Young-Jun Son (center), Seungho Lee (left) and Nurcin Celik celebrate their awards at the IIE Conference and Expo in Miami.
A University of Arizona professor and two of his graduate students took top honors at the at the 2009 Annual Conference and Expo of the Institute of Industrial Engineers.
Young-Jun Son, a UA associate professor of systems and industrial engineering, and his two students earned the three honors during the competition held June 1 in Miami.
Son, along with doctoral candidates Seungho Lee and Nurcin Celik, took the best paper award in modeling and simulation for their paper, "Dynamic Learning in Human Decision Behavior under the Extended Belief-Desire-Intention Framework."
Celik, whom Young-Jun advises, received the best master's thesis award for her thesis, "Dynamic-Data-Driven Adaptive Multi-Scale Simulation (DDDAMS) for Planning and Control of Distributed Manufacturing." She also won the best Ph.D. scientific poster award in the conference's Ph.D. colloquium. Celik is extending her master's thesis toward her doctoral dissertation.
"Receiving prestigious awards and being recognized by our major society is truly exciting and encouraging," Son said. "This is great motivation for our team to keep up the good work."
Son's research group is one of the most renowned in the field of industrial engineering. The group's research in simulation and modeling of human behavior involves creating computer programs that mimic human decision-making behavior.
"In our research work, we try to focus on high productivity as well as high quality," Son said.
Son said the conference awards and his group's high profile relate to the magnitude of the subjects they are tackling.
"The large-scale systems we address ... greatly affect economic prosperity as well as the human welfare of our nation - the grandest national challenges," he said.
Son's group also has been applying behavior-modeling techniques to attempt to predict how people might react to disasters, such as a bomb exploding on a city street. The group created the city area affected by the explosion in a virtual reality environment, and human subjects donned the virtual reality goggles and hit the virtual city streets in the aftermath of the blast.
Researchers then watched how the subjects reacted to virtual smoke pouring out of buildings, emergency vehicles hurtling by with sirens blaring, panicked crowds rushing toward them, helicopters buzzing overhead and dozens of other disorienting stimuli. These observations were then incorporated into intelligent evacuation management software programs.
Son also likes to engage his students by taking them to competitions, and his group has received numerous other awards from the Institute of Industrial Engineers.
In 2008, Son and Seungho Lee won the best paper award in homeland security at the Industrial Engineering Research Conference in Vancouver, Canada. While there, Lee also won best Ph.D. scientific poster award.
At the 2005 Industrial Engineering Research Conference in Atlanta, Son earned the Outstanding Young Industrial Engineer Award. He and five of his graduate students also won the award for the best research paper in modeling and simulation.
Pete Brown
College of Engineering
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