Speaker Bios for NSF Cybermanufacturing Workshop

 

Saigopal Nelaturi

Saigopal Nelaturi’s research includes intelligent automation, digital manufacturing, geometric modeling, computational design, robotics, and spatial computing. He is the Associate Director for the Design and Digital Manufacturing Program at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where he helps in research, technology development, strategy, and commercialization efforts for PARC’s software solutions in digital manufacturing. He was recently recognized by DARPA as an early career scientist representing the next generation of extreme innovators. Dr. Nelaturi earned his Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an M.Sc. in Manufacturing from the University of Bath in the U.K., and a B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from RV College of Engineering in Bangalore, India.

 

William Sobel

William Sobel is Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder of System Insights and he principle architect and chair of the MTConnect Institute Technical Steering Committee. He also has been the primary contributor to the open source implementations of the MTConnect standard and is Co-Chair of the Industrial Analytics Task Group of the Industrial Internet Consortium.   Mr. Sobel brings over 25 years of experience architecting, managing, and developing complex applications for numerous industries. Prior to working for System Insights, Mr. Sobel was a visiting lecturer at UC Berkeley working at the RadLAB teaching agile web development and worked on various cloud scalability research projects resulting in the Olio web analysis toolkit. During his employment at the university, Mr. Sobel authored the MTConnect standard as a consultant to AMT (Association for Manufacturing Technology) to address the lack of standardized inter-device communication in manufacturing. Prior to his work at UC Berkeley, Mr. Sobel was VP/Chief Architect at MSCI-Barra, specializing in financial risk management software for some of the largest asset management companies in the world. Mr. Sobel led a team to architect and build the industry’s first hosted risk management software as a service (SaaS) platform. In 1995, Mr. Sobel co-founded Redpoint Software, a leading capital markets enterprise risk management software company. At Redpoint, Mr. Sobel architected and built a real-time distributed database caching infrastructure to support fault tolerant parallelized analytics for financial risk management and trading systems. He then sold the company to Barra in 1998. Prior to founding Redpoint, Mr. Sobel worked for Isis Distributed Systems, where he designed and built the distributed high-availability infrastructure for the Swiss Stock Exchange Trading System in Zürich using the Isis toolkit.

 

Jan Vandenbrande

Dr. Jan Vandenbrande joined DARPA as a program manager in July 2015. He is interested in developing math and computational tools to radically improve the design of mechanical products. Topics of specific interest to Dr. Vandenbrande include: exploiting new design possibilities enabled by new materials and fabrication processes (3-D printing, composite fibers, micro truss structures) and enhancing design discovery.

Before joining DARPA, Dr. Vandenbrande was a technical fellow and senior manager of the Applied Math Geometry and Optimization group at Boeing. He leveraged his knowledge in geometric reasoning, production automation and design processes to create several advanced geometry processing systems to change how products are designed and made. Boeing uses these tools to conduct design trade and optimization studies, to enable proprietary composite layup fabrication processes, and to visualize metal machinability issues. Dr. Vandenbrande authored several parametric air and spacecraft models for design trade studies such as the hypersonic X-43C and the Orbital Space Plane study.

At Unigraphics, now Siemens NX, Dr. Vandenbrande worked on the architecture of the next-generation Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) system, improving tool path generation performance and revamping the CAM user interface. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Rochester for his work on machinable feature recognition.

 

Jarek Rossignac

Jarek Rossignac is Professor of Computing at Georgia Tech. His research focuses on the design, representation, simplification, compression, analysis and visualization of complex 3D shapes and animations. Before joining Georgia Tech in 1996 as the Director of the GVU Center, he was the Visualization Strategist and Senior Manager at IBM Research. He holds a Ph.D. in E.E. from the University of Rochester, a Diplôme d'Ingénieur ENSEM, and a Maîtrise in M.E. from the University of Nancy, France. He holds 26 patents and published 154 peer-reviewed articles (including 4 in ACM SIGGRAPH, 6 in the ACM Transactions on Graphics, and 13 in the ACM Symposium on Solid and Physical Modeling) for which he received 23 Awards and over 7900 citations, yielding an h-index of 48. He created the ACM Symposia on Solid Modeling, chaired 20 conferences and 6 international program committees (including Eurographics), delivered over 30 Distinguished or Invited Lectures and Keynotes, organized and delivered numerous short courses (including 8 at SIGGRAPH) and served on the editorial boards of 7 professional journals and on 82 Technical Program committees (including SIGGRAPH and several other ACM conferences). He served as the Editor-in-Chief of the GMOD (Graphical Models) journal 2010-13. Currently he is the Director of the NSF Aquatic Propulsion Lab (APL). He is a Senior Member of the ACM and a Fellow of the Eurographics association.

