Bhattacharyya and Shen Graduate from NSF's new Silicon Valley Incubator

University of Maryland recently graduated its first team from NSF's new Innovation-Corps (I-Corps) start-up accelerator program. UMD's I-Corps Team consisted of Shuvra S. Bhattacharyya (Professor, ECE/UMIACS), Chung-Ching Shen (Assistant Research Scientist, ECE) and Dean Chang (Director, MTECH Venture Programs).

I-Corps is a new program that teaches Silicon Valley lean start-up best practices to the top scientists and researchers in the U.S. and was featured in the New York Times, San Jose Mercury News, National Public Radio, and Nature. The I-Corps team of Shen, Bhattacharyya, and Chang, called Streamlined Embedded Technologies (SET), is focused on technology transfer in the area of innovative hardware and software to enable development of advanced sensor networks, including wired and wireless sensor networks across the domains of environmental monitoring, video networks, surveillance, defense, and building automation.

Each team in the I-Corps program consists of an Entrepreneurial Lead, a Principal Investigator, and an I-Corps Mentor who brings knowledge and experience about business and technology transfer to the team. Shen, Bhattacharyya, and Chang participated in these roles, respectively. The SET Team members developed a commercialization strategy for the technology that was recently developed in the Maryland DSPCAD Research Group, which is jointly affiliated with ECE and UMIACS.