■ Keynote Speakers

■ Keynote Speaker 1

Dong Ho Park, Professor, Korea

Founder and Honorary President of the Korean Reliability Society
Fellow in the Korean Academy of Science and Technology (KAST)

Title: Maintenance and warranty policy for repairable system subject to lemon law conditions

Abstract: The search for an optimal maintenance and warranty policy has been a hot issue for a long time in the field of reliability engineering and a number of research results have been proposed in the literature. This presentation focuses on the maintenance and warranty policy for a repairable system subject to the “lemon law” conditions and its recent related works. The lemon law is a regulation to protect the customers from the defectives when the system failures occur repeatedly or the accumulated repair time exceeds a certain limit and is widely enforced over most industrialized nations. In most situations, the period during which the lemon law is effective is shorter than the warranty period and is set different from region to region. Recent research works on various situations are reviewed and the case for mutual interaction of the system components are briefly discussed as well.

Biography: Dong Ho Park is a professor, emeritus at Hallym University, Chuncheon, Korea. He received his B.S. degree in Applied Mathematics from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Florida State University, Tallahassee, USA, in 1980 and 1982, respectively. He was formerly an associate professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, USA, until 1995 and was a director of Statistics Division, Department of Mathematics and Statistics during 1992-1993. He is a founder of the Korean Reliability Society in 1999 and assumed the presidency of that society from 1999 to 2004. In 2009, he received a prestigious presidential medal for his contribution in developing the Korean science and technology and in 2010, he was elected as a fellow in the Korean Academy of Science and Technology(KAST). He also was a recipient of a Gallup award from the Korean Statistical Association in 2012. Since his retirement in 2012, he has been working as a research professor at Industry Academic Cooperation Foundation in Hallym University, Korea. At present time, he is an honorary president of The Korean Reliability Society. He has published a large number of research papers in various areas of reliability theory, including nonparametric classes of life distributions and hypotheses life testing, Bayesian estimation, software reliability, and system warranty and maintenance policy, in a wide variety of international journals.

■ Keynote Speaker 2

Liudong Xing, PhD, Professor

University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, USA

Title: Reliability in the Internet of Things

Abstract: The Internet of Things (IoT) aims to enable seamless connections between people and diverse objects, transforming our society toward becoming efficient, smart, and convenient incurring potentially vast economic and environmental benefits. During the past decade, the IoT technology has developed rapidly in various application domains, spanning from smart healthcare to smart energy, smart manufacturing to smart agriculture, smart environmental monitoring to smart ocean, smart cities to smart supply chains, and so on. Due to the critical nature of IoT applications, reliability is a vital requirement for deploying and operating robust IoT systems. Based on a layered IoT architecture, this talk presents the reliability-related issues and research on IoT systems. Particularly, reliability modeling, analysis, and design issues and solution methods will be discussed for the IoT perception technologies, IoT data communications, IoT support technologies, and IoT applications and services. Several open problems in the reliability of IoT will also be presented.

Biography: Liudong Xing is a Professor at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, USA. She received her PhD degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville in 2002. Her research interests include reliability and resilience modelling, analysis and optimization of complex systems and networks. She is the author or co-author of over 300 journal articles and three books entitled “Reliability and Resilience in the Internet of Things”, “Binary Decision Diagrams and Extensions for System Reliability Analysis”, and “Dynamic System Reliability: Modeling and Analysis of Dynamic and Dependent Behaviors”. Prof. Xing has received multiple teaching and scholar awards, including the 2015 Changjiang Scholar Award. She was also corecipient of 2018 Premium Award for Best Paper in the journal of IET Wireless Sensor Systems, and the Best (Student) Paper Award at several international conferences. She currently serves as Associate Editor or Editorial Board member for multiple journals including IEEE Internet of Things Journal, Reliability Engineering & System Safety, IEEE Access, etc. She is IEEE ComSoc Distinguished Lecturer for the class of 2024-2025. She has been the IEEE ComSoc IoT-AHSN TC SIG chair for “IoT in Tactile Internet” since 2023. She is a fellow of the International Society of Engineering Asset Management and a senior member of IEEE.

