GE SWAC (Spot Welding Adaptive Control) failure

GE Research Schenectady spent $7M over 5-6 years developing adaptive feedback control for spot welding combustor cans. Tom (with postdoc and grad student, while Tom was in Japan as ONR liaison) demonstrated the algorithm didn't start measuring until 0.2 sec into a process that completes in 0.1 sec — controlling after the fact. Tom was funded as a "whipping boy" to discipline GE Research; he received ~$40-50K against their >$1M/year.

I didn't know it at the time, but I was the whipping boy for General Electric Research in Schenectady, New York. They had been working for five or six years on SWAC — S-W-A-C, spot welding adaptive control. General Electric Research had spent seven million dollars developing this technology. While I was off in Japan, I had a postdoc and a graduate student working on this project, and they showed that this process was not working at all. GE Research in Schenectady had blown seven million dollars and had nothing to show for it. They were supposed to spend their money with GE Research, rather than going off and giving it to some stupid university. But the managers up at Lynn decided to cut out GE Research and give a portion of the money to me. They were giving over a million dollars a year to them, and they gave me like forty thousand dollars to do some work, fifty thousand — a lot less. But we're cheaper.