Undergraduate Research Opportunities in Manufacturing Engineering

Sensor Networks and Information Systems
Yannis Paschalidis, Associate Professor (joint with ECE) and Co-Director, CISE
http://ionia.bu.edu/Research
yannisp@bu.edu

Research interests lie in the fields of systems and control, optimization, networking, operations research, and computational
biology. The main application areas I am targeting include communication and sensor networks, manufacturing systems,
and supply chains.

Wireless Sensor Networks (SNETs)
SNETs consist of very small devices, the sensors – which self-assemble into a network and are used to monitor (and control) some physical process or system. Emerging applications are in industrial/building automation, health care, environmental monitoring, and others. My group is pursuing fundamental work in improving SNET performance through better network protocols that implement transmission scheduling, throughput maximization, minimal energy routing, and efficient resource allocation. We are also working on developing new SNET functionality, for instance enabling SNETs to collectively determine the physical location of their nodes. This
localization technology can lead to new innovative uses of SNETs such as finding objects and personnel in a large industrial campus or warehouse. A student may get involved in this exciting and emerging SNET research area by working/experimenting with our SNET testbed. The testbed consists of about 100 sensor nodes of different types and functionality.

Computational Biology
In collaboration with Professor Vajda (BME) and Professor Vakili (MFG) I am developing new optimization techniques for
understanding protein-protein interactions. Specifically, we have developed a new computational approach for predicting the 3-dimensional structure of a complex of two proteins given the 3-dimensional structure of the component proteins. The work is critical in better understanding a variety of biological processes (e.g., metabolic control, immune response, signal transduction, gene regulation), but also in new drug design.

Supply Chain Management
My group is also involved in developing new inventory control approaches that emphasize cost reduction and quality-of-service in large supply chains/networks. Increasingly, companies are interested in delivering predictable quality-of-service to their customers, which implies predictable backlogs and delays in their worldwide supply chains. To that end, though, one needs more data and distributional information on demand, transportation times, and manufacturing
downtimes.