Document Actions
Soundar R.T. Kumara
- Allen E. Pearce/Allen M. Pearce Professor
University Park, pa 16802
Education:
- Ph.D., Purdue University
Biography:
Research Interests
Distributed Sensor Data Fusion, Complex Networks, Intelligent Agents, Inter Operability and Web Services, and Service Informatics ; applications to Supply Chain Logistics, Manufacturing and Healthcare Enterprises
Biography
Dr. Kumara's undergraduate education was in mechanical engineering from Sri Venkatesawara University, Tirupati, India. He received his M.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, in industrial engineering and Ph.D. from Purdue University.
Dr. Kumara's research efforts focus on intelligent manufacturing and intelligent systems, with an emphasis on sensor based process monitoring, process diagnostics, distributed intelligent agents in logistics and complex networks. He has successfully extended the frameworks developed in his intelligent manufacturing research program to military logistics and supply chain logistics. He is currently involved with several research projects in the following areas: IT in distributed systems for product platform design, sensor networks, complexity theory based survivability analysis in large scale logistics networks and supply chain logistics. He is currently working with NIST on healthcare informatics; and General Motors on interoperability of supply chain systems based on Web services paradigms; and with NSF on infrastructure monitoring. Professor Kumara's research focuses on developing and integrating theoretical and applied perspectives.
Dr. Kumara is among the first researchers in the world to apply several advanced computing models like finite state machines, syntactic pattern recognition and multi-agents to manufacturing problems. His research efforts in process monitoring and diagnostics have resulted in a new paradigm, Intelligent Integrated Diagnostics (IID), which combines monitoring, diagnosis and control to provide real time on line quality control. In this research work, he has pioneered the use of time series modeling, wavelets, neural networks, artificial intelligence (AI), and chaos theory. Dr. Kumara's research team was the first in the world to develop continuous tool wear estimation methods for metal cutting. They were also the first to prove the existence of low dimensional chaos in metal cutting (Published in Phys. Rev. E., 1995). The advanced computing tools and techniques he has developed in his manufacturing research program have been successfully integrated into applications in military logistics. Dr. Kumara extended his work in intelligent process diagnostics to develop an automated text understanding system based on cognitive linguistics and Sanskrit grammar. This work resulted in Crisis Action Message Analyzer (CAMA), a system to understand electronic messages from Desert Shield/Desert Storm. Further, based on the multi-agent technology that he developed for intelligent manufacturing, He has contributed to the world's largest software agent system (Ultralog) developed under the funding from DARPA. He has pioneered the use of Complex Networks in Supply Chain logistics, repeat collaborations in terrorist networks, dynamic cluster formation in large scale networks and search in weighted graphs. He collaborates with several leading scientists: Professors C.R. Rao from Statistics, Reka Albert from Physics, Munindar Singh from Computer Science, Sang Gook Kim from Mechanical Engineering, and Xiang Zhang from Mechanical Engineering.
Dr. Kumara has worked with several academic institutions during his tenure at PSU including MIT, University of Tokyo, City University of Hong Kong, Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST), Logistics Management Institute (VA) and Intelligent Automation Incorporated (MD).
Professor Kumara's work has been recognized with several awards. He is an elected Fellow of Institute of Industrial Engineers and the International Academy of Production Engineering (CIRP). His winning Penn State's Faculty Scholar Medal (highest research award given at the university level), Premier Research Award (highest research award at the Penn State College of Engineering level), and Penn State's Graduate Teaching award (highest graduate level teaching award) are noteworthy. He is the only faculty member in the Industrial Engineering department's history to have won any of these awards. He is one of the seven faculty members from the College of Engineering to have won the Faculty Scholar Medal in the past twenty three years. He has been invited to give keynote talks in several international conferences. Several of his students have won national and international awards.
Selected Publications
