After four years at the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology, the Laboratory for Intelligent Integrated Networks of Engineering Systems is moving to the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth! The move comes as Amro M. Farid assumes his new appointment as an Associate Professor of Engineering at the Thayer School.
As one of the prestigious Ivy League universities, Dartmouth is consistently ranked amongst America’s top dozen universities. Moreover, the Thayer School of Engineering has several features that when taken together make a well-customized home for the LIINES. It:
- commits to three research areas; two of which include complex systems and energy.
- organizes itself as a single school of engineering rather than departments; thus enabling research and teaching in engineering systems.
- maintains a strong commitment to teaching; ranking first nationally for five out of the last 6 years.
- maintains a healthy relationship with the social sciences within the larger liberal arts university; thus situating today’s engineering systems challenges within their social context
- emphasizes the role of entrepreneurial innovation in engineering; truly embracing the “empowering your network” ethos.
As the LIINES makes its move to Dartmouth, its important to reflect upon some of its achievements in the last four years. From its initial focus on smart power grids, it’s research program has expanded to address the application of control, automation and information technology to intelligent energy systems. This has meant the development of three additional research themes namely:
These efforts have lead to several notable outputs. In research publications, these include 17 journal papers since January 2014 with an average impact factor of 3.874, 2 books, 4 book chapters and 43 conference papers. In teaching, two new courses were developed ESM 501 System Architecture and ESM 616 Techno-Economic Analysis in Power System Operations. We are happy that students at the Masdar Institute consistently rated both of these courses highly. The LIINES has also increasingly taken on an international profile with active leadership in the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) Technical Committee on Smart Grids, the IEEE Systems, Man & Cybernetics (SMC) Society Technical Committee on Intelligent Industrial Systems, and the Council of Engineering System Universities (CESUN).
Of course, the LIINES’s productivity is largely due to its students. And so this is also a moment to recognize their hard work and dedication. This began with the 2013 cohort Apoorva Santhosh, Reshma Francy, Reem Al Junaibi, Aramazd Muzhikyan continued to William Lubega in 2014 and more recently Deema Allan, Wester Schoonenberg, and Halima Abdulla. Thanks to the support of Prof. Kamal Youcef-Toumi, their MIT student colleagues Hussein Abdelhalim, Fang-Yu Liu, and Bo Jiang have also been instrumental in fostering a collaborative international atmosphere despite the time zone hurdles. Each of these students has made strong research contributions to the growth of the lab and have gone on to successful careers beyond graduation.
Going forward, the LIINES will continue to work in the intelligent energy systems area as part of the Thayer School’s commitment to energy and complex systems. That said, the LIINES members at Masdar will remain as such and will continue their research in the spirit of international collaboration as their MIT student colleagues have done in the past. Dr. Toufic Mezher, Professor of Engineering Systems & Management has kindly agreed to coordinate the LIINES student members as they complete their degrees. Naturally, we will also continue to collaboration with the MIT Mechanical Engineering Department and more specifically Prof. Kamal Youcef-Toumi, the Mechatronics Research Laboratory and the Center for Clean Water & Energy.
We’re looking forward to an exciting new 2015-16 academic year at the LIINES. Stay tuned for more!
LIINES Website: http://amfarid.scripts.mit.edu
LIINES 
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