Robert Gao, the Cady Staley Professor of Engineering and chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, received the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ (ASME) 2023 Milton C. Shaw Manufacturing Research Medal. Gao is recognized for “significant contributions to improving the understanding of manufacturing process dynamics through multi-physics sensing and AI-driven data analytics.”
“I feel greatly honored to receive this ASME award,” Gao said. “[I] would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the contributions from my students, postdocs, colleagues and collaborators, who have worked with me on advancing the state-of-knowledge of manufacturing. I am also grateful for the support from various funding agencies and for ASME, which has provided a professional home for me to grow.”
The Milton C. Shaw Manufacturing Research Medal, established in 2009, is a society-level award and recognizes significant fundamental contributions to the science and technology of manufacturing processes and winners receive a bronze medal, certificate and cash award. ASME, which was established in 1880, and has more than 85,000 members in more than 135 countries worldwide.
Gao’s AI for manufacturing work was also recognized with the 2023 Andrew P. Sage Best Transactions Paper Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics for his paper “WaveletKernelNet: an interpretable deep neural network for industrial intelligent diagnosis” that was published alongside a former student and other colleagues. The paper describes the “synergistic integration of model-based and data-driven methods to enhance the interpretability of deep learning neural networks for machine fault diagnosis.”