“Dr. Rivero brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to our institution,” said Forrest Masters, Ph.D., interim dean of the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering. “Her dedication to interdisciplinary research, advanced manufacturing techniques, and commitment to excellence in education makes her an invaluable addition to our community.” 

Dr. Rivero comes to UF after serving five years as the Kate Gleason Professor and Department Head of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Her experience in higher education also includes her various faculty positions at Iowa State University and Texas Tech University. Dr. Rivero earned her bachelor’s, master’s, and Ph.D. degrees from Pennsylvania State University, all in industrial and manufacturing engineering. 

Throughout her career, Dr. Rivero has successfully spearheaded numerous research projects funded by federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and NASA. Her accomplishments are further highlighted by numerous awards for research, service, and teaching, with notable mentions including the Society of Manufacturing Engineers John G. Bollinger Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award and the Woman of the Year in Education by the Hispanic Association of Women. Additionally, she is a distinguished fellow of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers, serving as the first Hispanic woman to be selected. 

Dr. Rivero replaces David Kaber, Ph.D., the Dean’s Leadership Professor, who has served as chair of ISE since 2018. Dr. Kaber will depart from his role after helping transform ISE into one of the top departments in the country during his tenure. In his span as the department chair, ISE has peaked with the 11th-best graduate program and 12th-best undergraduate program among public universities nationwide by the U.S. News & World Report. ISE also experienced significant growth in enrollment numbers in both programs during the Fall 2023 semester. 

“The ISE department has undergone a major transformational change over the past five years and has an advancing trend in rankings due to excellent faculty research and student academics,” Dr. Kaber said. “Dr. Rivero is an experienced and recognized scholar and academician in industrial and systems engineering, and I am confident that she will take ISE to the next level through excellence in ISE science and practice.” 

Dr. Rivero’s research group, the iMED laboratory, has made significant strides in designing scalable manufacturing techniques incorporating additive manufacturing for diverse material systems, ranging from biopolymers to metal alloys and concrete. At UF she will be expanding her research to industrialized construction in collaboration with her colleagues in ISE, the Engineering School of Sustainable Infrastructure & Environment, and the College of Design, Construction and Planning as part of a $2.5 million project using strategic funding from the office of UF President Ben Sasse. For this purpose, the iMED lab will be moving into Weil Hall Structures and Materials Laboratory with a large-scale 3D printer capable of printing warehouses and buildings, among other structures.  

Dr. Rivero also has extensive industry experience in advanced manufacturing systems and materials, having worked with Detroit Diesel Corp., Honeywell Engines & Systems, Pratt & Whitney, and John Deere. Her contributions extend to collaborations with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where she served as a faculty fellow. In her role as department chair, she will seek to strengthen ties with industry. 

“We are confident that under Dr. Rivero’s leadership, ISE will reach new heights of innovation, collaboration, and achievement,” Dr. Masters said. “Given her combination of professional and educational experience, we know she will make an excellent addition to our Gator engineering team.”

Brady Budke
Marketing and Communications Specialist
Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering

Using a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Mostafa Reisi Gahrooei, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISE), will work to design a systematic data collection method that estimates the level of damages based on current information and adaptively guides data collectors to locations where the damage-level estimates are highly uncertain. This method will allow data agents to collect reliable data under severe time and resource constraints. 

“Extreme events often create unexpected situations that cannot be predicted beforehand,” Dr. Reisi Gahrooei said. “For example, while there are excellent predictions about how a hurricane may hit an area, the impact, level of damage and location of damage for that hurricane is very difficult to predict.” 

The proposed method first constructs a pre-disaster preliminary probabilistic model of physical damage levels for different structures. This model uses domain and expert knowledge of a region to preliminarily estimate how the region may be impacted by an extreme event before it happens.  

“Such a model estimates what the damage would look like in a region based on our knowledge of building distributions, type of buildings and built environment, land use, etc.,” Dr. Reisi Gahrooei said. “However, this is only a baseline as the actual impact of an extreme event depends on many factors related to the event itself.” 

 The model will determine initial trajectories for multiple data collectors to maximize information gain in the shortest possible time. 

“For example, we may have a few drones flying over to collect data regarding the level of damage and a few humans who are driving around to collect data.” Dr. Reisi Gahrooei said. 

This data collection system will use a novel hierarchical Bayesian framework, which allows for continual updating of beliefs about the level of damage caused by an extreme event, based on new observations.  

