Improving Complex Systems Today

Daniel Frey is an associate professor of mechanical engineering and engineering systems at MIT and he is a leading researcher of design theory and methodology, especially in the field of quality technology and robust design. He has had extensive consulting experience with many industries. Therefore, he has a very good sense of proportion between theory and practice, and he received the Junior Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching at MIT. Thus, he is not only conducting cutting-edge research, but he is also very good at making materials comprehensible. He is now co-director of the MIT-Singapore University of Technology and Design Alliance and is making efforts to establish a new direction in research and education in design engineering. Shuichi Fukuda held a workshop titled Computer aided Cooperative Product Development at MIT with Ram Sriram in 1989, at the same time as DARPA started their concurrent engineering DICE project. Thus, he is one of the pioneers in this field. He published the outcomes of this workshop with Ram Sriram and Robert Logcher as Lecture Note No.437 from Springer in 1991. He worked for a long time as an executive board member of the Engineering Information Management Systems group, ASME. He is now Chair of the Computers and Information in Engineering Division, ASME, which developed from this group. In addition, he served as Vice President at the IEEE Reliability Society, so his activities extend over wide areas. He is President of ISPE, which hosts the International Conference on Concurrent Engineering.