FRONTIERS OF ENGINEERING
Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering from the 2010 Symposium
NATIONAL ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING
OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES
THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES PRESS
Washington, D.C.
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NOTICE: This publication has been reviewed according to procedures approved by a National Academy of Engineering report review process. Publication of signed work signifies that it is judged a competent and useful contribution worthy of public consideration, but it does not imply endorsement of conclusions or recommendations by the NAE. The interpretations and conclusions in such publications are those of the authors and do not purport to represent the views of the council, officers, or staff of the National Academy of Engineering.
Funding for the activity that led to this publication was provided by IBM, The Grainger Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Department of Defense-DDR&E Research, Microsoft Research, and Cummins Inc. This material is also based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0903867. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.
International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-309-16362-0
International Standard Book Number-10: 0-309-16362-5
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THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES
Advisers to the Nation on Science, Engineering, and Medicine
The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit, self-perpetuating society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and engineering research, dedicated to the furtherance of science and technology and to their use for the general welfare. Upon the authority of the charter granted to it by the Congress in 1863, the Academy has a mandate that requires it to advise the federal government on scientific and technical matters. Dr. Ralph J. Cicerone is president of the National Academy of Sciences.
The National Academy of Engineering was established in 1964, under the charter of the National Academy of Sciences, as a parallel organization of outstanding engineers. It is autonomous in its administration and in the selection of its members, sharing with the National Academy of Sciences the responsibility for advising the federal government. The National Academy of Engineering also sponsors engineering programs aimed at meeting national needs, encourages education and research, and recognizes the superior achievements of engineers. Dr. Charles M. Vest is president of the National Academy of Engineering.
The Institute of Medicine was established in 1970 by the National Academy of Sciences to secure the services of eminent members of appropriate professions in the examination of policy matters pertaining to the health of the public. The Institute acts under the responsibility given to the National Academy of Sciences by its congressional charter to be an adviser to the federal government and, upon its own initiative, to identify issues of medical care, research, and education. Dr. Harvey V. Fineberg is president of the Institute of Medicine.
The National Research Council was organized by the National Academy of Sciences in 1916 to associate the broad community of science and technology with the Academy’s purposes of furthering knowledge and advising the federal government. Functioning in accordance with general policies determined by the Academy, the Council has become the principal operating agency of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering in providing services to the government, the public, and the scientific and engineering communities. The Council is administered jointly by both Academies and the Institute of Medicine. Dr. Ralph J. Cicerone and Dr. Charles M. Vest are chair and vice chair, respectively, of the National Research Council.
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
ANDREW M. WEINER (Chair), Scifres Family Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Purdue University
ALI BUTT, Assistant Professor,
Department of Computer Science, Virginia Tech
MARK BYRNE, Mary & John H. Sanders Associate Professor,
Department of Chemical Engineering, Auburn University
DILMA DA SILVA, Research Staff Member,
Advanced Operating Systems Group, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
DANIEL ELLIS, Associate Professor,
Department of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University
MICHEL INGHAM, Technical Group Supervisor,
Flight Software Systems Engineering and Architectures Group, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
YOUNGMOO KIM, Assistant Professor,
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Drexel University
JACOB LANGELAAN, Assistant Professor,
Department of Aerospace Engineering, Pennsylvania State University
BABAK PARVIZ, Associate Professor,
Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Washington
Staff
JANET R. HUNZIKER, Senior Program Officer
ELIZABETH WEITZMANN, Program Associate
Preface
This volume highlights the papers presented at the National Academy of Engineering’s 2010 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium. Every year, the symposium brings together 100 outstanding young leaders in engineering to share their cutting-edge research and technical work. The 2010 symposium was held September 23–25, and hosted by IBM at the IBM Learning Center in Armonk, New York. Speakers were asked to prepare extended summaries of their presentations, which are reprinted here. The intent of this book is to convey the excitement of this unique meeting and to highlight cutting-edge developments in engineering research and technical work.
GOALS OF THE FRONTIERS OF ENGINEERING PROGRAM
The practice of engineering is continually changing. Engineers today must be able not only to thrive in an environment of rapid technological change and globalization, but also to work on interdisciplinary teams. Cutting-edge research is being done at the intersections of engineering disciplines, and successful researchers and practitioners must be aware of developments and challenges in areas that may not be familiar to them.