“As we collect data from a zone, or multiple zones, we continuously update our belief about the damage levels in the entire impacted region through the Bayesian framework,” Dr. Reisi Gahrooei said. “This continuous belief updating will allow us to identify what zones should be visited next.” 

The outcomes of this project will set the stage for the development of automated damage assessment systems that will result in more efficient and successful emergency management operations. 

Brady Budke
Marketing and Communications Specialist
Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering

“This project was motivated by the fact that the adoption of emerging technologies in infrastructure systems significantly impacts equity,” Dr. Yang said. “There is a lack of systematic ways to define fairness for systems with high dynamics, and little is known about the fairness tradeoffs.” 

As an example, Dr. Yang cites how newly emerging electric scooter systems are going against the overall equity model that is present in existing infrastructures, like public transit. Because of the unique challenges that come with measuring fairness in electric scooter access and use, the research by Dr. Yang is set to provide policymakers with a more holistic picture to guide decision-making on various regulations that can uphold public transit equity principles in access to individualized transportation systems. 

“We will build a new optimization model to effectively compute the price of fairness at various levels of fairness in system access using a diverse set of fairness measures. We will also perform extensive tradeoff analyses to assist in policymaking on fairness in system use,” Dr. Yang said. “We hope to verify that these measures can precisely evaluate system fairness and that our optimization models can effectively compute the efficiency loss due to newly enforced fairness requirements. These developments are expected to support comprehensive analysis of fairness and the efficiency of tradeoffs.” 

A case study that involves shared micro-mobility systems and various experiments using real-world data will be used to help conduct and analyze tradeoffs and provide insights for fairness policymaking. The research findings will be implemented into undergraduate and graduate courses to help show the challenges of measuring and promoting fairness in civil infrastructure system access through new emerging technologies.

Brady Budke
Marketing and Communications Specialist
Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering

This fall, ISE has welcomed 15 new Ph.D. students, which is the largest entering class in the past five and a half years. One way the department has been able to bring on new students is through the newly implemented First Year Ph.D. Fellowship Program. Using the Harbert S. Gregory ISE Endowment fund, this fellowship program provides a stipend, tuition assistance, and health insurance for up to two Ph.D. students in their first year of study. Kaber said, “These are highly prestigious fellowships that allow students to enter our program without a defined work commitment and to align with a faculty member (over time) based on their specific research interests.” 

In the master’s program, ISE welcomed 39 new students on-campus and through the UF Electronic Delivery of Gator Engineering (EDGE) program. The department also saw 48 new students join the Outreach Engineering Management (OEM) master’s program. The current total ISE graduate population is approximately 200 ISE students. The department has utilized the new Haldeman M.S. Admission Scholarship to further support new student access to ISE programs beyond the existing Academic Achievement Scholarships through the College of Engineering. Using support from the Harold D. Haldeman Jr. Endowment fund, the program provides up to 20 scholarships per year of $2,500 for a master’s student to conduct ISE research with a faculty member. 

The departmental growth has also included the undergraduate program. During the past three years, the four-year graduation rate for the BS ISE program increased from approximately 12% to 37.1%, while the time to degree decreased from 4.92 years to 4.39 years. Despite the program moving more students to job placement sooner, program enrollment has increased since suppression of the pandemic. Student enrollment settled at a low point of 405 during spring 2023 but is now on the rise at an expected 462 students for the Fall 2023 semester. Related to this, the ISE program is experiencing the highest level of transfers in the past five years with a total of 82 new students entering the program this semester.  

“With the continuing increase in the state population and more students seeking engineering degrees covering methods and tools that flexibly apply to a broad range of applications,” Dr. Kaber said, “ISE programs are becoming high-growth majors of choice for students entering and studying at UF.” 

Brady Budke
Marketing and Communications Specialist
Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering

Dr. Reisi Gahrooei will work with co-principal investigators Yiannis Ampatzidis, Ph.D., an associate professor, and Ute Albrecht, Ph.D., an associate professor, both with the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, Southwest Florida Research and Education Center (UF/IFAS SWFREC). 

“In a centralized approach, farms share their data with a central server to develop analytical models to support farm decision-making,” Dr. Reisi Gahrooei said. “Under this scenario, farmers may be hesitant about how their data is being used and whether it is shared with other third parties and growers.” 

The researchers proposed a new approach to design algorithmic solutions that allow farms to keep their data locally instead of sharing it with a central server. Each farm creates a local model that is transmitted to an aggregator. Once an aggregated model is created, it is then broadcast to each farm to create a personalized model that supports local decision-making. The approach eliminates data-sharing requirements while still allowing for benefit to be gained from knowledge that exists in other farms. 

