Category Archives: Engineering
OFRAK, an Open Source IoT Reverse Engineering Tool, Is Finally Here – WIRED
At the 2012 DefCon security conference in Las Vegas, Ang Cui, an embedded device security researcher, previewed a tool for analyzing firmware, the foundational software that underpins any computer and coordinates between hardware and software. The tool was specifically designed to elucidate internet-of-things (IoT) device firmware and the compiled binaries running on anything from a home printer to an industrial door controller. Dubbed FRAK, the Firmware Reverse Analysis Console aimed to reduce overhead so security researchers could make progress assessing the vast and ever-growing population of buggy and vulnerable embedded devices rather than getting bogged down in tedious reverse engineering prep work. Cui promised that the tool would soon be open source and available for anyone to use.
This is really useful if you want to understand how a mysterious embedded device works, whether there are vulnerabilities inside, and how you can protect these embedded devices against exploitation, Cui explained in 2012. FRAK will be open source very soon, so were working hard to get that out there. I want to do one more pass, internal code review before you guys see my dirty laundry.
He was nothing if not thorough. A decade later, Cui and his company, Red Balloon Security, are launching Ofrak, or OpenFRAK, at DefCon in Las Vegas this week.
In 2012 I thought, heres a framework that would help researchers move embedded security forward. And I went on stage and said, I think the community should have it. And I got a number of emails from a number of lawyers, Cui told WIRED ahead of the release. Embedded security is a space that we absolutely need to have more good eyes and brains on. We needed it 10 years ago, and we finally found a way to give this capability out. So here it is.
Though it hadnt yet fulfilled its destiny as a publicly available tool, FRAK hasnt been languishing all these years either. Red Balloon Security continued refining and expanding the platform for internal use in its work with both IoT device makers and customers who need a high level of security from the embedded devices they buy and deploy. Jacob Strieb, a software engineer at Red Balloon, says the company always used FRAK in its workflow, but that Ofrak is an overhauled and streamlined version that Red Balloon itself has switched to.
Cuis 2012 demo of FRAK raised some hackles because the concept included tailored firmware unpackers for specific vendors products. Today, Ofrak is simply a general tool that doesnt wade into potential trade secrets or intellectual property concerns. Like other reverse engineering platforms, including the NSAs open source Ghidra tool, the stalwart disassembler IDA, or the firmware analysis tool Binwalk, Ofrak is a neutral investigative framework. And Red Balloons new offering is designed to integrate with these other platforms for easier collaboration among multiple people.
What makes it unique is its designed to provide a common interface for other tools, so the benefit is that you can use all different tools depending on what you have at your disposal or what works best for a certain project, Strieb says.
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OFRAK, an Open Source IoT Reverse Engineering Tool, Is Finally Here - WIRED
The James Webb Space Telescope makes stunning images thanks to these engineering solutions – Space.com
In 1989, a group of engineers first started working to design a space telescope that would change the way we see our universe. There was only one problem: much of the technology they would need didn't exist.
Those engineers and others went on to invent 10 brand new technologies in order to build what is now the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb), an observatory designed to do things that once seemed impossible. Engineers at contractors like Northrop Grumman, one of the private companies that worked on Webb with NASA, developed, tested and built the telescope. Here's some of the groundbreaking engineering they developed to make Webb work.
Webb is an infrared telescope, and since infrared radiation is shed as heat, the telescope's instruments had to be kept close to absolute zero, the coldest temperature possible in the universe. It was under these conditions that engineers had to test their designs for the observatory.
"If it has to operate in space at cryogenic temperatures, guess what? You got to show it meets its requirements [in] that environment," Charlie Atkinson, chief engineer at Northrop Grumman for JWST, told Space.com.
Gallery: James Webb Space Telescope's 1st photos
Engineers needed to make much of Webb's mirrors out of a material that wouldn't break in the extreme cold but was also super-light, since the telescope's mirror would be nearly 10 times bigger than the Hubble Space Telescope's mirror but also needed to be much lighter or the observatory would be too heavy to launch.
