Apr 2023
“Sometimes you just have to jump out the window and grow wings on the way down” (Ray Bradbury). Motivation and creativity are necessary elements for growing effective wings. During problem solving in engineering and research, people often feel a lack of creativity and imagination, blocking the way forward. Whenever such a situation occurs, “thinking out of the box” is required to stimulate our imaginations and to help us come up with new and creative intuitions. Knowledge, data and analogies can serve as answers to such emotional difficulties which need to be collected and analyzed intelligently. Thinking beyond the problem (outside the box) with analogies, and restructuring the knowledge in a generalized way, helps achieve better creative solutions than focusing on the problem itself.
“Out of the box thinking” is easy to say, but difficult to implement. Building upon personal experience with analogies and knowledge-based systems, this talk will highlight the benefits of using 'analogies' and 'out of the box thinking' for general research and engineering problems. This presentation will emphasize an analogy-application model as well as previous and on-going research problems in the context of industry 4.0 related to artificial intelligence, machine design, human-robot collaboration and robot path planning.
Dr. Rafiq Ahmad is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alberta. He is also a Faculty Associate at the Nasseri School of Building Sciences and Engineering at the University of Alberta. He is the founder and director of the “Smart & Sustainable Manufacturing Systems Laboratory (SMART Lab)”, which focuses on systems design and engineering. Dr. Ahmad is also the founder and director of “Aquaponics 4.0 Learning Factory (AllFactory),” a unique learning factory researching system design and development for plants and fish production in an indoor, vertical, symbiotic ecosystem soil-less environment. His research interest includes smart engineering systems design, technologies development, digitization, lean manufacturing, hybrid manufacturing, additive manufacturing, robotics, and green technologies (3Rs: recycling, remanufacturing, and repair).
Dr. Ahmad is a Ph.D. in advanced manufacturing from Ecole Centrale de Nantes, France, and Master’s in design and manufacturing from ENSAM-Paris, France. He holds a BSc. Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the UET-Peshawar, Pakistan. Dr. Ahmad obtained a two-year Post-doctoral fellowship from the University of Luxembourg. Dr. Ahmad is a board member of the International Society of Automation - Edmonton (as Co-UofA Student Section Advisor) and a member of APEGA, CSME, and ASME. He is also an active editor, reviewer, and organizer of numerous international conferences and journals. Dr. Ahmad is the recipient of the prestigious Edmonton’s 2022 Top 40 under 40 Award by Edify Magazine for his serial innovation and streamlined technology development to impact our society. He is also the director and founder of the Canadian not-for-profit ProBEEs Digital Education Society.