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Colin Parris, Ph.D.
Vice President for Software Research GE Global Research
GE SPECIAL
HOT CAREER PATHS Jobs in GE Analytics » Data Technologies « » Data Analysis « » Data Management «
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BIG IRON AND BIG DATA, HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE, MINDS AND MACHINES
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In this photo, GE’s Colin Parris is speaking at the 30th BEYA STEM Conference in Philadelphia, February 2016. GE appointed Parris vice president of software research in the fall of 2014. He leads software, systems, and analytics experts researching ways data can impact industry, placing him at the forefront of GE’s transformation into a Digital Industrial company.
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Photo Credit: Cover and page 6, Michael Hemberger/Photographer
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USBE & IT DIGITAL Number 1
FEATURES
03 | E ditorial Page 05 | S econd Wave of the Internet
EDITORIAL PAGE DATA CAREERS
G
eneral Electric, or GE, has a long history of working in oil and gas, energy, transportation, healthcare,
medical devices, software development and engineering industries. From its early days in electric to jet engines, computer manufacturing, and today’s GE Digital. “If you went to bed as an industrial company, you’re going to wake up as a
06 | How Prepared are you for the Data Economy?
software and analytics company,” GE Chairman and CEO Jeff Immelt told the
08 | Career Voices
of us,” he said. According to GE, the company is in the process of creating
10 | Here’s looking at You, Data Career
third “Minds + Machines” summit in 2014. “This change is happening in front
a new era in productivity they call the “Industrial Internet.” The Industrial Internet is about connecting industrial machines, infrastructure ecosystems and people at work to the Internet in order to derive value through analytics, machine automation, and the ability to predict and prevent critical issues. These innovations promise to bring greater speed and efficiency to diverse industries. The Industrial Internet will deliver new efficiency gains, accelerate productivity growth the way the Industrial Revolution and Internet Revolution
13 | 8 Tips to Build Your Data Science Career 14 | Engineering Healthcare 16 | Industrial Internet at HBCUs
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did. So where will the Industrial Internet take us? Read the stories of GE scientists and engineers about how they are making the world work better, faster, safer, cleaner, and more cost-efficiently. GE is looking for the next generation of pioneers, problem solvers, and dreamers to join a legacy of leadership. Career Communications Group’s Job Search is here to help you find GE internships, Leadership Program Opportunities and search all entry-level GE opportunities.
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US Black Engineer & Information Technology (ISSN 1088-3444) is a publication devoted to engineering, science, and technology and to promoting opportunities in those fields for Black Americans. The editors invite submissions directed toward the goals of US Black Engineer & Information Technology. In particular, we wish to present ideas and current events concerning science and technology and personality profiles of successful Blacks in these fields and related business pursuits. Fully developed articles may be sent for consideration, but queries are encouraged. US Black Engineer & Information Technology invites letters to the editor about any topics important to our readership. Articles and letters should be sent to: US Black Engineer & Information Technology, Editorial Department, 729 E Pratt St., Suite 504, Baltimore, MD 21202. No manuscript will be returned unless accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope. US Black Engineer & Information Technology cannot be responsible for unsolicited art or editorial material. This publication is bulk-mailed to 150 colleges and universities nationwide. Subscriptions are $26/year. Please write to US Black Engineer & Information Technology, Subscriptions, 729 E. Pratt St., Suite 504, Baltimore, MD 21202. Copyright (c) 2017 by Career Communications Group, Inc. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. Like us on Facebook: facebook.com/BEYASTEM
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The Industrial Internet:
Second Wave of the Internet by Rayondon Kennedy & Lango Deen rkennedy@ccgmag.com & ldeen@ccgmag.com
W
