WORDS FROM THE CHAIR
All of us at the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering – our faculty, our students, the administration, our alumni, and our sponsors – have many things of which we are proud. We have a tradition of unparalleled excellence and leadership in research, education, and service that has made ISyE nationally and internationally prominent. Indeed, many of our peer departments regard ISyE as the flagship academic unit in industrial and manufacturing engineering, and I agree. This prominence is due to the quality of our students and faculty, our curricula, our intellectual breadth and diversity, our international initiatives, and our relationships with our alumni and alumnae, sponsors, and the broader academic and professional communities.
We are unique in the size (number of faculty) of our school relative to the size of other industrial and manufacturing engineering programs in the United States and the world, and the challenge for us is to insure that this unique aspect is an asset. One way to meet this challenge is to have an intellectually diverse faculty who are capable of not only individual scholarly excellence but also who can create and apply knowledge as part of an interdisciplinary research team. We are also fortunate to be at Georgia Tech, an institute with an entrepreneurial culture, embedded in a scholarly culture of the highest quality. Further, Georgia Tech is very aggressive regarding international educational and research programs, which is particularly supportive of an environment for many of the topics that we study.
Many of these topics reflect the many important trends that affect ISyE today. One is the revolution in sensor, communications, and computer technologies that is causing us to reexamine fundamental modeling paradigms for many of the systems that we analyze. Decision making in such areas as health care, manufacturing, logistics, and supply chains can be made increasingly in (near) real-time due to the concomitant information systems that can sense, transmit, and process data rapidly.
Another trend that affects us is globalization and with it risk mitigation due to the possibility of major disruptions (e.g., weather, labor strife, accidents, SARS, terrorism). This trend has motivated us to have significant interest in international supply chains, which almost invariably involves manufacturing and logistics in emerging economies. We have now been involved for over five years with The Logistics Institute – Asia Pacific, in partnership with the National University of Singapore and are now developing a partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University that includes plans to launch a Sino-U.S. Global Logistics Center soon.
The world is moving quickly, and the body of knowledge in the areas of expertise that define our intellectual span is growing rapidly. But we have chosen our directions carefully, and as a result, we are, at least in part, setting the pace of relevant knowledge growth in these related areas. Our industrial and manufacturing engineering peer departments, nationally and internationally, are moving rapidly, too, and we have to work hard to stay ahead, particularly in recruiting excellent students, recruiting and retaining excellent faculty, and obtaining the resources necessary to achieve the excellence that we have all come to expect. However, if we achieve success in facing these challenges (and I'm confident that we will succeed), we have an enviable future.
