Frontiers of Engineering is a valuable collaboration platform
As a member of Euro-CASE, ATV can nominate speakers and participants to the bi-annual conference Frontiers of Engineering which gathers early career professionals from EU and US. In 2023, Associate Professor Yang Cheng from Aalborg University was nominated and took part in an intense learning and collaboration program.
Yang Cheng came to Denmark in 2007 for his PhD studies at Aalborg University. Today, he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Material and Production, Aalborg University. His research focuses on production management and how to apply technology into the production and supply chain in order to increase efficiency. As such, his focus is not on developing new technology but putting known technology to good use.
High expectations going to the Frontiers of Engineering
“I was very honored to be nominated as a participant in the conference. I of course knew of the Nokia Bell Labs and could see from the program that the conference was focused on early career professionals and on creating linages between leading young engineers in Europe and the US. From that perspective, I felt privileged to take part. And I was of course looking forward to learning something new.”
The conference took place at the Nokia Bell Labs in New Providence and is internationally recognized for its contributions to technology development, and it is no stranger to its history. Hence, the conference included visits to the library where the lab's nine Nobel Prices and four Touring Prizes are on display alongside the inventors of UNIX and the C programming langue.
Time to discuss possible complementarities
The conference included 45 participants from the US and from all over Europe. The program had four overall sessions: The Quantum Era Challenge; Computational Era in Life Sciences; Green Hydrogen; Future Directions in Additive Manufacturing (for which Yang Cheng was nominated). The program was not overloaded with presentation and thus had and sufficient free time for discussions and social events as a means to inspire collaboration.
“We had three days together and not a packed program in terms of paper presentations. This meant that we had a lot of time to discuss research interests and possible complementarities. I was very fortunate to meet a couple of possible collaborators that I am now in dialogue with regarding possible joint activities. One is a researcher from Oak Ridge National Lab who works on Human Centric Digital Technology. We both have an interest in Industry 5.0 in which people work closely with robots – rather than robots doing all the work as was the idea in Industry 4.0. I think we will apply for an International Network Program to explore possibilities.
The other was a professor from UCLA who works on biostatistics. Normally, this is not a field very close to my own, but it is very interesting how she works with and process data.
I think we can apply some of these methodologies to the production field – there is so much data coming out of production processes, and we must be better at identifying value in these datasets. I think maybe we can learn from biostatistics here and we are talking about possible joint application. It is very exciting!”