hen we talk about “Industrial” a few things that come to mind are companies engaged in manufacturing and factories where goods are made by machines. So it’s not surprising the term ‘Industrial Internet’ is being slightly overlooked by people outside of the industries using them. Although industrial internet might sound like a plot out of a Sci-Fi blockbuster (think “The Matrix” or “The Terminator”), the use of machines talking to machines, machines predicting problems, and self-troubleshooting is happening around us all the time. As the Industrial Internet is incorporated into more technologies, products and services are becoming more efficient and responsive, delivering more benefits for the consumer. In health care, doctors are shifting focus from the treatment of disease state to prevention of a disease state. Brad Hahn, a senior vice president at Aurora Healthcare, thinks that with the help of the Industrial Internet, and its data collection capabilities, the health care system which has 15 hospitals, 185 clinics, and more than 80 community pharmacies, can do just that. By partnering with General Electric (GE), Aurora is on a faster pathway to the discovery of symptoms of breast cancer and cardiac arrest. “Things don’t happen in a moment,” said Jeff Immelt, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of GE, at a recent Minds and Machines Summit. “It’s about transitions and change,” he added. Imagine millions of devices, vehicles, buildings, and smart machines with enabling technologies such as sensors and robotics, intelligent machines running software analytics, all managed by the people who develop the software and run the machines. The prediction is that 50 billion items will be connected by 2020. Helping GE’s people in their transformation are telecom companies such as AT&T and Verizon, system integrators like Accenture, a multinational management consulting services company, and CISCO for Edge Computing. Edge computing is pushing computing applications, data, and services away from centralized nodes and enables analytics and knowledge generation to occur at the source of the data. This is where you come in. As GE is transforming itself to become the world’s premier digital industrial company, take a moment to explore opportunities with software-defined machines and solutions that are connected, responsive and predictive. GE is organized around the “GE Store,” through which each business shares and accesses the same technology, markets, structure and intellect. Each invention further fuels innovation and application across our industrial sectors. With people, services, technology and scale, GE delivers better outcomes for customers by speaking the language of the Industrial Internet. S
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DIGITAL ISSUE 2017 I USBE&IT 5
HOW PREPARED ARE YOU
Colin Parris, Ph.D. Vice President for Software Research GE Global Research
C
olin Parris ’85, Electrical Engineering, Howard University, is one of the greatest data economy evangelists on the planet. One of his proudest accomplishments is his role in the Blue Gene Supercomputer business. But long before supercomputer projects for highperformance system-on-a-chip architecture, Parris was an emerging leader in the world of digital convergence. “When I first began at Howard, I was focused on electrical engineering, and then this thing called software suddenly showed up,” he recalled.
“People were always building processors and chips and electronic circuits to solve a problem, but software enables you to reconfigure the electronic circuit very quickly so that you can have the circuit do other things on top of a processor,” he explained. Parris fell in love with software at Howard. His electrical engineering degree course not only introduced him to BASIC (Beginners’ All-purpose Symbolic Instruction) and Pascal, it gave him a ready network—students and professors—and taught him how to learn, which comes in handy considering the rate and pace at which Internet of Things (IoT) technologies he is involved in develop. He also learned the difference between simply writing code and architecting code. “If you’re just going to write code, yeah that’s interesting, but can you write effective code? Can you write code that’s secure? Can you write code that’s flexible?” Federal funding of computer science education helps people understand how things work together and create the building blocks that change the world, Parris said. “In the early days at Berkeley, the university became well known for BSD UNIX,” he said. “That operating system was created by AT&T, but it came out of a program at MIT funded by the U.S. government. They found Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), which became UNIX and then UNIX came to Berkeley and Bill Joy took that program and founded the Solaris operating system.” Joy played an integral role in the early development of BSD UNIX while a graduate student at Berkeley. Today, nearly all operating systems are heavily influenced by Multics, through
by Lango Deen ldeen@ccgmag.com
