Tuesday, January 7, 2020

OU Industrial and Systems Engineering Professor Recognized With Award for Supporting Students


NORMAN, OKLA. Janet Allen, University of Oklahoma professor of industrial and systems engineering, was named the recipient of the 2019 Ruth and Joel Spira Outstanding Design Educator Award.

One of the highest honors bestowed by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the award recognizes an individual who has made significant contributions to engineering design education through scholarship creation, instructorship, and as a mentor and role model.

Allen is one of the founders of the National Science Foundation/ASME Travel Grant Program, which she has helped run for more than 20 years. This program created a Student Design Essay Competition, funded by the National Science Foundation. Winners are awarded grants to travel and present their work at the International Design Engineering Technical Conferences annual ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference.

“Students go to the conference and talk to whomever they want, present their ideas and get feedback,” Allen explains. “It gives them the tools to continue to develop their careers.”
Since the creation of the grant, nearly a dozen essay winners have gone into the academic field, even sending students of their own to the conference.

Appropriately, Allen was nominated by a former student, Wei Chen, who is a professor of mechanical engineering at Northwestern University.

“Professor Allen is passionate about encouraging students to rise to their full potential,” Chen wrote. “Through her educational and outreach efforts, she has positively influenced the lives of hundreds of undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty members.”

Allen joined the University of Oklahoma in 2009. Along with Professor Farrokh Mistree, she established the Systems Realization Laboratory, with a focus on engineering design. Additionally, Allen holds the John and Mary Moore Chair of Engineering at OU.

“We’re all extremely proud of our students,” Allen says. “We want to continue to help make their lives better, particularly their experiences in grad school.”
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Tuesday, May 29, 2018

University Of Oklahoma’s Hands-On Engineering Course Profiled

The Norman (OK) Transcript (5/22) reports that over the last 25 years, University of Oklahoma industrial and systems engineering (ISE) students “have supplemented courses they take at OU with ‘hands-on’ machining/design of manufacturing experience at Moore Norman Technology Center.” Most ISE students cannot operate “the machines that make the parts they are designing, an important step ISE Interim Director Shivakumar Raman thinks is necessary for engineering practice.” Raman believes the University of Oklahoma’s partnership with MNTC “is the first and only hands-on undergraduate engineering partnership like it in the country.” More than 90 engineering students are currently enrolled in Raman’s class, compared to 16 in Raman’s inaugural class.


Faculty and Students Representing OU ISE at the IISE Annual Conference

The OU School of Industrial and Systems Engineering had a strong showing at the 2018 Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers Annual Conference and Expo in Orlando, Florida. OU ISE was represented by Drs. Kash Barker, Andres Gonzalez, Ziho Kang, Shima Mohebbi, Charles Nicholson, and Shivakumar Raman, as well as Dr. Nazanin Morshedlou, recent ISE doctoral graduate, ISE grad students Vera Bosco, Nafiseh Ghorbadi Renani, and Deniz Berfin Karakoc, and DSA grad student Alexander Rodriguez.

OU ISE Associate Professor Kash Barker co-chaired the conference program with Chase Rainwater of the University of Arkansas and Diana Berry of Harsco Rail, overseeing the abstracts, extended abstracts, proceedings papers, and schedule for nearly 1200 presentations across 22 tracks. OU ISE’s strategic application focus in cyber-physical-social systems engineering was on display in the Security Engineering and Safety, Human Factors, and Ergonomics tracks with several student and faculty presentations and organized sessions.

In addition to current OU ISE students and faculty attendees, also pictured are Dr. Pedro Heubner, new OU ISE faculty member and recent doctoral graduate from North Carolina State University, Dr. Deji Badiru, former OU ISE faculty member and dean of OU’s University College who is currently dean of the Graduate School of Engineering and Management at the Air Force Institute of Technology, and Dr. Cameron MacKenzie, OU ISE doctoral graduate and assistant professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering at Iowa State University.


Monday, January 23, 2017

Raman Inducted Into Oklahoma Higher Education Hall of Fame

View video of induction acceptance speech.

The Oklahoma Higher Education Hall of Fame (OHEHF) was established in 1994 to recognize and honor individuals, living and deceased, for outstanding meritorious service to higher education in Oklahoma. This year represents the 23rd year to honor higher education educators and administrators as well as those who support higher education with distinguished contributions. OHEHF recently announced the class of 2016 for induction into the Oklahoma Higher Education Hall of Fame. Dr. Shivakumar Raman of the school of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISE) will be inducted this year in a ceremony on October 24, 2016 to be held at the Cowboy Hall of Fame.

Shivakumar Raman, Ph.D., has taught more than 3,000 undergraduate students and mentored more than 60 graduate students on their theses since joining the OU School of Industrial and Systems Engineering in 1988. He has garnered more than $10 million in funded research and published over 150 articles journals, books and conference proceedings. He has transformed manufacturing education in Oklahoma and provided support to the manufacturing community as a scientific committee chair for the North American Manufacturing Research Institute of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers. He is an elected fellow of three engineering societies: Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME), American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE).

Professor Raman will be honored by OHEHF for his contributions to the educational enterprise at OU. He has initiated and carried to success many educational programs within OU. One such initiative is the partnership with the Moore Norman Technology Center for providing hands-on manufacturing experience to all undergraduates. Consequently, our students work on lathes, milling machines and CNC machines to build parts. For more information, you may read the press release here.

Kang Receives Best Transaction Paper Award


Dr. Ziho Kang has received the Andrew P. Sage Best Transaction Paper Award. Established in 1998, the award recognizes the author of the best paper in the IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC) Society. Formal announcement will be made in the second issue of the SMC Magazine in 2017. The paper was judged based on originality, technical merit, and impact to the society. The topic is on introducing the concept of Visual Groupings to characterize complex visual scanning patterns, and utilizing the concept to evaluate human performances between experts and novices. Feel free to read the open-access paper at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6960823.