News

  • Jun. 2023, Eugene L. Grant Award: Congrats to Dr. Ramin Giahi, Dr. Cameron A. MacKenzie, and Dr. Chao Hu for receiving the 2022 Eugene L. Grant Award for their best paper published in The Engineering Economist! This journal article is titled “Optimizing the flexible design of hybrid renewable energy systems” and was published online in The Engineering Economist in Jan. 2022. The Eugene L. Grant Award is an annual award from the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Engineering Economy Division.
  • Jun. 2023, Adam Passing Final Defense: Our lab member Adam Thelen successfully defended his Ph.D. work on June 7th. His Ph.D. thesis is titled “Machine learning-based aging models for estimating battery state of health and predicting future degradation.” Congrats, Adam (and Dr. Thelen)! Adam will start working as a Battery Research Engineer at Apple in July. We wish him all the best in her future career.
  • May 2023, Tutorial on UQ of ML Models Available on arXiv: Our recent tutorial paper covers emerging uncertainty quantification (UQ) methods for machine learning (ML) models with a particular focus on neural networks and the applications of these UQ methods in tackling engineering design as well as prognostics and health management problems. This tutorial is available on arXiv: [Uncertainty Quantification in Machine Learning for Engineering Design and Health Prognostics: A Tutorial]. Python codes for a toy problem and two case studies are publicly available on our GitHub page.
  • Apr. 2023, Hao Passing Final Defense: Our lab member Hao Lu successfully defended his Ph.D. work on April 20th. The title of his Ph.D. thesis is “Advances in Deep Learning and IIoT Toward Industry-Scale Machine Health Monitoring.” Congrats, Hao (and Dr. Lu)! Hao will start his faculty career at China University of Petroleum Qingdao in July. We wish him the best of luck in his future career.
  • Apr. 2023, Adam Winning ISU Research in Excellence Award: Congrats to Adam for receiving an ISU Research in Excellence Award! Only three ME Ph.D. students received this award this year. Adam is the third member of our group to receive this award. The two previous winners are Dr. Austin Downey and Dr. Mohammad Sadoughi.
  • Feb. 2023, Austin Downey Winning NSF CAREER Award: We are very happy to share that Dr. Austin Downey, REIL Alumni, has recently won the NSF CAREER Award for junior faculty. Dr. Austin received his Ph.D. from Iowa State University in 2019 (co-advised by Dr. Simon Laflamme and Dr. Chao Hu). He is now an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina. He was awarded for his work on data-driven control of high-rate dynamic systems. More information about this CAREER award is available on the University of South Carolina College of Engineering and Computing website.
  • Sept. 2022, Two-Part Digital Twin Review Available on arXiv: Our recent digital twin review (Part 1 and Part 2) provides a comprehensive review of digital twin enabling technologies (e.g., physics-informed ML, UQ of ML models, fault diagnostics, and failure prognostics). The two-part review papers are available on arXiv: [Part 1: Modeling and Twinning Enabling Technologies] and [Part 2: Roles of Uncertainty Quantification and Optimization, a Battery Digital Twin, and Perspectives]. These two papers have recently been accepted for publication in Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization.
  • Aug. 2022, Highly Cited Research Paper 2020 Award (Applied Energy): Our work titled “Deep convolutional neural networks with ensemble learning and transfer learning for capacity estimation of lithium-ion batteries,” published in Applied Energy in 2020, has recently been selected to receive the Highly Cited Research Paper 2020 Award. It is the second time we have won this award; the first time we won this award was in 2015 when the award was given for our paper published in 2012 titled “A multiscale framework with extended Kalman filter for lithium-ion battery SOC and capacity estimation.” The two articles are here: [2022 Paper], [2012 Paper].
  • Aug. 2022, REIL Established at UConn (Formerly SRSL at ISU from 2015-2022): Our research group moved from Iowa State University (ISU) to UConn in August 2022. The group name was changed from “System Reliability and Safety Laboratory (SRSL)” to “Reliability Engineering and Informatics Laboratory (REIL)” for better alignment with the group’s research interests.