NEWS

Five members of the Louisiana Tech University student chapter of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) and Dr. Jun-Ing Ker, program chair of industrial engineering at Louisiana Tech and the chapter faculty advisor, attended the IISE 2019 Southeast Regional Conference last week in Baton Rouge.

Pictured are student conference attendees (from left) Ali Farahani, Alan Fulton, Sammy Monk, Josh Green, and Laura Halbrook.

The students, Ali Farahani, doctoral student in computational analysis and modeling, Alan Fulton, vice president of the chapter and undergraduate industrial engineering student, Sammy Monk, chapter president and undergraduate industrial engineering student, Josh Green, chapter treasurer and undergraduate industrial engineering student, and Laura Halbrook, chapter secretary and undergraduate industrial engineering student, joined more than 140 students from across the Southeast United States to attend workshops and network.

Following the “Leading the Fourth Industrial Revolution” theme,the students learned about “Industrial Cybersecurity and the Role IEs (industrial engineers) Play”, “How to Negotiate”, “IEs in Oil & Gas”, and “AI (artificial intelligence) in Healthcare”.

They also attended a career fair and took a tour at the Intralox manufacturing plant in New Orleans.

“The Fourth Industrial Revolution is all about the integration of systems and the need to provide real-time customer facing data between companies,” Monk said. “The program here at Tech started preparing me for this kind of information-rich environment in my first quarter when I started Living with the Lab.  For example, I was required to turn what was happening in the physical world, with my robot or fishtank, into readable data on a display screen that my professor could check in real time.”

“The IISE Southeast Regional Conference provides a good opportunity for our students to listen to speakers who are alumni of other industrial engineering schools and to learn various paths that could lead to successful industrial engineering careers besides traditional manufacturing,” Ker added. “Some examples are artificial intelligence, autonomous robotics, cyber security, the internet of things and predicative and prescriptive data analytic that encompass the fourth industrial revolution – Manufacturing 4.0.”

The IISE is the world’s largest professional society dedicated solely to the industrial and systems engineering profession. The organization provides leadership for the application, education, training, research and development of industrial and systems engineering. In addition to attending conferences, the Louisiana Tech chapter hosts industry speakers and schedules plant tours for professional development each quarter.