At the 2-1/2–day U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, 100 of this country’s best and brightest engineers, ages 30 to 45, have an opportunity to learn from their peers about pioneering work being done in many areas of engineering. The symposium gives early career engineers from a variety of institutions in academia, industry, and government, and from many different engineering disciplines, an opportunity to make contacts with and learn from individuals they would not meet in the usual round of professional meetings. This networking
may lead to collaborative work and facilitate the transfer of new techniques and approaches. It is hoped that the exchange of information on current developments in many fields of engineering will lead to insights that may be applicable in specific disciplines and thereby build U.S. innovative capacity.
The number of participants at each meeting is limited to 100 to maximize opportunities for interactions and exchanges among the attendees, who are chosen through a competitive nomination and selection process. The topics and speakers for each meeting are selected by an organizing committee of engineers in the same 30- to 45-year-old cohort as the participants. Different topics are covered each year, and, with a few exceptions, different individuals participate.
Speakers describe the challenges they face and communicate the excitement of their work to a technically sophisticated but non-specialized audience. Each speaker provides a brief overview of his/her field of inquiry; defines the frontiers of that field; describes experiments, prototypes, and design studies that have been completed or are in progress, as well as new tools and methodologies, and limitations and controversies; and summarizes the long-term significance of his/her work.
THE 2010 SYMPOSIUM
The four general topics covered at the 2010 meeting were: cloud computing, engineering and music, autonomous aerospace systems, and engineering inspired by biology. The Cloud Computing session described how this disruptive technology changes the way users design, develop, deploy, utilize, and disseminate applications and data. Following an overview presentation on the potential of cloud computing, there were talks on the challenges of providing transparent interfaces to the users while maintaining massive scale, developing robust cloud applications, and the environmental ramifications of cloud computing.
Technology has strongly influenced music since the first musical instruments and continues to do so in a variety of ways. In the Engineering and Music session, presentations covered advances in very large-scale music information retrieval, non-mainstream ways that people outside the engineering community are using technology to create music, the use of laptop computers in collaborative live performance, and utilizing mathematics to analyze and better understand music as well as incorporating mathematical representations into visualizations for live performance.
Autonomous Aerospace Systems was the focus of the third session, which included presentations on techniques for enabling “intelligence” in autonomous systems through probabilistic models of the environment and the integration of human operators in the control/planning loop, challenges for automation posed by NASA’s current and future space missions, the role of health awareness in systems of multiple autonomous vehicles, and automation and autonomy in the deployment of the next generation air transportation system.
The symposium concluded with the session Engineering Inspired by Biology, which highlighted the diverse role biology is playing in contemporary engineering. Talks focused on engineering challenges in the analysis of genetic variation, gene expression, and function; engineering biomimetic peptides for targeted drug delivery; and using biomolecules for actuation as motor-powered devices within systems.
In addition to the plenary sessions, the participants had many opportunities to engage in informal interactions. On the first afternoon of the meeting, participants broke into small groups for “get-acquainted” sessions during which individuals presented short descriptions of their work and answered questions from their colleagues. This helped attendees get to know more about each other relatively early in the program. On the second afternoon, there were tours of the IBM T.J. Watson Lab in Yorktown Heights and the IBM Industry Solutions Lab in Hawthorne.
Every year, a distinguished engineer addresses the participants at dinner on the first evening of the symposium. The speaker this year was Dr. Bernard S. Meyerson, vice president for innovation at IBM, who gave a talk on the topic, Radical Innovation to Create a Smarter Planet.
NAE is deeply grateful to the following organizations for their support of the 2010 U.S. Frontiers of Engineering Symposium: IBM, The Grainger Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Department of Defense-DDR&E Research, National Science Foundation, Microsoft Research, and Cummins Inc. NAE would also like to thank the members of the Symposium Organizing Committee (p. iv), chaired by Dr. Andrew M. Weiner, for planning and organizing the event.
Contents
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Introduction |
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Warehouse-Scale Computing: The Machinery That Runs the Cloud |
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Developing Robust Cloud Applications |
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Green Clouds: The Next Frontier |
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Introduction |
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Very Large Scale Music Understanding |
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Doing It Wrong |
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Digital Instrument Building and the Laptop Orchestra |
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Demystifying Music and Its Performance |
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Introduction |
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Intelligent Autonomy in Robotic Systems |
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Challenges and Opportunities for Autonomous Systems in Space |
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Health Awareness in Systems of Multiple Autonomous Aerospace Vehicles |
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Certifiable Autonomous Flight Management for Unmanned Aircraft Systems |
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Introduction |
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The Current Status and Future Outlook for Genomic Technologies |
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Engineering Biomimetic Peptides for Targeted Drug Delivery |
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Autonomous Systems and Synthetic Biology |