Identifying, stimulating, and nurturing computer engineers

This paper deals with one company's view of identifying and nurturing promising computer engineers. The structuring of the work and the transition from academia to industry are discussed. It should be noted that much of the process cited is applicable to what is done within the entire company regarding engineering, but as a focus examples from computer development are mentioned and the major computer trends and challenges to computer science and engineering education are presented.     

Madan G. Singh (1946-2002): distinguished academic, scholar, and entrepreneur

For more than a quarter of a century, Madan G. Singh taught and accomplished seminal research on approaches to better control, manage, and understand complexity in systems. This interdisciplinary work has covered the intersections of the areas of control engineering, systems engineering, applied mathematics, management science, and computer science. His work has been remarkable at both a theoretical level, as well as at a practical level. Indeed, over the years, his practical work has led to new insights which have driven the theoretical developments. He has examined complexity in human-made systems, in managerial decision making, in marketing, and in production planning and scheduling. He has taken full advantage of contemporary developments in computing technology and in organizational science. He was, in a great many respects, a truly excellent exemplar of the modern academic, with highly tuned entrepreneurial skills integrated with major research skills. His career reflects well the contemporary changing character of academia that is now simultaneously home to ivory tower research, pragmatic market-driven research and associated product and service development. The purpose of this commemorative paper is to describe the evolution of his academic, research, scholarship, professional service, and enterprise efforts over the last two and a half decades.     

A new species of hardware

If natural evolution is so successful a designer, why not simulate its workings in an engineering setting, by using a computer to evolve solutions to hard problems. Researchers pursuing this idea in the 1950s and '60s gave birth to the domain of evolutionary computation. Four decades later, the domain is flourishing, both in industry and academia, presenting what may well be a new approach to optimization and problem-solving. Published in 1859, Charles Darwin's “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection” shook the foundations of not only science but also society at large. Now with new uses for the evolutionary model coming into being, researchers and scientists are beginning to create hardware that can grow and improve itself over time, evolving steadily as it finds new and better ways to do the tasks it has set before it     

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     

The Olin experiment [engineering education experiment]

This paper describes the engineering education experiment conducted at the Franklin W. Olin College in Needham, MA, aimed at increasing the quality and quantity of the engineering workforce in the US. Instead of the usual theory-heavy lectures, segregated disciplines, and individual efforts, the experiment emphasizes design exercises, interdisciplinary studies and teamwork. Olin's radically new way of training engineers incorporates changes that many in industry and academia say are long overdue. Judging by some of their internships, it appears that Olin's first graduates will have no problems landing their desired jobs. Meanwhile, people are keeping an eye on these graduates as they make their way into the real world.     

Who Was James Clerk Maxwell and What Was and Is His Electromagnetic Theory?

The electromagnetics community makes profuse utilization of Maxwell's equations, his theory, and their applications. It is arguable that very few of us have clear ideas about what exactly Maxwell did and what kind of scientist he was. In fact, he developed many of the fundamental ideas in electrical engineering, and provided mathematical language for their exposition. His contributions to other branches of science are no less significant. He was not only one of the great scientists of the nineteenth century, but was also great for all time. To this end, the present essay starts with a brief outline of his life. It then provides a short but critical discussion of his original contributions in electromagnetics and their evolution as his electromagnetic theory. We also give a cursory review of his significant contributions in other areas of science. It is hoped that this will provide the electromagnetics-community readers with a better and more complete appreciation of James Clerk Maxwell as a scientist, as well as of his electromagnetic theory as we know now it.     

