Tag: engineering

The Jobs Robots Won’t Take

Posted on by robbie

In April 2017, the U.S. unemployment rate dropped to the lowest level in a decade. And while there are many factors to consider, there’s evidence that automation and the rise of robots may not eliminate as many jobs as projected. Here are some of the sectors offering long-term job security for decades to come.

CLEAN ENERGY

The fastest growing profession in the country: wind turbine technicians.
Solar energy is also a bright spot for the unemployed and underemployed, “growing at a rate 12 times faster than the rest of the U.S. economy,” according a 2017 report published by Environmental Defense Fund. The majority of this growth consists of installation jobs. Robots can’t climb onto rooftops to mount photovoltaic panels (or repair them), which means there’s an ever-growing number of positions for living, breathing workers.

EDUCATION, HEALTHCARE AND CUSTOMER RELATIONS

“Where humanity matters there will be humans,” says business advisor and technology consultant Shelly Palmer.
Schools, hospitals and businesses continue to need workers to do “people things” since robots can only react to predictive behaviors or conduct menial tasks. “Robots do not yet have the ability to perform complex tasks like negotiation or persuading, and they are not as proficient in generating new ideas as they are at solving problems,” says Mynul Khan, chief executive officer of Field Nation in an op-ed for Tech Crunch.
To learn how education could adapt in an automated world, check out this additional reading:
How to Prepare for an Automated Future

ENGINEERING AND ARCHITECTURE

The number of architectural and engineering jobs has more than tripled from last year’s average of 2,000 each month to 7,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the industry isn’t just having a moment. It’s estimated by 2022, biomedical engineering will experience 23 percent growth, environmental engineering 12 percent and civil engineering (the field with the most positions) 8.4 percent.
Fueling the demand for this non-automated workforce? An aging population and crumbling infrastructure.

MAINTENANCE

Call it “Rise of the Maintenance Workforce.” While robots are clearly putting pressure on the American labor force, when they break, humans are needed to fix them. The demand for people who can repair hardware and software, as well as code new programs, is expected to steadily increase. By 2022, there may be more than half a million new jobs in robotic and machine learning maintenance, installation and repair.  Some labor experts project that modern technologies will ultimately create more jobs than they destroy.
This gradual shift can best be witnessed in U.S. manufacturing, which has shed almost 5 million jobs since 2000. The auto industry has introduced around 52,000 robots during the past seven years, helping to spur the creation of nearly 260,000 jobs. A 2013 study done by the International Federation of Robots (which despite its name is not made up of robots; rather it’s a group of tech industry leaders) estimated that 10 to 15 percent of jobs in the auto sector were created because robots and machines were introduced to assembly lines.
To learn more about how robotics is affecting manufacturing, check out this additional reading:
The New Hire: How a New Generation of Robots Is Transforming Manufacturing
How Artificial Intelligence and Robots Will Radically Transform the Economy

There’s More to Innovation Than Asking ‘What’s Next?’