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FOR THE DATA ECONOMY? UNIX, either directly (Linux, OS X) or indirectly (Microsoft Windows). “Berkeley’s Arpanet turned to the Internet, and government seeded a lot of what we have in the computer age,” Parris said. While Parris was completing his Ph.D. in electrical engineering, he helped convert an AT&T digital telephone switch from centralized call processing to distributed processing. Later, at IBM, where he spent more than 20 years of his career, one of his first software development projects was electronic promotions for merchants to entice us to shop online and encourage us to come back—all via IBM servers. “The first wave of the internet was about connecting consumers,” he said. “Now we have more than 3 billion people connected on the Internet. By 2020, it will about 7 billion. When you look at the number of machines that will be connected by 2020, it’s roughly about 50 billion things.” That staggering number of connected devices around the world becomes profound when you think the next sets of attacks are going to be attacks on infrastructure, he warned. “Massive attacks that could cripple financial, energy, and health systems that are all on the Internet because everything has been digitized,” Parris noted. “If we aren’t building the right systems and educating the next generation, who will take the lead?” He asks us to imagine not just the worst-case scenarios of industrial machines—jet engines, power generators, pipelines, and locomotives—connected through the Internet, but to adopt
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a digital mindset that embraces what the Industrial Internet can offer in growth opportunities. “To succeed and capitalize on the growth opportunities the Industrial Internet is creating, industrial companies must not only be deep in software and analytics but also have the physical knowledge to match,” Parris urged. “It’s not enough to have great software. In the complex, high-tech infrastructure worlds, you must have the deep domain expertise and knowledge of the machines and business operating environments to match,” he said. In the fall of 2014, GE appointed Parris vice president of software research. He leads software, systems, and analytics experts researching ways data can impact industry, placing him at the forefront of GE’s transformation into a Digital Industrial company through partnerships with GE’s businesses, partners, and clients. Parris’s blogs, talks, speeches and interviews have carried the same message since 2014: The data economy is here. S
For students, Parris has 4 TIPS for success in the data economy: 1. Develop a passion around learning. 2. Spend a couple of hours doing what you’re passionate about. 3. Join support groups; find communities that nurture your passion. 4. Build something.
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CAREER VOICES by Lango Deen ldeen@ccgmag.com
J
ames Gerard “Gerry” Lopez was still in kindergarten in the San Fernando Valley,
California, when General Electric’s J. Stanford Smith put out a call to action in 1972. Smith wanted a tenfold increase in minority engineering graduates within 10 years.
James G. “Jerry” Lopez, Ph.D. Systems and Synthesis Lab GE Global Research 8 USBE&IT | DIGITAL ISSUE 2017
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n response, the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) sponsored a symposium on increasing participation of minorities and women in engineering. Two years later, the University of Notre Dame hosted a meeting of representatives from research centers, universities, and advocacy organizations to develop methods to increase representation and make sure everyone gets a chance. Lopez attended California State University at Northridge and earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1988. After that, he landed a great job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is the leading center for robotic exploration of the solar system At the time, the JPL had a program where if you were working as an engineer you could go to the University of Southern California and get a graduate degree at no cost. So Lopez took advantage of his workplace benefits and earned his master’s in electrical engineering in 1990. “I had no plans to continue on with my education,” Lopez recalled. “But through the Office of Academic Affairs at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory I came upon an opportunity that was offered to minority engineering students to get a Ph.D. at one of a number of colleges that were part of this program. It was called the GEM program.” Lopez applied and was accepted and also got accepted into the Ph.D. program at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “Through the GEM program I was able to complete my Ph.D., also in electrical engineering, but with a focus on fiber optics and lasers n 1999,” Lopez said. “I owe that program a lot,” he added.” I probably would not have gone on to do my Ph.D. without them.”
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“Engineers use data all the time. The thinking in the past was just going through the data and finding what we were looking for. Big data analytics is where you’re trying to get the data to tell you something new. Something you didn’t know before. By necessity all of us at GE have had to start thinking like data analysts and data engineers.” — James G. “Jerry” Lopez, Ph.D.
