This dissertation uses a historical approach to study the origins and trajectory of computer engineering as a domain of disciplinary and professional activity in the United States context. Expanding on the general question of “what is computer engineering?,” this project investigates what counts as computer engineering knowledge and practice, what it means to be a computer engineer, and how these things have varied by time, location, actor, and group. This account also pays close attention to the creation and maintenance of the “sociotechnical” boundaries that have historically separated computer engineering from adjacent fields such as electrical engineering and computer science. In addition to the academic sphere, I look at industry and professional societies as key sites where this field originated and developed. The evidence for my analysis is largely drawn from journal articles, conference proceedings, trade magazines, and curriculum reports, supplemented by other primary and secondary sources. The body of my account has two major parts. Chapters 2 through 4 examine the prehistory and early history of computer engineering, especially from the 1940s to early 1960s. These chapters document how the field gained a partially distinct professional identity, largely in the context of industry and through professional society activities. Chapters 5 through 7 turn to a historical period running from roughly the mid 1960s to early 1990s. Here I document the establishment and negotiation of a distinct disciplinary identity and partially unique “sociotechnical settlement” for computer engineering. Professional societies and the academic context figure prominently in these chapters. This part of the dissertation also brings into relief a key argument, namely that computer engineering has historically occupied a position of “persistent instability” between the engineering profession, on the one hand, and independent disciplines such as computer science, on the other. In an Epilogue I review some more recent developments in the educational arena to highlight continued instabilities in the disciplinary landscape of computing, as well as renewed calls for the establishment of a distinct disciplinary and professional identity for the field of computer engineering. I also highlight important countervailing trends by briefly reviewing the history of the software/hardware codesign movement.

Between Discipline and Profession A History of Persistent Instability in the Field of Computer Engineering, circa 1951-2006

GlobalSoftware Engineering implies a paradigm shift towards globally-distributed development that can be advantageous, but at the cost of having to address the specific challenges that arise when the stakeholders are not colocated. Reusing assets during the initial processes of the software development life cycle could be beneficial, but automated support is essential if the expected benefits of requirements reuse are to be actually obtained. The main contribution of this paper is the specification of a collection of software features for a tool support for distributed, catalogue-based natural-language requirements reuse. Two additional contributions are also made: (1) an implementation of the requirements specifications previously mentioned using Drupal, a Content Management System; and (2) an empirical assessment of this tool support using distributed university students as subjects (n=57). According to our findings, the tool helps in making requirements reuse better than requirements specification from scratch and in managing traceability, is easy to use, useful, and easy to learn. In contrast, the tool is not particularly suitable for managing users and user roles.

Automated support for reuse-based requirements engineering in global software engineering

August Dvorak is best known for his development of the Dvorak keyboard. However, Dvorak also adapted and applied many behavioral and scientific management techniques to the field of education. Taken collectively, these techniques are representative of many of the procedures currently used in applied behavior analysis, in general, and especially in precision teaching. The failure to consider Dvorak's instructional methods may explain some of the discrepant findings in studies which compare the efficiency of the Dvorak to the standard keyboard. This article presents a brief background on the development of the standard (QWERTY) and Dvorak keyboards, describes parallels between Dvorak's teaching procedures and those used in precision teaching, reviews some of the comparative research on the Dvorak keyboard, and suggests some implications for further research in applying the principles of behavior analysis.

August Dvorak (1894-1975): Early expressions of applied behavior analysis and precision teaching.

We study optimal policies for design reuse in a software project using a control theoretic approach. A project needs to be developed in minimum time by optimally choosing the proportion of effort allocated towards design activities. We first consider a local case, where the benefits of design activities are restricted within the project. Here the optimal policy follows a bang-bang structure: invest fully in design followed by investing fully in implementation. Next we consider two sequentially linked projects where design capital built in the first project can be reused by the downstream project. For the two project case, the design investment in the upstream project first increases and then decreases with the ability to utilize design capital accumulated in the first project for the second project. We also propose a coordination scheme that rewards the upstream project team so that design investment in this project is chosen in a globally optimal manner.

Optimal software design reuse policies: A control theoretic approach

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID3325416_code328623.pdf?abstractid=2431382&mirid=1

Optimal Software Design Reuse Policies: A Control Theoretic Approach

brought together a group of leading engineers in computer technology (see box at right). Participants represented a cross section of industry and academia and came from organizations that are well distributed geographically throughout the United States. To define the research directions for computer engineering, the group had to cope first with such issues as what computer engineering really encompassed, where it fit in modern industrial society, and what its goals should be. While participants did not believe that a clearly defined set of recommended research directions would emerge from the deliberations , they hoped that results wsould further understanding and progress in computer engineering and would be of benefit to research planners in industrial, academic, and governmental communities. The National Science Foundation, a major funding source for university research in computer technology, as svell as several of the research-sponsoring agencies of the Department of Defense, sent observers to the workshop's closing session. What is computer engineering? Computer technology is still remarkably young and because of the enormous pace at which it is developing, computer engineering has never been clearly defined. Modern computers date back only to the late 1940's. The computer's early development came about primarily through the pooling of efforts of two groups: applied mathematicians with a desire to use machinery to reduce the tedium of scientific computations and electrical engineers in command of a technology that permitted the construction of such machinery. The collaboration of these groups was the primary influence on computer development from the late forties to the early sixties. Throughout that period, the designers and builders of computers were predominantly electrical engineers, and the users tended to be predominantly applied mathematicians (in addition to those in the rapidly expanding business data processing community). This dichotomy in personnel was also present in the organizations that sprung up to cater to the needs of the computer professionals, Computer science tends to stress understanding and insight. Computer engineering emphasizes practical, economic systems. with the IEEE Computer Society (under its original name, the IRE Professional Group on Electronic Computers) primarily serving the engineering segment and the Association for Computing Machinery looking primarily after the applied-mathematician-user segment. The workshop participants felt that computer engineering is the discipline that deals with the design and development of computer systems and emphasizes such factors as function, performance , cost, size, power requirements, reliability, maintainability, and societal impact. Intrinsic to computer engineering is the …

Freeman

Papers

Research Directions in Computer Engineering