ENGINEERING ACADEMIES IN US, UK, AND CHINA ANNOUNCE GLOBAL GRAND CHALLENGES SUMMIT

Washington, DC, November 14, 2012 – The US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) today announced a major international summit to explore new approaches for solving some of the world’s most pressing challenges. The summit, to be held in London on March 12-13, 2013, will bring together many of today’s leading thinkers and innovators with the next generation of engineering talent from around the world.
The inaugural Global Grand Challenges Summit is a new collaboration of the NAE and the national academies of engineering in the United Kingdom and China. This two-day event will spark discussion and debate, with a goal of identifying opportunities for global cooperation on engineering innovation and education to address common technological goals. More than 400 people—from industry, research, education, and policy—will participate at the event, which will also be webcast to a worldwide audience.
Sessions will focus on issues of sustainability, health, education, technology and growth, enriching life and resilience. Participants will discuss ways of developing the collaborations, networks and tools to take on complex global issues.
Speakers include: Caltech’s Frances Arnold, Imperial College professor Lord Darzi, University of Cambridge professor Dame Ann Dowling, former DARPA head and present Google/Motorola exec Regina Dugan, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, Stanford University president John Hennessy, prolific inventor Dean Kamen, MIT bioengineer Robert Langer, and genomics pioneer J. Craig Venter. Many more speakers will be announced in the coming months.

The academies are organizing this event with the support of Lockheed Martin and the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). The summit was inspired by the NAE’s 2008 report “Grand Challenges for Engineering,” findings of an international panel of leading scientists and engineers which are already having wide-ranging impacts, particularly in US education through initiatives like the Grand Challenges Scholars Program. The Global Summit builds upon a series of US summits.
“Engineers hold the key to addressing many of the world’s greatest challenges, but we will only solve these if we become more systematic in the way we educate, innovate, and collaborate,” said Royal Academy of Engineering president Sir John Parker. “This major international event will push for a sea change in the way engineers interact with each other, with other disciplines, with policymakers and with society at large. It will also highlight the excitement of cutting-edge engineering and showcase the central role engineers will play in delivering a safe, sustainable and prosperous future.”
“The prosperity of future generations relies on unprecedented levels of interdisciplinary and international cooperation in pursuit of solutions to global challenges,” said NAE president Charles M. Vest, President of the US National Academy of Engineering. “Whether the task is providing clean water for a rising global population or developing the resilience of our infrastructure to climate change, solutions demand more than isolated scientific breakthroughs. Instead, it is time to explore what could be accomplished with a globally-integrated systems approach.”
Founded in 1964, the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is a private, independent, nonprofit institution that provides engineering leadership in service to the nation. The mission of the National Academy of Engineering is to advance the well-being of the nation by promoting a vibrant engineering profession and by marshalling the expertise and insights of eminent engineers to provide independent advice to the federal government on matters involving engineering and technology.
Founded in 1976, The Royal Academy of Engineering promotes the engineering and technological welfare of the country. Our fellowship – comprising the UK’s most eminent engineers – provides the leadership and expertise for our activities, which focus on the relationships between engineering, technology, and the quality of life. As a national academy, we provide independent and impartial advice to Government; work to secure the next generation of engineers; and provide a voice for Britain’s engineering community.
The Chinese Academy of Engineering is the Chinese national academy of engineering and technological sciences. Its missions are to initiate and conduct strategic studies, to provide consultancy services for decision-making on key national engineering and technological sciences issues, and to promote the development of engineering and technological sciences in China for the benefit and welfare of society.

Contact:
Randy Atkins
Director, Communications/Media
National Academy of Engineering
202.334.1508, atkins@nae.edu

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

URL:

http://www.raeng.org.uk/international/global_grand_challenges_summit.htm

The International Society for Service Innovation Professionals (ISSIP), a global non-profit consortium of industry, academia and governments has launched a research project to co-develop curricula guidelines for all forms of education in service with educators, government agencies and industry representatives around the world. As a first step in this project we have produced a brief survey for the purpose of discovering the extant breadth and depth of service education and the needs for service education in the future.