Frequency Insertion Strategy for Channel Assignment Problem

This paper presents a new heuristic method for quickly finding a good feasible solution to the channel assignment problem (CAP). Like many other greedy-type heuristics for CAP, the proposed method also assigns a frequency to a call, one at a time. Hence, the method requires computational time that increases only linear to the number of calls. However, what distinguishes the method from others is that it starts with a narrow enough frequency band so as to provoke violations of constraints that we need to comply with in order to avoid radio interference. Each violation is then resolved by inserting frequencies at the most appropriate positions so that the band of frequencies expands minimally. An extensive computational experiment using a set of randomly generated problems as well as the Philadelphia benchmark instances shows that the proposed method perform statistically better than existing methods of its kind and even yields optimum solutions to most of Philadelphia benchmark instances among which two cases are reported for the first time ever, in this paper. Won-Young Shin was born in Busan, Korea in 1978. He received B.S. in industrial engineering from Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) in 2001 and M.S in operation research and applied statistics from POSTECH in 2003. Since 2003 he has been a researcher of Agency for Defense Development (ADD) in Korea. He is interested in optimization of communication system and applied statistics. Soo Y. Chang is an associate professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Pohang, Korea. He teaches linear programming, discrete optimization, network flows and operations research courses. His research interests include mathematical programming and scheduling. He has published in several journals including Discrete Applied Mathematics, Computers and Mathematics with Application, IIE Transactions, International Journal of Production Research, and so on. He is a member of Korean IIE, and ORMSS. Jaewook Lee is an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial Engineering at Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH), Pohang, Korea. He received the B.S. degree in mathematics with honors from Seoul National University, and the Ph.D. degree from Cornell University in applied mathematics in 1993 and 1999, respectively. He is currently an assistant professor in the department of industrial engineering at the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH). His research interests include nonlinear systems, neural networks, nonlinear optimization, and their applications to data mining and financial engineering. Chi-Hyuck Jun was born in Seoul, Korea in 1954. He received B.S. in mineral and petroleum engineering from Seoul National University in 1977, M.S. in industrial engineering from Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in 1979 and Ph.D. in operations research from University of California, Berkeley, in 1986. Since 1987 he has been with the department of industrial engineering, Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) and he is now a professor and the department head. He is interested in performance analysis of communication and production systems. He has published in several journals including IIE Transactions, IEEE Transactions, Queueing Systems and Chemometrics and Intelligent Laboratory Systems. He is a member of IEEE, INFORMS and ASQ.     

A generation in search of a future

To many executives and practicing engineers, the turmoil in the universities has been a bewildering phenomenon. At the Fourth of March meeting at M.I.T. to protest the misuse of science and engineering (IEEE Spectrum, April 1969, p. 8), Professor George Wald of Harvard?notable for his undergraduate teaching as well as for the research on vision that brought him a Nobel Prize?addressed the question of what is worrying the young. He spoke without a text, but a tape preserved his eloquent indictment of the way things are. The standing ovation it evoked is testimony that his talk resonated strongly with the minds of the audience convoked by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an M.I.T. faculty group. It is printed here, with his permission, for the insight it gives into the ferment which, though less strong on engineering campuses than in some other places, is giving social relevance a strong place in the values and professional aspirations of the next generation of electrical engineers.     

A view from the other side [engineering education]

A former General Electric engineer and manager who turned to teaching dispels seven common myths about academia. These myths are that academia is highly inefficient; those who can't practice, teach; teaching is a nice way to retire; tenure breeds mediocrity; only people with practical experience should teach; the US lost its competitive edge in manufacturing because of research-dominated engineering schools; and the MBA distorts engineers' values     

Are the Goals of Good Science and Good Engineering Practice Incompatible with the Goals of Good Business Management? Should They be? Are They?

It has been the author's experience that the goals of good science and good engineering practice are not sufficiently well understood by responsible community members in nonscientific areas. This paper will outline what these goals are and present a program for the better utilization of science and engineering activities by these community members. With better understanding between these groups, the United States can begin to realize the innovation required to keep it competitive in the world marketplace.     

Domain Specific Reconfigurable Processing Core Architecture for Digital Filtering Applications

This paper presents a reconfigurable processing core architecture targeted for digital filtering applications. The architecture can be configured to execute linear phase FIR filter, DLMS adaptive FIR filter, (I)FFT, and 2D-(I)DCT with high performance and low energy consumption by reducing heavy routing resources used extensively in other reconfigurable architectures. The pipeline depth of the multipliers in the processing core is locally controlled so that power consumption is reduced by minimizing unnecessary register switching is saved. We have shown that the proposed processing core consumes less energy and has better or comparable performance than that of the existing reconfigurable architectures proposed in academia and industry, that have been tailored for these applications. The circuit is designed in 0.35-m CMOS processing technology with 3.3 V supply voltage.Sangjin Hong received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in EECS from the University of California, Berkeley and his Ph.D in EECS from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He is currently with the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Stony Brook University - State University of New York. Before joining SUNY, he has worked at Ford Aerospace Corp. Computer Systems Division as a systems engineer. He also worked at Samsung Electronics in Korea as a technical consultant. His current research interests are in the areas of low power reconfigurable SoC design and optimization for DSP and wireless communication systems. He has served as a member of technical committee and track chair for numerous IEEE technical conferences.Shu-Shin Chin was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, ROC, in 1974. He received his M.S. and Ph.D degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Stony Brook University—State University of New Yorkin 1999 and 2004, respectively. His research interests include low-power digital circuits, and coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures for high-performance DSP systems.     

