Research
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Research
My research focuses on three broad areas of interest:
- Big Data, which focuses on the development and implementation of methods that can be used to extract (mine) information from industrial data sets in order to provide actionable and valuable knowledge about the system under consideration. Current research examines the topics of data quality assessment, soft sensors, system identification, design of experiments, machine learning, and process monitoring.
- Holistic Control, which focuses on the development and implementation of methods that can control a process from start-up to shut-down and handle not only normal operating conditions, but also process upsets and faults. Topics of interest include process control including proportional, integral, and derivative (PID) control, model predictive control (MPC), fault detection and diagnosis, programming of programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and the implementation of digital twins for control.
- Smart WorldTM, which focuses on the application of big data and holistic control to different areas of life to create systems that can act on their own independently of others (both humans and machines). This entails the development of modular, independent, and robust systems. Current areas of application include smart factories, or Industry 4.0, smart grids, and smart homes.
- Computational Linguistics, which focuses on creating grammatically perfect phrases and sentences at runtime so that the user sees a properly constructed phrase, for example, adding items to a basket means that the proper form of the noun appears (1 item, 2 items,…) and not a generic form (1 item(s)), where the user must select the correct form.
Topics of Current Interest
I am currently interested in the following topics:
- Big Data:
- Multivariate data quality assessment;
- Soft sensors and irregularly sampled data;
- Soft sensors and sampled data with unknown sampling characteristics, such as unknown, exact sampling time;
- Modelling complex and interacting systems;
- System identification, especially its application to closed-loop process data; and
- Performance assessment of processes.
- Holistic Control:
- Application of soft sensors to fault detection and isolation;
- Digital twins and fault detection and diagnosis; and
- Digital twins and control.
- Smart World:
- Automation and design of chemical processes;
- Modelling a Smart Factory;
- Smart Factories and Digital Twins; and
- Smart Greenhouses.
- Computational Linguistics:
- Development of Language-Specific Models.