We ask you, as a professional with interests in service or service industries, to take a few minutes to complete this survey. Results of this survey will be posted on the ISSIP web site (www.ISSIP.org). Participation in this survey is entirely voluntary and you may quit the survey at any time. If you have any questions about this survey, please contact: Ralph D. Badinelli Professor, Virginia Tech, ralphb@vt.edu.
The survey can be accessed at https://survey.vt.edu/survey/entry.jsp?id=1333571936356
Thank you for assisting this research.
—
Ralph D. Badinelli
Professor
Business Information Technology Department 0235
Virginia Tech
Blacksburg, VA 24061
(540) 231-7688

University Venture Fund

USA has 23 million unemployed and 3.7 million unfilled jobs.

According to a survey earlier this year of over 38,000 employers in 41 countries, 34% of companies worldwide reported finding it hard to fill open positions.

If you ask, employers are more than happy to provide a laundry list of capabilities that students lack.

Read more here.

URL:
www.universityventuresfund.com

http://www.universityventuresfund.com/publications.php?title=jobs-capabilities-and-the-new-digital-divide

Machines are getting faster and algorithms better, so how might this help unlock more opportunities for the creative teams in society?

If you haven’t read “Race Against the Machine” read this first, then read the eBook…
http://sloanreview.mit.edu/the-magazine/2012-winter/53208/winning-the-race-with-ever-smarter-machines/

Augmented teams of people are able to solve complex problems more rapidly…
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/science/scientists-see-advances-in-deep-learning-a-part-of-artificial-intelligence.html
“This is a really breathtaking result because it is the first time that deep learning won, and more significantly it won on a data set that it wouldn’t have been expected to win at,” said Anthony Goldbloom, chief executive and founder of Kaggle, a company that organizes data science competitions, including the Merck contest. .. The technology, called deep learning, has already been put to use in [Smart Phone]services… ”

Cognitive tools that augment human intelligence are on the same type of evolutionary journey as tools that augment human physical strength (steam engines, cars, etc.)…

Some even foresee what will be coming after the Smart Phone era..
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-end-of-the-smartphone-era-is-coming-2012-11

“Computers have been getting smaller and closer to our faces since their very beginning. First they were in big rooms, then they sat on desktops, then they sat on our laps, and now they’re in our palms. Next they’ll be on our faces.  (Eventually they’ll be in our brains.)”

Every technology augment is eventually disrupted….
Slide rule -> calculator -> “smart” phone -> “super smart” glasses -> “super-duper smart” implants….

What do “cognitively augmented people” do in the future?
We should keep our eye on Kickstarter and other crowd-funding sites for projects that people have a passion to achieve, but require collective action.
http://www.kickstarter.com/

What if industry required universities to post their projects to Kickstarter?
https://service-science.info/archives/2538

Furthermore, what if all industry AND government funding programs for universities required faculty and students to post to Kickstarter?

Might this increase entrepreneurial culture at universities?

I would like to see someone invent a mechanism to incent/crowd-fund top new faculty to go work in universities with the lowest academic rankings in the world… If top new faculty could get rich by going to the weakest universities – this would be akin to the NFL Draft (every year weakest team gets first draft choice for top college athlete), and help improve competitive parity of regions.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444734804578062802698020758.html

If this last one seems too strange – top faculty going to depressed regions – check this out – the best minds at MIT are focussing on where the biggest challenges in the world happen to be and going there to work on the challenges with local entrepreneurs:
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/11/features/open-university?page=all

“Joi Ito, 46-year-old director of MIT’s Media Lab since last September, has just selected the faculty’s newest outpost: the troubled streets of downtown Detroit. “I was in a rough neighbourhood there yesterday, where there are miles and miles of bombed out buildings, and it just blows your mind to see a bunch of kids building urban farms,” he says back in his office in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “They have no streetlights. If you connect a streetlight to the grid, it gets controlled by the city and regulated. So they’re thinking, how can we create solar-powered low-cost streetlights, as that will lower crime? They have a maker space in a church, a place where the kids can learn how to build a computer, a bike shop where they can learn how to do repairs. The kid who runs this place, Jeff Sturges, is awesome.We’re sending a bunch of Media Lab people to Detroit to work with local innovators already doing stuff on the ground.” ”

Therefore in the age of smart technology, we will need better ways to combine our resources to take collective action on what really matters to people, and to ensure the flow of top talent to the regions of the world that need them the most… people who flow into those regions should have an incentive, and it would be great if someone could create the policy mechanism to achieve that… right now people in poorer regions try to migrate to richer regions… and the brightest sometimes succeed at that through a series of life choices…
http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211

