NAMS-2 presents “Air Time” – Talks by SMEs in Aviation
Hosted by Crown Innovations & the University of California’s CITRIS and the Banatao Institute
Held Weekly at NASA Ames Research Center and Online
Crown Innovations, Inc., in collaboration with the University of California’s CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, hosts a series of seminars on advanced aviation to share interesting research and ideas on pertinent topics and innovative methodologies with the Advanced Air Mobility and Air Traffic Management community. The seminar series is divided into chapters, each lasting approximately one month long, with new topics every week! All chapters feature leading experts on cutting-edge research to inspire innovation and collaboration. Air Time seminar speakers will include subject matter experts from UC Berkeley, Merced, Davis, and Santa Cruz. The seminars take place weekly at NASA Ames Research Center and online.
Be sure to join our sessions live for the latest in aviation research. Not every session will be recorded, as some of our speakers present their findings to Air Time in advance of publications intended for general audiences.
Chapter 1: Multimodal Integration
| Feb 3 | California Airlink Overview & Vision | Alexandre Bayen, UC Berkeley |
| Feb 10 | Advanced Air Mobility: Tools for System Analysis and Design | Raja Sengupta, UC Berkeley |
| Feb 18 | Irregular Operations, Flight Delay, and Passenger Delay: Some New(ish) Evidence | Mark Hansen, UC Berkeley |
| Feb 24 | Charting Policy Pathways for AAM | Susan Shaheen, UC Berkeley |
Chapter 2: Artificial Intelligence in Advanced Aviation
| Mar 4 | Designing Aircraft for Autonomy | Mark Mueller, UC Berkeley |
| Mar 10 | Predicting the Severity of Drone Intrusions into Controlled Airspace Using LLM and NLP-Augmented Bayesian Inference | Jasenka Rakas, UC Berkeley |
| Mar 25 | The Future of Air Mobility: Agile and Collaborative Robot Autonomy | Giuseppe Loianno, UC Berkeley |
| Apr 1 | Controlling and motion planning for redundancy and safety | Mark Mueller, UC Berkeley |
| Apr 7 | Multi‑Modal Monitoring of Pilot–Controller Communication and Intent for Aviation Safety | Jasenka Rakas, UC Berkeley |
| Apr 14 | Modeling and Control of a Prescribed Fire with UAVs as Sensors and Actuators | YangQuan Chen, UC Merced |
Chapter 3: Autonomous Operations & Systems
| Apr 28 | From Autonomous Systems to Epistemically Aligned Human-AI Teams for Advanced Air Mobility | Zhaodan Kong, UC Davis |
| May 5 | Mapping the World Together: Collaborative Neural Implicit Mapping Under Communication Constraints | Negar Mehr, UC Berkeley |
| May 12 | Securing (And Defending Against) Next Generation Embodied UAS | Alvaro Cardenas, UC Santa Cruz |
| May 19 | Hybrid Systems Methods for Assured AI in Advanced Air Mobility and Autonomous Aviation | Ricardo G. Sanfelice, UC Santa Cruz |
| May 26 | (Details coming soon) |
Air Time Volume 2 begins October 2026!
Interested in attending? Email nams2pmo@crownci.com
Crown Innovations, Inc. is the prime contractor for the NASA Academic Mission Services 2 (NAMS-2) contract. Contact the program management at nams2pmo@crownci.com for more information or to arrange a collaboration in your field.