––––––––––––––––––––
DATA SCIENCE TEAMS
1. Spreadsheet users 2. Machine learning experts 3. IT and data engineers ––––––––––––––––––––
After his Ph.D., Lopez went on to work for a startup company outside Boston on high capacity fiber optic networks. When the telecom bubble burst in the early 2000’s he moved to General Dynamics working on another fiber optics program, gyroscopes, and project leadership. Then an opportunity came up almost nine years ago to join the staff at General Electric’s Global Research. At General Electric, Lopez has been involved with projects that look at the machines that GE builds, such as aircraft engines and gas turbines that generate electricity and power our cities, and wind turbines. “My role is to lead projects that develop technologies to make those machines work better, more efficiently, burn less fuel, produce more electricity and cost less for the customer,” he explained. Through the course of developing those technologies and as GE has transformed itself from a physical to a digital industrial company, Lopez says he has had to understand more and more how
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the data and analytics around those machines help us understand the operations of those machines and things about the machines electrical engineers might not know. “Engineers use data all the time,” Lopez said. “The thinking in the past was just going through the data and finding what we were looking for,” he said. “Big data analytics is where you’re trying to get the data to tell you something new,” Lopez added. Something you didn’t know before. ‘What can you tell me data that I didn’t think about before or didn’t quite understand about my machine before? “By necessity all of us at GE have had to start thinking like data analysts and data engineers,” Lopez said. Excel spreadsheets are not up to the job. To handle the massive amounts of data for analytics-driven companies such as GE are new tools that run in the Cloud like R. R, also called GNU S, is a programming language and has become the most popular language for data science and an essential tool for finance and statistical data. Lopez cautions however that traditional engineering disciplines are still important, because students also have to understand the physics of the machine and how that works.
“What we’re trying to do is to combine the physics and analytics,” he said. “That’s where the whole digital industrial internet thing comes in and what’s going to make engineers of the future valuable” for solving global problems in power & water, oil & gas, energy management, aviation, transportation, and healthcare. Lopez has a daughter who will soon graduate with a bachelor’s degree in biology and a highschool age son who hopes to study mechanical engineering. If he were talking to his 20-year old self, Lopez said he would simply say “Dream big!” Growing up in a poor neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley, Lopez said he had a very limited view of what he could be or what he could do. He certainly didn’t know what the Internet was. “I was extremely fortunate to get a bachelor’s degree and a master’s and then the GEM opportunity,” he said. “At eighteen or nineteen, I didn’t always take the opportunities that were handed to me, because frankly I didn’t think I could dream that big,” Lopez said. S
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Brett Matthews, Ph.D. Lead Research Engineer GE 10 USBE&IT | DIGITAL ISSUE 2017
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HERE’S LOOKING AT YOU,
DATA CAREER
by Lango Deen ldeen@ccgmag.com
B
rett Matthews is leading the way in data science and data analytics at GE. How did he become a data scientist? What did he study?
Developing industrial machines and devices that touch people’s lives are all in a day’s work for Brett Matthews and his team. They make technology that power planes, trains, provide power for large and small grids all over the world. The technology they create also allows them to make our devices more energy efficient and environmentally friendly. “Our business partners usually come to us with some technical problem they’d like to solve,” Brett explains.
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Those problems include increasing efficiency or safety, reducing costs or emissions, or detecting or preventing mechanical failures. “These machines are equipped with many sensors—pressure transducers, vibration and acoustic sensors, arterial blood pressure,” he adds.
How does he do that?
Brett says his job is to use his professional background in digital signal processing, machine learning, and statistical pattern recognition to make machines smarter. “I develop and apply digital signal processing and machine learning methods, which we call “analytics” on these signals to solve our businesses’ problems,” Brett says. “My work usually involves getting large volumes of data from our business partners, conceiving mathematical and technical solutions, building those solutions in code, evaluating the solutions on data, and refining and improving,” he adds. “I typically write code in MATLAB, python, C/C++ and a few other languages.” GE makes many types of machines. They run from large, jumbo-sized jet engines to locomotives, enormous wind turbines with blades more than the length of a football field, and heart monitoring devices about the size of a pack of chewing gum or a USB memory stick.
How can you prepare for his job?
“In terms of education, I have a Bachelor of Science, Master of Science, and a Ph.D., all in electrical and computer engineering,” Brett says. “Someone looking to do this job should have a background doing research in some Data Science-related area,” he advises. Brett gets to work on important, challenging projects. He also gets to be at the cutting edge of technology in GE Digital. As a lead research engineer, he is one of the many scientists and engineers in the Software, Sciences, and Analytics division of GE’s Global Research Center, who come up with advanced solutions to serve the needs of GE’s business units in aviation, healthcare, energy, and transportation.
