A Bangladeshi graduate student in the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering, Md Ferdous Alam, won the Best Paper Award for the Manufacturing Science and Engineering Conference (MSEC 2020).
MSEC is The American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ (ASME) premier manufacturing conference.
Alam works with his advisor, MAE Prof David Hoelzle, at the Hoelzle Research Lab (HRL) on autonomous manufacturing systems. The paper focuses on Alam and Hoelzle’s work on building an autonomous additive manufacturing system that includes a cognitive element which would allow for intelligent online decisions.
To do this, Alam and Hoelzle are experimenting with various machine learning algorithms, with special interest in reinforcement learning. They are then looking into making these algorithms usable in data-expensive applications with complex dynamics.
“In essence, we want to take manufacturing systems, which may require either continual calibration, or have strict performance metrics in which the design space is uncertain and actual manufactured products deviate from the best models, and make sure the manufacturing systems are intelligent so they hit performance specs regardless of these challenges,” Alam said.
For Alam, this award was significant, as it was his first publication for his PhD research.
“It is always great to have recognition for your hard work,” said Alam. “I am thankful to my advisor for his continuous support and guidance even when I got stuck in my research. I also love our lab tradition. We often have casual conversations with fellow lab-mates about various research topics which helps us to grow as researchers.”
Alam said he is excited about the possibility for the application of his research.
“Through this paper we introduced the idea and now we want to focus on building a robust framework for autonomous manufacturing systems,” said Alam.
Alam hopes that the work he has done will be used as a framework by future researchers and engineers to build their own new and novel products.
Alam's father’s MA Mannan, who works as a production manager in a Dhaka based English daily newspaper, said: "We are extremely pleased with Alam's success, and hope he will improve further in the future."