Data is one of the most valuable assets for industrial businesses such as electricity generation and delivery industry. It is known today that businesses increasingly prefer data-driven decision-making to intuition-based decision-making, which probably accounts for why the data analytics market is growing at a compound annual rate of nearly 30%. It is challenging to analyze oceans of unstructured data. AI and machine learning (ML) technologies will allow businesses to analyze these unstructured data in a smarter and faster way. These technologies can also discover patterns and trends in structured data that are not easily observable. Furthermore, the volume of this data is so vast it causes a major strain on traditional (including AI/ML) models of computing where everything is controlled and analyzed centrally.

New frameworks and methodologies are needed to turn data into insight, technologies into strategy and opportunities into value and responsibility, and bring micro-analytics closer to the end-customer. In addition, predictive and prescriptive analytics should be adaptive, catering for decision-making based on real-time data with an extremely high degree of accuracy. In short, intelligent data analytics and data-driven approaches is the new oil, but one needs a powerful engine to extract, refine and harness it efficiently. This seminar will present a distributed computational framework (/engine) for intelligent data analytics and data-driven modeling via cellular computational networks (CCNs) and graphs. Several case studies of predictive and/or prescriptive analytics with CCNs in smart grid operations and management will be presented.

Dr. G. Kumar Venayagamoorthy is the Duke Energy Distinguished Professor of Power Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Clemson University. He is the Founder and Director of the Real-Time Power and Intelligent Systems (RTPIS) Laboratory. Dr. Venayagamoorthy received his PhD and MScEng degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Natal, South Africa.  He received his BEng degree with a First-Class Honors in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, Nigeria. Dr. Venayagamoorthy holds an MBA degree in Entrepreneurship and Innovation from Clemson University, USA.

Dr. Venayagamoorthy’s research interests are in the development and innovation of artificial intelligence, power systems and smart grid technologies. He is an inventor of technologies for scalable computational intelligence for complex systems and dynamic stochastic optimal power flow. He has published ~ 600 refereed technical articles which are cited over 23,000 times with a h-index of 70 and i10-index of > 300. Dr. Venayagamoorthy has given over 500 invited technical presentations including several keynotes and plenaries in over 40 countries to date.  Dr. Venayagamoorthy has been ranked by Elsevier/Stanford University among the Top 26,000 scientists worldwide across all fields and in the top 0.1% worldwide in the fields of energy and AI in four consecutive years.

Dr. Venayagamoorthy is a Fellow of the IEEE, IET (UK), the South African Institute of Electrical Engineers (SAIEE) and Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), and a Senior Member of the International Neural Network Society (INNS). He is the Editor of the IEEE Press Series on Power and Energy Systems. Dr. Venayagamoorthy is a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS), Industry Applications Society (IAS) and Industrial Electronics Society (IES). He is also a Member of the Board of Governors and the Vice-President for Industry Relations of the INNS.

A recent symposium under the joint auspices of the National Science and Technology Council Subcommittees on Advanced Manufacturing and Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence has produced the outline of a strategy for achieving resilient manufacturing ecosystems through artificial intelligence, https://www.nist.gov/publications/towards-resilient-manufacturing-ecosystems-through-artificial-intelligence-symposium .  That strategy emphasizes the potential to harvest network effects by gathering, classifying, and aggregating manufacturing data at national scale.  Similar models have transformed other industries in which the United States now leads the world but runs counter to the prevailing manufacturing culture, which emphasizes implementing proprietary solutions on the factory floor and keeping information close.  That orientation exaggerates the importance of explicit domain knowledge and ignores the potential of AI methods to extract the implicit manufacturing expertise incorporated in the billions of parts that manufacturers are producing and have previously produced.  It can also provide AI entrepreneurs an opportunity to adapt transformational business models successfully applied in other industries to the $2 trillion per year US manufacturing sector.   The talk will illustrate how an AI-driven manufacturing service infrastructure might operate.

Dr. Bruce Kramer is a graduate of MIT (S.B., S.M., Ph.D) and has served on the faculties of Mechanical Engineering of MIT and George Washington University.  He is currently the Senior Advisor in the Division of Civil, Mechanical and Manufacturing Innovation of the National Science Foundation, coordinating NSF’s participation in the National Advanced Manufacturing Program and co-leading the preparation of the 2014, 2018 and 2022 National Strategic Plans for Advanced Manufacturing by the National Science and Technology Council Subcommittee on Advanced Manufacturing.  Dr. Kramer previously directed NSF’s Divisions of Design, Manufacture and Industrial Innovation and Engineering Education and Centers.  He co-founded Zoom Telephonics of Boston, a producer of communications products marketed under the Zoom and Motorola brands, holds three U.S. patents, and is a Fellow of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers and an International Fellow of the School of Engineering of the University of Tokyo.  He has received the F.W. Taylor Medal of CIRP, the ASME Blackall Award, and the R.F. Bunshah Medal of the ICMC for his contributions to manufacturing research and the Distinguished Service Award, the highest honorary award granted by the NSF.

