Mark Hinders holds BS, MS and PhD in Aerospace and
Mechanical Engineering from Boston University,
and is currently Professor and Chair of Applied Science at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. Before
coming to
In Prof. Hinders’ research group the term nondestructive evaluation is taken to mean many seemingly different things:
• Medical Diagnostics: Ultrasound images, mammograms, etc. are two-dimensional “cuts” of three-dimensional anatomy. Doctors are expert at interpreting them, but the diagnosis is still quite subjective.
• Structural Flaw Detection: Technicians are not as highly trained at diagnosis, plus there is no standard “anatomy” and the structure can’t tell where it hurts. There’s also the morning after bowling night!
• On-line Inspection: Engineers don’t want to interpret images. They want the instrumentation to give a green light if the process is OK, and a red light if it’s out of spec.
• Intelligent Robotics: The key to useful robots is a combination of imaging sensors and the on-board intelligence to interpret them. Want to tell the robot to turn left at the big tree, not feed it GPS coordinates.
The focus of our work is to implement new and better measurements with both novel instrumentation and artificial intelligence that automates the interpretation of the various (and multiple) imaging data streams. Each student’s research typically has application to several seemingly quite different areas, in order to gain meaningful experience in multiple industries. Our graduates have gone on to work in a wide variety of jobs, and many of our current research projects are being done in close collaboration with our former students:
