Speaker: MengChu Zhou (Fellow of IEEE)

Dr. Zhou joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, New Jersey Institute of Technology in 1990, and is now a Distinguished Professor. His interests are in intelligent automation, complex systems and networks, Petri nets, Internet of Things, edge/cloud computing, and big data analytics. He has over 900 publications including 12 books, over 600 journal papers including over 500 IEEE Transactions papers, 30 patents and 29 book-chapters. He is a recipient of Excellence in Research Prize and Medal from NJIT, Humboldt Research Award for US Senior Scientists from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and Franklin V. Taylor Memorial Award and the Norbert Wiener Award from IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society, Distinguished Service Award from IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, and Edison Patent Award from the Research & Development Council of New Jersey. He is Fellow of International Federation of Automatic Control, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Chinese Association of Automation and National Academy of Inventors.

Talk: What is the Next Industrial Revolution?

Human beings have experienced two major industrial revolutions. The first one took place in the 19th century, which replaced muscle power from humans and animals with mechanical power. The second one started in the middle 20th century, which provided people and societies with Internet. It was built with the technologies from computing, communication, networking and information storage. Both offered unprecedented productivity increases. What will be the next one? This talk intends to answer this question by presenting some recent development of Internet of Things (IoT) and smart systems. IoT was selected by IEEE as a major initiative to develop and advance over the next few years. Several recent studies have predicted the huge growth of IoT and tremendous benefits to the world economy. It was expected that 26 billion IoT units would be installed by year 2020, generating $300 billion in revenue. The IoT will generate an additional $1.9 trillion in economic value. We plan to present a system engineering approach to Internet-of-Things-based smart systems and their applications to smart manufacturing, smart cities, smart gird, smart logistics, and smart healthcare services.

Logistics

This will be a lunch meeting at SwRI.  Exact time and location TBD.