Biomedical engineering at the forefront in Japan

This paper introduces recent Japanese contributions to biomedical engineering (BME) technology. As in the United States, Japanese research has expanded to include neural and tissue engineering, although electrical and mechanical engineering applications remain important. In the last few years, Japanese biomedical engineering has been at the forefront in cardiovascular research, robotics (including surgical, rehabilitation, and entertainment robots), and rehabilitation engineering. In answer to Japan's aging society, the Ministry of Industry and Technology has focused on an experimental house called the Welfare Techno-House to develop assistive devices which include ubiquitous wearable orthoprostheses.     

电力系统静态等值改进算法的研究

随着电网互联网络的不断增大,电力系统等值方法研究有着越来越重要的意义。但是,在传统的电力系统W ard静态等值方法中存在一些不适合工程应用的问题。这些问题主要包括如何求取接地支路参数和边界节点功率注入。针对这些问题,文章根据实际研究情况,改进了传统的静态等值方法,尤其改进了接地支路参数与边界节点注入功率的求解过程,使其能够适用于工程应用,并通过山东585电网系统验证改进后静态等值算法的正确性。     

NSF initiatives for the information technology workforce

It is the policy of the United States government to encourage the progress of women and underrepresented minorities in science and engineering, including information technology (IT). For over a decade the Computer and Information Science and Engineering Directorate (CISE) of NSF has been supporting projects designed to improve opportunities for women and minorities in computing. From an initial emphasis on increasing the numbers in graduate school studying computer science and engineering, CISE's emphasis broadened to include research. Studies examining the underlying reasons why women and minorities are underrepresented in IT.     

城市路灯照明节能技术现状与发展趋势

本文分析讨论了城市路灯照明工程中的各种节能措施,包括：电容补偿式节能、调压式节能、电子镇流器节能、太阳能电子镇流器节能、市电LED路灯和太阳能LED路灯;阐述了高压钠灯电子镇流器的工作原理、电路拓扑结构、运行参数和工作性能以及在工程应用中面临的挑战;介绍了LED路灯的光源特性、LED元件连接方式、驱动控制电路与控制方式、以及当前制约LED发展的技术瓶颈;最后,从工程应用和经济成本方面对比分析了LED光源和高压钠灯光源的相关性能指标,指明在未来数年内高压钠灯仍将是城市路灯的主要光源,电子镇流器在城市照明节能改造中仍将扮演重要角色。     

The Education and Professional Development of Engineering Faculties

The goal of engineering education is to train students to enter the practice of engineering. To accomplish this, there must be a faculty which is itself well-educated and adept at the practice of engineering, as well as a sympathetic environment, adequately equipped with appropriate facilities. Today's rapid technological progress renders earlier developments obsolete. The engineer, therefore, must be alert to adapt to his purposes the latest and most powerful advances of scientific knowledge. The failure of the faculty to keep up this pace has resulted in an inability to cope with the implication of scientific advances and a lack of communication between the educator and his counterpart in industry and development laboratories. By default, the scientist has had to step in to assume engineering responsibilities; thus the training of our engineers all too often has become a function of industry and development centers. If industry and science continue to take over this responsibility, we need a searching examination to determine the cause of our inadequacy. Our faculties and institutions must maintain an adequate and identifiable program of engineering education, or our role will become precarious and ambiguous. At the heart of the problem are the opportunities, or lack of them, provided for engineering faculties to continue their educational and professional development. A total program of faculty education and professional development will include: 1) research and development investigations, 2) consulting, 3) internal educational activities, and 4) external educational activities.     

Nonautologous gene therapy with implantable devices

Treatment of human diseases with gene therapy is a technological break through that has been touted to be the “ultimate medicine”. A potentially more cost-effective method of gene therapy is to use universal cell lines engineered to secrete therapeutic products that are suitable for implantation in all patients requiring the same product replacement. To avoid immune rejection, these nonautologous donor cells can be protected within immuno-isolation devices such as alginate-fabricated microcapsules. This article documents the early development and current status of nonautologous somatic gene therapy, combining biomaterial with genetic engineering to develop a new direction of research. Topics covered include: questions in gene therapy; nonautologous somatic gene therapeutics; the expression of recombinant gene products in immuno-isolation devices; the delivery of recombinant gene products with encapsulated cells in vivo; and animal models of human genetic diseases     

Golden accomplishments in biomedical engineering

The 50th anniversary of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) is an appropriate time to look back at the origins and growth of both the field of biomedical engineering and the EMBS. The present account gives most attention to the aspects of biomedical engineering to which IEEE members (and, earlier, American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) members and Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE) members) contributed, which is to say that this account emphasizes the electrical, electronic, and computing aspects of biomedical engineering. Topics covered include: history of the technologies; the roots of biomedical engineering; prehistory and history of the profession; biomedical applications of the computer; health care; ultrasound technology; new means of medical imaging; endoscopy, lasers, and fear of electromagnetic fields; study of human metabolism; the Human Genome Project, robotics, and internationalization; and forecasting progress in biomedical engineering.     

