Members of the Optimal Design Laboratory (ODE) took home two “Best Paper Awards” at the ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conference which took place in August, 2015.
Emrah Bayrak, Max Yi Ren (ME Alumnus), and Panos Papalambros have won the Best Paper Award for Design Automation at the International Design Engineering Technical Conferences for their work, “Ecoracer: Optimal Design and Control of Electric Vehicles Using Human Game Players.”
Their work explores the idea of using an online crowd, incentivized via a game, to help an optimization algorithm for creating and controlling design alternatives. This work shows that useful heuristics obtained from human players using a game can succesfully be transferred to search algorithms in order to solve computationally expensive design optimization problems.
Alex Burnap, Jeffrey Hartley, Yanxin Pan, and Panos Papalambros have won the Best Paper Award for Design Theory and Methodology at the International Design Engineering Technical Conferences for their work, “Balancing Design Freedom and Brand Recognition in the Evolution of Automotive Brand Character.”
Their work quantifies the tradeoff that designers at Audi, BMW, Cadillac, and Lexus make when wanting to create a new exciting vehicle model, while still staying true to their design history. Using morphable 2D and 3D designs, thousands of online crowdsourced responses, and hierarchical distributed statistical representations, the team found that BMW and Cadillac have the least “design freedom” before significantly sacrificing brand recognition, quantifying just how much their designs should change to stay fresh.
