Category Archives: Engineering

Seeing Machine from MIT

View from photo: an image (of a staircase) created to approximate the view through a seeing machine

MIT poet develops ‘seeing machine’ by Elizabeth A. Thomson

The work is led by Elizabeth Goldring, a senior fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. She developed the machine over the last 10 years, in collaboration with more than 30 MIT students and some of her personal eye doctors. The new device costs about $4,000, low compared to the $100,000 price tag of its inspiration, a machine Goldring discovered through her eye doctor.
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The pilot clinical trial of the seeing machine involved visually impaired people recruited from the Beetham Eye Institute. All participants had a visual acuity of 20/70 or less in the better-seeing eye. A person with 20/70 vision can see nothing smaller than the third line from the top of most eye charts. Most participants, however, had vision that was considered legally blind, meaning they could see nothing smaller than the “big E” on a standard eye chart.
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Goldring and colleagues are now working toward a large-scale clinical trial of a color seeing machine (the device tested in the pilot trial was black and white).

House Testimony on Engineering Education

Testimony of Vivek Wadhwa to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce,
May 16, 2006.

Vivek Wadhwa has continued the work published in the Duke study: Framing the Engineering Outsourcing Debate. In the testimony he provides an update on the data provided in the report.

Contrary to the popular view that India and China have an abundance of engineers, recent studies show that both countries may actually face severe shortages of dynamic engineers. The vast majority of graduates from these counties have the qualities of transactional engineers.

Differentiating between dynamic and transactional engineers is a start, but we also need to look at specific fields of engineering where the U.S can maintain a distinct advantage. Professor Myers lists specializations such as systems biology and personalized medicine, genomics, proteomics, metabolomics that he believes will give the U.S a long term advantage.

Our education system gives our students broad exposure to many different fields of study. Our engineers learn biology and art, they gain significant practical experience and learn to innovate and become entrepreneurs. Few Indian and Chinese universities provide such advantages to their students.

The dynamic and transactional differences were mentioned in his business week article: Filling the Engineering Gap.

The conclusion he presents seems wise to me.

The numbers that are at the center of the debate on US engineering competitiveness are not accurate. The US may need to graduate more of certain types of engineers, but we have not determined what we need. By simply reacting to the numbers, we may actually reduce our competitiveness. Let’s better understand the problem before we debate the remedy.

Microsoft Wants More Engineering Students

Microsoft Marching For More Engineering Students:

“We believe it is in the best interests of our industry, to have a continuing stream of high-quality, well-educated students in the sciences and technology. Software is a people-intensive business. Microsoft is committed to technical innovation, research is a primary arm of that, and we, therefore, want to continue to hire technically innovative people,” Roy Levin said.

Webcasts from the event with National Science Foundation, National Academy of Engineering and Microsoft representatives.

Related:

Golden Buckyballs

In the hunt for golden buckyballs:

Scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland and at the University of Nebraska report in today’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that they have discovered hollow molecular structures made of pure gold — golden buckyballs.
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“You can put another atom in the center,” Wang said. Depending upon the kind of atom put at the center of the cage, he said, you could create a material with novel chemical, magnetic or even optical properties. “We intend to try that.”

Related:

Mexico: Pumping Out Engineers

Mexico: Pumping Out Engineers

Currently, 451,000 Mexican students are enrolled in full-time undergraduate programs, vs. just over 370,000 in the U.S. The Mexican students benefit from high-tech equipment and materials donated to their schools by foreign companies, which help develop course content to fit their needs. Many of these engineers graduate knowing how to use the latest computer-assisted design (CAD) software and speaking fluent English.

Another country on the engineering education bandwagon for economic growth.

Those figures are quite impressive. I would like to see what Vivek Wadhwa (one of the authors of the Duke study: USA Under-counting Engineering Graduates) says about the comparability of the figures. Still, the number of engineering undergraduate students in Mexico surprises me; this is one more indication of how many people see the value of engineering education.

