Does Undergraduate Biomedical Engineering Education Produce Real Engineers?

This note presents the results of a study of undergraduate biomedical engineering education done during the 1980-1981 academic year. The curricula from 29 institutions offering a degree program or an option in biomedical engineering were tabulated by subject category and compared to the older discipline of electrical engineering. The object was to determine how much, if any, reduction there is in engineering course work in order to includelife sciences in the biomedical engineering programs, and if the amount of life sciences is enough to adequately provide for students' needs. An attempt is also made to correlate the purpose of the programs and the content of their curricula Course catalog information and a survey sent to the 29 universities were used to assess the information.     

Toward a unified systems engineering education

Systems engineering education is analyzed. The root of systems engineering is system theory, and both are given a brief overview. The methodology of systems engineering is used to design an educational concept. Four alternative approaches, and their merits are tested and evaluated against the requirements defined for education. The conclusion, for the benefit both of engineering education in general and systems engineering in particular, is an integration of systems engineering principles into the education of all branches of engineering, rooted as they are in system theory and design practice already. This approach means a rationalization of the present engineering education, and meets the requirements from industry to a wider spread use of systems engineering principles and practices     

Engineering education and practice: The need for a consistency of outlook

Engineering education has been unduly influenced by attitudes more appropriate to the natural sciences. It should instead acknowledge the ultimate concern of the engineer for design rather than analysis, for systems rather than constituent components, and for value to the community in place of mere increase of knowledge. Advocacy of an engineering education which is consistent with engineering practice is supported by suggestions concerning curriculum structure, syllabus content, and educational methods.     

Computer science in electrical engineering

The vital role that electrical engineering departments must play in providing undergraduates with special competence in computer sciences is explored. Three related problem areas are discussed: (1) meeting the needs of students majoring in computer sciences in electrical engineering; (2) balancing the treatment of continuous and discrete systems so that students have a background in discrete systems comparable to that which they now acquire in continuous systems; and (3) realizing wider and more effective use of the digital computer as a tool for analysis and design in all engineering courses. Specific suggestions for meeting these needs are offered.     

A Survey of Glove-Based Systems and Their Applications

Hand movement data acquisition is used in many engineering applications ranging from the analysis of gestures to the biomedical sciences. Glove-based systems represent one of the most important efforts aimed at acquiring hand movement data. While they have been around for over three decades, they keep attracting the interest of researchers from increasingly diverse fields. This paper surveys such glove systems and their applications. It also analyzes the characteristics of the devices, provides a road map of the evolution of the technology, and discusses limitations of current technology and trends at the frontiers of research. A foremost goal of this paper is to provide readers who are new to the area with a basis for understanding glove systems technology and how it can be applied, while offering specialists an updated picture of the breadth of applications in several engineering and biomedical sciences areas.     

The humanities and their effect on engineering education

The author seeks to shed light on the current debate on what constitutes an appropriate education in the humanities and social sciences, to give some of its history and rationale, and to explain why there will and always should be such a debate. He then describes the humanities and social sciences and shows how they evolved fairly recently from philosophy. He discusses the importance of the humanities and social sciences to the education of engineers, to the engineering profession, and to the quality of life of individuals and society. Finally, he describes how the humanities and social science requirements are structured in most engineering curricula and makes recommendations for improvement     

Bootstrap - Inspired Techniques in Computation Intelligence

This article is about the success story of a seemingly simple yet extremely powerful approach that has recently reached a celebrity status in statistical and engineering sciences. The hero of this story - bootstrap resampling - is relatively young, but the story itself is a familiar one within the scientific community: a mathematician or a statistician conceives and formulates a theory that is first developed by fellow mathematicians and then brought to fame by other professionals, typically engineers, who point to many applications that can benefit from just such an approach. Signal processing boasts some of the finest examples of such stories, such as the classic story of Fourier transforms or the more contemporary tale of wavelet transforms.     

