We are saddened to report that Professor Dornfeld passed away in March, 2016. If you enjoyed his blog, please consider making a contribution to either of two funds at UC-Berkeley that have been established in his memory.

David A. Dornfeld Graduate Fellowship
David A. Dornfeld Scholarship

Saturday, November 9, 2013

Sustainability as a Driver for Manufacturing Innovation

7th Wu Lecture at University of Michigan

I was invited to present the Seventh S. M. Wu Lecture in Manufacturing Science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on October 28th, 2013. The topic was billed as "innovation in advanced manufacturing" but I used the occasion to shift rapidly into a discussion about sustainability as a driver for manufacturing innovation - a familiar topic to reader of these posts!

The lecture was videotaped and made available to stream on-line to anyone interested. In place of a written blog this time around I am offering this lecture instead. There is a link to the video post of the lecture at the end of this text section.

The content of the lecture is as follows:

    - Some history from Madison
    - Advanced manufacturing
    - What is sustainable manufacturing
    - How is sustainability linked to  productivity and innovation?
    - Riding the “wave of big data”
    - Some examples

Some explanation about this lecture series and my involvement … Professor S. M. Wu was a pioneer in the application of statistical methods to the understanding and optimization of manufacturing processes. While he was at UW-Madison in the late '70's I was one of his PhD students (actually PhD #29 out of some 118!). He later moved to Univ. of Michigan in Ann Arbor where he had a very successful career applying these methodologies to a host of challenging manufacturing problems in, among others, the auto industry. He passed on in 1992 and this lecture series is in his memory. So, it is appropriate to start with some nostalgia about the "Madison days" as a grad student with Professor Wu. You can skip that if you like.

The actual lecture starts at slide 7 (00.07:48 into the video). The video presentation is accompanied with the slides presented at the bottom of the screen.

This is an hour long lecture. If you want to watch the whole lecture you might like to break it up into pieces. The start times in the video for each section are listed below:

    - What is sustainable manufacturing - 00.09.45
    - How is sustainability linked to  productivity and innovation? - 00.22.59
    - Riding the “wave of big data” - 00.30.00
    - Some examples - 00.41.06
        - Material selection/process + system design - 00.41.06
        - Social impacts and manufacturing - 00.46.45
        - Leveraging manufacturing for maximum effect - 00.50.27
    - Summary/Acknowledgements - 00.57.12
    - Question and Answers - 00.59.30

Please follow this link to the Seventh S. M. Wu Lecture in Manufacturing Science. The lecture is introduced by Professor Jun Ni of Univ. of Michigan, also a student of Professor Wu.

I'd appreciate any comments or feedback on the content on the lecture.