Charles K. Alexander

Communication aspects of ProSkills: a non-technical skill development and enhancement program for engineers

Engineers face a major decision relating to their careers. They can enter their profession, or they can become a successful professional. In both cases, a strong technical foundation is required. But, to be a truly successful professional, engineers must also develop and use many nontechnical skills. Professional engineers use a balance of technical and non-technical skills to achieve their highest level of success. Of the many non-technical skills needed to be successful, the most important is communication. In addition to documenting important information for their own reference, engineers need to effectively communicate with technical peers and with the non-technical community. This involves four types of communication: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This paper is a discussion of the communication aspects of ProSkills. ProSkills is a successful process developed by Fenn College of Engineering at Cleveland State University to enhance and expand a wide range of the non-technical skills engineering students must have to be successful. Unlike the classical approach used to teach written and oral communication in liberal arts courses or across the engineering curricula, ProSkills integrates communication skill enhancement within the existing technical curricula.

An alternative geometrical setup for the image-based tactile sensor

The authors present an alternative image-based sensor setup. This setup uses an optically sealed chamber, an array of light sensors, an array of light sources, and a reflective elastic surface serving as the touching surface. Mainly, this approach, as compared to other image-based tactile sensors, ensures a reduction in the size of the needed array of light sensors, and produces an enhanced digitized image representing the reflective elastic touch surface. The feasibility of operation of this approach is shown.<<ETX>>

Increasing Aural Skills of International Graduate Students

Deals with a successful attempt to improve the linguistic proficiency of international graduate students at Tennessee Technological University. Without proper guidance by skilled English language instructors at the very beginning of their graduate program, these newly arrived students may find themselves at a disadvantage in the American classroom because they lack the necessary aural comprehension and oral proficiency to take advantage of the learning environment. A pilot program at Tennessee Technological University has demonstrated that the international students ability to process technical and nontechnical English efficiently in oral and aural models can be improved without requiring the student to take time-consuming intensive English programs on arrival in the US. Concentrated aural practice in the areas of listening acuity, inferencing, and problem solving yielded gains in proficiency over a short period. Graduate faculty members have reported improvements in student attitudes and in course work, as well as greater ease in communicating with these students.

Enhancing the US Power Infrastructure

The primary motivation for this set of research activities was to develop a foundation in several aspects of power in order to position Cleveland State University to lead a multiuniversity effort to secure funding for enhanced power system projects and to be able to eventually secure a NASA Space Power Systems Center status through the competitive bidding process. This was accomplished by focusing on these major project areas, (1) the design of the next generation nuclear-electric power generation system, (2) the design of a distributed, fault-tolerant, and modular power system, and (3) the development of the dynamics and control of active magnetic bearings for flywheel energy storage without using conventional sensors.

A high level descriptive language for the automatic generation of Fortran and Pascal code

The authors show that if a given software end product is developed in accordance with the principles of strongly typed data constructs and structured programming, then the translation of such a software system into other languages can be fully automated. For this purpose, an interactive computer-aided programming environment (CAPE) that supports a strongly typed, structured graphical descriptive language named CAPE was developed. Using this package, translation of CAPE programs to Fortran and Pascal languages is fully automatic. Furthermore, software development using this package enhances and simplifies programmer design methods and produces syntactically error-free Fortran and Pascal code.<<ETX>>

Professional environment for knowledge workers: educators' responsibilities

It is argued that educators possess the potential for having the greatest impact on developing a knowledge workers professional identity and that because of this they must also bear the greatest responsibility for this development. They can impact the students directly by presenting seminars with professionally related content, by incorporating such topics into their classroom lectures, and by serving as appropriate role models. Educators can also assist, indirectly, by supporting an encouraging membership and active participation in the local IEEE Student Branch.<<ETX>>

Increasing aural skills of international graduate students

Deals with a successful attempt to improve the linguistic proficiency of international graduate students at Tennessee Technological University. Without proper guidance by skilled English language instructors at the very beginning of their graduate program, these newly arrived students may find themselves at a disadvantage in the American classroom because they lack the necessary aural comprehension and oral proficiency to take advantage of the learning environment. A pilot program at Tennessee Technological University has demonstrated that the international students ability to process technical and nontechnical English efficiently in oral and aural models can be improved without requiring the student to take time-consuming intensive English programs on arrival in the US. Concentrated aural practice in the areas of listening acuity, inferencing, and problem solving yielded gains in proficiency over a short period. Graduate faculty members have reported improvements in student attitudes and in course work, as well as greater ease in communicating with these students.

Chairman's corner IEEE SAC

I have been very involved with IEEE student activities during most of the time that I have been a member of the IEEE — dating back to the fall of 1961 when I was a freshman at Ohio Northern University. Ohio Northern is very special in that it helped instill in its students a real need to actively belong to the IEEE and to develop professionalism via that route. Through my continuing involvement with the IEEE, I have been able to see, in many schools, the impact that an outstanding IEEE Student Branch can have on the morale and quality of an EE department. This same involvement has taken me all the way up to the highest office in the IEEE that relates to student members, Chairman of the Student Activities Committee (SAC).

A professionally complete education: Identity crisis? IEEE student membership aids self-discovery

The Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland provided that profound advice to Alice when she asked directions at a yet unchosen fork in the road. But its hardly fairytale advice; all of us need specific goals if our decisions are going to be consistently valid in guiding our futures.

Use of test signals in system identification by quasilinearization

Identification of linear systems with unknown input gains and parameters by quasilinearization is studied both by the boundary value method and the performance index method. It is shown that the boundary value method requires a test signal whose order of complexity is proportional to the order of the system. On the other hand, with the performance index method, it is proved that the normal inputs to these systems are sufficient for complete system identification. This is significant because the most important consideration of system identification is to be able to identify the system under normal operation with as little disturbance to the system operation as possible.