Dr. Moshe Kam, 2011 President and CEO of IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional association, says engineering education must undergo significant transformation in the next decade to continue to push innovation forward, or global economic expansion will slow. Kam believes engineers of all disciplines need a deeper understanding of computing and networking, cross-disciplinary education, and sharper analytical skills.
Dr. Kam is the Robert Quinn Professor and Department Head of the Electrical and Computer Engineering at Drexel University.
Additional curriculum areas that are likely to undergo significant changes include:
• Incorporation of considerations from economics, psychology, law, and even advertising in engineering design.
• International opportunities to study and work abroad.
• Engineering applications of life sciences and biology.
• The shift of many engineering enterprises from products to services.
• Progress in automated computing tools and symbolic computation.
“The engineering and computing education system is the backbone for key industries,” says Kam. “There would be no Silicon Valley without Stanford. No high-tech Route 128 in Boston without Harvard, MIT and Tufts. The dramatic advances by India’s information technology industry wouldn’t be possible without the 15 Indian Institutes of Technology, and it is not a coincidence that Europe’s technology centers are found where a major university is located (e.g., Silicon Fen near Cambridge University, and Technopolis Innovation Park Delft near Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands).”
Read the full article here: IEEE President Calls for Engineering Education Transformation
See Prof. Kam’s presentation: Transformating Engineering Education Summary during the conference titled ‘Transforming Engineering Education: Creating Interdisciplinary Skills for Complex Global Environments‘ co-hosted by IBM and IEEE.