Posted on by robbie

Omoju Miller, a self-described futurist (someone who studies the future’s possibilities), enjoys picturing tomorrow. As a Nigerian woman who settled in the Bay Area, she’s already torn down historical barriers to work as a software engineer in Silicon Valley, a white man’s world. But in envisioning a new society, Miller isn’t thinking only of contemporary struggles; she’s pondering what humanity will need next. Take one of her projects: Hiphopathy, where she’s using machine learning to parse rappers’ metaphorical language, in the hopes of teaching a computer to think conceptually, developing, in the process, a form of artificial intelligence.
Recently, NationSwell spoke with Miller about true visionaries that inspire her and the lessons we can all take away from their avant-garde thinking.
What’s the best advice you have ever been given on leadership?
I would say it’s learning how to listen and learning how to not do things for people. A good leader is somebody that enables others to rise to their own challenges. In leadership, it’s so easy sometimes to just want to jump in and do the work yourself because you can do it a lot faster. But a good leader does not do that. A good leader is a teacher who supports you as you stumble and figure it out for yourself.
What’s on your nightstand?
The book I just read — well, it’s not on my proverbial nightstand, it’s on my computer — it’s a series of essays by Tim Urban on [the website] Wait But Why? unpacking Elon Musk and his companies. Why did he found Tesla, Solar City, SpaceX? Why does he do what he does? Why did he come from South Africa, move to Canada, then to the United States? How can one man actually think he can be that intelligent that he can create a technology that will move us to Mars so that he can given humanity a chance to exist? The hypothesis is that at some point in time, something is going to happen to Earth that is going to make it impossible for humans to survive. Just like how the dinosaurs went extinct. And the only way you can prevent that happening is if the human species became multi-planetary. And there’s this man on Earth right now who believes he can capitalize enough people and resources to take humanity to multi-planetary existence. That is crazy! That is futurism to the max.
What’s your favorite movie of all-time?
One of the reasons I actually came to Berkeley, Calif., and the Bay Area specifically was because of George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola and the rest of them. I’m a big Star Wars fan and also a big Coppola fan, and I wanted to live in a place close to Skywalker Ranch. I wanted to breathe the same air as the people who gave Hollywood the finger and decided they could tell their own stories and were willing to mortgage their homes and everything to tell their fantastical stories. I can’t say that Star Wars is one of my favorite movies, because it’s not. I think it may be the Godfather series. It’s such a great story, and it’s also very beautiful. It’s a story of people who live life to the fullest. Micheal Corleone needn’t have to be the Godfather. He could have remained what he wanted to be, but the pull of family was so strong. I also love the movies of Spike Lee, and it’s been great watching those over the years because the stories he tells are so different. It’s just wonderful that he’s such a consummate artist.
What do you wish someone had told you when you first became a software engineer?
The first thing I want to tell myself is make sure that you own your own path. Don’t settle for just a job, no matter how fabulous it is. Don’t settle for it, because you have the capacity to invent the future. And [you] cannot invent the future when you’re wasting your time.
What inspires you?
My belief in self- transcendence. At first, I thought I was going to have a normal life: white picket fence and all that kind of stuff. And I want to have that, but the question is, what’s next? When you get to that point, you don’t care about things anymore because you literally don’t care about material things. You are beginning to push your mind and what you can invent and what you can do. And with every little bit I was able to attain, it was like, Can I dream bigger? Can I dream bigger? I think that for the last six or seven years, I’ve gotten to the point where I truly believe I can solve the problems I put my mind to. I’m convinced I can do that. That is enough to make you wake up every day and go do it.
What’s your proudest accomplishment?
I would say finishing my Ph.D., because I wasn’t sure I was going to do it. Not because it was difficult or it was hard, no, that’s not the issue at all. It was because there were so many other distractions, there were so many other jobs that I could have taken that would pay a lot more money than staying in school and prioritizing finishing a Ph.D. So sticking it out and finishing it required so much will, because I was giving up so much money every couple of months to keep on doing it. I’m very happy about that.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
 

These Computer Science Programs Have Just What Women Want

Posted on by robbie

The likes of Marie Curie and Jane Goodall may have set great examples for future female scientists, and it’s time that more women follow in their footsteps — especially when it comes to computer science.
For all the jobs available in the industry and programs to train workers for it, a mere 18 percent of computer science graduates in the United States are women. Can we balance out the gender gap amongst computer scientists? Some of the top institutions of higher learning have already started, according to The New York Times.
At Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, 40 percent of incoming freshmen are women, and almost a third of computer science graduates this year were women at the University of Washington. And that’s not all. Harvey Mudd College in California boasts that 40 percent of their computer science program enrollees are female and this year, more than half of their engineering school graduates were women — a first for the school.
As promising as these numbers are, these three schools represent only a fraction of the computer science programs in the country. The question remains – what’s their secret, and how can it spread to every school?
Unsurprisingly, there is no cure-all, but one general trend is helping out everywhere: With so many professional opportunities for computer science majors, the field in general is attracting more students — regardless of gender.
But what sets Carnegie Mellon, University of Washington, and Harvey Mudd apart is that they are grabbing potential students when they’re younger by promoting computer science at an earlier age. By hosting summer camps and training high school teachers to teach computer science, girls are more likely to gain exposure to the discipline and develop a lifelong interest in it.
Another tactic used by these schools is revamping their marketing and support systems. Harvey Mudd, for example, has featured female students in their brochures to show that it’s normal for girls to study science. “We made it very clear that being a female scientist, that’s normal,” said Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd. Plus, the school now talks about computer science as a way to problem solve (as opposed to it simply being about technical coding), putting an emphasis on its practical applications.
At Carnegie Mellon, the requirement to have prior experience in order to enter the major was eliminated and an official student mentorship program was established. By removing barriers and easing the process of becoming a computer science major, more women are showing interest.
Good news is, this can be easily replicated elsewhere.
As Lenore Blum, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon told The New York Times, “I don’t think we’re doing anything that nobody else could do, but it has to be sustained and institutionalized.”
If other schools picked up some tips from this trend-setting trio, America could be well on its way to unlocking a whole new set of minds for computer science.
MORE: Can Google Crack the Code for More Female Computer Scientists?

