Presenter: Dr. Eliot Winer Heuristic optimization strategies and Virtual Reality (VR) have seen exponential growth in power and ability in recent years. Humans are able to visualize and interact with more data than ever before. These advancements provide opportunities to address issues within traditional engineering areas as well as those in non-traditional areas outside of engineering. In this talk I will describe several research projects that: 1) provide novel and significant improvements to particle swarm optimization (PSO), 2) apply PSO and virtual reality for interactive path planning of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and 3) use virtual reality and fuzzy-logic to improve surgical planning. While these topics seem wide-ranging, I will provide the common platforms used to advance the optimization and visualization methods used for these various topics. Eliot Winer is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, a faculty affiliate of the Virtual Reality Applications Center, and a faculty of the Human Computer Interaction Graduate Program. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the University at Buffalo in 1994 and 1999, and his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from The Ohio State University in 1992. He teaches courses on mechanical systems design, optimization, and professional ethics. His research interests include Internet technology for large-scale collaborative design; analysis, visualization, and interaction with medical data studies; multidisciplinary design synthesis; computer-aided design and graphics; applications in optimal design; and virtual reality modeling for conceptual large-scale design. He is a member of the AIAA Multidisciplinary Design Optimization (MDO) Technical Committee and General Chair of the 5th AIAA MDO Specialists Conference to be held in 2009. He currently has funded research projects with John Deere, the Department of Education, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and NASA.