 

Ram Sriram

Ram D. Sriram is currently the chief of the Software and Systems Division, Information Technology Laboratory, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Before joining the Software and Systems Division, Sriram was the leader of the Design and Process group in the Manufacturing Systems Integration Division, Manufacturing Engineering Laboratory, where he conducted research on standards for interoperability of computer-aided design systems and healthcare informatics. He was also the founding manager of the Sustainable Manufacturing and the Manufacturing Metrology and Standards for the Healthcare Enterprise programs. Prior to joining NIST, he was on the engineering faculty (1986-1994) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and was instrumental in setting up the Intelligent Engineering Systems Laboratory. Sriram has co-authored or authored nearly 250 publications, including several books. Sriram was a founding co-editor of the International Journal for AI in Engineering. In 1989, he was awarded a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, U.S.A. He is the recipient of the ASME’s 2011 Design Automation Award and the Washington Academy of Sciences’ 2015 Distinguished Career in Engineering Sciences Award. Sriram is a Fellow of ASME and AAAS, a life member of ACM and AAAI, a Senior Member of the IEEE. Sriram has a B.Tech. from IIT, Madras, India, and an M.S. and a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA.

 

Ming Lin

Ming C. Lin received her B.S., M.S., Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science respectively from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina (UNC), Chapel Hill. She has received several honors and awards, including 2010 IEEE VGTC Technical Achievement Award and 10 best paper awards at premium international conferences.   She is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE.  Her research interests include physically-based modeling, virtual environments, sound rendering, haptics, robotics, and geometric computing. She has (co-)authored more than 250 refereed publications in these areas and co-edited/authored four books. She has served on over 150 program committees of leading conferences and co-chaired dozens of international conferences and workshops. She is a member of the Board of Directors of Computing Research Association – Women, a member of IEEE Computer Society (CS) Board of Governors, Chair of 2015 IEEE CS Transactions Operation Committee, and a former Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2011-2014).  She also has served on several Editorial Boards, steering committees and advisory boards of international conferences, government agencies, and industry.

 

Thomas Kurfess

Thomas R. Kurfess received his S.B., S.M. and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from M.I.T. in 1986, 1987 and 1989, respectively. He also received an S.M. degree from M.I.T. in electrical engineering and computer science in 1988. Following graduation, he joined Carnegie Mellon University where he rose to the rank of Associate Professor. In 1994 he moved to the Georgia Institute of Technology where he rose to the rank of Professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. In 2005 he was named Professor and BMW Chair of Manufacturing in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Clemson University’s International Center for Automotive Research. In 2012 he returned to Georgia Tech where he was appointed the HUSCO/Ramirez Distinguished Chair in Fluid Power and Motion Control and Professor of Mechanical Engineering. During 2012-2013 he was on leave serving as the Assistant Director for Advanced Manufacturing at the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President of the United States of America. In this position he had responsibility for engaging the Federal sector and the greater scientific community to identify possible areas for policy actions related to manufacturing. He was responsible for coordinating Federal advanced manufacturing R&D, addressing issues related to technology commercialization, identifying gaps in current Federal R&D in advanced manufacturing, and developing strategies to address these gaps. He has served as a special consultant of the United Nations to the Government of Malaysia in the area of applied mechatronics and manufacturing, and as a participating guest at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in their Precision Engineering Program. He currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining, and the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences, and on the Board of Trustees for the MT Connect Institute. His research focuses on the design and development of advanced manufacturing systems targeting digital manufacturing, additive and subtractive processes, and large scale production enterprises. He has significant experience in high precision manufacturing and metrology systems. He has received numerous awards including a National Science Foundation (NSF) Young Investigator Award, an NSF Presidential Faculty Fellowship Award, the ASME Pi Tau Sigma Award, SME Young Manufacturing Engineer of the Year Award, the ASME Blackall Machine Tool and Gage Award, the ASME Gustus L. Larson Award, an ASME Swanson Federal Award, and the SME Education Award. He is a Fellow of ASME, AAAS, and SME.