In 2007, I sought to have Lenovo Corporation sponsor a senior capstone
design team to work on technology for a developing country. A proposal
subsequently submitted jointly with Kurt DeMaagd to Lenovo was funded,
allowing us to attack the problem of providing computers for schools in
developing countries, where no Internet infrastructure or even electric
power grid was available. Lenovo's goal was to identify appropriate technology
that might assist them to introduce a product well suited for such a market,
as part of their very significant program of philanthropic efforts. We
began by forming a team of electrical and computer engineering
students, joint with two telecommunications students, as part of the
Senior Capstone Design course I used to teach each semester. The teams were
charged with developing a solar-powered, satellite-connected Internet
capability of 4-8 seats that could be installed in a Maasai village in
Tanzania. Kurt DeMaagd and I were joined by Prof. Jennifer Olson
(Telecommunications) on a trip seeking possible sites in
June, 2008, and in December, 2008, we took a team of four ECE students,
plus the hardware they chose and built, to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, to
join up with two Tanzanian faculty members and two of their EE
students. Together, we went to Losirwa Village, a Maasai community
that is a subvillage of Mto wa Mbu (Arusha District) in Tanzania. A week's
hard work
there resulted in the Maasai's first Internetted primary school, run by
solar cells and some very hefty batteries. Although Lenovo sponsorship ended
after the first year, MSU stepped in and provided fundiing to found a new Study Abroad program and a new
undergraduate specialization in Information and Communication
Technology for Development that has helped to institutionalize this
program, allowing students to complete two background courses on the
economic and cultural issues of development and a course on technology
appropriate for developing countries, followed by a field
experience installing a system in a region with such needs (initially
in Tanzania). To date, the program has served three elementary schools and
two secondary schools, providing all of them computer classrooms and Internet access, and where needed, a solar power system. We have now also installed video classrooms in three of those schools. To date, more than 65 MSU students have spent a
month in Tanzania under this program, under the supervision of Profs. Jennifer Olson and myself. Earlier, Professors Kurt DeMaagd and Lalita Udpa also participated in overseeing the students' activities in Tanzania.
The 22-minute MSU Today video is here: Tanzania Student Project Video from Big Ten Network!
An 8-minute version is also available at Short Tanzania Video.
The new video by Study Abroad student Brian Cooper is HERE.
Our student and faculty visits are supplemented by maintenance visits from our Tanzanian IT specialist, Alex Rutatinisibwa, who also works with us during our student visits. We were also greatly helped by Eric Tarkleson, a member of the first student team we took to Tanzania, an assistant on many subsequent visits while he earned an M.S. degree, and then the founder of his own Tanzanian company, Enda Solar, which helped us engineer and maintain our power systems for several years.We now have five schools on our mini-network, sharing the feed from the Halotel fiber optic network, which now extends to Mto wa Mbu. The schools are Baraka Primary School, Manyara Secondary School, Mto wa Mbu Primary School, Rift Valley Secondary School, and Jangwani Primary School. The primary schools' computers initially ran on solar power systems that we installed, while the secondary schools used power purchased from Tanesco, the Tanzanian utility, and conditioned and backed up by systems from Enda Solar (of Arusha, Tanzania). We eventually added remote Internet monitoring of the power systems in all the schools, so that we can now diagnose a power problem from East Lansing and dispatch help in Tanzania to fix the problem. Today, all but one of the schools have grid power, but still use our solar/battery backup systems. We've now installed video projectors in several classrooms in each of the schools, and a central file server where teachers and students can store their files.
I made my first trip to China in 1988, living in Shanghai at Fudan University for the summer while continuing my study of the Chinese language, begun at MSU in 1987.
During my service as Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group for Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (SIGEVO), I decided to begin organizing our first conference in Asia, not as our regular GECCO conference, but as an additional one, to be called the International Summit on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (GEC Summit for short). I was general co-chair (with Prof. Lihong Xu, a visiting professor in my laboratory) of this conference, which was held in Shanghai, June 12-14, 2009. We were delighted to see that more than 380 papers were submitted for this conference.
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 90s, 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.
My collaborations with Chinese researchers and a series of lecture trips to China have resulted in my being named Advisory Professor at five Chinese universities: Tongji University, East China Normal University, Shanghai University, Shanghai Maritime University, and Shanghai Business School. Today, I also collaborate with researchers at Shantou University (with which BEACON has established a joint laboratory for application of evolutionary computation to problems in robotics and inage processing), Guangdong University of Technology, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and others. Since 2015, I have made annual trips to China to work with my collaborators, typically in November of each year.