The engineers settled on beryllium a rare, super-light metal coated with an extremely thin layer of gold. But that choice meant that engineers had to come up with an entirely new way to make a very fine powder of pure beryllium metal called O-30-H so that it would be as stable as possible in cryogenic temperatures.
Then into the cold the mirrors went. Although the mirrors didn't break, they did deform slightly, Atkinson said. Here, the team faced two key challenges. First, the engineers had to make sure the mirror deformed the same way every time they got it extremely cold. Then they had to compensate for the effect by creating exactly inverse deformations at room temperature.
"They actually looked bad at room temperature so that they would be perfect at cryogenic temperature," Atkinson said.
In order to keep the telescope so cold, engineers needed to block out any trace of sunlight, a challenge they tackled by building a giant sunshield the size of a tennis court.
"I think one of the biggest challenges we had was the sunshield," Atkinson said.
The sunshield has five layers made of a film called Kapton, each coated in aluminum. The two layers closest to the sun also have a silicon coating on the side facing the sun to reflect as much light and heat back into space as possible, so the engineers were working with complex materials.
Next, the team had to make sure each layer of the shield was in exactly the right position. The layers aren't parallel to each other they're angled precisely to make sure any heat made by the spacecraft part of the observatory never makes it to the telescope and can "bounce its way out."
"If they were angled [another] way the heat would be trapped," Atkinson said.
Even the less glamorous parts of the observatory were puzzles to solve. The greatest challenge that the engineers faced might have been designing the structure that the telescope's mirrors rest on, Atkinson said.
This structure, also called the backplane, is crucial because it has to hold the 18 primary mirror segments in position relative to one another. If the support structure didn't do that well, the image quality would be ruined. For Webb, there was hardly any room for error the goal was to hold each mirror segment in place with errors no larger than tens of nanometers, which are billionths of a meter. Previous technologies had only gotten that margin down to tens of micrometers 1,000 times less than Webb's goal.
It was a big ask, to say the least.
Like the rest of the telescope, engineers had to test the backplane in cryogenic temperatures. But where engineers knew from the start how to test the mirrors, the support system was trickier. In order to reach the precision needed for Webb, engineers had to meld two technologies in a whole new way. The result, called speckle pattern interferometry, uses lasers and video technology to measure how much the rough structure deformed in the cold.
"[We] had to create a technology to validate another technology," Atkinson said. "That was probably what I thought was one of the biggest challenges."
It took decades here on Earth to engineer the materials used to make Webb, but they're now all in space, and so far, working exactly as they should. The work of engineers at Northrop Grumman and other companies that helped build Webb is finally done, and Atkinson could not be more thrilled to see what comes next.
"It's incredibly amazing that we are on the verge of handing [JWST] over to the scientists," he said at a press briefing in June. "We've got this tool that they can now use to uncover things that, you know, we don't even know how to ask the question of right now."
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Duke-led Center Seeks to Examine and Engineer the Microbial Communities of Indoor Spaces – Duke University
A multidisciplinary team of researchers led by Duke University will undertake an ambitious endeavor to understand and improve the microbial communities that inhabit the structures in which we live, work and play what scientists call the built environment.
The Engineering Research Center for Precision Microbiome Engineering, or PreMiEr, aims to develop diagnostic tools and engineering approaches that promote building designs for preventing the colonization of harmful bacteria, fungi or viruses while encouraging beneficial microorganisms.
PreMiEr is funded by a five-year, $26 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), renewable for a second five-year, $26 million term. The Duke center is one of four new Engineering Research Centers (ERCs) announced by the agency today.
This center touches on the struggles any parent or caregiver undergoes because they want to make the best decisions about what their loved ones are exposed to, but thats a really difficult thing to do because we dont yet know what a healthy microbiome might look like in the places we spend most of our time. Our goal is to start to fill those data gaps and lay the foundation for researchers to dig into these important questions.
claudia gunsch | director of premier
Joining Duke in the effort are researchers from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, and North Carolina State University.
This center touches on the struggles any parent or caregiver undergoes because they want to make the best decisions about what their loved ones are exposed to, said Claudia Gunsch, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Duke and the director of PreMiEr.
