SmallSat has already started! Browsing around the posted content, I came across something that immediately caught my attention - an ionic liquid electrospray thruster! Looking at the poster though, there are some striking similarities to the AIS-ILIS1 (1/)... 
Here we see the plastic reservoir housing from the poster compared to the ILIS1 renders. Again, besides the difference of being a spike array vs. a slit emitter, the similarity is shocking... (2/)
Finally looking at the assembly size comparison in the poster. The lighter color plate under the extractor is wider than the casing underneath in the poster thruster, but scaling is practically identical to the ILIS1 taking into account the plastic body and mounting (3/)
Now, I develop thrusters completely open source. On my own dime and time, scraping by with almost nothing at home. I am happy to help proliferate the advance of EP openly. All I ask of the community is just to properly credit myself and AIS if deriving designs from my work. (4/)
This could very well be purely coincidence. However, if not, this underlines a key appropriability issue facing open source developers. Especially for hardware developers, who spend a lot of time/money iterating designs and providing info freely, proper credit is important. (5/)
I actively encourage and welcome changes to designs, and for anyone to use them as the basis for their own systems. I openly develop and release everything exactly for this purpose, to ultimately lower the barriers of entry. All I ask in return is for credit if it is used (6/)
It seems that the thruster block itself may be coincidence. Checking the few poster references, a similar thruster design (without the electronics) was published last year in September 2019, using a similar style of casing, wave-spring, and assembly. (7/)
Interestingly, it does seem in fact that we both came to the same conclusion independently regarding the basic thruster layout, though the electronics portion is the most recent addition to the original design (which just came out now in this poster). (8/)
While the thruster designs may have been independently conceived, the poster research focuses primarily on the integrated thruster electronics, which did not exist in the prior referenced study on the thruster design. It is possible this part was still derived from AIS (9/)
Interestingly, the very first design this thruster was derived from (excluding any electronics) was far more similar to the MIT S-iEPS and Accion TILE, at similar turn-on voltages. The work on the first iteration of the thruster can be found here (10/): electricrocket.org/2019/522.pdf
This then evolved into a more similar version to the one currently presented in the poster. Again, no electronics are present here, just the thruster itself. The design is a bit different, with a rectangular instead of square casing (11/): electricrocket.org/2019/372.pdf
Finally, we have the most recent iteration in the poster session published now which uses a the square reservoir casing and very similar electronics/integration to the ILIS1 (along with the obvious use of the Picos.) This is a Cubesat version, with two systems on the board (12/):