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DATA SCIENCE AREAS: 1. Statistical signal processing 2. Machine learning 3. Applied statistics 4. Operations research 5. Mathematics or statistical natural language processing “Often people in related fields like physics have skills that apply here as well,” he adds.
• Brooklyn Technical High School, 1996 • B.S. in Computer & Systems Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2001 • M.S., Electrical, and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2003 • Ph.D. Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2012
How he got to become a data scientist?
As Brett was nearing the end of his Ph.D. program and seeking jobs, most opportunities he saw for someone with his background were in academia, government defense labs, or Wall Street, he recalled. “Ideally, I wanted a job where I could do state-of-the-art research in machine learning and signal processing, but also apply it to real problems, and also have the freedom to try new things,” he said. “I really didn’t know such a job existed, and that’s exactly what this job turned out to be,” he said. “My job at the research center is actually the dream job that I didn’t know existed.” Brett joined GE after finishing his Ph.D. program, about 4 years ago. It was his first full-time position, but he had chalked up 10 internships at Lucent Technologies (1), Sikorsky Aircraft (2), Texas Instruments (3), IBM TJ Watson Research Center (3), and MIT Lincoln Labs (1)as an undergrad and a grad student.
“I got involved in Internet of Things (IoT) work, mainly through my current job at GE Global Research,” Brett said. “Although I was always interested in signal processing and machine learning, my job at GE involves working on many machines, which benefit from remote monitoring and diagnostics, a natural problem for IoT work and research.” Most of the people who work at GE’s Global Research Center have Ph.D.’s, but many others come through the Edison program, which requires a master’s degree at the entry level. The GE Edison Engineering Development Program is a two- to threeyear early career program consisting of three or more rotational assignments. Participants have the opportunity to earn credit towards an M.S. degree in engineering or other real world application technologies. You’ll receive education and mentorship from the top minds in your field while working on high-profile projects driven by real GE business priorities. “I think it is very important to be a mentor and to have mentors in our careers, as well,” Brett says. “I actively participate in GE’s African-American Forum (AAF), which is an affinity group for African-American employees at GE. AAF gives me the opportunity to meet other GE employees, who have become mentors to me, and to mentor students at universities, through recruiting. While it can be difficult to find time, meeting with someone for a couple of hours or so, monthly or quarterly, is definitely manageable,” he recommends. Brett’s job requires a lot of work and he says frustrating setbacks happen all the time. “Overcoming these challenges is a big part of the fun, so it all balances out,” he says. S
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8 tips: How to prepare for a data science job
MUSIC + M TH =
INNOVATION P
by Lango Deen, ldeen@ccgmag.com
edro Pastrana-Camacho graduated from the University of Puerto Rico with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. He earned another bachelor’s degree in math, with a minor in music from Purdue University, as well as a master’s in computer science. How did he change his career and gain skills in data science?
Pedro Pastrana-Camacho was about 10 years old when he started playing the cuatro Puertoriqueño—the national instrument of Puerto Rico. At that age, Pedro didn’t give much thought as to why the music sounded so good or the complex geometry in the humming of the strings. But no doubt about it, he was skilled in the scales and patterns of the Caribbean folk guitar. Thanks to the music, Pedro won a scholarship to University of Puerto Rico, where he earned dual bachelor degrees in computer science and mathematics. After graduation, he chose Purdue University in Indiana to do a master’s degree in computer science. Three and half years ago, Pedro joined General Electric (GE) and translated his skills in computer science into a whole new career. Pedro’s work in different GE businesses included gathering large data sets in health care, and on the performance of large commercial aircraft engines. Seven months ago, he joined GE Research’s Software Systems and Patterns Factory Lab, where he designs and develops software. “In my current position as a computer scientist, I work with a team which focuses www.blackengineer.com
PEDRO’S 8 TIPS:
1
Learn about everything that excites you, even something others consider simple or trivial. You never know what you can bring.
2
Aspire to go big by connecting your skills to benefit a community or a larger group of people.