Many Politicians Are Dragging Their Feet on Immigration Reform. But This CEO Says It’s Time

Posted on by robbie

Last week several news organizations including the Washington Post and Politico reported that many Washington insiders feel any hope for immigration reform in the near future is “dead,” following the defeat of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in his primary race. But those outside the Beltway aren’t so pessimistic. In a recent speech at the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, Greg Brown, the CEO and Chairman of Motorola Solutions, said, “Why is the timing not right for this? I find that unacceptable.”
According to Anna Marie Kukec of the Daily Herald, Brown plans to continue to advocate for immigration reform and rally other business leaders to do so, until it’s revived. According to Brown, it just makes good business sense at a time when the economy remains “fragile.”
Brown said that American businesses cannot find workers with the skills they need, due to limited visas available for high-skilled workers. He believes that hiring such international workers does not take jobs from Americans—on the contrary, it creates jobs for them.
“Immigrant workers are job generators themselves,” he said. “They have a job multiplier effect. So if our goal is to grow a dynamic environment for businesses to be created, grow and thrive, we ought to care about this as a state.”
Motorola Solutions runs programs to encourage American kids to become engineers, working with the Chicago Public Library Foundation, the Museum of Science and Industry, school districts and other organizations. “It’s about preparing the workforce for the jobs that will keep America competitive and enable kids to succeed in the 21st century,” Brown said. “But, unfortunately, it takes 18 years to make an engineer, and the crisis for talent is now.”
MORE: Can An Influx of Immigrants Bolster Michigan’s Economy?

A New Museum Exhibit Educates About Disaster Preparedness

Posted on by robbie

From ‘superstorm’ Sandy in 2012 to the countless forest fires that ravage the West every year, natural disasters are increasingly becoming a large part of American life. As a result, combating Mother Nature when she’s at her angriest requires not just innovation, but education, too.
That’s exactly what a new exhibit at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. aims to do, according to Next City. Organized into categories of earth, wind, fire, and water, “Designing for Disaster” is educating visitors about the history of disaster relief and prevention, as well as what works and what doesn’t.
Tales of large-scale projects such as flexible staircase joints at UC Berkeley’s California Memorial Stadium will surely draw in visitors, though it is the hands-on demonstrations and focus on everyday solutions that this exhibit is making the most difference with.
As the Washington Post writes, “The exhibit’s most compelling demonstrations show how innovative engineering solutions can reduce the impact of disasters and, in fact, already are.”
Whether highlighting family disaster plans, showcasing earthquake drills, or using an interactive feature to help visitors learn about the durability of different roof styles, Designing for Disaster is spreading knowledge.
As Americans flock to our nation’s capital during the summer vacation months, they can learn how others are preparing for natural disasters. And with that education, perhaps they can educate members of their own communities on how best to prevent future damage.
After all, while you can’t avoid Mother Nature’s fury, you can make sure you’re ready to meet it head on.
MORE: The Competition for Disaster Relief Funds Heats Up

Today’s Classrooms Are Now Teaching Tomorrow’s Techies

Posted on by robbie

Remember the days when you were better at explaining the internal workings of an iPhone app than your 12-year-old niece was? Well, take note: Your superiority in that department is headed the way of the VCR.

As the New York Times reports, across the country, public school systems in major cities are shifting their thinking on computer programming classes, bumping them up from elective-only status to full-fledged requirements for all students.

Take Chicago. Within five years, the Windy City’s public schools plan to make computer science a prerequisite for graduation. Additionally, the district plans to offer coding classes in a quarter of its elementary and middle schools by that time as well. In New York City, the coming school year will bring 60 newly-trained teachers (across 40 schools) to impart computer programming on students.

And this tech movement doesn’t stop with just major metropolitan areas. In nine states, students can earn now core math and science credits when they sign up for computer classes.

A nonprofit called Code.org is doing its part to push the mainstreaming of basic coding classes in schools by offering free curriculums for teachers’ use. These programs game-ify the arduous task of young children learning to code by using, for example, the popular app Angry Birds in an effort to make lessons fun. To do this, the curriculums developed by Code.org — which is funded in part by big tech names like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg — borrow from a visual programming language called Scratch, which was developed within MIT’s Media Lab in 2007.

So what can you learn from all this? Well, it sounds like now’s a good time to start spoiling your niece. After all, she’s going to be the one you’ll be calling for tweaks to your website in just a few short years.