The nuts and bolts of EMBS student chapters! [Student's Corner]

The Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS) student chapters and clubs enable students world wide to engage with the global biomedical community, build relationships that extend beyond college, and better understand societal benefits that result from biomedical pursuits. This article addresses lessons learned from the formation of an IEEE EMBS student chapter at Kansas State University (KSU) and highlights some of the activities supported by this group, which include research to aid persons with disabilities and hands-on efforts to interest young women in science and engineering.     

Fire-fighting mobile robotics and interdisciplinary design-comparative perspectives

The objective of this paper is to illustrate the benefits of an autonomous fire-fighting robot design competition as an effective tool for undergraduate education. It presents experiences at the United States Air Force Academy, USAF Academy, CO; Pennsylvania State University-Abington; and Trinity College, Hartford, CT, together with the results of the contest surveys conducted in collaboration with The Technion*Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa. The primary goal of the design project is to create an autonomous mobile robot that navigates through a maze searching for a fire (simulated by a burning candle), detects the candle's flame, extinguishes the flame, and returns to a designated starting location in the maze. The fire-fighting design contest promotes interdisciplinary design and teamwork. To accomplish the stated goal, students must integrate knowledge gained from such classes as engineering design, circuits, controls, signals and systems, computer programming, mathematics, and engineering mechanics. Within the three institutions, the contest has been successfully utilized as a foundation for a wide range of educational goals. These activities include freshman design, robotics courses, K-12 outreach, senior design projects, and undergraduate research.     

Engineering the Future: Embedding Engineering Permanently Across the School–University Interface

This paper describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of an educational program. Engineering the Future (EtF) sought to promote a permanent, informed awareness within the school community of high-level engineering by embedding key aspects of engineering within the education curriculum. The Scottish education system is used for a case study in which a range of pilot high schools worked in close partnership with two university engineering departments. The study focuses on electronic/electrical engineering (EEE), a technically challenging area, which reflects many of the problems that are intrinsic to modern society. In so doing, the work also sought to support and refine the transition from the school environment to higher education engineering courses. EtF is founded on research into transformational change and describes the findings of a three-year program that sought to develop sustainable and transferable means of encouraging school students to study engineering at university. The authors describe the conditions needed to support sustainable developments. They also provide an analysis of inevitable constraints and suggest strategies to address these issues. The paper concludes that sustainable long-term promotion of engineering within schools to support the transition to university is possible if certain conditions are fulfilled. These conditions include the use of a model that facilitates partnerships among researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners in all sectors. Building such essential linkages is often challenging, but this effort is necessary if changes in engineering education are to be realized and sustained.      

A Woman in the World of Engineering

This paper discusses the career of one woman in the world of engineering as a way of pointing out the problems that women encounter in engineering. The problems include hiring, salaries, promotion, management, travel, and attitudes of coworkers. The paper includes suggestions for engineering professors to help prepare women students for engineering.     

Making connections: engineering ethics on the World Wide Web

This paper focuses on the use of the World Wide Web in courses and course units dealing with engineering ethics and/or the social implications of engineering. Course materials and other resources for use by students and faculty are discussed and a new website, the Web Clearinghouse for Engineering and Computing Ethics, is introduced. Course materials and resources found on the Web include: ethics centers that focus on engineering ethics and/or other fields of professional ethics; case studies and other instructional materials; course syllabi; codes of engineering ethics; ethics pages of professional societies; papers, articles and reports with relevance to engineering and computer ethics; on-line ethics journals and newsletters; and primary source archives. The Web lends itself for use as a place to post a “living” course syllabus, with hypertext links to on- and off-site material containing course information and assignments as well as information on content and pedagogical techniques of interest to faculty who are developing and teaching courses in engineering and computing ethics. By illustrating in real-time the interconnectedness of information from engineering, the humanities and the social sciences, the Web serves as a tangible metaphor for the interdisciplinary approach necessary for a complete examination of ethics in engineering     

