�������� student-faculty team wins $50,000 in SUNY startup competition

Creating a business is usually not part of the plan for faculty members and researchers. But Assistant Professor Jayson Boubin now hopes to commercialize his work on specialized cameras for drones, thanks to encouragement from the Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Partnerships (EIP).

Boubin and Melika Dastranj, PhD ’28, participated in the this summer and took home the grand prize of $50,000 as the winner of Demo Day.

S4, in its sixth year, has grown to include 222 SUNY students, faculty and staff from 30 SUNY campuses. Fifteen teams pitched their innovations to a full room at Demo Day, which was a new experience for Boubin.

“Lately, when you’re applying for funding or a grant, it’s less about written applications and more of you pitching your tech in a closed room to a small group,” said Boubin, a faculty member at the Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science’s School of Computing. “Getting to watch everyone’s pitches, seeing everyone’s reactions and having a room full of encouragement was so energizing.”

At S4 Demo Day, Boubin was amazed at the other pitches and the advances being made across SUNY.

“My colleague, [SUNY Empire Innovation Professor] Nancy Guo, is doing such advanced work in AI diagnostics for cancer; she did an incredible job,” he said. “I was also blown away by a student from SSIE [Watson’s School of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering], Rommel Trotman — he was inspired to create Balance Socks, a balance-sensing tech that monitors patients’ stability to help assess and prevent falls. It was inspired by his mother’s experience as a nurse in a hospital.”

S4 has been incorporated as one of the components of ��������’s Excellence in Entrepreneurship and Discovery (EXCEED) Pre-Accelerator Program, which is supported by a National Science Foundation Accelerating Research Translation (ART) grant.

Kathryn Cherny, PhD ’18, manages the ART grant and its various EXCEED programs with the goal of increasing translational research capacity impacts. These impacts are seen through increasing patent filings and licensing, connecting to industry for use-inspired research, supporting spinout companies and advancing a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation reflected by including research translation in promotion and tenure guidelines.

“Boubin is an incredible researcher who was able to take a very complex technology and communicate the importance and impact to a non-scientific audience in seven minutes,” said Cherny. “That is a honed skill, just like grant writing, and incredibly hard to do well. This success exemplifies the idea behind EXCEED, which is with strategic support, training, and funding we can accelerate the translation of our faculty’s incredible innovations to real-world impacts.”

REMIX, Boubin’s company, aims to simplify this technology enough that anyone with a Federal Aviation Administration license could attach it to a drone and process the necessary data for individual use.

“The ‘RE’ in our company name stands for ‘Real Time’” Boubin said. “The camera we are using is processing 250 MB of data per second, which is a lot — that would take up all of the internet capabilities of an entire house, easily.”

“MIX” refers to how Boubin’s device can process large amounts of data while detecting true pixels of light from an object and not letting reflections from surrounding objects be mistaken for real things.

“This level of detection is game-changing for spotting anomalies like crop disease or picking up contamination in bodies of water before it’s even visible,” he said.

As Boubin heads into the fall semester, he will balance the demands of faculty and business-owner life: “It’s an ongoing learning experience being in these programs, and having the help and guidance of the Office of Entrepreneurship staff has been most impactful for accelerating this technology,” he said. “I’ve learned so much.”

What’s next for REMIX? More customer discovery: The NSF’s I-Corps model aims for businesses to talk with at least 100 potential customers to understand their needs and develop a path to translate their product or service from lab to market. Boubin and his team are continuing their customer discovery work at a satellite conference in Utah this August.

Computer science student Jacqueline Liu, PhD ’27, is returning to Boubin’s lab this fall after a summer internship with the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), where she continued her research that applies to the REMIX solutions with aerospace and defense applications. Liu is a Science, Mathematics and Research for Transformation (SMART) Student, which is a U.S. Department of Defense scholarship program for STEM students. The internship at AFRL was an opportunity that’s part of the SMART program.

“In my role as graduate student intern, I had a lot of flexibility to do any research project that will eventually contribute to my dissertation, so I did research on band selection for hyperspectral imagery (HSI),” Liu said. “My favorite moment from this internship is experiencing the flight test with a miniaturized HSI camera mounted on the drone. Dr. Boubin and my labmates are very talented, and I learned a lot from them.”

The next step after customer discovery is going through a business accelerator program or applying to the Seed Translation Research Project (STRP), which awards up to $150,000 as a grant to support innovation commercialization through EIP’s EXCEED program.

Boubin offered this advice to fellow faculty doing research: “The [EIP] office is always sending out opportunities for funding business development to faculty. I really think more faculty ought to take a look around their labs and see what tech or research they’re working on could have a real-world impact.”