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©2004 Rajesh Gupta, UC San Diego

Information Technology:Driving innovation, Engineering the engineer

Rajesh GuptaComputer Science and Engineering

Electrical and Computer Engineering (courtesy)

[email protected]


Transformational Influence of Engineering on Society

• Materials and Components– Understanding of properties, behavior

– Manipulation at gross level to create artifacts

• Information Technology– Convergence of information (data) and communication

• Also “ultimate tool of free speech” (Vinton Cerf)

• Biotechnology/Genetics – New ‘computational microscopes’ driving life sciences.


Information Technology influences

• How we communicate, interact, and share– collaboration is the default mode of interaction

• How do we build things and commerce– Manufacturing evolving from ‘SIMD’ to ‘MIMD’

• Market of one, mass customization, new economics

• How do we conduct the business processes– Walmart inventory control– Verizon billing system

• How do we conduct science– Explosion in data sources– Automatic, learning, inferencing, and validation

• … and so on.

Information infrastructure has become a fundamental enabler of Science

Fran Berman, SDSCGeosciences

Data Managementand Mining

Life Sciences

Astronomy

• Computers • Data management

systems • The World Wide

Web• Digital Libraries• Visualization

systems • Communication

systems

• Computers • Data management

systems • The World Wide

Web• Digital Libraries• Visualization

systems • Communication

systems

Physics


Raising the Engineering Talent for the Coming Generations

How IT is driving the engineering profession?


‘The Engineer’ circa 24th

Century

JAMES DOOHANa.k.a. Montgomery 'Scotty' Scott

He played the quintessential engineer that was able to work miracles. Hence the name 'The Miracle Worker'. He appeared in all seven of the Star Trek movies with an appearance on Star Trek The Next Generation in the episode 'Relics'. One of the more memorable lines from that episode is Scotty talking to the holodeck computer saying:

"N-C- C-1-7-0-1. No bloody A, B, C, or D".


The Engineer

• The quintessential engineer, circa 1970– Calculus, material properties, fluid/thermo dynamics

– Time variant, time invariant systems, signals and circuits

– Ability to quantify, parameterize problem space

– Practical and practiced

• The quintessential engineer, circa 2010– Engineering at the interfaces: vanishing ‘middle-of-the-roader’

– Design processes, Innovative, Entrepreneurial

– Ability to gather insight from data and make it part of virtual experience

– Model based reasoning, abstraction and reuse of technology solutions

– Ability to constantly relearn, changing material/technological realities

– Simulation-enabled and ‘virtually’ equipped


Some sobering thoughts

• Half-life of an engineering degree– Varies from 7 years to 18 months

• 50% of knowledge acquired by an engineer finishing a CS/E degree is obsolete in 2 years

• In some case, we are already teaching obsolete material.

• 80% of the jobs current high school students will apply do not exist today

• 80% of new employees leave their employer in first 3 years

• Innovation in applications is increasingly an off-shore activity.


ABET Certification Criteria, 2004/2005

Engineering Facilities

Ceramic Engineering

Chemical Engineering


Mechanical Engineering

Industrial Engineering

Materials Engineering


Information Technology in Engineering

• Driven by the need to ensure…– Scalability of solutions

– Operational efficiency of methods

... across the engineering disciplines.

• Key movements in skills:

ProgrammingStatisticsFilesOptimization

AlgorithmsStatistical learningData organizationPareto optimization


Computer Science & Engineering


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Why Nanoscale Systems?

• Very compelling reasons for (hyper) integration– 50 mm2, 50M transistors, 10-100 MIPS/mW, $5/part– Technology Enabler:

• no wires, no battery, no stiffness, no cost

• Technology convergence = New systems capabilities– Computing and radios– On the horizon: sensing, micromechanical, microfluidics

• Biofluidic sample preparation, transport, disposal• Chemical analysis, biological assays• In-situ monitoring, control, communication, adaptation• Remotely operated, reconfigurable laboratories for biochemical

analysis


Chips into Fabrics and Buildings

Ember radios and networksSource: Ember Networks


Chips in Human Body

Source: Shkel (MAE), Ikei (Biomed), Zheng (ENT), UC Irvine


µSystems have a place in major human endeavors• Communications:

– Wireless, Sensor networks, open spectrum

• Entertainment: – Virtual worlds, education, multimedia delivery

• Medicine and Biology: – lab-on-chip, devices & disability assists

• Transportation: – automotive, avionics

• Physical Sciences: – big science, life sciences

• Exploration: – space, oceanic

Instrumentedwide-area spaces

Personal area spaces

Internet end-points

In-body, in-cell, in-vitro spaces

These innovations require significant marketplace participation.


Engineers as Entrepreneurs

• Entrepreneurship– Technological success intimately tied to its acceptance in the

marketplace

• Entrepreneurship is about combination of resources – Innovation is at the heart of entrepreneurship

• Creativity drives innovation– Technological change provides the opportunity – (sustaining or disruptive)

• To succeed, invention needs co-invention– supporting technology adoption, proliferation, network effects.– IP, Organization, Privacy, Policy implications, …

–Technological advance intimately tied to its acceptance in the marketplace


Question

• How should engineering education be structured now to produce engineering talent best prepared for 2010 and beyond?

• Research initiatives at the interfaces of life, society and science– IT & creative/business processes, large scale systems, assistive

technologies, data and knowledge management, crisis response.

• Proactively prepare engineering talent for innovation– Creative element shift from pure technology to applications

• Science of Design– IT skills: algorithms, learning, organizing data, communicating.– Ability to model and navigate complex, adaptive systems with

emergent behaviors.


Measures of Success

• Spur a culture of innovation across broad spectrum of engineering disciplines driven by new technology, tools, and cognitive capabilities– As evidenced by at scale collaborative efforts, new programs– As evidenced by demand for our engineering graduates.

• Steps in that direction: – Cal-IT2 samples: Urban crisis response (RESCUE), WIISARD– Center for Networked Systems (CNS)– Center for MicroSystems Engineering (CMSE) with emerging effort on

assistive technologies.

• A school-wide program on basic abstractions of IT, technologies and trends, requirements, co-inventions, design principles, economic and social aspects.– 2-3 courses as a minor to the undergraduate program


Open Questions?

• In the spectrum between a complete ‘service’to a specialized program in CSE– Where exactly IT would lie?

– What ‘short term’ industry needs would be served?

– Where is the threshold of pain in engineering personnel?

• Should there be a line between technology and applications? Is there?

It

Technology

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