Perspectives of information and communication technologies for engineering education

Abstract

The information and communication technologies of today and tomorrow are characterized by: the Internet and its related technological networks; mobile telecommunication systems; video-based multimedia application for communication and information; and speech recognition/automated speech output. They are developing into embedded systems with invisible PC-free interfaces and into new breeds of robots and Multi-Agent Systems. These systems have started to change the technical and organizational structure of all human-machine-systems and their control tasks. In this paper, some aspects of these changes are described in view of the future roles of engineers within society. The paper is based on the memorandum which was drafted by an international expert group to be presented at the Congress on Information and Communication during the First World Engineers' Convention, 19-21 June 2000, Hannover, Germany. Subsequently this memorandum was discussed and agreed on by the participants of the Congress workshops. These participants were several hundred engineers from all over the world. Their ideas and concepts have been integrated into this paper.