Features

Climate change is real. Its effects are drastic, and worsening. Global efforts to cut emissions and reduce fossil fuel consumption have met with mixed results. To mitigate the most catastrophic outcomes of climate change, some engineers are turning to outside-the-box ideas like solar radiation management.

Data science is an interdisciplinary field that leverages scientific methods, processes, algorithms, and systems to extract insights and knowledge from both structured and unstructured forms of data. It’s commonly associated with big data and artificial intelligence, combining statistics, data analysis, machine learning, and related techniques to understand and analyze actual phenomena with data.

AI’s integration into the architectural landscape is a testament to the industry’s readiness for technological evolution, and it continues to shape the future of architectural design. “It goes hand in hand with computer science developments. It’s a long legacy,” says Dr. Daniel Koehler, assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture.

Mechanical engineering is one of the oldest and broadest engineering disciplines. Its domain stretches across complex mechanical systems’ design, analysis, manufacturing, and maintenance. While mechanical engineering has played (and continues to play) an enormous role in the evolution of the automobile, it represents just one area of a massively important discipline.

Launched into the mainstream with ChatGPT, today’s generative AI models have applications in every field and discipline; tomorrow’s impacts will be wide-reaching. Given its broad applications, the challenges within AI are many. Its transformative power works in both directions and the potential risks are roughly commensurate with the potential rewards.

Electrical engineering is a rich field with challenges for tomorrow’s engineers. Sitting at one of the most interesting crossroads of science and technology, its territory stretches across microelectronics, energy systems, telecommunications, and robotics. Much overlap exists between its different research areas, and that overlap is mimicked in many of the field’s largest potential breakthroughs.

Apple’s A16 Bionic processor has 16 billion transistors. There is no way for a human to design such a chip manually. In electronic design automation (EDA), a field that includes the design of chips and circuit boards, today’s engineers rely on software tools to aid them.

With such a vast area of focus, professionals in this field can tackle numerous problems that impact the environment and people’s health. Projects range from designing water treatment facilities to developing sustainable energy systems. Environmental engineers also use their expertise to address complex socio-environmental problems, like reducing greenhouse gas emissions and promoting environmental justice.

Next year’s coding classes could look very different from this year’s. Advances in AI have rippled into every industry and profession, and the impacts have already been acutely felt in the way code is written and maintained. Today’s engineers can interact with front-ends that resemble ChatGPT, asking natural language questions about code and receiving specific and functional results.

While AI advances seem recent due to increased press coverage, they have been a part of many software programs for quite some time. Computer-aided design (CAD) programs have integrated AI to help streamline the design process, allowing for faster iteration and more accurate results.