Related:

Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge

The Synapse Revealed

Image by Graham Johnson, Graham Johnson Medical Media. The Synapse Revealed – Deep inside the brain, a neuron prepares to transmit a signal to its target. The brain contains billions of neurons, whose network of chemical messages form the basis of all thought, movement and behavior.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and Science created the Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge: “In a world where science literacy is dismayingly rare, illustrations provide the most immediate and influential connection between scientists and other citizens, and the best hope for nurturing popular interest.” The deadline for submissions is 31 May 2006. See information on the 2005 winners (including the image shown here).

Shortage of Petroleum Engineers

Talent Shortage Slows Oil Tech

There’s an extreme shortage of experienced petroleum engineers,” said Tariq Ahmad, a petroleum engineer consultant who has been in the business for 28 years. “The technology is there, but if you don’t have the people who can run the technology, what’s the use? It’s a major, major problem.”

A total of 2,412 students are enrolled in petroleum engineering undergraduate programs in the United States this year, according to Lloyd Heinze, chair of the petroleum engineering department at Texas Tech University. That compares with 11,014 students enrolled in petroleum engineering programs in 1983.

Related posts:

Demystifying Technology for High School Students

Demystifying technology for high-schoolers by Greg Rienzi, Johns Hopkins University News:

The Engineering Innovation program, which Hopkins will initially offer at three JHU campuses and five California universities, will allow high school sophomores, juniors and seniors to enroll in the college-level course What is Engineering? taught by Johns Hopkins or other university-accredited faculty.

The initiative is based upon a successful program the Whiting School developed five years ago for students in Montgomery County. The program was expanded last year to include students in Baltimore City and Baltimore County.
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The participants in the program will spend four weeks learning the basics of engineering as they conduct hands-on laboratory experiments and complete assignments that range from building a better mousetrap to assembling a digital circuit that operates a robot.

Johns Hopkins will continue to accept applications until June 1st, or until classes are full.

For more information see: Engineering Innovation from The Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

Top degree for S&P 500 CEOs? Engineering

See more recent post with data from 2005-2009: S&P 500 CEO’s: Engineers Stay at the Top

The most common undergraduate degree for CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies is Engineering: with 20% of all CEOs (from 2005 CEO Study: A Statistical Snapshot of Leading CEOs

Another interesting point from the report (at least to those of us who grew up in Madison with a father who taught at the University of Wisconsin (teaching Chemical Engineering, Industrial Engineering and Statistics, in my father’s case, by the way):

For the second year in a row, the University of Wisconsin joins Harvard as the most common undergraduate university attended by S&P 500 CEOs. Prior to 2004, Harvard alone was the most common school attended.

Engineering the Boarding of Airplanes

Airlines Try Smarter Boarding

“An airplane that spends an hour on the ground between flights might fly five trips a day,” he explains. “Cut the turnaround time to 40 minutes, and maybe that same plane can complete six or seven flights a day.” More flights mean more paying passengers, and ultimately, more revenue.
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Convinced that there was a statistical solution to the problem, Lindemann approached Arizona State University’s industrial engineering department. “We have a great university in our backyard, and hoped they could help,”
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Professor René Villalobos and graduate student Menkes van den Briel began reviewing boarding systems used by other airlines. “The conventional wisdom was that boarding from back to front was most effective,” says van den Briel. The engineers looked at an inside-out strategy that boards planes from window to aisle, and also examined a 2002 simulation study that claimed calling passengers individually by seat number was the fastest way to load an aircraft.

The two then developed a mathematical formula that measured the number of times passengers were likely to get in each other’s way during boarding. “We knew that boarding time was negatively impacted by passengers interfering with one another,” explains van den Briel. “So we built a model to calculate these incidents.”

Villalobos and van den Briel looked at interference resulting from passengers obstructing the aisle, as well as that caused by seated passengers blocking a window or middle seat. They applied the equation to eight different boarding scenarios, looking at both front-to-back and outside-in systems.
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Villalobos and van den Briel presented America West with a boarding approach called the reverse pyramid that calls for simultaneously loading an aircraft from back to front and outside in. Window and middle passengers near the back of the plane board first; those with aisle seats near the front are called last. “Our research showed that this method created the fewest incidents of interference between passengers,” Villalobos explains, “and was therefore the fastest.”

A nice example of industrial engineering. And a clear example of the benefit of industry higher education cooperation.