This Dayton Company is Uniting Academia, Industry, and Government to Accelerate Innovation

As technologies advance and systems capabilities expand, humans and machines are working in tandem more than ever before. From the electric vehicle industry to the defense field, research is being conducted on how to harness human and machine cognition to expand advancements across industries. Dayton startup Parallax Advanced Research is bringing together cross-functional organizations to generate cutting-edge solutions across the board.

“We’re a non-profit advanced research organization linking together these areas to solve critical problems in national defense, space, economics, and research and development,” President and CEO Dennis Andersh said. “We do a lot of work in AI, machine learning, and autonomy to apply academic research to developing products by filling in the gap.”

Parallax explores these connections through the science of intelligent teaming. Teaming refers to human-machine, machine-machine, and human-human interactions and how the different teams perform with and alongside each other. Parallax is researching how these teams can be leveraged to optimize performance across applications we use every day.

“When humans control unmanned aerial systems from the ground, that’s a human control to a machine in the air, so the science needs to be done to make sure we maintain FAA rules and regulations to avoid catastrophes of flying those platforms,” Andersh said. “For example, many new vehicles have collision avoidance technology and other sensors, so how does the human that drives them interact with those systems in the vehicle?”

The company is not just researching for future innovations on paper. Parallax is also working alongside government agencies such as DARPA to apply their research for current solutions, from the commercial industries to aerospace development, and defense.

“We’re moving technologies out of the Air Force Research Lab to the warfighter in an operational environment,” Andersh said. “With AI machine learning, for example, this is helping us to understand how machines make decisions, which is a challenge that has to be solved in order to trust those technologies in the field.”

Parallax Advanced Research is positioned to solve those critical problems through its innovative work and its location. Andersh said the company’s proximity to Ohio research universities and organizations at the forefront of the civil space industry are key to its current goals, as well as upcoming groundbreaking projects.

“There aren’t many other states that have similar research capabilities,” he said. “We have the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the NASA Glenn Research Center, both major anchors for research and development that we’re partnering with. We’re also actively involved with the StarLab project that’s going to be created at Ohio State to bring about research that would eventually fly into space. We want to help bring the state together.”