But thats a really difficult thing to do because we dont yet know what a healthy microbiome might look like in the places we spend most of our time, Gunsch said. Our goal is to start to fill those data gaps and lay the foundation for researchers to dig into these important questions.
Human beings spend more than 90% of their time within built environments the homes, offices, cars, hospitals, stores and other manmade enclosures that underpin modern society. Yet very little is known about the ever-present but largely invisible populations of microorganisms (built environment microbiomes) that grow and live in these spaces.
Thats a big blind spot, given that there are roughly just as many bacterial cells as there are human cells within a human body, and there are bound to be interactions between those microbes and those in the built environment. Diseases such as asthma, diabetes, obesity, irritable bowel disease and many others have already been linked to changes within the human microbiome. Understanding which microbes are thriving in the spaces we spend most of our time and how they affect us and our own microbiomes is the first step toward teasing out their potential health effects, both positive and negative.
Duke is thrilled to lead this effort and expand upon our deep collaborations with academic, industry, and community partners, interdisciplinary research culture, innovative spirit, and commitment to broadening participation in STEM.
Vincent Price | president of duke university
On the heels of a global pandemic costing over five million lives globally, PreMiEr outlines a timely and audacious vision for microbiome engineering in the built environment that could help us avoid such calamities while leading to tremendous impact on our quality of life, said Jerome Lynch, Vinik Dean of Dukes Pratt School of Engineering.
We want to be able to go into hospital rooms or other closed environments and devise treatment strategies for unwanted microbes, Gunsch added. Thats something that is achievable in the short term. For the long term, we want to develop the tools, procedures and knowledge base needed to identify and define what a healthy microbiome looks like and devise approaches for promoting those healthy microbiomes across a wide range of built environments.
PreMiEr will focus its efforts through an inclusive and collaborative lens to ensure that any of the questions asked or solutions pursued incorporate a wide range of cultural and societal viewpoints. This is reflected in the structure of the research center, which includes a core area for investigating the societal and ethical implications of microbiome engineering to innovate responsibly.
Of the more than 40 researchers, almost half are women and nearly 20% belong to historically marginalized groups in STEM. Through its partnership with NC A&T, the nations largest historically black college and university, and other institutions sharing the goal of broadening participation in STEM, the center will contribute to the development of a diverse workforce capable of tackling these critical challenges into the future.
Duke is thrilled to lead this effort and expand upon our deep collaborations with academic, industry, and community partners, interdisciplinary research culture, innovative spirit, and commitment to broadening participation in STEM, said Duke President Vincent Price.
For decades, NSF Engineering Research Centers have transformed technologies and fostered innovations in the United States through bold research, collaborative partnerships, and a deep commitment to inclusion and broadening participation. The new NSF centers will continue the legacy of impacts that improve lives across the Nation.
Sethuraman Panchanathan | director of nsf
Joining Gunsch on the PreMiEr leadership team are four distinguished faculty from neighboring North Carolina institutions:
The NSF ERC program supports convergent research that will lead to strong societal impact. Each ERC has interacting foundational components that go beyond the research project, including engineering workforce development at all participant stages, fostering a culture of diversity and inclusion where all participants gain mutual benefit, and creating value within an innovation ecosystem that will outlast the lifetime of the ERC. The program was created in 1984 to bring technology-based industry and universities together in an effort to strengthen the competitive position of American industry in the global marketplace.
For decades, NSF Engineering Research Centers have transformed technologies and fostered innovations in the United States through bold research, collaborative partnerships, and a deep commitment to inclusion and broadening participation," said Sethuraman Panchanathan, director of NSF. The new NSF centers will continue the legacy of impacts that improve lives across the Nation.
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West Virginia DOH awarded Marshall Engineerings Employer of the Year – WOWK 13 News
HUNTINGTON, WV (WOWK) The West Virginia Division of Highways has been named the Marshall University College of Engineering and Computer Science Co-Op programs 2022 Employer of the Year.
Marshall University says the agency has provided dozens of students with hands-on learning opportunities in the civil, mechanical and electrical engineering fields. The Co-Op program says the DOH was chosen based on the opportunities provided as well as student feedback.
