Mississippi State's Institute for Systems Engineering Research Team Earns National Recognition

July 5, 2018

An academic paper written by a team of Mississippi State University engineering researchers and an assistant professor of industrial & systems engineering won three awards at the recent American Society for Engineering Education annual conference and could potentially be selected as the conference’s best overall paper.

The paper, titled “Immersive Virtual Training Environment for Teaching Single- and Multi-Queuing Theory: Industrial Engineering Queuing Theory Concepts,” received the New Industrial Educator Outstanding Paper Award and the Industrial Engineering Division Best Paper Award. It was also selected as the best paper in Professional Interest Council 1, which is comprised of 12 different academic disciplines.

By virtue of winning the best paper award for Professional Interest Council 1, the Mississippi State paper will now compete against winning papers from the other four interest councils to be named best overall paper of the entire conference. That award will be selected next summer at the 2019 ASEE Conference.

The Mississippi State team is comprised of researchers from the Institute for Systems Engineering Research and the Bagley College of Engineering.

“To be honest, I was completely surprised that we won not only the Industrial Engineering Division Best Paper award and the New Industrial Engineering Educator Outstanding Paper award but also the best paper in PIC 1,” said Michael Hamilton, an assistant research professor and associate director for the Institute for Systems Engineering Research. “Knowing how competitive PIC 1 is, I’m honored that our work is considered innovative and worthy of recognition. We are trying to do the best possible work to provide new ways for students to stay engaged when learning engineering concepts.”

In addition to Hamilton and industrial & systems engineering assistant professor Raed Jaradat, the team was comprised of Parker Jones, Emily Wall, Vidanelage Lakshika Dayarathna, Debisree Ray and Ginnie Shih En Hsu.

To be named Best Paper of ASEE’s Professional Interest Council 1, the Mississippi State paper first had to be named the top paper in the Industrial Engineering division. It was then selected as the top interest council paper after competing against papers from the council’s 11 other divisions. Those divisions include aerospace, architectural engineering, biological & agricultural engineering, chemical engineering, civil engineering, construction engineering, electrical & computer engineering, engineering economy, engineering management, manufacturing, and mechanical engineering.

The Bagley College of Engineering is online at www.bagley.msstate.edu and can be found on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube at @msuengineering.

The Institute for Systems Engineering Research can be found online at http://www.iser.msstate.edu/.

MSU is Mississippi’s leading university, available online at www.msstate.edu.

By: Philip Allison