■ Keynote Speaker 3

David Coit, PhD, Professor

Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA

Title: Maintenance and Design Optimization for Systems of Dependent Degrading Components

Biography: David Coit is a Professor in the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ, USA, with visiting professor positions at Universite Paris-Saclay, Paris, France and Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. His current teaching and research involves system reliability modeling and optimization, and energy systems optimization. He has over 140 published journal papers and over 100 peer-reviewed conference papers (h-index 64). He is currently an Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Reliability and Journal of Risk and Reliability and for 15 years was a Department Editor for IISE Transactions. His research has been funded by USA National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, industry, and power utilities. His NSF grants included a CAREER grant to develop new reliability optimization algorithms considering uncertainty. He was also the recipient of the P. K. McElroy award, Alain O. Plait award and William A. J. Golomski award for best papers and tutorials at the Reliability and Maintainability Symposium (RAMS). Prof. Coit received a BS degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell University, an MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and MS and PhD in industrial engineering from the University of Pittsburgh. He is a fellow of IISE.

■ Keynote Speaker 4

Insu Jeon, PhD, Professor, Korea

Chonnam National University, Korea

Title: Phase-changing gels for thermal and electric energy harvesting

Abstract: Hydrated-salt-induced phase changes can be leveraged toward the development of cost-effective and environmentally friendly materials with many invaluable functions, including interchangeable states, energy (heat, electricity, and mechanical) harvesting, and switchable adhesion. However, the use of existing materials presents challenges such as limited supercooling, uncontrolled nucleation, a narrow operational temperature range, and cyclic instability, which collectively limit the practical applications of phase-changing gels. In this study, we propose a strategy that utilizes the synergistic effect of hydrated sodium acetate trihydrate (SAT) and glycerol to develop phase-changing gels with excellent supercoolability (below –80 ℃). The proposed strategy concurrently resolves all the aforementioned issues by creating a stronger yet switchable solvation barrier around the salt ions in the gel network. As a proof of concept, we rationally integrate SAT and glycerol within a polymer gel matrix at the molecular level to develop a supersaturated glycerogel. This supersaturated glycerogel possesses a cyclic, on-demand, and sustainable (by concentrating sunlight) structural transformability (~2000-fold change in stiffness) and exhibits prolonged environmental and mechanical stability. In addition, we demonstrate its ability to generate high-performance heat (~42 ℃) and thermoelectric voltages (~336 mV) at environmental temperatures of −30–37 ℃. Furthermore, it exhibits stable shape adaptability (~100%) and shape-memory ability (~100%), along with extremely tough and reversible adhesiveness (debonding energy for gel/glass adhesion: ~800 J m-2). The utilization of the SAT/glycerol synergy promotes the development of diverse high-performance phase-changing gels for advanced medical and technological applications.

Biography: Insu Jeon is a professor at Chonnam National University, Gwangju, Korea. He received his B.S. degree in Mechanical Design Engineering from Pusan National University, Busan, Korea in 1993 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Daejeon, Korea, in 1995 and 2000, respectively. Prof. Insu Jeon initiated research on the development of various gels during a one-year visiting research period at Harvard University in USA starting in 2013. Since 2016, he has been conducting research on the development of various functional gels and has continuously published papers in prestigious international journals such as Progress in Materials Science, Advanced Materials, Advanced Functional Materials, Materials Horizons, Water Research, and the Chemical Engineering Journal. He has received various awards from the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers, including Research Excellence Award (2022) and Experimental Mechanics Academic Award (2020) and the Reliability Academic Award (2016) in the Reliability Division, and Yoo-Dam Academic Award (2005) in the Materials and Fracture Division. He served as a Program Member (Review Board) of the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) from 2018 to 2021 and as the Chair of the Reliability Division of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2019. He served as the chairman and a co-chairman of ICMR (International Conference on Materials and Reliability) held in Jeju, South Korea in 2019 and in Yamaguchi, Japan in 2022, respectively. He is currently serving as the editor of the Journal of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers, Series A (2023~). Furthermore, he is currently appointed as an adjunct professor at Zhejiang University in China.