Advanced Tools for Data Analytics

Dr. Richard Braatz

Dr. Richard D. Braatz is the Edwin R. Gilliland Professor of Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he does research in applied mathematics and control theory and their application to chemical and biological systems. He received an MS and PhD from the California Institute of Technology and was the Millennium Chair and Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University before moving to MIT. He has consulted or collaborated with more than 20 companies including IBM, United Technologies Corporation, Novartis, and Abbott Laboratories. Honors include the Donald P. Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council, the Curtis W. McGraw Research Award from the Engineering Research Council, and the AIChE Computing in Chemical Engineering Award. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, International Federation of Automatic Control, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. For more information, see Dr. Braatz's page.

Dr. Sirish Shah

Dr. Sirish L. Shah has been with the University of Alberta since 1978, where he held the NSERC-Matrikon-Suncor-iCORE Senior Industrial Research Chair in Computer Process Control from 2000 to 2012. He is the recipient of the Albright & Wilson Americas Award in 1989, the Killam Professor in 2003, the D.G. Fisher Award for significant contributions in the field of systems and control, the ASTECH award in 2011 and the 2015-IEEE Transition to Practice Award. He has held visiting appointments at Oxford University and Balliol College as a SERC fellow, Kumamoto University (Japan) as a senior research fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), the University of Newcastle, Australia, IIT-Madras India and the National University of Singapore. The main areas of his current research are process and performance monitoring, analysis and rationalization of alarm systems. He has co-authored three books, the first titled, Performance Assessment of Control Loops: Theory and Applications, a second titled ‘Diagnosis of Process Nonlinearities and Valve Stiction: Data Driven Approaches”, and a more recent monograph on “Capturing connectivity and causality in complex industrial processes”. He is emeritus professor at the University of Alberta, a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering and the Chemical Institute of Canada. For more information, visit Sirish Shah's page.

Dr. Bhushan Gopaluni

Dr. Bhushan Gopaluni is a professor in the department of chemical and biological engineering and an Associate Dean for Education and Professional Development in the faculty of Applied Science at the University of British Columbia. He is also an associate faculty in the Institute of Applied Mathematics, the Institute for Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems, Pulp and Paper Center and the Clean Energy Research Center. He is currently an associate editor for Journal of Process Control, The Journal of Franklin Institute, guest editor for Process Control Special Series in the Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in 2003 and a Bachelor of Technology from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 1997 both in the filed of chemical engineering. From 2003 to 2005 he worked as an engineering consultant at Matrikon Inc. (now Honeywell Process Solutions) during which he had designed and commissioned multivariable controllers in British Columbia’s pulp and paper industry, and had implemented numerous controller performance monitoring projects in the Oil & Gas and other chemical industries. He is one of the leading experts on data analytics for process industry and has authored over 110 refereed articles in reputed international Journals and conferences. His publications have been recognized through best paper awards and keynote presentations. He is also the recipient of the prestigious Killam Teaching Prize and the Dean’s service medal from the University of British Columbia. For more information, visit the DAIS page.

Lee Rippon

Lee Rippon is a PhD student studying Chemical and Biologial Engineering (CHBE) at UBC. He also holds BASc and MASc degrees from UBC in CHBE where his research experience includes applications of compressive sensing, adaptive control, system identification and process monitoring on sheet and film processes. His current research interests include applying statistical machine learning techniques to historical process data to perform fault detection, isolation, and diagnosis in a kraft process. For more information, visit the DAIS page.

Yiting Tsai

Yiting Tsai has finished both his BASc and MASc degrees at CHBE. His interests are process control and statistical modeelling of time-series data. His current PhD research focuses on the application of Machine Learning techniques to design smart controllers, which identify and predict process faults ahead of time and apply appropriate control actions to prevent such faults. For more information, visit the DAIS page

Dr. Aditya Tulsyan

Dr. Aditya Tulsyan is currently a Senior Engineer at Amgen. Prior to joining Amgen in 2016, Aditya was a Postdoctoral Associate in the Process Systems Engineering Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Process Control from the University of Alberta, Canada in 2013. He has held research positions at the National University of Singapore, University of British Columbia and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. His research interests are in systems engineering, statistical machine learning, signal processing and Bayesian inference. For more information, visit Dr. Tulsyan's page.