• Question: What does engineering mean to you?

    Asked by 848artk49 to Fran, Peppe, Greg, Petros, Pooja on 15 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Greg Chance

      Greg Chance answered on 15 Nov 2017:

      It means looking at the world and understanding what the rules are. Then using those rules to solve problems or find ways to make things better!

    • Photo: Petros Papapanagiotou

      Petros Papapanagiotou answered on 16 Nov 2017:

      Engineering is my passion, my job, and my way of being creative. Writing programs is sort of like art to me. I get to create new things that people can use. It is a way to express myself and how I can make a computer work and what I can make it do.

    • Photo: Fran Zuch

      Fran Zuch answered on 16 Nov 2017:

      Right now it means a great job, lots of challenges and the possibility to find awesome solutions to everyday problems. And maybe create something that will help future generations or further our understanding. I think this just makes it an exciting area to work for.

    • Photo: Giuseppe Cotugno

      Giuseppe Cotugno answered on 20 Nov 2017:

      Engineering means making approximations and finding the right trade off. For example, a mathematician says that the line crossing two points has an infinite number of points (this is the theory, when things are ideal). An engineer is given the job of drawing lines on a computer using a software. Computers have limited memory, so they cannot draw an infinite number or points on screen. Hence the engineer decides that 1000 points are enough for a line drawn on screen because the points are so close that the human eyes do not make any difference between a 1000 point line and a 1500 one (this is one approximation of the theory, tailored to the problem to solve). Another engineer is given a similar task of drawing a line on a computer, but this line will not only be seen by a person but an AI program will have to be able to distinguish the line from the rest of the background (like an autonomous car detecting white lines on the road with a camera). At this point the engineer decides that 1000 points are too few, but 2000 are enough because an AI software requires more information than a human eye to distinguish a line from everything else correctly

Comments