“The fundamental methodologies developed in this project should be applied to real datasets collected at multiple agricultural farms, with potentially different data collection protocols and standards,” Dr. Reisi Gahrooei said. “In addition, data collected at various farms often differ in size and distribution due to economic and geographic differences. Addressing these differences to develop generalizable models useful to all participating farms is very challenging.” 

The group of researchers plan to evaluate the proposed “federated farming analytics” in modeling a collection of citrus farms as a case study. Along with this, the proposed cyberinfrastructure can easily be adapted to other specialty crops, especially other tree crops, and production systems. The group looks to focus on perennial crops, such as fruit trees, nut trees, and key vegetable crops. 

Brady Budke
Marketing and Communications Specialist
Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering

IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of IEEE membership with only one-tenth of one percent of the total voting membership being eligible in each year. This award is recognized by the community as a prestigious honor and an important career achievement. 

“IEEE and the Systems, Man & Cybernetics (SMC) Society are key organizations in advancing engineering science in critical areas, such as human-machine systems and human-AI teaming,” Dr. Kaber said. “My interests have been to contribute to modeling and design approaches, and I have been fortunate to be able to do so through SMC Society publications, meetings and administration. A professional connection with IEEE has had a substantial positive impact on my career, and I encourage all early career faculty to start now with IEEE.”        

His primary area of research interest is human-systems engineering with a focus on human-automaton interaction, including design and analysis for situation awareness in complex human in-the-loop systems. Domains of study for his research have included physical work systems, industrial safety systems, robotic systems, transportation systems and healthcare.  

Prior to joining UF, Dr. Kaber was a distinguished professor of industrial engineering at North Carolina State University where he also served as the Director of Research for the Ergonomics Center of North Carolina. He is a previous Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Industrial Engineers and a Fellow of the Human Factors & Ergonomics Society. Dr. Kaber is also a Certified Human Factors Professional (BCPE) and a Certified Safety Professional (BCSP).  

He has also received multiple research grants including the Human-Centered Computing Research Award from the National Science Foundation, and funding from NASA’s Langley Research Center Aviation Safety Program to study the impact of aviation display clutter on overall pilot performance.  

Dr. Kaber received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1991 from the University of Central Florida, as well as his Master of Science in industrial engineering in 1993. Additionally, Dr. Kaber earned his Ph.D. in industrial engineering in 1996 from Texas Tech University. 

The project will utilize multiple lightweight wearable devices, including a smartwatch and eye-tracking glasses, to measure operators’ heart rate variability, galvanic skin response, eye blink rate, and pupil size. This data will then be used to develop an algorithm that will determine cognitive arousal and workload during a target task performance. Based on the assessment of the operator’s physical and physiological state and stress levels, AR devices (headsets) will be employed to provide knowledge-task guidance in real-time to aid the operator with the task at hand. 

“The primary challenge for UF ISE in this project is creating a data-to-knowledge ‘pipeline’ from wearable devices to an intelligent agency that determines what information or guidance to provide to a human operator, all in real-time,” Dr. Kaber said. “Getting raw data streams from the devices to Python is done but sanitizing and smoothing the data streams for feature extraction, which drives an operator state classifier, at the speed of milliseconds is difficult to do. Fortunately, we have some outstanding graduate students at UF, who are working on the project.”   

Dr. Kaber, who is a Co-PI on the project, is working with a collaborative team that includes Jaime Ruiz, Ph.D., and Lisa Anthony, Ph.D., both associate professors in the UF Department of Computer & Information Science & Engineering (CISE), James Fairbanks, Ph.D., a CISE assistant professor, Maryam Zahabi, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Texas A&M, and Evan Patterson, Ph.D., a research scientist at the Topos Institute. Yunmei Liu, a UF ISE Ph.D. candidate, will be assisting Dr. Kaber with ISE’s portion of the project.  

“After we collect the subjects’ physiological signals through wearable devices, I will need to find features that can accurately reflect any changes in the operator’s cognitive workload. Then, I can determine an algorithm that is suitable for us to complete the work of predicting cognitive workload through physiological signals,” Liu said. 

This new technology will have a broad impact in that it can be used by civilian operators as well as the armed forces as they engage in high-complexity tasks in adverse environments, such as military helicopter pilot checklist completion and Army field-medic care triage for soldier amputee cases.  

