Engineering’s Dr. Raymond Smith III named an ASEM fellow
Dr. Raymond L. Smith III, associate professor in the East Carolina University Department of Engineering, received a pair of honors during the American Society for Engineering Management (ASEM) International Annual Conference in Boise, Idaho.
Smith was named an ASEM fellow, one of the highest honors conferred by the society. He also received the Merritt Williamson Award for best international annual conference paper.
“This dual recognition is especially meaningful,” Smith said. “It represents the integration of my lifelong work in both academic scholarship and professional practice, bringing systems thinking and artificial intelligence together to improve how we manage complex engineering projects.”
The Fellow Award recognizes those who have made outstanding contributions to the engineering management profession through leadership, research and professional service. The award honors professionals for advancing the theory and practice of engineering management.
Smith’s paper is titled “Rethinking Project Management with Multi-Agent Systems: A Framework for AI-Driven Coordination.” The paper offers an artificial intelligent solution for managers who face stress and pressure from growing complexity, tighter timelines and heightened expectations for their projects.
The paper introduces the concept for the use of multi-agent systems, essentially a group of artificial intelligence agents that collaborate to solve complex problems by dividing tasks and sharing information. These AI agents can tackle tasks such as scheduling, budgeting, risk assessment and communication, with a supervisory AI agent coordinating actions and escalating decisions to a human project manager when needed. The concept would reduce cognitive burden, enhance responsiveness and reposition the project manager as a strategic orchestrator of AI agent-driven insights.
Smith serves as director of systems engineering for the Center for Sustainable Energy and Environmental Engineering in ECU’s College of Engineering and Technology. His research focuses on systems modeling, sustainability and decision analysis across multiple domains, including health care systems, coastal resilience, supply chain design and engineering education.
He came to ECU in 2017 after more than 20 years in the technology industry, holding senior engineering and management roles at companies such as IBM and Lenovo.
He is a licensed professional engineer in North Carolina and holds credentials as a Certified Professional in Engineering Management and as a Project Management Professional. Smith is also a senior member of both the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) and the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences. He has had multiple leadership and board positions with IISE and the American Society for Engineering Education.
Smith earned his doctorate in industrial and systems engineering (operations research), master’s in industrial engineering and operations research, master’s in economics, and bachelor’s in industrial engineering from N.C. State University. He also has a master’s in systems architecting and engineering from the University of Southern California.