MengChu Zhou, Distinguished Professor in the Helen and John C. Hartmann Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, will be this year’s speaker for the Dean’s Lecture Series. Zhou will present the talk “What is the Next Industrial Revolution?” at the James F. Hardymon Theatre in the Davis Marksbury Building on April 8, 2019. The lecture will begin at 3:30 p.m. and will be preceded by a reception.

The abstract for Zhou’s talk is below.

“Human beings have experienced two major industrial revolutions. The first one took place in the 19th century, which replaced muscle power from humans and animals with mechanical power. The second one started in the middle 20th century, which provided people and societies with Internet. It was built with the technologies from computing, communication, networking and information storage. Both offered unprecedented productivity increases. What will be the next one? This talk intends to answer this question by presenting some recent development of Internet of Things (IoT) and smart systems. IoT was selected by IEEE as a major initiative to develop and advance over the next few years. Several recent studies have predicted the huge growth of IoT and tremendous benefits to the world economy. It is expected that 26 billion IoT units would be installed by year 2020, generating $300 billion in revenue. The IoT will generate an additional $1.9 trillion in economic value. We plan to present a systems engineering approach to Internet-of-Things-based smart systems and their applications to smart manufacturing, smart cities, smart grid, smart medical and healthcare services.” 

Zhou received his B.S. degree in control engineering from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China in 1983, his M.S. degree in automatic control from Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China in 1986 and his Ph. D. degree in computer and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY in 1990. He joined New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Newark, NJ in 1990, where he is currently director of the Discrete-Event Systems Laboratory. His research interests are in intelligent automation, Petri nets, Internet of Things, Web service, cloud computing, workflow, big data, transportation and energy systems.  Zhou has over 700 publications, including 12 books, approximately 400 journal papers (over 300 in IEEE transactions) and 28 book chapters. He has 11 patents and several pending ones. Zhou is a Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, AAAS and CAA. 

MengChu Zhou, Distinguished Professor in the Helen and John C. Hartmann Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, will be this year’s speaker for the Dean’s Lecture Series. Zhou will present the talk “What is the Next Industrial Revolution?” at the James F. Hardymon Theatre in the Davis Marksbury Building on April 8, 2019. The lecture will begin at 3:30 p.m. and will be preceded by a reception.

The abstract for Zhou’s talk is below.

“Human beings have experienced two major industrial revolutions. The first one took place in the 19th century, which replaced muscle power from humans and animals with mechanical power. The second one started in the middle 20th century, which provided people and societies with Internet. It was built with the technologies from computing, communication, networking and information storage. Both offered unprecedented productivity increases. What will be the next one? This talk intends to answer this question by presenting some recent development of Internet of Things (IoT) and smart systems. IoT was selected by IEEE as a major initiative to develop and advance over the next few years. Several recent studies have predicted the huge growth of IoT and tremendous benefits to the world economy. It is expected that 26 billion IoT units would be installed by year 2020, generating $300 billion in revenue. The IoT will generate an additional $1.9 trillion in economic value. We plan to present a systems engineering approach to Internet-of-Things-based smart systems and their applications to smart manufacturing, smart cities, smart grid, smart medical and healthcare services.” 

Zhou received his B.S. degree in control engineering from Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, China in 1983, his M.S. degree in automatic control from Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China in 1986 and his Ph. D. degree in computer and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY in 1990. He joined New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), Newark, NJ in 1990, where he is currently director of the Discrete-Event Systems Laboratory. His research interests are in intelligent automation, Petri nets, Internet of Things, Web service, cloud computing, workflow, big data, transportation and energy systems.  Zhou has over 700 publications, including 12 books, approximately 400 journal papers (over 300 in IEEE transactions) and 28 book chapters. He has 11 patents and several pending ones. Zhou is a Fellow of IEEE, IFAC, AAAS and CAA.