Ask a person what engineering is and you will get a wide variety of answers.  We will discuss how engineering and technology evolved from a craft to a trade to a profession and now to an academic discipline.  We will look as how the early days of engineering education were to be an apprentice then one was a trainee and, more recently, a university student maybe with a graduate degree.  The modern idea of an engineer centers on design, innovation, and creation.  The modern practice of engineering is close to the entrepreneur and venture capitalist and start-up company creator.  Science discovers, describes, and explains what is and engineering designs, creates, and invents what is not.

Biography:

C. Sidney Burrus is Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering and former dean of engineering at Rice University.  He has authored 5 books and over 250 articles on Digital Signal Processing, received teaching awards from Rice, and research awards from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers and others. This includes the Kilby Medal for signal processing. The OpenStax Project started in 1999 at Rice University to apply modern technology and theory to education. Burrus has been closely involved with it since its founding and has lectured and published widely on it.

Prof. Burrus received his PhD from Stanford, has held visiting positions at MIT and the University of Erlangen in Germany, and is an Adjunct Professor at the Beijing Jiaotong University. He was on the founding committee for International University Bremen in Germany; was a consultant on the founding of Tan Tao University in Vietnam; and is on the advisory board of the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Lahore, Pakistan.

Most recently, he was on the managing board of an international conference on “Humans, Machines, and the Future of Work” or, “when robots can do everything humans can do, what will humans do?”

Biography: