No matter the research, SSIE professor is all about efficiency

If you ask Sangwon Yoon what analysis he and his college students are engaged on, he offers an inventory so lengthy that he must double-check he hasn’t left something out.

They’re collaborating with Innovation Associates in Johnson Metropolis, N.Y., to excellent a robotic meeting line known as PharmASSIST that may fill 100,000 mail-order prescriptions per day. They’re additionally serving to a microchip producer with its automated testing facility within the Philippines, in order that dangerous processors don’t find yourself in telephones and different digital gadgets.

Each Toyota Materials Dealing with North America and forklift producer Raymond Corp. search their recommendation about making warehouses extra environment friendly and cost-effective, resembling by figuring out probably the most logical layouts and the most effective locations for wi-fi forklift recharging stations.

A number of of Yoon’s graduate college students lately printed a paper about streamlining site visitors at John F. Kennedy Worldwide Airport in New York Metropolis to handle climate delays and to keep away from late departures and arrivals.

Additionally they have used information mining and algorithms to research healthcare matters resembling breast, thyroid and lung cancers, and organ donation.

What ties all these numerous matters collectively? As an affiliate professor within the Division of Techniques Science and Industrial Engineering in addition to a researcher for the College’s Watson Institute for Techniques Excellence (WISE), Yoon focuses on the same issues to be solved in every realm.

Since its inception in 1989, WISE has secured over $55 million in exterior, sponsored analysis funding with numerous business companions (together with $2.75 million in fiscal yr 2019).

“I study the completely different domains, however all of the methods we use are to make the programs extra environment friendly,” Yoon says. “The strategy we’re making use of to air-traffic administration may very well be the identical as what we’re making use of to the warehouse or meeting line.”

A key a part of programs science is sifting by means of huge quantities of information to establish which parts are most vital, then determining how you can enhance them. Yoon’s strategies fuse basic programs optimization methods with the newest strategies of information mining and synthetic intelligence. Generally, although, the reply could be so simple as synchro- nizing all clocks in a producing facility.

As a lead researcher for a number of warehouse and manufacturing facility programs research, Yoon is aware of that auto- mation is the longer term: “If you happen to noticed the film A.I., one character walked right into a warehouse the place there was no mild. If there are not any folks there, we don’t want it. Sooner or later, we are going to see extra ‘lights-out’ warehouses.”

And if he has something to do with it, these warehouses will run effectively, too.