From engineering to industrial design: issues of educating future engineers to systemic design

Abstract Within the recent "Ecam Engineering" five-year international program developed at Ecam Lyon in France, a "Design" specialization area is proposed to educate engineers to the issues of systemic design. This program has emerged from the collaboration of Ecam Lyon with Politecnico di Torino, Italy. By offering different courses from the two institutions to the students, this program attempts to broaden the scope of classical engineering curricula towards a large spectrum of "design" issues. However, there is a huge gap between the content and pedagogy of systemic design developed at Politecnico to address an audience of future industrial designers, and the classical engineering design curriculum based on methodological and systematized approaches. This paper discusses the conceptual and operational challenges faced in this program to manage efficiently the transition of the engineers' curriculum towards sustainable design

From engineering to industrial design: issues of educating future engineers to systemic design

Within the recent “Ecam Engineering” five-year international program developed at Ecam Lyon in France, a “Design” specialization area is proposed to educate engineers to the issues of systemic design. This program has emerged from the collaboration of Ecam Lyon with Politecnico di Torino, Italy. By offering different courses from the two institutions to the students, this program attempts to broaden the scope of classical engineering curricula towards a large spectrum of “design” issues. However, there is a huge gap between the content and pedagogy of systemic design developed at Politecnico to address an audience of future industrial designers, and the classical engineering design curriculum based on methodological and systematized approaches. This paper discusses the conceptual and operational challenges faced in this program to manage efficiently the transition of the engineers’ curriculum towards sustainable design

Human factor in intelligent manufacturing systems - knowledge acquisition and motivation

Abstract People play a central role in intelligent manufacturing systems because of two reasons: their knowledge is indispensable to create and improve intelligent manufacturing systems; and their motivation is very important to identify and solve causes of the problems which may occur in order to prevent them in the future. Therefore, adequate learning methods are required to accomplish these two goals: empower and motivate people. In this paper innovative methods such as learning by doing, simulations and virtual reality will be presented as the ways to transfer the knowledge about intelligent manufacturing systems and to increase motivation concerning their improvements

Holographic MIMO Communications: Theoretical Foundations, Enabling Technologies, and Future Directions

Future wireless systems are envisioned to create an endogenously holography-capable, intelligent, and programmable radio propagation environment, that will offer unprecedented capabilities for high spectral and energy efficiency, low latency, and massive connectivity. A potential and promising technology for supporting the expected extreme requirements of the sixth-generation (6G) communication systems is the concept of the holographic multiple-input multiple-output (HMIMO), which will actualize holographic radios with reasonable power consumption and fabrication cost. The HMIMO is facilitated by ultra-thin, extremely large, and nearly continuous surfaces that incorporate reconfigurable and sub-wavelength-spaced antennas and/or metamaterials. Such surfaces comprising dense electromagnetic (EM) excited elements are capable of recording and manipulating impinging fields with utmost flexibility and precision, as well as with reduced cost and power consumption, thereby shaping arbitrary-intended EM waves with high energy efficiency. The powerful EM processing capability of HMIMO opens up the possibility of wireless communications of holographic imaging level, paving the way for signal processing techniques realized in the EM-domain, possibly in conjunction with their digital-domain counterparts. However, in spite of the significant potential, the studies on HMIMO communications are still at an initial stage, its fundamental limits remain to be unveiled, and a certain number of critical technical challenges need to be addressed. In this survey, we present a comprehensive overview of the latest advances in the HMIMO communications paradigm, with a special focus on their physical aspects, their theoretical foundations, as well as the enabling technologies for HMIMO systems. We also compare the HMIMO with existing multi-antenna technologies, especially the massive MIMO, present various...Comment: double column, 58 page

On microelectronic self-learning cognitive chip systems

After a brief review of machine learning techniques and applications, this Ph.D. thesis examines several approaches for implementing machine learning architectures and algorithms into hardware within our laboratory. From this interdisciplinary background support, we have motivations for novel approaches that we intend to follow as an objective of innovative hardware implementations of dynamically self-reconfigurable logic for enhanced self-adaptive, self-(re)organizing and eventually self-assembling machine learning systems, while developing this new particular area of research. And after reviewing some relevant background of robotic control methods followed by most recent advanced cognitive controllers, this Ph.D. thesis suggests that amongst many well-known ways of designing operational technologies, the design methodologies of those leading-edge high-tech devices such as cognitive chips that may well lead to intelligent machines exhibiting conscious phenomena should crucially be restricted to extremely well defined constraints. Roboticists also need those as specifications to help decide upfront on otherwise infinitely free hardware/software design details. In addition and most importantly, we propose these specifications as methodological guidelines tightly related to ethics and the nowadays well-identified workings of the human body and of its psyche