Department News

Electrical and Computer Engineering at BYU are student-focused programs. In fact, the goals of the program are given in terms of the life and career accomplishments the program is preparing graduates to achieve. We refer to these as program educational objectives. The objectives have been established by the faculty after consulting with those who have a stake in the success of our students---the college and university administration, parents and families, and representatives from industry, employers, and graduate institutions. For more information about the educational objectives, see the program educational objectives and learning outcomes website.

Dr. David Andrews of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Arkansas presented a colloquium speech to students and faculty of the department on October 22. His talk was titled “It’s Not Your Father’s Computer”. His talk began by observing the contradiction we face that while our use of computers has changed dramatically over the past few decades, the technology base for computing systems has resisted change. On one end are large numbers of sensor rich and networked IoT devices. At the other end of the spectrum are big power-hungry data center and warehouse scale computer systems. Further, the driving applications we run on these systems no longer simply crunch numbers and return a result. In the remainder of the talk he focused on the reasons he believes our old computing approaches will not suffice in this new era. He then outlined what he believes are critical new research challenges that need to be addressed to support the new driving applications in the area of IoT and embedded systems.

Dr. David Long presented this year's Bader Lecture at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami. He spoke about using radar scatterometry to study wind patterns on the ocean, variations in sea ice, and the health of vegetation in tropical climates. To read more about this, click here.