3 4
Focus on critical thinking and problem solving rather than equations. Use Open course software and collaborate on open source projects.
on building an analytical eco system. This eco system will give domain experts the tools to develop, share, and update analytical models for GE’s assets across the company,” Pedro explains. In other words, each engine has a digital copy that helps in data collection. The data helps make better predictions of an engine’s performance, when a turbine’s likely to fail, when it’s time to do repairs, and helps reduce flight delay and cancellations due to airline equipment issues. Pedro said he first started writing software. Next, he discovered AI or artificial intelligence, and then it was machine learning, natural language processing, and privacy, which help solve data problems. “Having those set of skills at GE, I found out I was prepared in a way,” Pedro added. “And how math and machine learning are used in an industrial scale. “There’s no specific set of classes,”
5 6 7
Sign up for online courses like Coursera.
Write software that reflects how much you care and how passionate you are about your work.
Build and invent physical prototypes integrating hardware like RaspberryPi, Arduino, little bits, and software.
8
Understand technical work in engineering, analytics, and business impact, to culture and people, and most importantly how each one of them affects the others.
he continued. “However, software engineering, computer science, programming, software development, the design and study of algorithms, algebra, and domains of math are common themes. “At GE, math is the language in which engineers and scientists communicate because we’re building analytical models,” he said Once you’ve checked off all those courses and requirements, Pedro says the fun part is how you use all that knowledge together to make something useful, and create analytical models and business strategies. In his spare time, Pedro works with students in the 10-week GE INSPIRE program and interns. He is also planning a personal AI assistant. To apply for the GE Inspire Program’s Internet of Things Generation, visit https://sites.google.com/site/ highschoolinternships/local-progrm/ ge-inspire. S DIGITAL ISSUE 2017 I USBE&IT 13
ENGINEERING HEALTHCARE by Lango Deen ldeen@ccgmag.com
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aneen Uzzell had been working at GE Medical Systems (now GE Healthcare) for about five years by the summer of
2007 when health-care leaders across America met at an annual senior executive event. The conference’s theme was “The Future is Now: Effective Leadership in a Global Healthcare Environment.” Five thousand miles away in Ghana, the GE Foundation, the philanthropic arm of GE, had launched its Developing Health Globally initiative, providing medical equipment, water desalination units, and power generators to the West African country’s resource-poor hospitals, health centers and maternal child health posts. Yet one of the keynote speakers at the four-day event was unimpressed. An international consultant in healthcare, he compared the American system to the MTV show, “Pimp My Ride,” where a rapper and his crew transform an old vehicle into a flashy, moving music sound station, reported a St. Thomas newspaper. “American health care places unbelievable amounts of high technology into a frame that is fired by an old, ineffective engine,” he said. Its system “rewards procedures, and not keeping people healthy.” But GE professionals like Uzzell were in “the grind” with “eyes on the ground” providing “diversity of thought, creativity, and decision-making.” Inspired by her mother, a successful businesswoman, and an older sister who was a nurse, Uzzell often dreamed of wearing a white swan Janeen Uzzell Global Director of Operations, uniform someday, but an older cousin who was studying GE Global Research, External Affairs, engineering motivated her to take a different path. and Technology Programs Although Uzzell started with an engineering 14 USBE&IT | DIGITAL ISSUE 2017
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education—a mechanical engineering degree from North Carolina A&T State University coupled with an M.B.A. from Fairleigh Dickinson University—little did she know that her field would open a range of possibilities in organizing projects in healthcare and business. A published expert in maternal and newborn health, Uzzell has served as an advisor on edgy technology for small- and medium-sized organizations and co-chaired the Medical Device Task Force for the Innovative Working Group hosted by the United Nations. Before GE she worked on validation engineering at Johnson & Johnson, then a small startup, which sent her to Brazil as part of the global development of Yellow Fever vaccination and coached her career forward with the sponsorship of her M.B.A. Later, from 2002 through 2005, Uzzell led a team of service engineers in GE Medical Systems (now GE Healthcare), who serviced healthcare equipment. The kind of big box GE technology in hospitals, such as CAT scans, MRIs, and x-ray machines. “While I was leading the healthcare service business, GE started to run healthcare disparity programs,” Uzzell recalled. “GE Healthcare was funding a health program at Harlem Hospital, which had one of the top trauma centers,” she said. The program was called “Hip-hop Stroke,” set up to teach children about the leading