI™. IntelinAir is actively engaged with the broader machine learning community, sponsoring an ML workshop at CVPR 2020 and releasing a public dataset, Agriculture-Vision.com, to push the boundaries of computer vision within agriculture. The NVIDIA Inception program offers IntelinAir collaboration opportunities with industry-leading experts and other AI-driven startups. “We are extremely excited to be a part of the NVIDIA Inception program. NVIDIA is a leader in the machine learning community on both the research and engineering fronts, and this collaboration will further fuel our ability to deliver meaningful crop intelligence to farmers and push the boundaries of what machine learning and AI can do for agriculture,” said Jennifer Hobbs, PhD, director of machine learning at IntelinAir. NVIDIA Inception is a virtual accelerator program that helps startups during critical stages of product development, prototyping and deployment. Every Inception member gets a custom set of ongoing benefits, from NVIDIA Deep Learning Institute credits, marketing support and preferred pricing on GPUs, enabling early-stage startups with tools that help them grow. For more information, visit www.intelinair.com/. About IntelinAir: IntelinAir is a full-season and full-spectrum crop intelligence company focused on agriculture that delivers actionable intelligence to help farmers make data-driven decisions to improve operational efficiency, yields, and ultimately their profitability. IntelinAir combines the power of aerial imagery analytics through computer vision and deep learning methodologies, agronomic science, and user-friendly interface (mobile) technologies to deliver near real-time decision support to farmers. The company’s flagship solution AgMRI™ is a field health monitoring and early-warning system that enables farmers to manage their operations proactively and with confidence. Read more here. This story was also featured by Yahoo Finance.
IntelinAir Joins NVIDIA Inception Program Read Post »
Genective recently opened its new world headquarters at the University of Illinois Research Park; with it, the grand opening was celebrated by the University, Genective, and their partners with the hopes of leading the way in innovation and research. With entities and activities in North America, South America, Europe, and Asia, Genective is currently dedicated to the research, development, and commercialization of transgenic traits. Genective’s Champaign facility includes state-of-the-art labs as well as open office space. For more information, visit genective.com. View the grand opening video.
Genective Grand Opening Read Post »
Since 1995, Yahoo has been connecting people to their passions and amplifying what matters most to them. Yahoo pioneered communications with Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail as the internet was booming. As the company grew, Yahoo became the premier destination for content including News, Sports, and Finance. Now, Yahoo is part of Verizon Media with over 900 million visitors from across the globe. If you would like to build products which impact millions and change the world, see below for the exciting work Yahoo does in the Research Park. Verizon Media Group’s Data Measurements and Insights team works on one of the biggest online advertising and audience data sets in the world. They are responsible for providing fast, clean, and relevant data for VMG’s advertising businesses as well as key measurements and insights about VMG users. Verizon Media is developing next generation technologies to enrich their advertiser and user experience through complex, scalable data platforms, with ever growing and interesting challenges. The Big Data Platforms team powers the most demanding Big Data applications in the industry on some of the largest Hadoop clusters ever built. Yahoo pioneered this level of scale with Hadoop, and Verizon Media continues to be a leader in this space. The team is made up of several PMCs (Program Management Committee members) and Committers in key Apache open source projects like Hadoop, Storm, and Tez, just to name a few. Leadership keeps Verizon Media at the forefront of these projects, both directionally and technically. If you want to work with Hadoop, Storm, or Spark and get a deep understanding of cloud computing, this is the team for you. Fun Fact: Did you know that Yahoo was the first tech company ever to implement emoticons ? Come see what Verizon Media Group is doing in the Silicon Prairie, in Champaign, Illinois!