CALL FOR CHAPTER PROPOSALS
Proposal Submission Deadline: Jan 15, 2013
Smart Manufacturing Innovation and Transformation: Interconnection and Intelligence
A book edited by Dr. Zongwei Luo (University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China)

To be published by IGI Global: http://www.igi-global.com/requests/details.asp?ID=870

Introduction
Fast advances in information technology (RFID, sensor, Internet of things, and the Cloud) have led to a smarter world vision with ubiquitous interconnection and intelligence. Smart manufacturing refers to advanced manufacturing with wise adoption of information technologies throughout end to end product and service life-cycles, capturing manufacturing intelligence for wise production and services. Smart manufacturing represents a field with intense competition in this century of national competitiveness.

Objective of the Book
This book will provide a forum of innovative findings in advanced manufacturing research and development. It aims to promote an international knowledge exchange community involving multidisciplinary participation from researchers, practitioners, and academicians with insight addressing issues in real life problems towards smarter manufacturing. By disseminating latest developments in smart manufacturing innovation and transformation in manufacturing upon current and/or emerging technology opportunities and market imperatives, this book covers both theoretical perspectives and practical approaches for smart manufacturing research and development triggered by ubiquitous interconnection and intelligence, enabling manufacturing innovation and transformation.

Target audience
This book will provide a forum of innovative findings in advanced manufacturing research and development. It aims to promote an international knowledge exchange community involving multidisciplinary participation from researchers, practitioners, and academicians with insight addressing issues in real life problems towards smarter manufacturing. The target audience would include multidisciplinary participants from society, industry, academia, and government.

Recommended topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

* Business models and mechanism design
* Big data computing and intelligence
* Transparent and service computing
* Social and human centric computing
* Robotics and automation
* SCM/Logistics for advanced manufacturing
* MEMS/Hybrid systems for advanced manufacturing
* E-commerce for advanced manufacturing
* Manufacturing intelligence
* Manufacturing sustainability
* Digital and additive manufacturing
* RFID/Internet of Things and cloud computing
* CAD/CAM/CAE/CAPP
* PLM/ERP/CRM
* Structural health monitoring

Submission Procedure
Researchers and practitioners are invited to submit on or before January 15, 2013, a 2-3 page chapter proposal clearly explaining the mission and concerns of his or her proposed chapter. Authors of accepted proposals will be notified by February 15, 2013 about the status of their proposals and sent chapter guidelines. Full chapters are expected to be submitted by April 15, 2013. All submitted chapters will be reviewed on a double-blind review basis. Contributors may also be requested to serve as reviewers for this project.

Publisher
This book is scheduled to be published by IGI Global (formerly Idea Group Inc.), publisher of the Information Science Reference (formerly Idea Group Reference), Medical Information Science Reference, Business Science Reference, and Engineering Science Reference imprints. For additional information regarding the publisher, please visit www.igi-global.com. This book is anticipated to be released in 2014.

Important Dates
January 15, 2013:                Proposal Submission Deadline
February 15, 2013:                Notification of Acceptance
May 15, 2013:                Full Chapter Submission
June 30, 2013:                Review Results Returned
August 15, 2013:                Final Chapter Submission
September 15, 2013:                Final Deadline

Inquiries and submissions can be forwarded electronically (Word document) or by mail to the Editor:
Zongwei Luo
E-mail:
zwluo@eti.hku.hk
Land mail:
University of Hong Kong
Level 3, Block A, Cyberport 4, 100 Cyberport Road, Hong Kong _______________________________________________
Service-science-section mailing list
Service-science-section@list.informs.org
http://list.informs.org/mailman/listinfo/service-science-section

Stephen Perelgut sent these really insightful links:

A pro/con discussion of the value of patents – quite instructive in its own right and it lays out the fundamental issues around ownership of IP: http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/Issues/2006/October/HeadToHead.asp

Head to Head: Patents Pro/Con Arguments

FOR
Barry Treves, President of the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys, UK
Patents protect inventions by giving the owner of the patent the right to stop anyone from making or using the invention without the owner’s permission

AGAINST
Terence Kealey, Vice-chancellor and clinical biochemist, University of Buckingham, UK
Patents are a menace. Inventors claim they need patents to incentivise their research but, today, it is the company that fails to innovate that goes bust. Companies take out patents, therefore, to neutralise the competition, so that they need do no more research.

