Engineering Education: A Focus on Systems

Engineers have a major advantage over scientists. For the most part, the systems we analyze are of our own devising. It has not always been so. Not long ago, the principle objective of engineering was to coax physical materials to do our bidding by leveraging their intrinsic physical properties. The discipline was one of " applied science. " Today, a great deal of engineering is about coaxing abstractions that we have invented. The abstractions provided by microprocessors, programming languages, operating systems, and computer networks are only loosely linked to the underlying physics of electronics. The rapid improvements in the capabilities of electronics during the last half of the 20-th century are, in part, the reason for this separation. The physical constraints imposed by limited memory, processing speed, and communication bandwidth appeared to evaporate with each new generation of computers. What appeared to one generation as luxuriously inefficient abstractions became the bread and butter of the next generation. The separation of " computer science " from " electrical engineering " is both a consequence and a cause, fueling the separation and reflecting it at the same time. At the same time, the systems science that was incubated in the study of electronic circuits (control systems, communications theory, and signal processing) has also become more abstract. Although these disciplines were created by true " electrical engineers " (" true " means that they were engaged with electrical systems), many of the practitioners today rarely encounter electricity directly. Their techniques are often realized in " embedded " software, ironically building on the abstractions that are only loosely connected to the electronics that their theory originally helped to create. The theories, however, have not adapted as well as one might hope to the world of software. Perhaps these theories remain too wedded to their physical heritage. Computer scientists lament that the engineers who write embedded software use so few of the beautiful abstractions they have built. They write their code in C (or even in assembly code), using low-level (less abstract) mechanisms. They ignore