NIWeek addresses engineering grand challenges

Austin, TX. The 14 grand engineering challenges identified by the National Academy of Engineering served as a rough outline for demonstrations during keynote sessions at this year’s NIWeek event. I’m not sure that keynote presenters touched on all 14, but it’s likely that the 3300 attendees could have found all 14 addressed during summits, during technical sessions, or on the exhibit floor, where the technologies on display were as hot as the Austin summer temperatures.

Kicking off NIWeek Tuesday morning, Dr. James Truchard traced the history of the test industry in general and NI in particular as many years of innovation brought us to the point today where we can address the 14 challenges. He recalled many years ago using a Wayne Kerr bridge to make impedance measurements, a tedious process that suggested to him the importance of automation. At the time, he said, automation was limited to instruments like a General Radio motor-driven wave analyzer.

Dr. T cited General Radio as one of the kings of the industry in the era of vacuum tubes from 1920 to 1965. Eventually, under the GenRad name, the company changed its focus to ATE, and HP became the dominant measurement company in the era of the transistor and integrated circuit. Now, Truchard said, the software is the instrument, and he expects NI to dominate in this new era of software supremacy.

Following Truchard’s remarks, Eric Starkloff, VP of product marketing for test and industrial embedded products, noted that mobile broadband links outnumber wireline connections by a 2:1 margin. He added, “We are digitizing the world around us,” thereby driving the emergence of software as a key component of test systems as well as embedded systems that need to be tested. Related to this last point, Michelle Tinsley, GM of the embedded computing division of Intel, predicted that by 2015 there will be 15 billion connected devices—and many will be connected embedded devices.

Starkloff aid the NI will spend $200 million on R&D this year in pursuit of the design, test, and deployment of such embedded and other devices and systems. He then introduced several demonstrations, many based on products that NI announced this week or on products and technologies introduced by its partners. Demonstrations included an Inertia add-on to Veristand for automotive test-cell measurement and control.

Another demo centered on smart grid technology. Brian MacCleery, distributed I/O product manager at NI, described a smart grid as one with sensors. In a dumb grid, he said, the sensor is a customer without power.

Bill Kramer of the National Renewable Energy Lab elaborated. His organization focuses five years ahead of industry, he said, and works with NI to get ideas into market. Kramer said, “HIL for us is extremely important—we can simulate power electronics in real time, and we don’t blow up expensive prototype hardware.”

Other Tuesday keynote demonstrations centered on RF test and semiconductor test. Sylvain Bertrand of ST Ericsson reported successes in IC characterization using the NI PXIe-5665 vector signal analyzer. Charles Schroeder, NI director of product marketing, said that software-defined instruments are finding use in semiconductor test, and he demonstrated an SMU that employs software to optimize step response despite variations in DUT characteristics that can exacerbate overshoot and ringing when the DUT itself becomes part of a traditional SMU’s analog control loop.

Starkloff summed up the lesson of Tuesday’s keynote session: “Turn an analog problem into a digital problem to reduce test cost and time.”

Jeff Kodosky kicked of the Wednesday keynote session with a look back at the first 25 years of LabView; he described how it has evolved to let domain experts build complete systems. He cited advantages of graphical data-flow programming: “With explosive growth of multicore machines and FPGAs, sequential processing is unnatural.” He emphasized that a graphical representation shows parallelism. “A text program can be complex,” he said, “but you can’t see the complexity, and underestimating complexity is dangerous.” Kodosky mentioned several long-term projects NI is working on, including an optimizing compiler and high-level synthesis tools for FPGAs.

Shelley Gretlein, director of core platforms (software), took over the Wednesday keynote session after Kodosky’s remarks, saying, “You need tools that scale with your application as you address 14 grand engineering challenges.” She quoted Ray Bradbury: “Predicting the future is much too easy…more of the same.” She urged attendees to avoid more of the same and “look for something better.”

Gretlein then introduced several demonstrations the indeed point to something better. Dr. Chong of Santec described world’s smallest OCT (optical coherence tomography) noninvasive imaging system for medical and other applications. Jeremiah Fasl of the UT civil engineering department described his use of a wireless sensor network platform installed on fracture-critical bridge in Austin. And Jaswinder Singh of NexGEN Consultancy described efforts in Rajasthan, India, to renovate the electrical grid—step 1 is to gather baseline data.

Gretlein concluded by telling her audience, “Of all the grand challenges, we are committed to do our part and equip you with the tools you need to create and deploy applications of the future. I am relying on you to solve the remaining engineering grand challenges we will face in the next quarter century.”

Ray Almgren, VP of product marketing for core platforms, hosted the Thursday and final keynote session of NIWeek 2011 by saying that NI is working to accelerate student innovation by making available the fundamental elements of modern engineering—not just the math students find in textbooks. He said that as students get more focused on math and simulation they became less interested, adding, “If you want students to pursue engineering, don’t tell them they must become great mathematicians.” That’s not to downplay the importance of math, but real-world experience with real hardware is critical to keeping students engaged.

Almgren then described several student projects highlighted at NIWeek, including a trumpet autotune system, a haptics implementation for tumor detection, and the Pitch Pals instrumented baseball. Students Mohan Xu and Yongfeng Gao were on hand to describe their own award winning 3-D display system.

Almgren said NI works with 6000 universities in 110 countries and has just entered into a partnership with MIT’s mechanical engineering department to integrate LabView into 14 courses. MIT professor Harry Asada, teacher of Robotics 212, said that some students have limited experience in programming but must deal with everything from control algorithms to verification and testing. He introduced students including mechanical engineer Maia Bageant and electrical engineer Eric Marion to demonstrate an oil-well riser plugging application.

College students weren’t the only students represented at NIWeek; high schoolers got recognition as well. Larry Kravitz MD of Austin Regional Clinic recounted his need for an exoskeleton or brace that could provide assistance to as many as 10 million Americans who may need knee-replacement surgery. Lacking time to develop such an exoskeleton on his own, he enlisted the aid of teacher John Sperry and high-school students including Rita Collier and Evan Reyier as well as Rodney (rod-knee?) the robot to develop a brace for which they have applied for a patent.

You can view keynote presentations here, except for the concluding one by storm chaser Tim Samaras of Twistex who, in dramatic videos of his own, showed him and his team deploying tornado probes. You can get an idea of his team’s efforts here and here, for example. The team relies on NI LabView, NI DIAdem, and NI CompactDAQ to acquire and analyze data.

By the way, the 14 grand engineering challenges are as follows: make solar energy economical, provide energy from fusion, develop carbon sequestration methods, manage the nitrogen cycle, provide access to clean water, restore and improve urban infrastructure, advance health informatics, engineer better medicines, reverse-engineer the brain, prevent nuclear terror, secure cyberspace, enhance virtual reality, advance personalized learning, and engineer better tools of scientific discovery.

Did any of these topics escape mention at NIWeek?