POTSDAM – Clarkson University is part of a new nationwide collaboration focused on developing new sustainable vehicle technologies as part of The Center for Electric, Connected and Autonomous Technologies for Mobility (eCAT).

The eCAT Center is an Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) sponsored by NSF tasked with developing sustainable mobility technologies such as electrification, smart infrastructure, and resilient computing systems. Clarkson is one of three schools, along with the University of North Texas and Wayne State University, to be part of the collaboration.

Chen Liu, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will serve as the site director of eCAT center at Clarkson University. Liu has expertise in perception and mapping for autonomous systems, hardware design and heterogeneous computing, and cybersecurity.

"The Clarkson faculty has collective strength across disciplines in sensing/perception, computing, electrification, green energy, and vehicle grid integration," Liu said. “We are looking forward to this opportunity to collaborate with industry partners and government agencies to work on these exciting areas of emerging technologies.”

The Clarkson University eCAT site will focus on hardware support and computing backbone, especially employing edge computing, edge server, cloud computing in a holistic and integrated fashion to address the computing need for connected and autonomous driving workloads. Clarkson has been awarded $600,000 over five years by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to conduct its research.