We are exceptionally pleased to be named Marshall University Employer of the Year, said Jimmy Wriston, P.E., West Virginia Secretary of Transportation. One of the Justice administrations primary goals is to utilize partnerships to build a workforce for the futureWe appreciate this recognition very much.
Tanner Drown, co-op coordinator for the College of Engineering and Computer Sciences, says the DOH has hired 20 students this summer who will move on to full-time positions after they graduate.
The West Virginia Division of Highways does an incredible job of providing co-op experiences and employment opportunities to CECS students, said Drown.
The DOH has been connected to the Co-Op program since it began in 2021. Marshall officials say students have gained real-life work experience through the partnership that they can apply to their academic training. West Virginia Department of Transportation state highway engineer, says the program is also beneficial to the DOH.
It introduces the students to the incredible opportunities DOH offers to developtheir skills and give them a real-world feel to how WVDOH operates as an organization and a team, Reed said. Co-op also opens up future employment opportunities with DOH.
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West Virginia DOH awarded Marshall Engineerings Employer of the Year - WOWK 13 News
A Deeper Dive Into Reverse Engineering With A CT Scanner – Hackaday
Weve recently got a look at how [Ken Shirriff] used an industrial CT scanner as a reverse engineering tool. The results were spectacular, with pictures that clearly showed the internal arrangement of parts that havent seen the light of day since the module was potted back in the 60s. And now, [Ken]s cohort [Curious Marc] has dropped a video with more detail on the wonderful machine, plus deep dives into more Apollo-era hardware
If you liked seeing the stills [Ken] used to reverse engineer the obscure flip-flop module, youre going to love seeing [Marc] using the Lumafield scanners 3D software to non-destructively examine several Apollo artifacts. First to enter the sample chamber of the CT scanner was a sealed module called the Central Timing Equipment, which served as the master clock for the Apollo Command Module. The boxs magnesium case proved to be no barrier to the CT scanners beam, and the 3D model that was built up from a series of 2D images was astonishingly detailed. The best part about the virtual models is the ability to slice through them in any plane [Marc] used this feature to hunt down the clocks quartz crystal.
[Marc]s Apollo gyroscope was next up, and the look inside the sealed case was very revealing. The details of the mechanical construction were stunning, right down to the bearings supporting the gyro rotor. A power supply module that had seen better days also got the treatment; its scans revealed the exploded capacitor responsible for its rough outward appearance. All the scan data are publicly available on Lumafields website, although youll need to create an account if you want to play with the models.
As for the scanner itself: is it something that could be built at home? Perhaps. Weve seen plenty of homebrew X-ray machines, and even a CT scanner or two. Let us know if you tackle a build like this wed love to get a look inside.
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A Deeper Dive Into Reverse Engineering With A CT Scanner - Hackaday
BB Engineering At The K Show 2022: Plastics Expertise And Innovative PET Recycling For High-Quality Products – Textile World Magazine
REMSCHEID, Germany August 11, 2022 As a sub-exhibitor of Oerlikon, BB Engineering will present itself as an expert in extrusion, mixing and filtration as well as an innovator for PET recycling with the VacuFil and VarioFil R+ systems at the K.
BB Engineering is no newcomer to the plastics industry. As a joint venture of Brckner Maschinenbau (leading with film extrusion lines) and Oerlikon Barmag (leading with man-made fiber spinning lines), BB Engineering took over the extruder division of Oerlikon Barmag already in 2002. BB Engineering can thus draw on more than 60 years of experience in extruder construction and is constantly engaged in development work to further optimize its products. To date, approx. 20,000 extruders have been delivered worldwide. The extruders are mainly used in film and synthetic fiber spinning lines for PP, PET, PA and PE. BB Engineering is the exclusive supplier for its parent companies and also sells extrusion and filtration technology to third party customers. The portfolio also includes various continuous and discontinuous polymer filters from small to large (0.1-40m filter area) as well as various polymer mixers.
The quality of the melt and thus of the end product is BB Engineerings top priority for all components and equipment. Our company has always stood for high-quality, durable machines and components that enable our customers to manufacture first-class products. A high-quality melt is crucial for trouble-free production and good, consistent product properties underlines Dr. Klaus Schfer, Managing Director.