cause of disability among adults in the U.S. Brain attacks, which strokes are, impact a high percentage of elderly foster parents and parents-with-care in the African-American community. GE’s stroke program was at the hospital Uzzell worked as a service operations manager so they asked her to manage it. First, she started with information tables on stroke, handing out pamphlets on symptoms, available treatment at hospitals, and getting doctors to take blood pressure. Then Uzzell took up more volunteering in New York. Next, she was traveling out of state with healthcare programs focused on the improvement of health in diverse communities. After a while, Uzzell was going as far as Kenya in east Africa with a Christian healthcare ministry. Before long, Uzzell was considering ‘sharpening her skill’ internally, integrating the market and good management into improving healthcare disparity programs and global health care. By the time a career opportunity www.blackengineer.com
“We are now a Digital/ Infrastructure company, and the Internet of Things brings advanced intelligence to everything we do… so now we can solve the world’s toughest problems and deliver the best solutions faster and smarter. What took us years to build and deliver in the past will be enhanced by our innovative systems.” came up to travel to Ghana, she had a proven track record at GE as one of the go-to people for healthcare. When GE’s chief technology officer in the office for healthcare called Uzzell about a position in the GE Foundation’s Developing Health Globally program in Ghana, she bought in. GE’s goal was going to focus on donating equipment, make sure the equipment was installed and properly serviced, and that there were sustainable water and energy services. It was the whole works, Uzzell said, but “we didn’t want to just drop and dash,” she added. Uzzell became an advocate in positioning GE as a trusted advisor in rural health. She strategized with ministries of health and heads of state in east and west Africa, and global partners, on how to align GE’s innovation to solve health challenges and expand access to healthcare through “disruptive” models. As the director of healthcare programs and healthymagination for GE Africa, she led a team focused on building solutions for health in some of the world’s most challenging environments. Currently, Uzzell is global director of operations with GE Global Research
External Affairs and Technology Programs. She oversees operational and business development aspects of external funding for technology programs in healthcare, aviation, and energy, while carrying out the strategy and vision of the External Affairs and Technology Programs organization. “When we started on the journey to provide better health to all people, we focused on reverse engineering our products to ensure quality, access and affordability for low resource settings,” Uzzell said. “Our results, though time consuming, enabled the VSCAN, handheld ultrasound to go to market and it now services women globally,” she added. “We are now a Digital/ Infrastructure company, and the Internet of Things brings advanced intelligence to everything we do…and so now we can solve the world’s toughest problems and deliver the best solutions faster and smarter. What took us years to build and deliver in the past will be enhanced by our innovative systems. It’s brilliant. We’re getting better every day.” S
GE IN SUSTAINABLE HEALTHCARE In June, General Electric opened a new $13 million GE Healthcare Skills and Training Institute, an education facility for healthcare professionals. Dr. Cleopa Mailu, cabinet secretary, Ministry of Health for Kenya and John Flannery, president & CEO of GE Healthcare, in Nairobi, Kenya, launched the center. Through the new facility, GE will train over 10,000 healthcare professionals from across Kenya and East Africa by 2020. Farid Fezoua, president & CEO, GE Healthcare Africa said, “The center will support the development of a pipeline of biomedical engineers, radiologists and technicians. This commitment to healthcare capacity building will help to reduce the country’s skills gap, improve job prospects and build a solid national healthcare system and private healthcare sector.”
DIGITAL ISSUE 2017 I USBE&IT 15
INDUSTRIAL INTERNET OF THINGS ON CAMPUS
by Lango Deen ldeen@ccgmag.com
T
here’s no question about it: Data is the new dollar. And colleges are gearing up their graduates for a networked world. Whether you are a private corporation or the Department of Defense, it is probable your manifestation of the Industrial Internet of things (IIoT) involves sensors, a system or machine, or groups of machines, software associated with each, and quite a bit of data, explains Robin N. Coger, dean of the College of Engineering at North Carolina A&T State University and a mechanical engineering professor. Coger adds that the physical parts of the IIoT tend to be linked to the virtual parts via communication through a network. “Hence, threaded throughout the possibilities of the IIoT is the simple fact that its accomplishments will persistently be tested by those who seek to compromise its networks,” she said. “Considering all of the elements of the IIoT, what single academic major has the necessary skills to proactively defend against such attacks, detect and counter compromises when they occur, and design new solutions to reduce vulnerability to future attacks?”