Systems engineering education

The article discusses some basic principles underlying systems engineering, and the translation of these principles to practices such as to enable the engineering of trustworthy systems of all types that meet client needs. The article is concerned with systems engineering education. Thus, it is inherently also concerned with systems engineering, as this provides a major component of the material that is important for systems engineering education. After setting forth some of the necessary ingredients for success in systems engineering, we devote some comments to objectives for and needs in systems engineering education     

The major problems facing engineering education

Engineering education has been much studied during the past fifty years. One of the first major studies, known as the Wickenden Report in its trial version recommended that engineering education be at the graduate level. However, this was later amended to say that engineering education should be an undergraduate study, but should be followed by an internship in which one's further education would be guided by the engineering colleges, industry, and the engineering societies working together. The dilemma of engineering education has been that we have tried to combine a broad general education with some engineering in a sort of liberal science education, instead of offering professional education with a very strong technological stem. Since we have chosen the former path, we find ourselves confronted by other unresolved questions. Should we teach science or engineering practice? How much emphasis should there be on design and how much on theory and analysis? How broad should the curriculum be and how much of the humanities should it contain? How much should we depend on graduate work to train an engineer? Now in addition to these dilemmas we find ourselves confronted with the problem of finding sufficient time to cover the material considered necessary. It is obvious that many of our constraints, schedules, credits, fifty-minute periods, lectures, laboratories, and lock-step methods must be replaced by new methods and systems designed to teach more efficiently. This offers an opportunity for cooperation among industry, the colleges, and the professional societies.     

An undergraduate computer engineering option for electrical engineering

Computer engineering is concerned with the organization, design, and utilization of digital processing systems. These may be general purpose computers or more specialized digital systems that are concerned with communications, control, information processing, etc. The rapidly expanding application areas for digital processing techniques require increasing numbers of properly trained engineers, and it is the responsibility of electrical engineering education to provide the necessary educational opportunities. A means for doing this is an undergraduate computer engineering option within electrical engineering. The curriculum for such an educational program would be both hardware and software oriented, as described.     

Interface management

Technology has grown so complex and specialized that no one person possesses the necessary knowledge and experience to know all that is needed. Those professionals that are tasked with managing the design and life-cycle development of today's complex systems and products can only achieve their goal by managing at the interface of both people and technology. These interface experts are known as systems engineers. Systems engineering is the interdisciplinary practice used to design and build complex systems. One of the most powerful tools of this discipline is the management of interfaces. Managing the design of complex technical systems at the interface requires an understanding of many topics, including interface-related issues, resource margin allocation, and technical performance measurement (TPM) techniques. Each of these topics is discussed in the article. The challenges in managing complex hardware-software systems can best be met by paying attention to what happens at the system and subsystem interface. Using the tools and techniques presented here, both project engineers and program managers can readily gauge the health of their development system or product.     

Signal processing outreach at the U.S. Naval Academy

This paper describes the US Naval Academy's outreach program called Summer Seminar, which offers the opportunity for high school seniors to participate in one of three six-day sessions to experience life as a midshipman, both academically and otherwise. This paper focuses on the workshop on electrical engineering in 2005, wherein approximately 360 of the total 1,855 high school students attended. The electrical engineering workshop began with an introduction to the fundamentals of electrical theory and led to several contemporary signal processing examples. These included digitized music and state-of-the-art biometric systems. The paper briefly describes each individual activities that incorporate active learning in the electrical engineering workshop     

Tutorial 15: control theory, part I

Control theory is the branch of engineering that tries to answer questions like "given a system configured in a particular fashion, will the system behave reasonably?" That is, control theory deals with analyzing systems. Control theory also tries to answer the question "given a system with (negative) feedback, what can I add to my system to see to it that my system will meet its specifications?" That is, control theory deals with designing systems, too.     

Pure or Applied?

It seems that in the general desire to acknowledge and recognize the contributions of science to our present society, there is a tendency to glamorize the basic sciences at the expense of their engineering counterparts. It is almost as if a descending hierarchy has been established between theory at one end and practice at the other. Perhaps this is not the case, but articles on the danger of neglecting pure research in the interest of its applications and lamenting the distribution of research and development funds are a familiar sight, while it is seldom noted that only rarely can pure research proceed faster than the engineering technology on which it rests. Such articles foster the idea that research is reserved to pure science while the design engineer is relegated to the role of skillful computer.     

