Vision of Engineering in the New Global Economy

In this presentation, we discuss the trends in the new global economy with specific emphasis on computer industry and their impact on computer education. These new trends include globalization of science including software and hardware development, the emergence of integration of computing and life sciences, interdisciplinary trends, critical needs for making systems easy to use, on time and budget, and with adequate performance. We also discuss demands on future computer scientists and engineers to possess not only technical skills, but also communication, process, and organizational skills.

We introduce the leading computer technologies today as well as research and education challenges in the areas of computer science and engineering. We present several examples of successful high tech companies and their technologies and products, and discuss their vision and strategies for success.

In the lights of these global trends, we briefly describe our successful research projects: (1) Technologies for Coastline Security, a multi-year project funded by US Office of Naval Research, and (2) One Pass to Production, a multi-year project funded by Motorola in the area of designing modern wireless devices. In the first project, we describe the development of 3D video and images systems and cameras and related video and image surveillance and analysis algorithms. These algorithms perform detection of the moving objects of interest, identify their locations, perform tracking of moving objects, and do object classification and creation of databases. In the second project, the main emphasis is in developing new tools and techniques for reducing the development life cycle of new 3G and 4G wireless systems, which include Web browsers, two-way video conferencing, Java games, video and MP3 players, and many additional multimedia features.

Prof. Borko Furht

Florida Atlantic University
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Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Dr. Borko Furht is Chairman and Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton, Florida. He is the founder and director of the Multimedia Laboratory at FAU, funded by National Science Foundation. Before joining FAU, he was a vice president of research and a senior director of development at Modcomp, a computer company in Fort Lauderdale, an associate professor at University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, and a senior scientist in the Institute "Boris Kidric-Vinca", in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from University of Belgrade, Yugoslavia. His research interests include multimedia systems and applications, video processing, wireless multimedia, multimedia security, video databases, and Internet engineering.