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News at the
Center
ESD
Symposium Probes Past, Present, and Future of Engineering Education
Industry
leaders discussed the broader training needed by tomorrow's engineering
leaders, including, from left, Travis Engen, Alcan Inc. President/CEO;
John Grace of ArvinMeritor Inc.; and panel chair Keith Glover, Cambridge
University Engineering Department head.
The Engineering Systems
Symposium, a call to solidify a new era of engineering studies that balance
technological innovation with sociopolitical contexts, drew more than
350 industry, government, and academic leaders and students to MIT March
29-31. Organized by the Engineering Systems
Division co-directed by Daniel Roos and Daniel Hastings, the symposium
surfaced key ideas about how new education approaches can foster a new
breed of engineering leaders to tackle complex problems.
"Today's engineers
need to understand the multidimensional complexity of the context in which
technological innovations occur," said Roos. "Often this leads
to unanticipated emergent properties. Engineers must learn to anticipate
them and to deal with the long-term implications."
Roos announced that
a new coalition of 18 top engineering schools in the U.S. and Europe have
agreed to collaborate in developing the field of engineering systems by
sharing educational materials and information on job opportunities for
emerging PhDs and by holding interuniversity student colloquia. The conference
drew participants from 28 universities and 60 companies.
New research framed
key questions on the third day. CTPID Director Fred Moavenzadeh chaired
the Infrastructure Panel, which focused on the interconnected systems
governing critical resources such as water, electricity, and transportation.
Moavenzadeh pointed out that these interconnections provide both strength
and weakness, particularly in cases of natural, human-made, or internal
disasters. Such a catastrophic failure in one system might provoke cascading
failures in other systems. "The challenge is to learn how to analyze
the risk of such failures, lhow to make the systems more robust, and how
to limit the damage within a system and insulate it from connected systems,"
he said.
Papers
describing the history, foundations, and challenges of engineering systems
are available online.
Harris
Named to AF Science and Technology Board
Wesley L. Harris, head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics
and director of CTPID's Lean
Sustainment Initiative, has been named to the Air Force Science and
Technology Board of the National Academies. The board works closely with
Air Force senior scientific and technical managers to develop specific
study tasks requested by the Air Force, assists in the establishment of
study committees to perform the studies, monitors the progress of studies
underway, and assures quality standards are met.
LARA
Co-Director Awarded Fulbright
Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, co-director of the Lean Aerospace Research Agenda
(LARA), won a Fulbright grant
under the Senior Specialist Program to spend five weeks this summer at
the University of Sydney helping launch a new initiative on negotiations
in the workplace.
Cutcher-Gershenfeld
and LARA Co-Director Thomas Kochan delivered concluding keynote speeches
at the National Labor-Management Conference in Chicago on June 2-4. They
will address the current status and future prospects of collective bargaining
and the transformation of American industrial relations.
Acxiom-MIT
Join Forces on Customer-centric Research
Acxiom Corporation and MIT announced
March 1 that they will collaborate on a research project focusing on customer-centric
information quality management (CCIQM). Dr. Richard Wang, director of
the MIT Information Quality Program,
and Dr. John R. Talburt, director of the Acxiom Laboratory for Applied
Research, will lead the effort. The team will explore data quality issues
related to customer-centric information architectures, particularly knowledge-driven
customer recognition systems used in Customer Relationship Management
(CRM) applications.
“I see this
collaboration with the MITIQ program as a means to further develop Acxiom’s
enterprise-wide focus on data quality and to bring together a working
group of other companies interested in this same area of research,”
said Zachary Wilhoit, Acxiom Leader for Data Content.
CTPID's MITIQ program
equips professionals with the understanding and means to significantly
improve their organization’s information and to use that information
as a strategic tool. Acxiom Corporation, headquartered in Little Rock,
Arkansas, integrates data, services, and technology to create and deliver
customer and information management solutions for major corporations worldwide.
Chung
Wins Infinite Mile Award
CTPID Administrative
Officer Su Chung received a School of Engineering Infinite Mile Award
for Sustained Excellence on April 29, a tribute to her many contributions
to MIT during 17 years of service.
