Date: 2/1/02 2:19 PM

From: Edmund Yeh

Dear all,

Here are my "greatest hits" of EE from the signals and systems side:

1. Fourier Series and the Sampling Theorem
2. Feedback Control
3. Entropy and the Source Coding (Data Compression) Theorem
4. Channel Capacity and Channel Coding (Error Correcting Coding) Theorem

Edmund

Date: 2/4/02 2:30 AM

From: pjk

Dear All -

A somewhat different perspective, among several:

The Stanford Alumni Association publishes "The Portable Stanford"
series of books. This includes some classics like James Adams's
"Conceptual Blockbusting" that I have used in courses. It also has a
title from 1992 called "Brief Lessons in High Technology" with a
series of seven essays by various notables, edited by James Meindl:

- The Ubiquitous Integrated Circuit
- Photonics
- Computer Architecture: Providing the Framework
- Software: A New Form of Literature
- An Overview of Expert Systems (Artificial Intelligence)
- Robotics
- Telecommunications

While this skirts rather too closely to the survey format we want to
avoid, by selection among the topics and deepening them, we could use
this list to look at possible topics and the depth vs. breadth issues,
i.e. abstraction vs. tangible reality.

All best, --Peter

Date: 2/4/02 11:03 AM

From: Jung Han

How about this one "Vacuum Tubes and Transistors" There are plenty of
principles and colorful stories associated with this subject.

Jung

Date: 2/5/02 1:48 AM

From: pjk

Dear All -

In the spirit of Edmund's "greatest hits" suggestion, I offer Color TV.
That has become so pervasive that it isn't even a self-conscious
commodity anymore, it just _is_.

And it has been since the FCC approved on Dec. 17, 1953 the color
transmissions based on the NTSC standard. Until digital TV becomes
more prominent, the NTSC standard stands as one of the, to me, marvels
of technological forsight of the 20th century.

And NTSC standard subsumes both AM and FM radio principles, themselves
noteworthy "hits".

In a very different vein I suggest power distribution, the national electric grid.
This could start with simple AC electric circuit ideas manifest on a gratifyingly large scale

All best, --Peter

Date: 2/5/02 12:45 PM

From: Richard Lethin

Peter,

May I suggest a "future" orientation (with the notion that the course be
structured as some interleaving of past/present/future):

- nanotechnology: comparative readings of Feynman's "lots of room at the
bottom" lecture, Drexler's Nanotechnology, Harvard's Whitesides, and
Mark Reed

- quantum computing

- cryptography (RSA algorithm, quantum crypto) with accompanying
readings in the impact of Turing's advances in W.W.II cracking Enigma
(and the hardware behind it) as well as "visionary" works by T.C.May and
the early 90's musings of the cryptoanarchists and how it played out in
the .com boom, and still has to play out. Could also link in the
Clipper Chip debate.

- computer graphics; readings on basic rendering algorithms, historical
study of some of the early Evans and Sutherland machines (if it could be
found) and some of the modern rendering engines (e.g., "take apart" a
Sony Playstation II and look at the Emotion Engine). Maybe link into
readings of Mirror Worlds.

Richard

Date: 2/7/02 9:19 AM

From: T.P. Ma

If a major purpose of the intro course is to attract student into our
major, then I like the topics in "Brief Lessons in High Technology" edited by
James Meindl.

Other topics such as Internet related, smart-weapons, GPS guidance
systems, cell phones will attract the freshmen's attention.

/T.P.

Date: 2/14/02 3:47 PM

From: Rimas Vaisnys

Dear Colleagues,

I'll put the adage "better late than never" to a test with this
note. Perhaps you will find it motivates your attendance at today's
meeting; if not that, then perhaps it will fuel the generation of your
suggestions.

Best, Rimas
-------------------------------------------------------------------
Draft for discussion - RV

If I had to give a one sentence summary what engineers do I would
say: Engineers are people who translate thoughts into object with the
intent that the objects be universally used in the society. Given a second
sentence I would say something like: Engineers design and synthesize the
objects or processes by composing them from smaller units whose properties
and behavior is understood through analysis of these subunits or of the
symbolic representations of the subunits. Given further room for
expression I would begin to specialize the discussion to specific fields of
engineering, by identifying the factual knowledge and concepts which are
basic to a field. I would also try to convey how the practitioners in that
field think.

What are the important phenomena and concepts that appear in electrical
engineering, important enough to make sure that they are somehow, directly
or indirectly, introduced in an introductory course? Let me offer a
preliminary list:

Current and voltage (flow and effort), and the relation to power
Transmission of power
Conserved quantities
Signals and information
Non-conserved quantities
System and environment
System: inputs, outputs, and internal states
Behavioral histories and states
Transition function and recursion
Coupling of systems and physical basis for constraints
Fan-in and fan-out
Composition of systems (synthesis of systems from subsystems)
Combination and sequence
Feedback
Information and power
Sensing and interfacing
Control
Representation of physical processes
Dynamic range, resolution, and noise
Discretization
Sampling and interpolation
Linearity and superposition
Fourier analysis and synthesis
Sampling theorem
Representation of symbols by physical processes
Boolean algebra
Programmability
Computation
Universal Turing Machine
Complexity
Synchrony and asynchrony
Networks of systems (information, signal and power)
Reliability
The real and the virtual
Object and process

I do not think that these concepts should be explicitly presented in any
course, least of all in an introductory one. My suggestion is that the
course be devoted to an exposition, perhaps better an exploration, of how a
real general purpose computer functions. The goal of the course should be
to induce in the student a state of understanding of such an artifact, to
provide motivation for further work in electrical engineering, and to make
certain that the student knows the necessary basic facts and methods of
electrical engineering, to be able to do more advanced work. A student
would be expected to demonstrate quantitative knowledge and quantitative
thinking of the issues explored in the course, and possibly would know that
material well enough to generalize it to novel situations.