Systems engineering

Who have we got? At the center of this, you know, automated pipeline, we've now got computational engineers, program engineers.

We've still got the systems engineers and the product managers defining what a process looks like.

And we've still got people like myself, simulation engineers, working with the physics experts to come up with good solutions.

I can't store all those simulations locally, a thousand of them on my computer, so we've now got the data engineers, and we've also got Nicola from the machine learning team.

And then Google, I went to Google to do be ML adjacent.

So I was still doing other things so I ended up doing a lot of systems engineering work at Google for the first two years it ended up being extremely like some cool memory allocators and stuff like that that had impact at Google scale to the point where I was able to be like okay I want to move to Google research it was like very exclusive it is before everything took off there's only like people who are very famous in there and so i was like a fly on the wall in the sybil team that team was doing large-scale linear solvers for google so basically think of it as like extremely large dimensional sparse features and you train a model for like months online uh which model which types of models so back then really like um google's found foundational things like ads pctr predictions uh ranking problems uh anywhere you needed some type of machine learning but at google scale so really the dimension is sort of like the rd is d is very huge so you would go to like perhaps more than int32 bigger than int32 because we ran into int32 bottlenecks but only a few of them are active so it's sort of like very sparse so the R square of the feature is pretty small so it's like very sparse feature and And then I was doing that.

So I started in that team.

And when I joined the team, I was going through this initial revolution pre-neural networks on, if you remember, latent feature models like collaborative filtering, tensor products, you add into a linear model and then just like do recommenders.

Professor Ji Wu in has continued that tradition of putting science first.

In this interview, recorded during COSPAR 2026 in Florence, he talks about his priorities of science, international collaboration, and the profound significance of adherence to systems engineering.

He talks about his personal journey too – Initially, he wanted to study medicine, but after an administrative mix-up... as China was coming out of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1970s, ended up studying telecommunications and electrical engineering.

He developed a strong commitment to international collaboration by working with the European Space Agency in the Netherlands, completing his PhD in Denmark, and completing a stint as the Vice President of COSPAR.

Today, we're talking about something that touches every member of INCOSE, the role of our chapters and the volunteers who make them successful.

Our guest today has over 40 years of experience in systems engineering, project management, business analytics, and military leadership.

His career has included service as a U.S. Marine Corps helicopter pilot, supporting NASA and the Department of Defense.

With over 25 years of INCOSE membership, he now serves as a chair of the INCOSE Chapter Advisory Committee, helping ensure that the voices of more than 70 chapters around the world are heard by the INCOSE Board of Directors.

Now you are chair of the INCOSE Chapter Advisory Committee, the CAC.

And so take us back to the beginning.

How did all of these different experiences shape the way that you approach systems engineering today?

That's interesting.

They're gonna give us an overview of what to expect from this year's conference.

Following their conversation, I'm gonna be joined by Dr. Suzette Johnson, she's chair of NDIA's Systems Engineering Division, to discuss how systems and mission engineering connects many different parts of the defense ecosystem and turns emerging technologies into real capabilities and previewing parts of the conference as well.

I'm Rachel Sutherland.

I lead PR here at the National Defense Industrial Association, and with me is Jen Walsh, Director of Divisions and co-lead of a very exciting event we have coming up, the Emerging Technologies for Defense conference and exhibition here in Washington, DC at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.

We have quite a few of our divisions actually that helped us as well as the combatant commands.

So we have our data analytics and enterprise platform division, we have our science and technology division, we have, um, our logistics t- um, division that is helping as well, and quite a few others.

But I also wanna mention, we have our systems engineering division.

Uh, this year we're also having their mini conference there for the systems mission engineering, and it's gonna be very exciting.