“This type of technology has the potential to prevent faults and failures in high-consequence systems and to save lives, under certain circumstances,” Dr. Kaber said. 

Hamed Amini, Ph.D.
Associate Professor

Hamed Amini, Ph.D., will join ISE as an associate professor in August 2022. Dr. Amini received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France. Before that, he received an M.S. in probability and finance from Paris VI University and a B.S. in applied mathematics and computer science from École Polytechnique. Since then, he has served as an assistant professor for the University of Miami, and most recently an associate professor for the Department of Risk Management and Insurance at Georgia State University.  

Dr. Amini’s research interests include quantitative modeling in finance based on the need to understand and manage systemic and liquidity risks. His most recent work focuses on FinTech, machine learning, and blockchain economics. Dr. Amini is currently working on developing machine-learning tools to measure risks from dangerous structures in networks. In addition to his research, Dr. Amini has taught multiple courses in financial engineering, risk management, and mathematics among others at various universities.  

“The department continued its search in AI-enabled ISE applications, including FinTech and we have been fortunate to recruit Dr. Hamed Amini,” said David Kaber, Ph.D., ISE chair. “Dr. Amini brings expertise in specific AI methods and applications, including graph neural networks for financial network analysis under crisis conditions. Dr. Amini will lead our new M.S. in Financial Engineering program development. The department plans to make additional faculty hires in this area in the future.”  

Minhee Kim
Assistant Professor

Minhee Kim will be joining ISE in the fall as an assistant professor. Kim is expected to receive a Ph.D. in industrial and systems engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Summer 2022. Kim holds an M.S. in statistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a B.S. in industrial and management engineering from Pohang University of Science and Technology in South Korea.  

Kim’s research focuses on data analytics for status modeling, inference, and prediction in smart and connected systems with applications in advanced manufacturing, nuclear energy, and healthcare. She has collaborated with many scholars and practitioners in nuclear engineering, computer engineering, mechanical engineering, and statistics. In addition, Kim has several published papers in top journals such as the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers Transactions and the Journal of Quality Technology. She has also received various awards and accolades such as the Gilbreth Memorial Fellowship. 

“UF ISE has a developing methodological area in quality, statistics, and reliability (QSR),” Dr. Kaber said.“Minhee Kim will be an outstanding addition to our QSR faculty with a focus on machine learning methods for prognostics in advanced manufacturing and other related applications. I am very excited to see the future synergy among our faculty and with other units around campus, including Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering, the Nuclear Engineering Program, and the Nelms Institute.” 

According to the USDA, natural pollinators are at a critical crossroads. Pollination increases crop productivity as well as the overall quality of a myriad of foods, including those that are needed to feed the human population. However, natural pollination methods may not work well in indoor environments. 

Dr. Hu and Yu Gu, Ph.D., an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering from West Virginia University, are working to develop a six-armed precision robotic pollinator, known as StickBug, to counteract this problem. These robotic pollinators are believed to be able to supplement insect pollinators and improve food safety in a controlled environment and have features such as mapping and flower data collection.  

There are a number of research challenges that are associated with precision robotic pollination. Researchers must consider the spatial-temporal development of crops and flowers, the similarity of flowers in a cluster, the unstructured plants with occlusions, and the number of flowers that need to be pollinated among a regional population. The StickBug was created to combat these challenges, specifically for greenhouse environments.  

“Instead of developing these robots as bee replacements, we see them as a ‘plan B,’ which is for improved food security during insect declines, supporting indoor agriculture, and providing services beyond what insects can do,” Dr. Hu said. “One particular challenge is that this robotic pollination system needs to work alongside and be easily accepted by growers. Throughout the course of this project, my team will utilize human-robot interaction theories to make the robot system easier and safer to work with.”  

The goal of the StickBug pollinator is to: aid growers and help them overcome the shortage of natural pollinators that are needed for improved productivity; and provide opportunities for higher food production profits by controlling pollination schedules. StickBug will also allow for selective pollination and better management of crops by timing and tracking pollinated flower growth.  

“Without the pollinators, we would not be able to enjoy most tree fruits (e.g., apples, peaches), berries (e.g., strawberries, blackberries), melons, coffee, and more,” Dr. Hu said. “In addition, approximately one in three bites of our food relies on pollinators, so the influence of our proposed system can be substantial. With a growing population, increased life expectancy and limited arable land on Earth, food security has long been recognized as a critical issue. Although the proposed experiments will only be focused on pollination, the technology can be further adapted for many other precision agriculture applications.”