From 1983 to 2002, I directed the Case Center for Computer-Aided Engineering and Manufacturing, a center established by the MSU Board of Trustees. The center was responsible for much of the early introduction of computing into the curriculum of the College of Engineering, having been established in 1978 as one of the nation's first academic centers for CAD and CAE. In the 1980's, I raised an endowment for the center that grew to over $2 million. In 1995, the center's Division of Engineering Computing Services became a free-standing unit, leaving the Case Center primarily with research/outreach duties carried out through its Manufacturing Research Consortium, Genetic Algorithms Research and Applications Group (GARAGe), International Technology Incubator, and globally distributed student engineering design teams activities.
During the 1990's, the Case Center was home to the International Technology Incubator, a program that brought scientists and engineers (particularly from the Former Soviet Union) to the U.S. to work with MSU and American companies, utilizing their expertise to assist in solving the companies' problems. For example, pictured here is Prof. Stepan Radzevitch, of Dneprodzerzhinsk, Ukraine, about to leave Kokomo, IN with me, after working on improving gear manufacturing at Chrysler's Kokomo Transmission Plant. Prof. Radzevitch was in the U.S. through the center's International Technology Incubator, as a follow-on to our joint research supported under the CAST program of the National Research Council/National Academy of Engineering.
During my sabbatical leave at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1993-94, I established a Chinese GA consortium of universities working on research in genetic algorithms, including BUAA, Tsinghua University, and Zhejiang University. Both the Russian and Chinese consortia worked with and continued to develop a common set of parallel GA tools, GALOPPS, (for both PC's and workstations) that were originally developed at MSU (however, GALOPPS was frozen in the late 90's, and no further development is ongoing with that platform). In 2000, I began additional collaborative GA research with faculty members in Shanghai (East China Normal University and Shanghai Jiaotong University) and Nanjing (Nanjing University), under sponsorship of the National Natural Science Foundation (China). In 2000, I also began working with collaborators at East China Normal University (Shanghai) and Nanjing University, on several problems employing genetic algorithms for data mining and parameter estimation problems. In January, 2002, I was named an Advisory Professor of East China Normal University, and in December, 2002, of Tongji University (Shanghai). In 2006, I began working with Tongji University to plan an ACM SIGEVO-sponsored conference, the GEC Summit, in Shanghai in May, 2009.
The Case Center also assisted the National University of Science and Technology, in Pakistan, with computer networking and related issues. When I visited Pakistan to deliver a short course on networking, I also visited Peshawar, an ancient community on the Silk Road in northwest Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan.