BB Engineering has been focusing its development work increasingly on recycling technologies for several years. In addition to extruders, filters and mixers that are suitable for both recycling processes and the processing of recyclate, BB Engineering offers a complete PET recycling plant called VacuFil.
With VacuFil, BB Engineering has developed an innovative and unique PET LSP recycling process. And here, too, the focus is on product quality. The process combines gentle large-scale filtration and targeted IV regulation for consistently outstanding rPET melt quality. Thus, much more than simple downcycling is possible with VacuFil. VacuFil processes a wide range of input materials post-production and post-consumer. The patented key component Visco+ vacuum filter removes volatile impurities quickly and reliably. VacuFil is a modular system that can be designed for different recycling applications. There are no limits to the downstream processes. Simple granulation is possible, but also direct feeding into further processing, e.g. in the synthetic fiber spinning mill. BBE offers VacuFil in combination with its own VarioFil compact spinning plant to produce polyester yarn.
Exactly this process can be visited during the K show at an open house of BB Engineering and Oerlikon Barmag. Not far from Dsseldorf, at the companys site in Remscheid, BBE and Oerlikon Barmag will open their doors and give customers and interested parties an insight into the technical center. Here, visitors can experience the VacuFil Visco+ recycling technology in operation with a connected VarioFil spinning plant and see live how high-quality recycling yarn is produced from PET waste.
Posted: August 11, 2022
Source: BB Engineering GmbH
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New Wisk engineering hub to support its 6th generation aircraft development – Inceptive Mind
The market for electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircrafts has grown substantially in the past few years. It looks to have a bright future, but many challenges are still ahead. There are numerous number of eVTOL developers across the world, each claiming to be better thanks to some innovative features and functions.
One of them is Wisk Aero, a California-based urban air mobility company that develops self-flying eVTOL aircrafts designed to be operated as air taxis. The company is continuing its global expansion with the launch of a new engineering hub in Montreal, Canada. The hub will be dedicated to the ongoing development of its 6th generation aircraft, to be revealed later this year.
Wisk is launching the new hub with existing Montreal-based personnel and intends to grow this presence to approximately thirty employees by the end of the year.
Wisk has been experiencing rapid growth, driven by a tremendous increase in interest for its mission and technology. In June this year, Wisk also hit other milestones, expanding in Australia and launching a partnership with the City of Long Beach.
Its new Montreal hub is part of a broader effort to further expand its global team of industry-leading talent around the world.
We are excited about the launch of our new Montreal hub, said Sebastien Vigneron, Sr. Vice President of Engineering and Programs. Canadas forward-looking approach to aviation and interest in AAM, combined with its pool of experienced aerospace talent, make it an ideal location for Wisk as we expand our global footprint. This expansion highlights the increasing global interest in our mission to bring safe, everyday flight to everyone, and we look forward to continuing that mission with support from our new Montreal-based hub.
The announcement of the new Montreal hub follows Wisks recent expansion into Australia. In addition to Montreal and its headquarters and facilities around the San Francisco Bay Area, Wisk now has a presence in Atlanta (Georgia), New Zealand, and Australia.
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New Wisk engineering hub to support its 6th generation aircraft development - Inceptive Mind
Formula E Racing Inspires this Northeastern Engineer – News @ Northeastern – Northeastern University
Omkar Ligade was stationed at Turn 4 when the first crash happened. A sudden rainstorm had sent the electric cars sliding across the city streets of Brooklyn.
The race leader lost traction and went into the side protection boards, says Ligade, a Northeastern graduate student in mechanical engineering. Ligade was volunteering as a flagging and communication marshall at the July 16 New York City E-Prix when a pile-up of crashes resulted in an early conclusion to the race.
Ligade brought home a souvenira fender from a crashed Jaguar.
Fortunately no one was hurt, Ligade says. The crashes werent actually loud because the rain reduced their speed, and the carbon fiber [chassis] is really good at absorbing the impact.
Though electric cars are less noisy than traditional gas-powered racers, Ligade found the New York event to be very loud.Very few people know about it because Formula E is in the early stages, Ligade says. But its going to have its boom within a few years.
