ISE Seminar: Linkan Bian

Details

ISE Fall 2025 Seminar Series

Title: Advancing Smart Manufacturing: Collaborative Research and Education for Scaling Innovation

Abstract
Smart Manufacturing, a convergence of Advanced Manufacturing and AI, continues to be a national priority for research and development. In this talk, Dr. Bian will share his journey in the field of smart manufacturing as a professor and a program director at NSF. The current bottleneck of smart manufacturing research lies in the fact that most of the existing efforts in data generation and algorithm development are conducted in silos, making it challenging to scale. Dr. Bian will present a vision for a collaborative research platform that aims to transcend the optimization of individual processes and products in smart manufacturing. By embracing multi-disciplinary research, such as advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, human factors, and more, smart manufacturing can lead to technical solutions that enhance factory operations and strengthen supply chain resilience for small and medium manufacturers; and eventually bolster the US manufacturing industry.

Bio
Dr. Linkan Bian is the lead program director of the Advanced Manufacturing (AM) program of the National Science Foundation (NSF). At his home institute, Mississippi State University, Dr. Bian is the Thomas B. & Terri L. Nusz Endowed Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Dr. Bian received his Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from Beijing University. The major themes of Dr. Bian’s research focus on understanding the process-structure-property relationships of additive manufacturing, as well as the investigation of how AI/ML can transform the modeling and experimental approaches. Dr. Bian is a fellow of IISE and associate editors for multiple IISE and ASME journals.