An Integrated Model to Design PCS Networks

An integrated model is proposed that comprises essentially, an Enhanced Profile-Based Strategy (EPBS) for small-scale roaming and a Caching Two-Level Forwarding Pointer (C2LFP) strategy for large-scale roaming. The idea behind the integrated model is how those two location management solutions are applied, and what is the suitable approach to specify the physical parameters of PCS networks from mobility management’s point of view so that our solutions can be more cost effective for location management. An evolutionary method, using a constrained Genetic Algorithm (GA) has been used to achieve network parameters optimization. For convenience, we selected the underlying planning problem with an appropriate set of parameters so that it can be treated, in what follows, both genetically and analytically. Thus one can easily verify the accuracy and efficiency of the evolutionary solution that would be obtained from the genetic algorithm. For more realistic environments, GA could be used reliably to build up sophisticated models that integrate the small-scale and large-scale roaming parameters of PCS networks. The results that have been obtained from a case study are presented in order to provide a deep explanation for the proposed integration approach. Salah M. Ramadan (samohra@yahoo.com) received the BS and MS degrees from Computers Engineering Department, Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt, in 1995 and 2002, respectively. From 2002, he was a PhD student in Computers Engineering Department at Al-Azhar University and is currently pursuing the PhD degree, where he is a research assistant in the Wireless Networks Branch. His research interests include traffic management in ATM networks, routing protocols, mobility management in PCS networks, and mobile computing. He is currently an instructor in Cisco Academy, Egypt. Ahmed M. El-Sherbini (Sherbini@mcit.gov.eg) received the Ph.D. in Electrical and Communication Engineering, Case Western University, U.S.A. March 1983 and M.Sc. in Communication Engineering, Cairo University, Giza, Egypt, June 1980. (M.Sc. Research Studies at the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Telecommunications (ENST), Paris, France) He is the Director, National Telecommunication Institute – Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Egypt and Professor of Electrical and Communication Engineering Dept. Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University, Egypt. M. I. Marie(azhar@mailer.scu.eun.eg) received his B.Sc, M.Sc and PhD in electronic and communication engineering from Cairo University on 1972, 1981, 1985, respectively. Now he is a professor of communications at Computer and System Engineering Department Al-Azhar University, Cairo, Egypt. His fields of interest includes digital communication, computer networks and protocols development. M. Zaki is the professor of software engineering, Computer and System Engineering Department, Faculty of Engineering, Al-Azhar University at Cairo. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from Cairo University in 1968 and 1973 respectively. He received his Ph.D. degrees in computer engineering from Warsaw Technical University, Poland in 1977. His fields of interest include artificial intelligence, soft computing, and distributed system.     

US domestic telecommunications policy in the next five years

The author examines the impact of changing technology and the changing marketplace on the telecommunications industry. He points out that telecommunications policy must permit the industry to respond quickly to these changes. He sets forth what he believes are the principles that govern this policy area and gives some examples of their applications     

What is engineering management?

The question, “what is engineering management?” has certainly been addressed before in both professional articles and textbooks. However, it seems appropriate to again address this question because of the renewed interest in engineering management. This renewed interest comes in many forms, but two stand out. The first is the increasing trend to give engineering management assignments earlier and earlier in a new engineering graduate's career. The second is the emphasis of engineering management skills in ABET 2000 in the undergraduate engineering program. Both of these initiatives seem to be led by industry and may be a direct result of industry's interest in engineering management skills as a competitive advantage as well as their downsizing practices, which have resulted in the more experienced engineers retiring early and their responsibilities being pushed down to the more junior engineers. If you believe, as does this author, that before you can become a good engineering manager you should first be a good engineer, then the trend of giving management assignments before engineers have had an opportunity to become well grounded in their engineering disciplines should be disturbing. This could eventually affect a company's ability to continue to play a leadership role in introducing new technologies. Hence, the question “what is engineering management?” is an important question. This article attempts to answer the question by addressing when engineering management skills are needed in an engineer's career     

Microwave engineering education in Australia

The emergence of Australian science/engineering is presented in its historical and socioeconomic milieu. Engineering education is then considered in tertiary educational institutions where microwave engineering is taught at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The Australian educational system provides education of a high standard for technicians, engineers, and scientists. While there was no indigenous microwave industry in Australia, microwave engineering was actively pursued in academia and in several quasi-government organizations/laboratories. In fields related to microwave engineering, Australia excelled in the areas of radioastronomy and microwave landing systems. In the 1980's indigenous microwave engineering firms appeared as a result of a determined effort to augment and strengthen the Australian manufacturing base. The recent emergence of the many centers described here and the appropriate fiscal policies put in place by the present government will aid the above process. In these new thrusts, universities and quasi-government organizations are destined to play a pivotal role     

