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08.07
Backscatter: So What Do You Do?
By Donald Christiansen
Oh, for the good old days when
your neighbor knew exactly what you did when you
told him you were an electrical engineer! The
mid-century EE was either a power engineer or a
communications (electronics) engineer. No
matter. You could be either, and your neighbor
was confident you would fix his TV when it acted
up.
Today’s practitioner is likely
to be involved in one of a multitude of
specialties that did not exist a few decades
ago. Your neighbor would rather tell you about
his vegetable garden than listen to your
convoluted response when he asks what you do. As
for your fixing his TV or DVD player, he knows
you will advise him to recycle the offending
appliance and get a new one. When his computer
misbehaves, he will not be surprised if you tell
him to put in a call to India.
The Way It Was
When the IEEE was formed in
1963, it elected to name itself the Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers. From this
ambiguity one might surmise that an individual
could be both an electrical and an electronics
engineer. Or maybe not — perhaps you were one or
the other. In fact, most of the practitioners of
that era construed electrical engineering as
power or electrical utility engineering.
Electronics engineering was everything else — and
never the twain would meet.
Our subspecialties back then
were represented by IEEE Professional Groups, largely inherited from the Institute of
Radio Engineers (IRE), one of the IEEE’s
predecessor societies. Today they are
represented by 39 Societies, whose
specializations range from A (Advanced
Packaging) to Z — oops, sorry, W (Wireless
Communications), with lots in between, like
Quantum Electronics, Project Safety Engineering,
Medical Imaging, and Nanobioscience. At recent
count, the IEEE publishes 135 Transactions,
Journals, Letters, and magazines. Should your
neighbor ask whether we publish as many arcane
publications as the AMA, you can assure him that
we do. Give him a few Transactions titles:
Computational Biology and Bioinformatics,
Applied Superconductivity, and the like. He
will quickly refocus his attention on his
rutabagas.
Computer Complexity
The pervasiveness of digital
technology has driven the profession in new
directions. The Computer Society had its origins
in 1951, when the IRE formed a Group on
electronic computers. With only 201 members, it
nevertheless attracted 832 attendees to its
major conference, nearly 50 percent greater than
the conference attendance of the 1,700-member
Instrumentation Group. Today, the IEEE Computer
Society’s membership is nearly 50,000, some
18,000 greater than that of the next largest
IEEE Society, and its publications include 28
specialized transactions and magazines.
Definitional Dilemmas
We now have schools of
electrical and computer engineering. Electronics
engineering has disappeared, subsumed, one might
conclude, partly in electrical and partly in
computer engineering. Should we expect the IEEE
to become the IECE? The pervasiveness of the
computer and digital technology has challenged
educators to keep pace. Curricula structure is
constantly debated. Neither educators nor
practitioners are quite sure how to define the
anatomy of the “computer profession.” Its
taxonomy is elusive. Neville Holmes, writing in
Computer magazine, proposes the
following: Engineering that deals specifically
with the design and manufacture of computers and
other digital equipment would best be called
digital engineering, as distinct from the
computer profession, which concerns
itself not with equipment but with people and
their data. Software engineering, concerned with
the design and construction of software, Holmes
suggests, could be severed from the computing
profession and included in digital engineering,
with program coders recognized as skilled
technicians.
Holmes also observes that a
merger of digital and communications engineering
seems to be happening, at least at the device
level. While he sees computing (computer science
and information technology) as distinct from
digital and software engineering, its strong
secondary relationship to the former is readily
confirmed through the numerous articles in
IEEE Spectrum that cover computer science
and IT, he notes. He cites, for example, “How
Electronic Medical Records Could Save Lives”
(October 2006). A number of the Computer Society
Journals, among them the Transactions on
Information Technology in Medicine and the
Transactions on Nanobioscience confirm
this relationship. The difficulty in
distinguishing engineering from computing is
compounded or perhaps confirmed by the fact that
6,500 members of the Computer Society are not
members of the IEEE, but rather affiliate
members of the Computer Society. If all this
seems a bit perplexing, try explaining it to the
folks next door.
Let’s hope you are among the
lucky few who can relate your job to something
readily understood by the non-engineer. Perhaps
you are involved in the space program, and, when
a successful launch occurs, you can brag — or
feign modesty, as you prefer — but in any event
acknowledge that you had a part in it. But be
careful; your neighbor may want to know exactly
what you did. And that’s where we began this
exercise.
Resources
For more on the structure of
electrical and computer engineering:
Liu, J., “Computing as an
Evolving Discipline: 10 Observations,”
Computer, May 2007.
Holmes, N., “The Computing
Profession and Higher Education,” Computer,
January
2007.
Holmes, N., “Jobs, Trades,
Skills, and the Profession,” Computer,
September 2002.
For more on the evolution of
electrical, electronics, and computer
engineering:
McMahon, A. M., The Making of
a Profession: A Century of Electrical
Engineering in America, IEEE Press, 1984.
Ryder, J. D. and D. G. Fink,
Engineers and Electrons: A Century of Electrical
Progress, IEEE Press, 1984.
Lucky, R., “The Future of
Engineering,” IEEE Spectrum, September
2002.
Donald Christiansen is the former editor and
publisher of IEEE Spectrum and an independent publishing
consultant. He can be reached at
donchristiansen@ieee.org.
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