Educating for innovation and management: the engineering educators'dilemma

Research on ways to improve engineering education has identified management and innovation skills as important to success in an engineering career. This paper explores the nature of those management and innovation skills through presentation of some original research on a community of innovative engineers and managers and some published research on personality differences between engineers, managers, and entrepreneurial innovators. This paper suggests the key to producing engineering graduates with a penchant for managing and innovating lies in developing a special kind of individuality (authenticity) in engineers toward the end of their tertiary studies. It suggests this individuality involves the courage to break with one's engineering paradigm as required and to operate pragmatically and “unscientifically” in the “public world” rather than theoretically and “scientifically” in the “special world” of engineering. It outlines an optional new curriculum for engineers and scientists developed by an Australian university to encourage authenticity and to prepare science and engineering graduates for careers in management and innovation     

输电线路建设工程监理工作中的几点建议

通过参与三峡输变电工程监理工作的实践 ,应把主要精力放在“质量控制”上 ;加强自身学习 ,掌握设计要领 ;任务落实到人 ,责任终身负责 ;注重“内外”质量 ,特别是内在质量 ;正确对待施工规范和标准 ;树立监理工作的权威及监帮共同提高工程的施工质量等做好输电线路建设工程监理工作的 7点建议 ,供大家参考。     

The paradox of “engineering science”-a cold war debateabout education in the U.S

During the early years of the Cold War, engineering educators in the United States vigorously debated a rather abstruse topic that, nevertheless, had lasting public policy implications. Did the field called “engineering science”, which the newly formed National Science Foundation (NSF) was chartered to support, indeed exist, and, if it did, how should engineering colleges and the NSF support it? My recounting of the public aspect of this debate (which occurred in articles published in the Journal of Engineering Education and magazines of professional engineering societies from 1945 to 1960) will focus on attempts by prominent engineers and a few scientists to come to terms with a perceived epistemological paradox. Although these groups had defined engineering as the application of science in the first half of the century, the NSF and the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) promoted research and teaching in “engineering science” after the war on the assumption that it represented “basic research in engineering”. This paper raises the historlographic method suggested by O. Mayr (1976) and examines how historical actors themselves defined and used the term “engineering science” rather than appplying the concept of engineering science to the past as an analytic tool     

Risk assessment in energy trading

This paper provides a state-of-the-art summary of risk assessment in energy trading. Techniques from financial engineering are needed by electric energy companies to manage price risk. These tools are needed by suppliers, distributors, and traders in a competitive electric power marketplace. Tools that have been adapted to the specific environment of the electric power system include portfolio analysis and hedging instruments. This paper provides a comprehensive critical literature survey of what has been applied to date in the power markets and which areas continue to need additional research. One example market scenario is used throughout the paper to demonstrate the usefulness of the risk assessment methods.     

University methodology for internetworking principles and design projects

An undergraduate engineering internetworking learning environment that presents both internetworking principles and laboratory experimentation is described. The learning environment uses the source code availability of the Linux operating system as a case study of the implementation issues and ramifications of internet networking infrastructures. Laboratory use of experimentation with internetworking equipment and software allows interaction with internetworking principles and fundamentals as well as implementation and performance issues. The objectives of this environment include providing a comprehensive mechanism whereby students are exposed to fundamentals and principles that may readily be applied to experimental-based internetwork research and internetwork product development. A follow-on capstone design environment is also briefly described.     

Experience with the CUPM Program in Mathematics

This paper demonstrates by a case history the feasibility of the program in mathematics recommended for all undergraduates in engineering by the Committee on the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics (CUPM) of the Mathematical Association of America. The case history is that of the mathematics program at the United States Military Academy, and it is a practical example of the program recommended by the CUPM. In main outline the CUPM recommends that the courses required for all undergraduates in engineering should include 12 hours of basic analysis (calculus and differential equations with content recognizing electronic digital computation), 3 hours of linear algebra, and 3 hours of probability and statistics. Substantially, this program is completed during the first two years by all cadets who graduate from the Military Academy. During their third and fourth years they may take additional courses on an elective basis, these being of the type recommended by the CUPM for students intending to go into research and development.     

适应大规模新能源友好送出的直流输电技术与工程实践

随着能源转型需求增长及新能源快速发展,中国能源结构与电力系统结构正面临着巨大变革。为了适应大规模新能源送出需求,构建以新能源为主体的新型电力系统,迫切需要研发应用灵活可靠的输电技术,基于电力电子设备的直流输电技术重要性日益凸显。目前,中国正在应用的直流输电技术包括常规直流输电技术、柔性直流输电技术及混合直流输电技术。文中基于中国直流输电技术发展和工程实践,归纳分析了大规模新能源经直流送出技术在工程应用中的关键问题,探讨了若干技术方向,为新能源送出技术发展提供了参考。