Nagi Gebraeel, associate professor in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech, conducts research in the area of detecting and preventing failure in engineering systems as they degrade over time. The goal is to avoid both expensive downtime and unnecessary maintenance costs.

"We could be talking about a fleet of airlines, trucks, trains, ships -- or a manufacturing system," Gebraeel said. "In any of these cases, it's extremely useful for a number of reasons to be able to accurately estimate the remaining useful lifetime of the system or its components."

Watch this short video of Nagi Gebraeel as he discusses his research of complex engineering systems.