A bang-bang PLL employing dynamic gain control for low jitter and fast lock times

Bang-bang phase detector based PLLs are simple to design, suffer no systematic phase error, and can run at the highest speed a process can make a working flip-flop. For these reasons designers are employing them in the design of very high speed Clock Data Recovery (CDR) architectures. The major drawback of this class of PLL is the inherent jitter due to quantized phase and frequency corrections. Reducing loop gain can proportionally improve jitter performance, but also reduces locking time and pull-in range. This paper presents a novel PLL design that dynamically scales its gain in order to achieve fast lock times while improving jitter performance in lock. Under certain circumstances the design also demonstrates improved capture range. This paper also analyses the behaviour of a bang-bang type PLL when far from lock, and demonstrates that the pull-in range is proportional to the square root of the PLL loop gain. Michael Chan received his bachelor degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Queensland in 2003. He is currently working towards his PhD at the same institution. His research interests include the design of high-speed clock and data recovery systems, and high speed phase locked loops. Adam Postula received the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Warsaw University of Technology, Poland, in 1974 and the Ph.D. degree in signal processing from the Poznan University of Technology, Poland, in 1981. He was an Electronic System Designer with ABB Sweden and a Researcher with the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden, from 1983 to 1992. He led the development of high-level synthesis tools at the Swedish Institute of Microelectronics and was engaged in VHDL standardization in Europe. Since 1995, he has been a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. His research interests include digital system design methodology, synthesis of digital systems, specialized processor architectures, and VLSI signal processing. Ding Yong received his PhD from University of London in electrical engineering in 1991. He was with National University of Singapore as a research scientist working in industrial research projects on data channel and servo-system for CD technology. In 1995, he joined VLSI design group of Western Digital as a principle engineer, where he was engaged in the IC design of Hard Disk Controller and CD-ROM Decoder and Controller. From 2000, he has been leading a mixed-signal design group as design manager and chief architect with Nano Silicon responsible for development of high-speed serial data transmission IPs. Lech Jóźwiak is an Associate Professor, Head of the Section of Digital Circuits and Formal Methods, at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Electronics from the Warsaw University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland, in 1976 and 1982, respectively. From 1979 to 1986, he was a chief of two R&D teams in the Research Institute of Computers in Warsaw, and consultant to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and industry. From 1986, he works mainly in the Netherlands, but also from time to time in USA, Canada, Australia, Belgium and Poland, combining advanced theoretical research with professional engineering practice and collaborating with industry, academia and governments. He is an author of a new information-driven approach to digital circuit synthesis, and new theories and methodologies of information relationships and measures, general decomposition and quality-driven design that have a considerable practical importance. He is also a creator of a number of practical products in the fields of application-specific (embedded) systems and EDA tools. His research interests include system, circuit, information and design theories and technologies, decision and optimization methodology, artificial intelligence, circuit and system design and EDA, re-configurable and massively parallel high-performance systems, embedded systems, and system dependability, analysis and validation. He is an author of more than 130 journal and conference papers and of some book chapters. He is a Director of EUROMICRO, co-founder and Steering Committee Chair of the EUROMICRO Symposium on Digital System Design, VIP in the IEEE International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design, program committee member of many other conferences, member of IEEE, EDAA, and of the Advisory Committee of the IEE Professional Network Embedded and Real-Time System Engineering. He is an advisor to the industry, Ministry of Economy and Commission of the European Communities in the fields of microelectronics, information technology, technology development and transfer, and SMEs.     

Proactive higher education for high technology

Foreseeing a need for far more engineers and scientists than its universities were turning out, Israel's government, military, and academia worked in concert to entice students into technical fields. Appeals to patriotism were part of the mix. The national initiative clarified to high school graduates and young people who had done their military service the understanding that both their personal and the nation's future success lies in technology and science, and it urges everyone with the qualifications to study engineering and science. Special emphasis was placed on attracting women, who form Israel's largest untapped human resource in these fields. The national drive proved a resounding success. Today, enrollment in the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, the country's major and leading technological research university, is 40 percent higher than just two years ago. The other two engineering schools in the country, at the Tel-Aviv University and Ben Gurion University in Be'er Sheva, enjoyed similar surges in enrollment. At the same time, many colleges in Israel began educating students in disciplines pertaining to high-tech industries. In view of not one but two consecutive years of far greater enrollment nationwide, we would appear to have succeeded in reversing the decade-long decline in young people's interest in engineering and related studies     

Will IPTV ride the peer-to-peer stream? [Peer-to-Peer Multimedia Streaming]

