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Lecture 13: Broader Engineering Perspectives

Lecture 13: Broader Engineering Perspectives. EEN 112: Introduction to Electrical and Computer Engineering. Professor Eric Rozier, 4 /8/ 13. Engineering Impact. Engineering Programs in the US are subject to accreditation by ABET Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology

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Lecture 13: Broader Engineering Perspectives

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  1. Lecture 13: Broader Engineering Perspectives EEN 112: Introduction to Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Eric Rozier, 4/8/13

  2. Engineering Impact • Engineering Programs in the US are subject to accreditation by ABET • Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology • Cannot become a licensed engineer without a degree from an accredited program. Why?

  3. Engineering Impact • The solutions we provide have a major impact on the world • Economic • Environmental • Societal • Safety • Our designs and solutions can have serious consequences, forseen and unforseen.

  4. Pentium FDIV Bug • Intel’s Pentium 5 • Professor Thomas Nicely noticed inconsistencies in calculations when addingPentiums to his cluster • Floating-point divisionoperations didn’t quite comeout right.Off by 61 parts per million

  5. Pentium FDIV Bug • Intel acknowledged the flaw, but claimed it wasn’t serious. Wouldn’t affect most users. • Byte magazine estimatedonly 1 in 9 billion floatingpoint operations wouldsuffer the error.

  6. Pentium FDIV Bug • Total cost to Intel? $450 million

  7. Pentium FDIV Bug • What could Intel have done? • What was Intel’s responsibility to its customers? • What was the impact toIntel? • What could it have been?

  8. Korean Air Flight 801 • Route from Seoul, Korea to Asan, Guam • Normally flown by an Airbus A300, replaced by a 747-300 • Night flight

  9. Korean Air Flight 801 • Air Traffic Control Minimum Safe Altitude Warning system – lets pilots know when they are too close to the ground. • System in Guam had been giving off spurious alarms, and prevented the airport’s other systems from detecting aircrafts approaching below minimum safe altitude • Engineers modified the system to limit alarms.

  10. 200 Deaths

  11. Korean Air Flight 801 • What were the engineers trying to accomplish? • What could they have done? • What ethical duties do we have as experts in these situations?

  12. Social Media • Social media has become massively popular • Privacy controls hard to manage, not the focus of the user experience • Some employers (like Virgin Atlantic) keep tabs on their employees. • Have even fired someover posts

  13. Social Media • Companies are starting to ask employees to log in and show their Facebooks as part of the hiring process • Illinois recently made this illegal. Still legal in most states.

  14. Social Media • What responsibilities do companies have for their user privacy? • What sort of ethical implications do seemingly benign technologies have?

  15. The Importance of Trust • Sarbanes-Oxley Act • HIPAA • California Proposition 11 • FISMA • Massachusetts 201 CMR 17.00 Over 10,000 regulations

  16. Users expect data to be stored indefinitely…

  17. Reliability • What responsibilities do we have as engineers to preserve information? • Should we be liable if our systems fail in these ways? • What limits should there be to liability? • Can a system ever be fully reliable? • What responsibility do we have to report the limits to our systems reliability?

  18. High Frequency Trading • Algorithmic trading, seeks to exploit small differences in prices, millions of programs running • How do they interact? • How does somethingwritten by Company Aaffect somethingwritten by Company B?

  19. High Frequency Trading • 2010 Flash Crash – largest intraday point loss • Losses recovered in minutes, but scared regulatory bodies • US SEC and CFTCconsluded that HFTcontributed to thevolatility.

  20. High Frequency Trading • SEC and FTC stated – “market makers and other liquidity providers widened their quote spreads, reduced liquidity, and withdrew from the market” • Some signal set offtheir algorithms,caused a jointmovement whichhelped cause the crash

  21. High Frequency Trading • What responsibility do we have to prevent disasters? • What happens when our duty to our employermight conflict? • How do we weighour responsibilities?

  22. The broader world is complex • Critical thinking • Awareness of situations and consequences • Working with regulators, and employers • Maintaining integrity

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