Research Directions in Computer Engineering

TLDR: This workshop brought together a group of leading engineers in computer technology and hoped that results would further understanding and progress in computer engineering and would be of benefit to research planners in industrial, academic, and governmental communities.

Abstract: 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 …