‘A Cross-disciplinary approach works best’
Within A&T’s College of Engineering, they have found that the cross-disciplinary approach works best. Researchers across several disciplines—computer science, computer engineering, industrial and systems engineering, electrical engineering, and others –team together. “This is enabling our College’s researchers to extend what began as innovations in cyber-identity and evolutionary computing, to be extended to new frontiers critical to the reliability of the IIoT,” Coger said. At Virginia State University, computer-manufacturing engineering, computer science, and other related programs 16 USBE&IT | DIGITAL ISSUE 2017
Illustration by Bryan Davis
are also helping students explore real-time communication between sensors and networks that connect the physical to the cyber world. Integration is taking on several forms. “We are creating an Industry 4.0 lab, where students can study and research the application of Internet of Things (IoT) in manufacturing,” said Keith Williamson, dean of Engineering, Science and Technology and associate vice president for research and innovation. “Our assembly system consists of multiple assembly robots, automated material handling systems, and a vision control quality assurance system all connected to an ERP system through embedded sensors and RFID. Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags are intelligent bar codes that can talk to a networked system to track every product that you put in your shopping cart. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is business process management software that allows organizations to use a system of integrated applications to manage the business and automate back office functions related to technology, services and human resources.
Industry 4.0
VSU’s Industry 4.0 lab allows students to gain hands on experience in creating IoT networks and will also be used to
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"Considering all of the elements of the IIoT, what single academic major has the necessary skills to proactively defend against such attacks, detect and counter compromises when they occur, and design new solutions to reduce vulnerability to future attacks?” — Dr. Robin Coger Dean of the College of Engineering, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University
study condition-based maintenance based on predictive analytic models collecting data from the IoT network. Raymond Boykin, a research professor in Information Logistics Technology, and a System, Applications & Products in Data Processing (SAP) Fellow, is focused on enterprise resource planning (ERP) logistics information systems and supply chain risk. “Our second initiative is closely related and involves IoT [Internet of Things] in the design and fabrication of our SAE Formula,” Boykin adds. “This application includes connected communications with the machines utilized in the manufacturing process and the connection of the PLM software (Siemens Team Center) with the ERP software,” he said, adding that there are plans to expand this into the race car monitoring system to track vehicle performance. The third initiative involves bringing the economics baccalaureate
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and masters programs to the College of Engineering and Technology. Given the nature of IoT ecosystems, VSU anticipates the need for dual programs that merge technology with economic theory. “Specifically, we anticipate the need for new economic models specifically aimed at technology-related industries facing rapidly changing market challenges,” Williamson said. Within the context of technology focused learning outcomes, the goals are to provide students with new concepts for value creation as IoT shifts economic models for capturing value. In this sense, VSU aims to establish a vision for entrepreneurship where value creation in traditional product mindset shifts from solving existing needs in a reactive manner to solving problems in real-time and in a predictive manner. On February 1, 2016, Dr. Makola Abdullah became Virginia State University’s 14th President with a
pledge to transform the institution into “Virginia’s Opportunity University.” At 24, Abdullah became the youngest African American in Northwestern’s history to receive a Ph.D. in engineering. “We are at the front and in the business of getting better,” Dr. Abdullah said. “The integration of the Internet of Things into our courses is evidence that we are providing quality and innovation into our programs to provide our students with experiences that will give them meaningful opportunities in STEM related fields when they graduate,” he said. “We are excited to be a part of this innovative learning experience.” The Higher Education Research and Development Survey shows Virginia State University (VSU) recently spent $8.37M on R&D. Compared to other research universities VSU spends an average amount of money on research. (Average: $8.17M) Out of the total $8.37M R&D budget, Virginia State University invested $5.01M in Life Sciences (59.8% of the total fund). S
DIGITAL ISSUE 2017 I USBE&IT 17
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