(bright music) - I was always fascinated by how machines work.

You can program a machine and it could do this job, and the other job.

Machines and ideas that work with the machines is what motivated me to become a mechanical engineer.

What would run the machine?

What is behind them that's making them work?

That I was more fascinated with.

Computer algorithms are brains of any machine.

Algorithms make machine smarter.

At my lab here, my students are developing different kinds of algorithms.

- So the main idea is when the optimization is done, you can give not only one single solution, but a set of solutions to the decision-makers.

- One thing we are working in our lab is to make engine control system smarter.

When you pressed onto your accelerator, it speeds up, but there are a lot of things that's happening inside.

As a designer, you want your engine to perform in a very efficient way.

If I have so much load on my tire because I'm going up the hill, how much fuel I should send.

If you do too low, then you are not going to go up with that speed that you want, if you're just too high, then it's going to reduce the life of your engine.

So finding that nice balance can be achieved through one of our algorithms.

So the red ones are simulated data and the blue one is the original data.

- Everybody has a different teaching philosophy.

On the teaching front, there I try to talk more about the reasons why we are doing this versus other way of solving the same problem.

It's really a rewarding profession.

You are building carrier of young people, and you go through that learning process.

I have been doing for 30 years now, and it's never a boring experience.

Being a university distinguished professor, I know that there was an external committee outside the college of engineering who looked at what I've done over the years, and thought I'm worthy of this.

That is a huge recognition to me.

(bright music)