Prof. Jenny Olson, of the Department of Media and Information, has been my collaborator on the work in Tanzanian schools for ten years. But recently, she has initiated some new research projects in Tanzania, and has made me a member of the research teams for these projects. One project, sponsored by MSU's Alliance for African Partnerships program, is to work with female farmers in Western Kenya, and with the craftsmen who build tools for them, to design tools that are better suited for use by women, rather than men. The project involves those farmers in client-centered design with the craftsmen in their communities. The women are currently testing the second round of tools produced by the craftsmen, commissioned after our meetings with them in June, 2018.
An associated project, funded by a travel grant from MSU's Center for Gender in Global Context, is assembling a joint MSU/African team to study the health impacts of the first project, by involving health professionals such as physical therapists, occupational therapists, and medical doctors. After a first meeting in June, 2018, the team is seeking to fill out its membership with all of the required expertise, then to write proposals for external support.
A third project, sponsored by MSU's Tanzania Partnership Program (TPP), aims to extend the Kenyan farm implement project to the village of Naitolia, in the Arusha region of Tanzania, near to the village of Mto wa Mbu, where our schools project had been operating for ten years. That project will commence in summer of 2018.
My long-term interest in Russia, beginning with three years of studying the language as an undergraduate, was strongly reinforced by my first trip there, during the "Putsch" in 1991. At that time, I met with colleagues in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Volgograd.
Later in the 90s, and for over four years, I worked with others to try to establish a network of computing and training facilities in Russia and the former Soviet Union, aimed at providing engineering services for U.S. companies, gainful employment in Russia for underemployed Russian engineers (in particular, nuclear engineers in the closed cities), and global team training for U.S. engineering students. This effort, which was conducted under the name "NEWTeams," was organized primarily by Michigan State University, the University of Utah, and the Utah Russia Institute. I had many meetings in Washington, DC, and in Moscow (with a representative from one of the nuclear cities). However, political problems leading to funding cuts in the the Nuclear Cities Initiative Program (U.S. Department of Energy) ultimately forced the abandonment of the effort, which history has since shown would very likely have had a large impact, due to the extensive outsourcing of engineering from U.S. companies to India and other places that occurred soon after this project had to be abandoned.
For about eight years, I was part of an interdisciplinary global design teaming research group, involving engineering, telecommunications, and anthropology, that conducted research, initially sponsored by EDS Asia/Pacific Division, and later, by the National Science Foundation, on the methods and tools needed for effective use of global teams for solving engineering problems, in a series of projects. The original EDS-sponsored work was called GEMS (Global Engineering Methodology Study). Subsequent work was conducted with a large international team of researchers from MSU, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, China, and notably, Russia, under the name "INTEnD" -- Internationally Networked Teams for Engineering Design. From September, 1998, to September, 2001, that work was conducted under a 3-year grant from the National Science Foundation. Please see our INTEnD project site for a description of some of the software, training methods, partners, etc., which we have developed. We then continued our work on globally distributed teams of design engineers through another NSF grant in partnership with the University of Texas Pan American campus and ITESM in Monterrey, MX.
Early in 1993, the GARAGe established a sister center, the AI/CAD center at Moscow State Technical University (Bauman). The photo on the right shows me touring the Kremlin during that visit. During my third visit to Russia in November, 1993, we also established the Russian/American Joint Education/Research Consortium for Intelligent CAD/CAM/CAE and Genetic Algorithms ("ICADGA Consortium"), including teams of students and faculty members at MSTU, Nizhny Novgorod State University, Moscow Aviation Institute, Taganrog State Radioengineering University, and the Institute of Radio Engineering and Electronics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. We sponsored several years of GA research at two of those universities, which comprised the "Russian GARAGe." Kharkov State Technical University (Ukraine) became an additional member of the ICAD/GA Consortium. The lower photo on the right is of one of my visits to the laboratory of Prof. Dmitry Ivanovich Batishchev, at Nizhny Novgorod State University.
As Director of the Case Center for Computer-Aided Engineering and
Manufacturing (1983-2002), I founded 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.
In June, 1996, I organized the First International Conference on Evolutionary Computation and its Applications, EvCA96, in Moscow, Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences, June 24-27, with about 20 Western and 50 Russian participants, with the backing of the International Society for Genetic Algorithms, organizers of the ICGA conferences in the US, and of the Case Center, which I directed.
In 1999, I was appointed Senior Scientific Advisor to the Utah Russia Institute, an organization which has initiated many projects involving Russian citizens with the U.S. and with Utah, in particular. It was established in 1993 by Utah's Governor Michael Leavitt and Russia's Prime Minister, Yegor Gaidar.
As Director of the Case Center, I also assisted the National University of Science and Technology, in Pakistan, with computer networking and related issues throughout the mid-90s. Early in 1993, I visited Pakistan and delivered a short course on networking at NUST. I had the privilege of being part of a joint Pakistani/US delegation to meet with Pakistan's President, Ghulam Ishak Khan, for a discussion about the formal chartering of NUST.