As CTPID's administrative
officer, Chung works with 80 faculty, staff, and students to manage research
volume of about $8 million funded by 50 industry sponsors and 15 government
agencies.
"Su demonstrates
how powerful a gentle manner can be," one nominator wrote. "Indeed
Su is unassuming, but a stellar administrator. Despite her unassuming
manner, she is driven by integrity, ensuring that she is knowledgeable
about every situation, and her patient persistence, complete engagement,
and due diligence, ensure positive closure on all issues."
IMVP
News
Sloan
Industry Center Fellow to Study Auto Industry Peer Groups
Stoyan Sgourev, who recently completed a Ph.D. in sociology at Stanford
University, arrived at MIT May 1 as an International
Motor Vehicle Program Sloan Industry Centers Fellow. He wrote his
dissertation on "Motivation, Comparison, and Network Structure: Going
the Extra Mile in Networks of Peers."
IMVP's first Sloan
Industry Fellow Matthias Holweg, co-author of the new book, Second
Century: Reconnecting Customer and Value Chain through Build-to-Order,
is a University Lecturer at the Judge Institute of Management, University
of Cambridge.
| Sgourev earned
undergraduate and master's degrees at the University of Sofia, Bulgaria,
and a second master's in sociology at the Central European University,
Warsaw, Poland. During the one-year appointment, Sgourev will work
with IMVP Principal Investigator Ezra Zuckerman, Sloan School associate
professor, on peer group support among auto dealers. His fellowship
project is part of a larger research effort launched by Zuckerman
and Sgourev in 1999: the Role of Parallel Relationships and Industry
Peer Networks in the U.S. Economy. |
 |
- Other
IMVP News
University of Venice Professor of Management Arnaldo Camuffo,
an IMVP principal investigator, will begin a one-year sabbatical working
with the Industrial Performance Center September 1.
- IMVP researcher
Frits Pil was prompted to associate professor with
tenure this spring at the Katz Graduate School of Business, University
of Pittsburgh. He also a research scientist at the university's Learning
Research and Development Center.
- IMVP researcher
Chunli Lee was promoted to full professor at Aichi
University, Japan, on April 1. He started a one-year sabbatical at the
Fairbanks Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University the same
day.
- MIT Press published
The
Second Century: Reconnecting Customer and Value Chain Through Build-to-Order
by principal investigators Frits Pil and Matthias Holweg. Reading
Matters reviews the book.
MSL
Focuses Auto Recycling Ideas on Electronics
The Materials Systems
Lab (MSL) is taking a new look at recycling. Historically, MSL has
examined automotive industry recycling practices and material selection
and substitution in the electronics industry, particularly in packaging.
The current Markets and Electronics Recycling project applies ideas from
auto recycling to the electronics industry.
MSL researchers Randy
Kirchain, Materials Science and Engineering Assistant Professor, and Frank
Field, CTPID Senior Research Associate, have visited half a dozen electronic
recyclers in the past year to gather data on current practices and to
develop an economic model for improving product design and recycling technology.
New European regulations and laws passed or pending in Massachusetts and
22 other states are putting new pressure on electronics firms to created
environmentally friendly products.
The comparison to
the auto industry has been useful, Field says. "Like automotive,
a substantial material value can be recovered from electronics. The question
is to look at how this industry is different from automotive. The most
obvious difference is that electronic objects are not kept for 10 years.
The turnover rate is much faster, more like two years. Because of that,
the opportunities for recovery are great. Already a lot of cell phones
are remanufactured and moved on to less advanced markets. Semiconductor
devices are remade into toys. There are other very interesting differences
and we trying to more carefully at the characteristics."
LAI
Visiting Scholar Proposess Lean Product Development Flow
Bo Oppenheim, professor of mechanical engineering at Loyola Marymount
University in Los Angeles, described a new process for organizing engineering
work flow in product development (PD), at a Lean Aerospace Initiative
(LAI) symposium April 14. Oppenheim, who spent a short sabbatical as a
LAI Visiting Scholar, focused on a radical reduction of waste including
extending product development value stream mapping and analysis, management
of uncertainty in PD processes, and identification of enabling practices.
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