A new volume Engineering in Context edited by Steen Hyldgaard Christensen, Bernard Delahousse, and Martin Meganck was launched 2-3 July 2009 at Engineers Ireland in Dublin, Ireland at workshop by the same name (more here).  iFoundry was represented at the meeting by co-director David E. Goldberg who presented a talk: The Missing Basics: What Engineers Don’t Learn and Why They Don’t Learn Them (here).

Engineering in Context

Watch the video from the Center for Plasma-Material Interaction at the University of Illinois in which liquid lithium wets a porous molybdenum sponge at 450C as part of the Study of Lithium Infusion in Porous media experiment (SLIP).

For more information about CPMI go to the website (here) or the YouTube channel (here).

iFoundry co-director David E. Goldberg just presented a talk at SPT 2009, the 2009 Conference of the Society for Philosophy of Technology at the University of Twente, The Netherlands.  The powerpoint stack from that talk is available in the viewer below:

The presentation Engineering Rigor and Its Discontents: Philosophical Reflection as Curative to Math-Physics Envy is available in the viewer below:

This talk was presented Wednesday at SPT 2009, the 2009 meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Technology.  The abstract is available here.

The powerpoint below was presented at the 2009 meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Technology in a plenary panel session on the forthcoming handbook, Anthonie Meijers (Ed.) (in press). Handbook of the Philosophy of Science, Volume 9: Philosophy of Technology & Engineering Sciences, Elsevier.

The handbook is in press and more information is available on the Elsevier link above or the Amazon link here.

Well-deserved congratulations to iFoundry co-director David E. Goldberg for receiving the 2010 Evolutionary Computation Pioneer Award. This award will be presented at the IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence in July 2010, in Barcelona, Spain.

Module 14 from Creative Modeling for Tech Vision covers more on little models.

The Illinois student chapter of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) is set to begin operating at the University of Illinois in Fall 2009.  Our Olin-Illinois partnership and a visit by students  in Spring 2009 to Olin College for the Summit on the Engineer of the Future 2.0 inspired the inception of an ASEE student chapter at Illinois.  Both iFoundry and Illinois ASEE are committed to working together on furthering engineering education and empowering engineering students to transform engineering education.

For more information about Illinois ASEE, contact current chapter president Brian Schertz.

The purpose of general education  is to encourage students to take classes that increase their breadth of knowledge and awareness of the world. However, general education is too general. Without a clear direction, selecting classes becomes a matter of “which class is easier?” rather than “Which class will best improve my current body of knowledge?”.

iFoundry believes that the human aspect of engineering is an essential part of becoming a well-rounded engineer-student. HAPI is an iFoundry proposal meant to encourage students to get the most out of their general education requirements by being purposeful in the selection of their courses.  HAPI themes are a set of courses that are centered around a specific theme or purpose.  This blog will begin a series on some examples of HAPI themes (details can be found in the HAPI manual). The examples we will cover are:

Anthropology

Classical Western Civilization

Economics

Environmental

Foreign Affairs

Health

Law, Policy, and Technology

Philosophy

“The Power of Story”

Understanding People

Each post in our series will discuss the theme as well as suggest some courses that can be taken at UIUC that follow the theme.

Our valued partner Olin College recently published its latest enewsletter detailing recent events at the College. You can  read about the latest happenings at Olin College in the pdf version of the newsletter.