10:10 am
322 Fryklund Hall

Abstract

The traditional roles of industrial designers and mechanical engineers has changed dramatically in the past decade, the relationship between the two has become even more intertwined and inseparable. A great engineer thinks like an industrial designer, and a great designer learns to think like the engineer. We need to remember that both are creative roles, but each have their own specific strengths that we can leverage and build on. Shared understanding and empathy and good communication, and often compromise are at the core of what makes the engineer/designer unit successful in developing innovative new products – and from this talk we will learn how industrial designers look at the problem, what their goals are in a project, and how you can work better with them to make the magic happen (and vice versa!).

Bio

Michael Hammond is Director of Industrial Design at Design Concepts in Madison, WI and a 2000 UW-Stout graduate. With nearly twenty years of professional product design and development experience, he has worked on more than 250 consumer products for Panasonic, Mattel, Trek Bicycles and others. Michael values the process of design: moving ideas forward from the intangible front end to more concrete solutions that get team’s excited about and that their users will value.

Lecture archive

10:10 am
322 Fryklund Hall

Abstract

In this talk, Professor Laura Albert will discuss how to protect critical information technology (IT) infrastructure using industrial and systems engineering methods. Critical IT infrastructure is vulnerable to risks that can be introduced from supply chains, and therefore, there is a need to design plans to mitigate these risks. In this research, we propose new optimization models and network interdiction models to identify a combination of cost-effective mitigations that maximally delay supply chain attacks when there exist multiple adversaries and that capture the interaction between a defender and multiple attackers. We propose network interdiction models for protecting critical infrastructure that prioritizes cost-effective security mitigations to maximally delay adversarial attacks. We consider attacks originating from multiple adversaries, each of which aims to find a “critical path” through the attack surface to complete the corresponding attack as soon as possible.

Bio

Dr. Laura Albert is the Assistant Dean for Graduate Affairs in the College of Engineering and an Associate Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests are in operations research with a particular focus on applications in homeland security and emergency response. She writes the blog “Punk Rock Operations Research.”

Lecture archive

10:10 am
322 Fryklund Hall

Abstract

The medical device startup has become the aspirational pinnacle for many medical device engineers. These small, dynamic companies dispense with everything but research and development, in an attempt to remove all hurdles to innovation. This facilitates rapid development on a single problem in an attempt to catch the elusive acquisition. Startups keep everything you might need at your fingertips, generating an engineer’s sandbox filled with toys. The environment fosters innovation and can be extremely rewarding. However, the startup was born from intense competition both within and between companies, which can take a substantial toll on those who venture into them unprepared. In this lecture we will talk about what brought the startup to prominence in medical devices, the organizational structure they typically take, how regulatory agencies interact with startups and how better understanding of these small companies can prepare you for a career within them.

Bio

Lucas Harder is a Principal R&D Engineer in the medical device community of the Twin Cities area. He has spent the last eight years working with medical device startups developing minimally invasive structural heart devices.