A Clinically Oriented Bioengineering Program for Undergraduates

The well-documented emergence of Bioengineering from independent research into clinical problem-solving has influenced the development of Bioengineering education at Carnegie-Mellon. Offered as an option to undergraduates, Bioengineering supplements the basic curriculum of an Engineering department with courses in the life sciences, clinical and instrumentation laboratories, and a hospital internship. These laboratories and internship, which are described here in detail, have as their purpose to provide the student with a familiarity with engineering applications in the medical field and to encourage the ability to work cooperatively in the clinical environment. These specific skills are to be added to the general engineering excellence and ability for independent growth which are the goals of the basic departmental curricula. Two years from its introduction, enrollment in the option has grown to a total of 49 undergraduates for the current academic year.     

基于安全工程的信息系统安全解决方案

信息系统的安全是至关重要的。文中针对目前应用系统安全威胁现状,提出一种基于安全工程的应用系统安全解决方案。该方案利用安全工程的思想,通过把安全工程生命周期与信息系统生命周期相结合,确定了信息系统生命周期中各阶段的主要安全工程活动,弥补了传统安全防护方案在信息系统安全防护方面的不足。这对信息系统安全工程的实施具有一定的指导意义。     

CDIO模式下测控专业的项目驱动式教学改革

本文在分析测控技术与仪器专业的教学现状及存在问题的基础上,根据工程教育专业认证的相关要求,提出结合CDIO工程教育模式的项目驱动教学方式,说明了项目驱动式教学的关键点及具体措施,给出了具体实施案例,有助于解决实际教学中理论学习和工程应用难以兼顾的问题,旨在提高新工科背景下学生的综合素质及能力,为社会培养具备工程基础知识、个人能力、人际团队能力和工程系统能力的人才。     

Mechatronics and smart structures: emerging engineering disciplines for the third millennium

This paper tackles the impact that Mechatronics and Smart Structures disciplines have on the engineering education in the new millennium. Mechatronics is an emerging engineering area that will likely alter the fundamental nature of engineering education in the disciplines of electrical and mechanical engineering. It can provide an academic model for developing multi-disciplinary programs within the engineering college departmental structure that is historically based on the traditional engineering disciplines. Mechatronics integrates the classical fields of mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer engineering, and information technology to establish basic principles for a contemporary engineering design methodology. A mechatronics concentration area in the engineering curriculum would support the synergistic integration of precision mechanical engineering, electronics control, and systems thinking into the design of intelligent products and processes. Smart Structures, a. k. a. Adaptive Structures, a. k. a. Adaptronics, is an emerging engineering field with multiple defining paradigms. One definition is based upon a technology paradigm: “the integration of actuators, sensors, and controls with a material or structural component”. Multi-functional elements form a complete regulator circuit resulting in a novel structure displaying reduced complexity, low weight, high functional density, as well as economic efficiency. Another definition is based upon a science paradigm in an attempt to capture the essence of biologically inspired materials by addressing the goal as creating material systems with intelligence and life-like features integrated in the microstructure of the material system to reduce mass and energy and produce adaptive functionality. Their basic characteristics of efficiency, functionality, precision, self-repair, and durability continue to fascinate designers of engineering structures today.     

Michigan multioption program in electrical engineering

A multioption (three) program in electrical engineering is proposed to meet the needs of a rapidly advancing technology and a wide range of student interests and objectives. A specific program is described which includes a wide range of technical electives outside of electrical engineering, and also features a novel treatment of advanced mathematics for electrical engineering students in both the systems and science areas. An integrated humanities-social sciences program is additionally described.     

Fuzzy Multi-State Systems: General Definitions, and Performance Assessment

Compared with a binary system model, a multi-state system model provides a more flexible tool for representing engineering systems in real life. In conventional multi-state theory, it is assumed that the exact probability and performance level of each component state are given. However, it may be difficult to obtain sufficient data to estimate the precise values of these probabilities and performance levels in many highly reliable modern engineering systems. New techniques are needed to solve these fundamental problems. A general fuzzy multi-state system model is proposed in this article to overcome these deficiencies. The basic definitions and assumptions of such systems are introduced. The concepts of relevancy, coherency, and equivalence are used to characterize the properties of such systems. Future research directions include performance evaluation algorithms for the defined fuzzy multi-state systems.