More coherently, the argument for and against public support for research, particularly at universities, is laid out in:
http://www.economist.com/debate/days/view/863

Opening statements: Should public money be used to fund applied research?

Defending the motion
Andrew Miller, Labour MP and Chair of the House of Commons Science and Technology Select Committee
Private funders of research will rarely be persuaded to put the necessary money into the long-term, low-return applied research that was crucial to the early development of space technology or future energy potential such as advanced battery technology.

Against the motion
Terence Kealey, Vice Chancellor, University of Buckingham
The OECD has speculated that, when governments fund research, they might only displace or crowd out its private funding. Companies fund their own research, so, when governments fund it, companies may simply withdraw their own money.

This also looks promising
http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm/journals.htm?articleid=1823463&show=html&WT.mc_id=alsoread

Moira H. Decter, (2009) “Comparative review of UK-USA industry-university relationships”, Education + Training, Vol. 51 Iss: 8/9, pp.624 – 634

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore significant historical changes, legislation and policy in the UK and USA from the 1960s to present day relating to university-industry relationships.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents a review of papers, reports and policy documents from the UK and USA drawing comparisons of university-industry relations.

Findings – The paper finds that many UK and USA universities were originally rooted in their communities with strong links to local industries. This culture has persisted and been strengthened through legislation in the USA but changes in UK policy have resulted in reduced industry links.

Research limitations/implications – The paper draws on secondary sources. Future research will explore more directly effects of changes in UK universities on university-industry interactions.

Practical implications – In recent years there has been an increasing UK government focus on university-industry links. The paper seeks to show that the success of technology transfer in the USA has deeper contextual sources, which may not be easily reproduced in the UK. The history and culture of UK universities presents a barrier to current knowledge transfer initiatives.

Originality/value – Technology transfer in the UK and USA have been compared previously, but not set in the context of the history of the university sector. This has implications for current policy initiatives from UK government agencies seeking to develop university technology as a source of innovation for industry.

Many university faculty especially engineering and business schools are seeking corporate sponsors for their existing or soon to be launched student innovation competitions.

Student innovation competitions are a great idea – the world needs more innovations, and it is a great experience for the students to win an innovation competition.  However, corporate sponsorships as a business model for these types of innovation challenges, limits the number of programs, and their sustainability.

As part of the transformation of universities – those faculty might be better advised to work to develop a short MOOC course (individually and collectively) that encourages students to post their innovation ideas to Kickstarter or related sites where many people can review the innovation pitch and decide whether or not to vote for it with a donation.

If students get funding to implement their innovation – they are real winners, with real “skin in the game.”

Also, Kickstarter funds documentaries, new innovation, and new businesses – so the following progression could be a series of wins…

innovation idea -> short video -> documentary -> prototype -> deployment -> business plan -> launch non-profit or business

So, faculty should think twice before starting a student competition, and instead help their students propose to crowdfunding sites, or innovate their own new crowdfunding site – meta-innovation!

There are many great Kickstarter project success stories already that can inspire student innovators.

Also, this helps in the transformation of faculty roles in universities along the progression towards more of a coach for knowledge application, not just knowledge transfer (teaching) or even knowledge creation (research):

View of University Priorities  include:
1. Knowledge transfer (teaching) – student tuition & government loans
2. Knowledge creation (research) – government grants & corporate partners
3. Knowledge application (entrepreneurship) – local incentives & alumni donations
4. Knowledge integration (bridge silos) – lowers costs without compromising depth
University business model is evolving (to fund the above, and continuously renew physical infrastructure)…

Ultimately, in the age of every smarter machines, the role of faculty will be helping students enter and win innovation competitions… this will be part of a regional transformation as well, not just the transformation of universities.

And of course the competition I would really like to see universities take on globally…. rapidly rebuilding societal infrastructure…

Service is the application of knowledge for the benefit of others

Service innovations scale the benefits of new knowledge…  globally… rapidly….

Promoting service innovations for our interconnected world is the mission of ISSIP.org – become a member today.

Introduction to ISSIP.org, and see slide #33 with a reference to Kickstarter…