Formula E was launched in 2014 in alliance with the 73-year-old global Formula 1 circuit, whose growing U.S. audience has been driven by the Netflix reality series Drive to Survive. True to the spirit of electric vehicles, Formula E teams must balance the desire to win with the need to conserve energy as each car is provided with a limited battery for the 45-minute races.
Ligade fell in love with the sport as a mechanical engineering undergraduate at Pimpri Chinchwad College Of Engineering in his native India, where in 2016 he co-founded Team Solarium, a student club that designed and built an electric car annually over three years. The progression made Ligade proud.
The third-year finished product was really lovely, says Ligade, noting that its speed topped out at 80 kilometers per hour (50 mph).
Formula E creates innovations that can be passed onto consumer products. The newest racers feature enhanced regenerative front-mounted brakes that replenish the batterya system so efficient that the cars no longer require a second set of hydraulic brakes in the rear.
The racing department sits directly underneath the technical development department, Allan McNish, Audi Sports Formula E team principal, told Time. There is always the very close hand-in-hand relationship between what we do on the track and what actually comes on the road [for consumers].Formula E is helping to change perceptions of electric vehicles as underperforming. The current racers top out at 280 kilometers per hour (almost 175mph), just 20 kmh behind Formula 1 cars, and their acceleration from zero to 100 kmh in 2.8 seconds rates only 0.2 seconds slower than gas-powered counterparts.
I like that electric vehicles can generate energy, Ligade says. In gas-powered cars, once youve burned the petrol, you cant get that fuel back.
Instead of offering pit stops, Formula E offers attack mode zones on the edges of the track that trigger four minutes of increased power. The five most popular driversbased on a pre-race vote by fansreceive additional power surges, a novelty that Ligade loves.
The evolution of electric vehicles continues to inspire Ligade amid his ongoing co-op with Hasbro, the Rhode Island-based toy manufacturer, where he is working as a reliability engineer.
Omkar is always looking to better understand the why in what we do, which is an essential trait of great engineers, says his supervisor, Lee Tympanick, a senior reliability engineer for quality assurance at Hasbro. He isnt afraid to offer his perspective on a different approach to accomplish a task. He is also passionate about learning new thingsprocedures, equipment, products, skillswhich tells me he wants to keep improving himself to be the best he can be.
Will his love of Formula E drive Ligade to a career in electric vehicles?
Im really interested in designing anything, he says. Designing is the gateway to finding the solution to any problem. It helps you find a better way.
For media inquiries, please contact media@northeastern.edu.
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Formula E Racing Inspires this Northeastern Engineer - News @ Northeastern - Northeastern University
Clemson and GE team up to bring more engineers into the workforce – UPSTATE BUSINESS JOURNAL – Upstate Business Journal
Employers are finding engineers difficult to come by, but Clemson University is one of the institutions thats looking to make a dent in that.
Through a partnership with GE called the Next Engineers program, high school students or Next Engineers can get up close with engineering through Engineering Academy Greenville. The program exists to help increase not only the number of students entering engineering but also the diversity of those students. According to a recent Pew Research study, only 17 percent of those entering the field were Black or Latino.
On July 22, a cohort of 11th-grade students had the opportunity to check out Clemson University and see some of Watt Family Innovation Center, testing out virtual reality headsets and 3-D printers. Next Engineers also got a look at the Clemson Energy Visualization and Analytics Center, a facility that monitors the carbon footprint of every object on Clemsons campus, down to a tree.
Ive wanted to be a mechanical engineer since I watched the Imagineering documentary on Disney Plus, said Hadley Medeiros, a junior at Daniel High School in Central, South Carolina. It shows how they built the attractions at the Disney theme parks.
The program offers three experiences for students, depending on grade level. They are:
Along with the Greenville schools that Clemson works with serving Greenville, Pickens, Oconee and Spartanburg counties there are hubs in Johannesburg, South Africa; Staffordshire, United Kingdom; and Cincinnati, Ohio.
Through the program, students learn how to think like engineers, with the ultimate goal of moving on to a secondary education in engineering. Students are expected to complete 80 hours per year of learning outside the normal classroom environment and can be eligible for a $20,000 scholarship from GE following completion of the program. Students get everything from immersive design challenges to college readiness workshops.
