US National Academy of Engineering’s Frontiers of Engineering 2011 Report
Contributed by Lueny Morell, HP Labs Program Manager for Strategy and Open Innovation
The US National Academy of Engineering recently published Frontiers of Engineering 2011: Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering from the 2011 Symposium, a summary of their September 2011 event.
Each year, this symposium brings together 100 outstanding young leaders in engineering to share their cutting-edge research and technical work. The four general topics covered at the 2011 meeting were: additive manufacturing, semantic processing, engineering sustainable buildings, and neuroprosthetics.
While it is virtually impossible to cover all engineering topics in a two-day event, it’s great to see that many of the engineering discoveries from academia presented in this symposium are aligned with HP Labs research (for example: life cycle cost assessment for sustainability, part of our Resource Management as a Service project; sensors, a key enabler of our CeNSE vision; social networks; 3D printing, and understanding of word and sentence meaning, relationships, and sentiment – crucial to understanding and extracting insight from “big data”, being pursued in several HP Labs projects, including Live Analytics and Context Analytics).
The Report, which can be a valuable resource for corporate research labs to learn about what’s going in academia, can be purchased or downloaded for free from the National Academies Press: http://www.nap.edu/
For the future, I’d also like to see the US NAE consider including discoveries being done by corporate research labs in this Symposium. This move could catalyze research partnerships between industry and university researchers and advance the state of the art more effectively.
