IMPACT is a National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) funded project under their MUREP PBI/HBCU Data Science Equity, Access and Priority for Research and Education (DEAP) program.
This project is a collaboration between three HBCUs which are member institutions of the University of North Carolina (UNC) System: Fayetteville State University (FSU) which is the lead organization, North Carolina Central University (NCCU) and Winston Salem State University (WSSU). IMPACT will build on FSU's existing capacity and collaboration with the Jet Propulsion Lab to engage HBCU students and faculty from the three universities in using Data Science to address scientific questions as one of the key factors to manage NASA Mission research. The institute will undergo a three-year period of training, research design, and execution aligned with two NASA use-cases:
the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABOVE) which addresses the context of protecting and improving life on Earth and
space exploration with heterogenous agents in the context of search for life elsewhere.
IMPACT will generate novel research results in the emerging area of energy-aware, efficient AI/ML models for perception tasks at the edge which are useful for multi-agent systems that solve challenges in the selected use-cases for earth observation and space exploration. IMPACT will create new ways of training students and provide high quality resources for learning Data Science.