Musings

Democratizing real-time data analytics education - one sensor at a time!

7/27/2013

A lot has been written and said about the power of technology in revolutionizing higher education. The web is playing an increasingly important role in democratizing higher education -- providing education to anyone and everyone, anywhere and everywhere.

As the barriers to entry for effective education continue to fall, I am pleased to share our new endeavor, www.matlabarduino.org. I launched this website along with my graduate students Chris and Vaishali with a mission and vision to provide high definition YouTube videos that demonstrate the use of two powerful technologies -- Matlab and Arduino -- to perform fundamental engineering tasks across several fields. The unifying theme for these tasks is the idea of procuring, analyzing, and visualizing real-world data to generate real-time insights that facilitate data-driven decision making.

The idea of creating this website and YouTube channel spawned during one of the several useful conversations that I have had with my second-year engineering students in my 800+ student class on engineering data analytics. For those who are not aware of these two technologies, here's a brief introduction:

Matlab is a software application built by the MathWorks. This technical software features one of the most comprehensive collection of software tools that can be and have been used to solve critical engineering and scientific problems. A large number of students around the world have access to Matlab through their universities and other sources.

Arduino is an open source hardware platform readily available in the market. This platform features a microcomputer chip that can be used to connect to sensors, actuators, and other devices, and create systems that can perform several automated tasks reliably and continually. Being open source, all the board designs and list of materials used to create the boards are freely available. Best of all, the entry level Arduino platforms start from $10. The one that we have selected is the Arduino UNO board. This board costs around $30.

So why combine the two? To an engineer such as myself, this is a match made in heaven. The Arduino board provides a simple and inexpensive method of electronically connecting with a plethora of devices and capture real-world data as and when it is generated. On the other hand, Matlab's raw computational prowess and plethora of sophisticated scientific software libraries allow one to analyze this real world data and convert it into information; information that is rich with actionable insights and qualitative acumen; information that can be used to answer difficult engineering and scientific questions.

The response to this website and the YouTube channel has been very encouraging. In just under 3 months since the launch, we have registered about 1500 video views from 70+ countries. These numbers are only expected to grow with time and more cutting-edge content. The average view duration is very close to the average length of our shorter videos.

As an educator, I strongly believe that as humanity becomes increasingly technological, we must provide our current and future generations of engineers and scientists the support structure and knowledge required to create systems that allow for effective and data-driven decision-making. Matlabarduino.org is a step in this direction. So the next time you have an idea, don't wait; simply 1) Plug an Arduino board to your computer 2) Start Matlab, and 3) Join the fun!

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The personal trainer visits the classroom

5/18/2013

2 Comments

I came across the personal trainer analogy and I made it a point to share it with my class of 400 students. (Yes, 400!)

The analogy is simple:
"My personal trainer will motivate, guide, and correctly train me, but at the end of the day, I am the one who has to workout. Similar to the personal trainers, my teachers will motivate, teach, and correctly train me, but at the end of the day, I am the one who has to do the class work."

Yesterday, as I was cleaning up my mailbox, I found this note from one of my students:

As I read the note, I could not help but imagine how powerful the personal trainer analogy is for it captures the very essence of life. As Bob Kelso from the TV series Scrubs once said, "Nothing in this world that's worth having comes easy".

To my students: thank you for the kind words, it is a privilege to stand in front of you and share whatever I know.

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Why Not Engineer Engineering Education?

3/27/2012

1 Comment

We live in complex times that bring with them several complex problems. Some of these problems are overarching engineering challenges -- battling global climate change, advancing healthcare systems, and improving urban infrastructure are just a few. These challenges are extremely grand in nature due to the environmental, social, economic, and societal interdependencies that surround them. Many of them have been identified and codified only in the past decade. There is no single solution that will address these challenges. The one thing that is clear, though, is that all these challenges require engineers to depart from the comfort zone of their traditional thinking processes, and dive into the pursuit of the unknown.

President Obama, during his 2011 State of the Union echoed this need by stating: “None of us can predict with certainty what the next big industry will be, or where the new jobs will come from. Thirty years ago, we couldn’t know that something called the Internet would lead to an economic revolution. What we can do – what America does better than anyone – is spark the creativity and imagination of our people. We are the nation that put cars in driveways and computers in offices; the nation of Edison and the Wright brothers; of Google and Facebook. In America, innovation doesn’t just change our lives. It’s how we make a living.”
Regardless of our political affiliations and ideologies, it is only fair to claim that the President is right. Innovation must be fostered. Innovators are highly creative people with a gritty personality that allows them to thrive in an uncertain and skeptical environment. Innovation, while initiated due to curiosity, and guided by necessities and bottom-lines, is an organic process. One cannot force innovation. One cannot control innovation. Innovation has and will continue to endure every test of time.

Then why is it that we expect to create a whole generation of innovative, problem solving millennials by using the controlled teaching methodologies of the early 1970s and 1980s? Many of these step-by-step teaching and learning methodologies were created when we were still battling small pox, when an iPad was only seen in Star Trek, and when these instant-gratification-seeking millennials weren't even born.

These are modern engineers in the making; they communicate via 140 character tweets, SMS, and Facebook. They like to experience things and get their feet wet, be it a laboratory experiment or a software project. They don't like waiting, and why should they wait? After all, they were thrust into the era of instant knowledge creation, curation, and sharing -- the era of holding an iPhone in their hand that allows them to "Google" about Einstein and "tweet" the search results. And who is responsible for this era? Us.

How is it that we expect our engineering students to address climate change and take an active role in eradicating -- not battling -- but eradicating once and for all, diseases like Cancer and HIV if the only thing we subject them to is sections of a textbook, mundane weekly homework assignments, and final exams?

When an 18-year-old student walks into his or her first lecture in an engineering school, why is it that we talk about textbooks, grade distributions and the schedule of exams? Why can't we gently make them aware of their role as the future problem solvers? After all, aren't these first-year engineering students the ones in whom we are placing our trust to come up with new technologies that will better our lives? The path to any meaningful scientific discovery or invention passes through valleys of setbacks, historically and statistically speaking. Why is it that our grading rubrics do not account for this necessity?

Aren't these engineering students a substantial chunk of our future investment portfolio? To increase the probability of a strong return on our investments, we must create a pedagogical ecosystem that provides conditions conducive to the genesis and sustainable perpetuation of these future innovators and creative problem solvers. We bear the responsibility of facilitating the growth and development of these modern engineers. Unless we use our pedagogical infrastructure to instill in them the sense that they matter and must step up to these challenges, we may miss out on the next Da Vinci, Einstein, or Steve Jobs. As an engineer and an educator, I often find myself asking: Why not rethink engineering education? Why not re-envision and humanize it? Why not step away from the cookie-cutter paradigm, and allow for individuality and creativity to flourish?

Why not engineer engineering education?

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Democratizing real-time data analytics education - one sensor at a time!

The personal trainer visits the classroom

Why Not Engineer Engineering Education?

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