Yahoo turned 25 this week Read Post »
The AgTech Innovation Summit was a success again this year. The 2020 AgTech Summit brought together the brightest minds in agtech for the fifth year. This year’s event included remarks from industry thought leaders including Bayer’s Senior Vice President of Open Innovation and Strategic Partnerships Allen Christian who said, “The future of agricultural innovation lies in the hands of the next generation of talented students. The AgTech Summit is a great example of how bringing people from across scientific disciplines together can help shape a more sustainable future for one of the world’s most important industries. At Bayer, we are proud to partner with the University of Illinois through our Innovation Center in the Research Park and as a sponsor the AgTech Summit.” The 2020 panels included discussions on investment, collaboration, and digital disruption in the agtech industry, including a discussion from growers and producers at the front lines of farming in a digital age. In addition to the unique mix of panel discussions, startup companies gave brief presentations on their technology, their company, and their plans for the future. The day concluded with the AgTech Showcase and Networking Event, a first for the Summit. The showcase not only allowed agtech companies to show off their technology, but it also provided the opportunity for the community to connect with Research Park companies, discover innovative technologies and network with industry leaders. The AgTech Summit is a collaboration between the University of Illinois Research Park, the University of Illinois, College of ACES, and the Office of Corporate Relations. Thank you to the generous sponsors who make this year’s event possible: Bayer and The Climate Corporation, John Deere, Kin + Carta, Google Cloud, Corteva, COUNTRY Financial, AGCO, Land O’Lakes, and the Illinois Center for Digital Agriculture. 2020 Agenda Wednesday March 4, 2020 7:30 AM: REGISTRATION AND CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST 8:00 AM: WELCOME AND OPENING REMARKS Laura Frerichs | Executive Director, University of Illinois Research Park Chancellor Robert Jones | Chancellor, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 8:10 AM: PLATINUM SPONSOR REMARKS Sam Eathington | Chief Science Officer, The Climate Corporation 8:25 AM: MORNING KEYNOTE ADDRESS Keith Narr | Vice President, Digital Labs and Data, Cargill 9:15 AM: COMPANY PRESENTATION Chinmay Soman | Co-Founder & CEO, EarthSense 9:30 AM: INVESTMENT IN AGTECH: A MATURING INDUSTRY? Moderator: Harlee Sorkin | Managing Director, Common Place Holdings Dennis Beard | Managing Partner, Serra Ventures Nancy Sullivan | CEO & Managing Partner, Illinois Ventures Dean Didato | Partner, Innova Memphis Abby Taubner | Partner, Gener8tor 10:20 AM: BREAK 10:35 AM: COMPANY PRESENTATION Rex Hess | Director of Science, Epivara 10:50 AM: COMPANY PRESENTATION Gabriel Burks | Senior Polymer Scientist, FrostDefense Envirotech 11:05 AM: DIGITAL DISRUPTION IN AGRICULTURE: MODERNIZING THE VALUE CHAIN Moderator: Vikram Adve | Co-Director, Center for Digital Agriculture Mark Moran | Director, John Deere Technology Innovation Center John Rahiya | Senior Manager, Business Development Global Fuse at AGCO Scott Hermes | Senior Director of Solution Delivery, Kin + Carta 12:00 PM: LUNCH 12:20 PM: AFTERNOON KICKOFF 12:35 PM: MOORE INNOVATION PRIZE 12:40 PM: COMPANY PRESENTATION Kaiyu Guan | Chair, Aspiring Universe 12:55 PM: AFTERNOON FIRESIDE CHAT Moderator: Laura Frerichs | Executive Director, University of Illinois Research Park Teddy Bekele | Chief Technology Officer, Land O’Lakes 1:30 PM: BREAK 1:45 PM: GROWERS AND PRODUCERS: PREPARING FOR THE NEXT GENERATION Moderator: Holly Spangler | Editor, Prairie Farmer Michael Ganschow | Farmer & Co-Owner, Ganschow Farms Jake Nims | Agricultural Engineer, Frank & West Environmental Engineers Leslie Cooperband | President & Co-owner, Prairie Fruits Farms & Creamery Jason Lakey | Farmer, Lakey Farms Brian Corkill | Owner, B.A. Farms Michael Haag | Past President, Illinois Pork Producers Association 2:45 PM: COMPANY PRESENTATION Daphne Preuss | Co-founder & President, BlooMD Shawn Carlson | Senior Scientist, BlooMD 3:00 PM: CORPORATIONS AND COLLABORATION: INDUSTRY LEADERS ON THE STATE OF AGRICULTURE Moderator: Dean Kim Kidwell | Dean, University of Illinois College of ACES Allen Christian | Senior Vice President, Open Innovation and Strategic Partnerships, Bayer Crop Science Neal Gutterson | Chief Technology Officer, Corteva Agriscience Paul Bloom | Vice President of Process & Chemical Research, ADM Aaron Schacht | Vice President of Innovation Regulatory & Business Development, Elanco Animal Health 3:55 PM: CLOSING REMARKS 4:00 PM: AGTECH SHOWCASE AND NETWORKING EVENT
AgTech Innovation Summit a Success Once Again Read Post »
On March 4, 2020, the Agriculture Technology Innovation Summit 2020 highlighted the AgTech located within the University of Illinois Research Park. The Park houses multiple corporate innovation centers, including Bayer, John Deere Tech Innovation Center, ADM Modeling Center, and Country Financial DigitaLab. AgTech startups such as EarthSense, LifeFoundry, and IntelinAir also participate in this event. Mark your calendar for this year’s summit to hear about the continuous AgTech developments at the Research Park.
AgTech Summit 2020 Read Post »