This talk goes through some of the experiences that Dr. Mehdi Ferdowsi gained while serving at NSF as a program director.  It will also cover some of the inner workings of the NSF ERC (Engineering Research Center) program.

Mehdi Ferdowsi joined Missouri S&T in 2004.  He is a professor of electrical and computer engineering, interim associate dean of research for the college of engineering and computing, and an ISC investigator.  From 2020 to 2022, he served at NSF as a program director at the Division of Engineering Education and Centers (EEC).  His research interests are in the areas of power electronics, energy storage, smart grid, vehicular technology, and wide bandgap devices.  He was a recipient of an NSF CAREER Award in 2007. 

This talk will address two projects funded by the Department of Energy.  One was focused on education and workforce development.  The other is currently active, "Enabling Extreme Fast Charging with Energy Storage."  DOE projects pose unique challenges, both in obtaining the funding and in executing the project.  These challenges will be discussed along with some strategies that have been successful.

Dr. Jonathan Kimball is a professor of electrical and computer engineering, an ISC investigator, and the director of the Center for Research on Energy and the Environment.  He has roughly ten years of industry experience at Motorola, Baldor, and a start-up company (SmartSpark Energy Systems).  He joined Missouri S&T in 2008 after completing his doctoral students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The Kummer Institute Center for Advanced Manufacturing has been founded for the express purpose of carrying out two distinct missions:

1. to promote economic development for Rolla and Southern Missouri through the location of Missouri manufacturing companies and their employees within the Missouri Protoplex (the future home of KICAM) to carry out advanced manufacturing research and development; and
2. to increase S&T research across the university by co-locating faculty with manufacturers within the Protoplex to carry out research in manufacturing and new product development in cooperation with these companies.

KICAM will carry out its mission with industrial-sized equipment and will conduct research in the TRL 4–6 range. The focus of KICAM will be to promote research in support of existing S&T research centers. The Missouri Protoplex building is a 217,000 square foot building with 80,000 square feet of manufacturing high bay space. Early thinking for programming for KICAM and the Missouri Protoplex building is currently under discussion, but will be decided by June 2022.

Dr. Richard Billo has recently accepted the position as founding director of the Kummer Institute Center for Advanced Manufacturing and professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Missouri S&T. In this role, Billo’s intention is to co-locate S&T faculty with Missouri manufacturers for the purpose of advancing economic development and manufacturing research for the region. Previously, he served as associate vice president for research, associate dean for engineering research, and department head of industrial and manufacturing engineering at the University of Notre Dame, University of Texas at Arlington, and Oregon State University, respectively. Billo has also held the position as head of the editorial board for the Journal of Manufacturing Processes and the Journal of Manufacturing Systems. He has been recognized by his peers through awarding of the Outstanding Faculty Award and Whiteford Faculty Fellowship. He has five issued patents from which were issued four licenses to industry for his research in manufacturing and information systems, and has published over 100 research articles.

Established in 1984, the NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC) program was created to build complex research centers that emphasize system aspects of engineering with strong industrial collaboration and contain a strong education component. Successive generations of ERCs have kept these fundamental principles while increasing diversity and inclusion, an innovation ecosystem, and stressing convergent research.

This talk will present the speaker's experience on the leadership team of the Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management system (FREEDM) from its inception to its graduation. Key aspects of what makes a successful proposal and what some of the pitfalls are will be discussed.

Dr. Bruce McMillin is professor of computer science, director of the Center for Information Assurance and co-director of the Center for Smart Living at Missouri S&T. He leads and participates in interdisciplinary teams in formal methods for fault tolerance and security in distributed embedded systems with and eye towards critical infrastructure protection. His current work focuses on protection for advanced power grid control. His research has been supported by the U.S NSF, AFOSR, DOE, NIST and several Missouri industries. McMillin has authored over 120 refereed papers in international conferences and journals. He is a senior member of the IEEE and member of the IFIPWG 11.0 on Critical Infrastructure Protection. He is a commissioner of the ABET Computing Accreditation Commission, serves as a director of the CSAB accreditation board, and is an IEEE Computer Society distinguished visitor.