I work on industrial systems from two directions at once: the instrumentation that measures a machine, and the data path that turns those measurements into something a person can act on.
It started with hardware. My degree is in electrical and electronics engineering, and my first published work was a telemetry robot for inspecting power-system components.
The data engineering followed from it — getting readings off equipment, out of vendor exports and PDFs, and into tables a team can query.
The two run together now. Research into how industrial systems sense and control themselves, and client work building the pipelines that make that data usable.