On December 29th, invited by assistant professor Xi Zhang of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, College of Engineering, Peking University, Professor Kaibo Liu from the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at University of Wisconsin-Madison gave a lecture to the College of Engineering students on the topic “Data Analytics for Service Decision Making”.

The lecture provided an overview of the recent advancement regarding data fusion, with a particular focus on the generic data-driven approaches to constructing an effective health index that combines multiple and heterogeneous sensor data to better characterize the health condition of units. Liu pointed out that the health index can then be used to support smart service decisions, such as closer monitoring of a unit’s health status, quicker fault diagnosis, more accurate forecast of a unit’s remaining lifetime, and proactive maintenance and control decisions better aligned to future conditions and performance. The talk arouse great interest among the students. They asked many questions and Liu answered them accordingly.

Liu’s research is in the area of system informatics and data analytics, with an emphasis on the data fusion approach for system modeling, monitoring, diagnosis and prognostics. In the past several years, Liu has many research collaborations with Prof. Xi Zhang.

In January 2015, Professor Kaibo Liu and Professor Xi Zhang supervised the foundation of IERA,  which is a non-profit website and platform for introducing, spreading, and enhancing the knowledge of Industrial Engineering to people over the world. IERA also serves as a central hub to connect audiences of industrial scientists, academic researchers, engineers, students and those who are interested in IE to share ideas, knowledge, and experience. The platform welcomes all Industrial Engineering professionals and students to join.