George Lo - Every New Idea Needs a Champion
George Lo is a leading researcher at CT in Princeton, New Jersey, where he launches and manages new interdisciplinary research projects and coordinates collaboration with universities, partners, and Siemens divisions. “I love the atmosphere in Princeton,” he says. “The people working here come from almost 30 different countries, and we have many young interns in the summer, making the place almost feel like a college campus.” Lo himself has worked at many different places around the world. Born in Indonesia, he studied electrical engineering at Imperial College in London. In 1980 he began working for Siemens in Erlangen as a software development consultant. He quickly found a topic that greatly intrigued him: the enhancement of Simatic software. Simatic is the world’s leading industrial automation system, and it is used in automotive manufacturing as well as in breweries, sewage treatment plants, and the pharmaceuticals sector.
Since 1995 Lo has been responsible for Simatic software in a variety of ways. He managed the development of software architectures for the U.S. market, was responsible for the software architecture of the latest Simatic version in Nuremberg, and helped to initiate research on PC-based control systems. His persistence was particularly in demand here, because industrial automation systems have their own hardware to ensure that they are robust and fail-safe and operate in real time. “Nobody could have imagined at the time that normal PCs would be able to take on such tasks,” says Lo. But PCs became and Lo developed a PC-controlled Simatic variant that is used today for numerous special solutions.
“At that time I was continuously traveling between Germany and the U.S.,” he says. His family lived in the U.S. and Lo had to make sacrifices to further his career. “But it was worth it, and I am now exactly where I want to be,” he says. What’s more, he now sees his grown-up daughter every day, because she also works for Siemens in Princeton. In 2003 his development team was transformed into a research unit and became part of CT. “Since then, we have worked even more closely with universities and have also taken part in government-sponsored research programs,” reports Lo.
One of his team’s most recent innovations is a new approach to developing machine tools. The technique uses the same simulation technology employed in video games. “The idea was originally presented to me five years ago. After three years of research and close cooperation with associated business units, we decided to turn it into a product,” explains Lo. The world models from video games are particularly useful in this regard because they simulate complex physical processes so as to depict objects and their movements as realistically as possible. Developers can now participate in ongoing simulations and save the objects they create in a library. “This allows engineers to easily test whether their ideas will work or not,” Lo says. When asked how he gained the ability to spot such trends, he replies, “Many years of experience – and the fact that I never give up“.