The great success of P2P systems for the purpose of file-sharing set the path to the next killer application on the Internet, P2P video streaming. Although it solves scalability issues, P2P technology experiences problems of a long start time and churn-induced instability that can greatly affect the user experience. Moreover, technical and business solutions for digital rights management are still under investigation. Great efforts are underway in both academia and industry to solve these problems, whose solution will offer a scalable, affordable, and legal TV-quality-like broadcast of content. In this article, we analyze what is available to the end user in terms of P2P video-streaming products and determine which of these are the most promising for IPTV and content distribution companies. In the following, we offer: (1) A survey of the available architectures. (2) A set of experiments on a popular peer-to-peer system, SopCast. (3) Guidelines for large scale deployment.     

Using Bandwidth-Space Partitioning to Improve Cell Coverage and Near-Far Unfair Access Problem in a Noise-Limited CDMA Cellular Network

This paper concerns CDMA cellular networks equipped with conventional matched filter receivers. For this type of cellular networks, two problems exist. One is the inverse relationship between the coverage and capacity, and the other one is the near-far unfair access problem. To resolve these two problems, a bandwidth-space partitioning technique is adopted. Several admission control schemes based on the bandwidth-space partitioning technique are proposed, and their performances are evaluated based on the simulation.Shih-Tsung Yang received his B.S. (1989) and M.S. (1991) degrees in electrical engineering from the National Taiwan University, and Ph.D. (1999) degree in electrical and computer engineering from University of Maryland, College Park.From 1999 to 2000, he was with SBC Technology Resourtces, Inc. where he was involved in the network architecture design for the ATM based networks. From November 2000 to May 2003, he was with Transilica/Microtune where he was involved in the design of Baseband and RF for the wireless communications. Since May 2003, Dr. Yang is now with Genesys Logic, Inc. where he is responsible for the baseband design of the WLAN and Ethernet.Dr. Yang’s research interests are in the area of Digital Communications, Communication networks and signal processing. E-mail: thomas.yang@genesyslogic.com.twAnthony Ephremides received his B.S. degree from the National Technical University of Athens (1967), and M.S. (1969) and Ph.D. (1971) degrees from Princeton University, all in Electrical Engineering. He has been at the University of Maryland since 1971, and currently holds a joint appointment as Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department and in the Institute of Systems Research (ISR) of which he is a founding member. He is co-founder of the NASA Center for Commercial Development of Space on Hybrid and Satellite Communications Networks established in 1991 at Maryland as an off-shoot of the ISR. He served as Co-Director of that Center from 1991 to 1994.He was a Visiting Professor in 1978 at the National Technical University in Athenas, Greece, and in 1979 at the EECS Department of the University of California, Berkeley, and at INRIA, France. During 1985-1986 he was on leave at MIT and ETH in Zurich, Switzerland. He was the General Chairman of the 1986 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in Athens, Greece and of the 1991 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory in Budapest, Hungary. He also organized two workshops on Information theory in 1984 (Hot Springs, VA) and in 1999 (Metsovo, Greece). He was the Technical Program Co-Chair of the IEEE INFOCOM in New York City in 1999 and of the IEEE International Symposium on Information theory in Sorrento, Italy in 2000. He has also been the Director of the Fairchild Scholars and Doctoral Fellows Program, an academic and research partnership program in Satellite Communications between Fairchild Industries and the University of Maryland. He won the IEEE Donald E. Fink Prize Paper Award (1992) and he was the first recipient of the Sigmobile Award of the ACM (Association of Computer Machinery) for contributions to wireless communications in 1997. He has been the President of the Information Theory Society of the IEEE (1987) and has served on its Board of Governors almost continuously from 1981 until the present. He was elected to the Board of Directors of the IEEE in 1989 and 1990. Dr. Ephremides has authored or co-authored over 100 technical journal papers and 300 technical conference presentations. He has also contributed chapters to several books and edited numerous special issues of scientific journals. He has also won awards from the Maryland Office of Technology Liaison for the commercialization of products and ideas stemming from his research. He has served on the Editorial Boards of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on Information theory, the Journal of Wireless Networks, and the International Journal of Satellite Communications.He has been the Dissertation Supervisor of over twenty Ph.D. students who now hold prominent positions in academia, industry, and research labs. He is the founder and President of Pontos, Inc., a Maryland company that provides technical consulting services, since 1980.Dr. Ephremides’ interests are in the areas of communication theory, communication systems and networks, queueing systems, signal processing, and satellite communications. His research has been continuously supported since 1971 by NSF, NASA, ONR, ARL, NRL, NSA, and Industry. E-mail: tony@eng.umd.edu