A Georgia High School Lets Students Learn on the Job

Posted on by robbie

If you’ve ever found traditional high school boring—sitting in a crowded classroom with dozens of other students, copying grammar rules from the board or memorizing the results that might have occurred if you had actually done a science experiment—then you’ll probably be jealous of the students at Camden County High School.
CCHS, located on the southernmost coast of Georgia, is a “career technical” school, which means it teaches vocational skills in addition to math and English. After freshmen year, each student enrolls in an “academy” to learn the technical aspects of a particular job. The academies are similar to the houses at Hogwarts—though membership is not based on a magical sorting but instead on a student’s interest in one of five realms: Government and Public Service; Engineering and Industrial Technology; Health and Environmental Sciences; Business and Marketing; and Fine Arts. The sixth academy (the Hufflepuff, if you will) is for freshmen.
While we often read dire reports about education in the U.S., Atlantic reporter James Fallows suggests that vocational schools might be one answer to our woes. Career technical schools prepare students for jobs that are less likely to be out-sourced, and those jobs pay more than retail or low-end service work, Fallows writes.
The school day at CCHS is lively. In Engineering and Industrial Technology Academy, the students run an auto-repair shop, where they fix local cars. In Government and Public Service Academy, students investigate mock robberies, gathering evidence, filing reports, and preparing trials for fake court. In Health and Environmental Sciences Academy, students bend over dummies in hospital gowns, practicing how to care for nursing home patients.
Rachel Baldwin, the CCHS Career Instructional specialist, says that recent studies have shown that “something like ‘grit’” is the most important quality for schools to teach.
“I think you are more likely to learn grit in one of these technical classes,” she told The Atlantic. “The plumber who has grit may turn out to be more entrepreneurial and successful than someone with an advanced degree. Our goal has been getting students a skill and a credential that puts them above just the entry-level job, including if they’re using that to pay for college.”
For students who want to learn by doing, and for parents who want to see their children graduate with real skills, career technical schools may just be the places to go.

Kate’s Hand: Using a 3-D Printer to Build a Toddler’s New Hand

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In Huntsville, Ala., there is a sticker-obsessed little girl named Kate Berkholtz, age 2. She is pint-sized inspiration for all wannabe go-getters — a strong-willed toddler who “doesn’t take crap from anybody,” according to her mother, Jessica Berkholtz.
Kate always knows what she wants to do, and she almost always manages to do it. Right now her favorite pastimes include romping around on jungle gyms and skidding down slides headfirst. But as she gets older, some seemingly basic kid activities — like swinging from monkey bars or riding a bicycle — may not come so easily. This is because Kate was born with a congenital abnormality that left only a thumb on her left hand; four fingers are missing.
Prosthetic limbs are an option for children as young as Kate, but they run anywhere from about $10,000 to $50,000, and insurance companies typically don’t cover the cost because young patients will outgrow the devices so quickly. Kate’s family’s insurance would have paid the bulk of the fee, her mother says, leaving the family to come up with the remainder — $3,000 to $5,000 — but the “expense was still a little ridiculous,” Berkholtz says.
MORE: These College Students Couldn’t Afford a 3D Printer. So They Built One.
Enter Zero Point Frontiers, a space engineering company in Huntsville that heard about baby Kate’s predicament and volunteered to help. Jason Hundley, the company’s president and CEO, was introduced to Kate’s family through his wife, who runs a local children’s gym that the family attends. Serendipitously, Zero Point Frontiers had recently acquired a 3-D printer, which the company’s engineers quickly set about using to devise and build a low-cost, kid-size prosthetic hand. The engineers uploaded the hand design into the printer via a memory card, which the jet printer then used as a blueprint to guide its spray, back and forth, layer by layer, depositing tiny particles of plastic gradually to produce the 3-D object.
Made out of a biodegradable polymer, the hard contraption fits onto Kate’s forearm with Velcro straps and is powered by her wrist movements. When Kate bends her wrist, the wires that act as tendons tighten, curling the little plastic fingers and allowing her to grip and pick things up.
It’s no small triumph, though the toddler is perhaps more interested in the fact that the prototype she’s testing comes in ocean blue, with neon green digits. Kate initially said she wanted a pink Dora the Explorer hand, says Hundley, but the 3-D printer has only 12 colors, and pink is not one of them. It doesn’t matter — Kate likes anything bright.
Hundley plans to make a variety of attachments for Kate’s hand — a separate one for bike riding, for swimming, for holding the bow of a violin. While adult prosthetics are designed to accomplish a broad range of functions and to last for many years (and to be flesh-toned, of course), Hundley says that the low cost of producing each of the 3-D-printed devices — about $5 for the hand, mostly to cover the cost of the straps and wires, and $1 for each attachment — means that you can make as many as you want and keep swapping them out as the child grows. “This technology brings something that was the price of a car down to the price of a latte,” Hundley recently told the magazine Orthopedic Design & Technology.
AND: This Student Solved His Speech Impediment with a Pen and Denzel Washington
The technology has actually been around for decades. Charles Hull, an engineer, invented 3-D printing in 1984 as a way for companies to model prototypes before firing up their factories and producing a design en masse. But in the last 10 years or so, as prices for the technology have come down, it’s been adapted for other uses, especially in the biomedical field. At Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C., for example, researchers led by Dr. Anthony Atala are using 3-D printers to shape human tissue cells into replacement organs. Atala wowed the world in 2011 when during a TED talk in California he unveiled the world’s first printed kidney. The organs aren’t quite ready for use in patients yet, but ultimately, the goal  is to produce organs, valves and other patient-specific tissues for people in need of transplants.
“This is only the beginning,” says Hundley. “For the first time, they’ve created printers that are less than $5,000. … In the coming years, you’re going to see much, much more of these types of applications.”
Going forward, Hundley hopes to make Kate’s printed hand modular, scalable and open source. That way, anyone can modify it to fit their particular needs, print the hand’s plastic structure and assemble it from anywhere in the world.
For now, he’s made a remarkable difference in the life of one towheaded toddler. Kate is “wanting to do things that her big brother is doing, like ride a bike or ride a trike, hold onto monkey bars, that kind of thing,” says her mom. “And this technology is going to let us do that like any other kid, for, like, five or ten bucks.”
DON’T MISS: $95 Device Lets You Charge Your Phone with Energy from Riding Your Bike

