IBIT

Engages with industry to develop digital knowledge and talent

Manoj J. Chacko

Career Experience wins 2022 Digital Innovation Award

The Digital Innovation Foundry is pleased to announce that Career Experience is the recipient of the 2022 Digital Innovation Award in partnership with Temple University’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Institute (IEI) Innovative Idea Competition.

Career Experience will receive $1,000 and mentorship to develop their idea for the Be Your Own Boss Bowl (BYOBB) in Spring 2023. The Digital Innovation Award is open to all Temple University students, alumni, faculty and staff.

Entries were selected by the DIF team based on the following criteria:

  • Digital – does the idea apply technology in an interesting and/or novel manner?
  • Problem – does the idea solve a real business or societal problem?
  • Practical – is the idea practically doable given current technology, context, and resources?

Mentoring Program 2021 – 2022

The goal of the IBIT mentoring program is to match experienced executives with students.

The senior executives are usually members of the IBIT Advisory Board, employees of IBIT sponsor firms or alumni. The role of the mentor is to provide guidance and coaching to students augmenting the existing professional development resources, which includes providing ideas/feedback and serving as a sounding board for challenges and problems. The benefit for mentors is the opportunity to engage with students, and the benefit for students is to leverage the experience of senior executives. The IBIT mentoring program is chaired by Sondra Barbour, member of the IBIT Advisory Board.

IBIT matched 51 students to 20 industry executives.

Cencora – Digitally transforming the tracking of pharmaceutical products

Every day, healthcare solutions leader Cencora (a Fortune 10 company) ships pharmaceutical products and treatments to customers such as pharmacies and hospitals. Each shipment leaves from one of the company’s state-of-the-art distribution centers in totes. The totes are durable and designed to be reused — but there was currently no process in place to track what happened to the empty totes after initial use.

DIF Role

Create an enhanced tracking methodology to track totes, considering cost, reliability, usability, and integration with existing systems. Additionally, the solution should account for change management and its impact on team member processes.

Cencora Representatives

Pablo Mora
Cencora
Dharmesh Patel
Cencora

DIF Consultant

Russell Abernethy
Russell Abernethy
Computer Science
Eric Wolfe
Mechanical Engineering

DIF Awards

Russell Abernethy, Recipient of the Fall 2022 Digital Innovation Foundry Scholarship

Impact

“The work was relevant and useful. We are often heads down into our day-to-day operations, and so greatly benefited from a new perspective that our partnership with the Digital Innovation Foundry brought” Tanmay Bandyopadhyay

 Jeremy Shafer and Yan Wang managed this project for DIF

Lab-scale Testbed for Mixed Human-Autonomous Vehicle Traffic Research

Lab-scale Testbed for Mixed Human-Autonomous Vehicle Traffic Research

Led by Dr. Philip Dames and students from Temple’s College of Engineering, the project developed a scaled robotic testbed for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). The testbed can be used to study system-level flow characteristics of mixed human-CAV traffic, which, to date, has received very little attention compared to existing traffic flow or the safety of automated vehicles.

There are many simulation-based studies of traffic, however, there are few experimental results. This project bridges the divide by reducing the cost, effort, and risk. The project will enable the CAV community to (a) rapidly prototype and study levels of connectivity between CAVs and human-driven vehicles, and (b) evaluate coordinated CAVs algorithms to modulate traffic flows.

The DIF project laid the foundation for an NSF award, which is currently under review.