In 2009 Florida Atlantic University received the National Science Foundation (NSF) award to create the Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC) for Advanced Knowledge Enablement (CAKE). In the period from 2009 to 2023 the FAU Center operated as a site of the Florida International University. Starting in 2023, the FAU CAKE Center received the NSF Phase III award and operates as a single site center.

The NSF IUCRC CAKE Center provides a framework for interaction between university faculty and students and industry in the critically important areas of information technology, communications, and computing. In the period from 2009 to present, the FAU Center had 49 industry members and completed 57 applied industry research projects.

The NSF I/UCRC has proven to be a win-win situation both for our university and our industry and government partners. We are thrilled with the opportunity to conduct industrially relevant research, receive additional funding for it, and moreover, benefit from the recognition and prestige of being an NSF research center. Our Center is successfully building a bridge linking academia, industry, and government in a coordinated research initiative, which this region desperately needs. The Center has the critical mass to serve the information technology industry and to help South Florida IT mature into the top tier.

The research focus of the Center is on the field of advanced knowledge enablement with the focus on areas of big data analytics, multimedia and data mining, artificial intelligence, video and multimedia processing, and cloud computing systems, sensors, and networks. These are all synergetic activities needed to complete the applied research projects that we have been conducting in the last 15 years. Research projects are interdisciplinary in their nature with the focus on applications in medical and healthcare, environmental, and mobile, public, and industrial applications. The figure below illustrates the research subareas and related vertical applications.

The FAU research team consists of 15 professors, who were all involved in IUCRC industry projects. They are experts in various subareas of the proposed research. Many high-quality graduate and undergraduate students have been recruited to work on the Center projects.