Will Mentorship Bring More Diversity to STEM Fields?

Posted on by robbie

We’ve all heard the statistics. Women, by and large, are disproportionately underrepresented in STEM fields. According to recent research from employment website LinkedIn, women make up just 30 percent of the entire workforce in the tech industry. The statistics in engineering are even worse. Only 15 percent of jobs in this high-paying, highly-competitive field are held by women. It’s a familiar story with no simple solutions.

As Fast Company’s Chris Gayomali points out, “The gender imbalance in STEM fields is a deeply rooted structural problem, from the actual hiring process to the education system responsible for churning out the future’s workforce.” But there are ways to ease the imbalance. And one strategy, experts claim, is through mentorship.

MORE: When Nobody in Technology Looked Like Her, This Woman Did Something About It

Last week, MentorNet, an organization that has paired more than 32,000 STEM students with mentors in the field over the past 15 years, announced that it was partnering with LinkedIn in order to expand its reach by utilizing their expansive professional social media platform to connect students — called protégés — with STEM professionals. This partnership allows MentorNet to leverage LinkedIn’s network of more than 277 million professional to find mentors who would be interested in the program. (Additionally, LinkedIn is providing MentorNet with a grant that will allow the organization to update its own technology platform to reach even more people.) Currently, Meg Garlinghouse, Head of LinkedIn Good, wrote in a blog post that the protégés greatly outnumber the mentors.

“LinkedIn is this rich profile for education, employment, and where people are in the world,” Mary Fernandez, MentorNet CEO, told Fast Company. “We can combine that with the data for our program, and once you understand the challenges people are facing, once you have this really rich profile, you can begin to match mentors and protégés algorithmically.”

ALSO: Is This the Pinterest of Math and Science Education?

But good news is often offset with bad. Research shows that while the number of women in STEM degree programs is increasing — the National Science Board’s recent report found that the number is up 21 percent since 1993 —  the number of degree-holders in these areas has actually declined over the past 30 years, from 23 percent in 1984 to fewer than 15 percent today. For its part, MentorNet’s mission of mentorship has proven to work: 92 percent of the program’s protégés have gone on to graduate, according to Fast Company.

Fernandez herself experienced the positive effects of mentorship when she was hired at AT&T Bell Labs while in graduate school at Princeton University. For her, the experience was invaluable. She even attributes it to helping her earn her Ph.D. Now, her mission is to help other young women find the support they need to be successful, which in turn can positively impact the nation’s economy.

“There’s an economic imperative for more diversity,” she said, noting that hiring managers couldn’t ignore a talent pool full of smart, educated women. “Women have to be part of the story. Latinos have to be part of the story. First-generation college attendees have to be part of the story.” And LinkedIn and MentorNet is rewriting it now.

DON’T MISS: The Surprising Secret to Improving Math Skills