They come see me here at the University about two times a month, typically on Saturdays, said Brittany Fatima Sanders, project manager for Next Engineers Greenville. We do engineering design challenges; they meet with faculty members and participate in activities like this to get them excited about being engineers and it works.
Source: Next Engineers Greenville
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How I Moved From Construction to Technology – Engineering News-Record
I made a career change three and a half years ago, and it was the best decision Ive made in my professional life. From time to time, Im asked about that change what motivated it, how I landed at the Oracle Innovation Lab after a career in construction with LendLease, and where my experience in academia fits into everything. In discussing my move, I have found myself repeating three simple pieces of advice I would offer to anyone contemplating a similar career move:
I have always been interested in technology and how people interact with it. I also love building things. My first childhood memories are of my brother and me playing with LEGO bricks. I always cared more about how to build with them than the look or feel of the finished product, and I think that helped propel my early decision to become a civil engineer. During my time as an undergrad, I recognized that I really enjoyed management more than engineering, and I adjusted my focus accordingly.
While I was getting my masters, I discovered I loved teaching others. At the same time, I wasnt interested in becoming a full-time academic, so I found a compromise and a challenge: I decided to work in the construction industry while also continuing with my education to get my PhD. That way, I was able live in both worlds. Once I finished my doctorate, I took an adjunct faculty role at Northwestern University to follow my passion for teaching and continued working full time at Lendlease.
I saw firsthand the disconnect between academia and industry and my work since has in many ways involved efforts to bridge the two. Ultimately, my path has been defined by finding ways to pursue work that I enjoy and adjusting as new areas or ideas captured my interest.
I spent several months networking with others in an attempt to enter the technology field before realizing that my best route was to focus on my own domain, construction.
Thats when, in 2010, a good friend and I organized a conference called TechforConstruction that sought to unite people from industry and academia at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Our first event drew around 150 participants and greatly exceeded our expectations, making us even more excited about bringing these two worlds together.
We hosted three of these events in total, and at the last conference I was asked to write for an industry publication. After finding that process rewarding, I began writing about different tech and construction topics each quarter. The exposure from these articles eventually opened up additional opportunities to speak at conferences about the practical use of tech in the field and to serve as an advisor for a startup. All the while, I continued working on projects that involved large-scale technology implementations in the telecommunications infrastructure field. All of these opportunities came from that first idea to focus on my domain by exploring the nexus of construction and technology.
I have always loved learning, but it became harder and harder to find the time after graduation as life got busier. At some point, I decided to pick a new topic every day and block out time to read about it. Then I went a step further and set up Google alerts for these topics that would be sent to my inbox every evening at 6 pm. It became routine for me to sit in a dark room and read the days articles as I rocked my child to sleep. I found having a dedicated time when I could focus on learning amid a busy work and personal life really helped me.
I still have this habit, but in my current role as co-founder and leader of the Oracle Industry Lab, I work with some amazing experts and innovators who expose me to new ideas every day. The Lab team works side-by-side with customers and partners in a hands-on simulated industry setting to turn ideas into solutions we can implement and use today. We have worked with leading companies including FARO Technologies, which leveraged the Lab to test and develop FARO Trek, an automated scanning integration with Boston Dynamics mobile robot Spot. Ive also taken on the challenge of expanding my domain to other industries in the past few years. I now can see the opportunities and similarities between multiple industries from construction to telecom to utilities to hospitality to food and beverage, just to name a few. So much to learn!
As I said, my decision to take on this role as vice president of innovation at the Oracle Industry Lab was the best career choice Ive ever made. It has allowed me to pursue my interests and continually learn in a community of kindred spirits. Im beyond grateful and thrilled that every single day I get to work with such talented team members, customers, and partners.
Burcin Kaplanoglu is vice president, innovation at the Oracle Industry Lab in Deerfield, Ill. He is active in industry organizations and onLinkedInwhere he provides educational content related to technology, innovation, robotics, AI and industry use cases.
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How I Moved From Construction to Technology - Engineering News-Record