Information Engineering: Navigating the Sea of Data in Today's World
by Dean Thomas L. Magnanti, Vol. 2, No. 3, May 2005
"One of the exciting aspects of this field, but clearly one of the more challenging aspects, too, is that it touches everything."
One of the School of Engineering's key strategic areas, Information Engineering, encompasses a very wide range of technologies and applications for acquiring, storing, transforming, and using information. Our initiative builds on a foundation of pioneering achievements that spans several decades and includes significant contributions to analog computers, the prototype of the Internet, magnetic core memory, the first workable public-key cryptographic system, computer time-sharing, and internet protocols (TCP/IP), to list only a few. That's quite a list!
In today's information-laden society, think of the magnitude of information that we currently encounter in our daily lives and think of the challenge in handling the massive amounts of data required to solve the world's complex problems. That's information engineering. One of the exciting aspects of this field, but clearly one of the more challenging aspects, too, is that it touches everything. Like calculus or differential equations, information engineering underlies nearly all disciplines of engineering as a fundamental enabling tool. For that reason, it has a remarkably broad "footprint."
As an example, embedded software and communication systems now abound in aeronautical engineering, a field that one might not immediately consider as synonymous with information engineering. Information engineering also touches such wide-ranging problem domains as computational biology, instrumented cities, and pervasive sensors, and it is increasingly central to such topics as materials science research, supply chain management, the Internet, and the so-called ad hoc networks or peer-to-peer networks.
(At least) two ways of looking at it . . .
We can examine information engineering by identifying an underlying discipline or a technology core – both hardware and software – but we can also approach it as a set of enormously broad application domains.
Clearly, a large number of faculty in our Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) are involved in various aspects of information engineering. Among their many efforts, they are developing novel approaches to wireless communications, methods for automatically upgrading software and authenticating and protecting digital information in portable devices, and novel devices such as quantum dot light-emitting flat panel displays or software reconfigurable handheld devices that can function as two-way radios, cell phones, geographical positioning systems, and personal digital assistants.
An applications approach:
From an applications perspective, modern imaging serves as a useful example. First, we require devices, such as x-ray or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems, to acquire and capture images, as well as information, visually. Additional complex issues arise when investigating the ultra small (nanotechnologies and microtechnologies): imagine, for example, the instruments required to capture images at the almost unimaginably small size of one-thousandth the size of the thickness of a human hair. Once gathered, the data might comprise gigabytes or terabytes of information. For example, one project of the Whitehead/MIT Bioimaging Center is a five-year effort to image in four dimensions every gene in a cell (the fourth dimension is time). This project will produce tens of terabytes of data. What kind of materials and devices would permit us to store so much information? How might we best then search, characterize, organize, and share the data? These are some of the issues information engineering tackles.
Information engineering also strives for improvements in the storage and transference of information, perennial issues that one might say have been with us since we began using file cabinets and photocopy machines. In addition to storing information, maintaining the security of the information, regulating access to it, and protecting privacy raise other issues. Today, as an example, we still need to carry booklets full of medical records with us as we walk from doctor to doctor. Think of the impact that information engineering could have if we could digitize the sea of medical information and the databases used routinely by the medical profession.
Approaches by multidisciplinary areas:
Handling a massive amount of information is a problem faced by many of our engineering fields and multidisciplinary areas. Computational and Systems Biology (CSB) is an MIT-wide program linking biology and engineering, including computer science, in a systems biology approach to the study of cell-to-cell signaling, tissue formation, and cancer. In handling the information requirements of this multidisciplinary research, CSB faculty use a 4-M model: Measuring biological phenomena, Mining that information to make some sense of it, Modeling that information using typical engineering models, and then Manipulating the underlying biological phenomena, perhaps going into the wet lab and manipulating the molecules or the tissues. Gathering the information (measuring) and mining the data are clearly computationally intensive. As another example, how do we extract useful information from the human genome? These applications require a firm understanding of the modern world of systems biology and of information engineering – a new kind of engineer.
Nanotechnology is relevant, not only because we need enormous computational power for measurement, as previously mentioned, but also because nanotechnology-based devices, such as photonic networks, can be "carriers" for all kinds of information.
Why what we're doing at MIT is different:
Essentially all engineering schools in the country are exploring information engineering in one form or another, but what might distinguish our efforts in the MIT School of Engineering from the others is both the breadth and the depth of our efforts, which include leadership in our EECS department, as well as in several other departments.
For example, many years ago Civil Engineering led the way in the use of information technology for designing structures and systems. In fact, even today, Civil and Environmental Engineering teaches one of our largest and most successful undergraduate courses in information engineering.
Our Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics is playing a leadership role in blending information engineering, and especially issues of reliable embedded software, with traditional aeronautical engineering, not only in the context of airplanes and spaceships, but also other things that fly, such as communications satellites.
Since computational modeling is critical to understanding the physical world, faculty and researchers in our Departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Nuclear Science and Engineering are developing digital models for simulating and manipulating complex physical phenomena; this approach has many benefits. For example, digital modeling is faster than physical experimentation and thus permits the exploration of a much broader range of possible material designs. Efforts such as these illustrate one of the many ways in which faculty and researchers in a variety of fields throughout the School identify themselves with our initiative in Information Engineering.
Our unique resources, diversity, and scale:
Our size, breadth, long-established organizational commitment, and strong tradition of interdisciplinary and crosscutting collaborative efforts enable the School to tackle issues with both a depth and a wide range of approaches that set us apart. By combining our premier programs in critical engineering disciplines with MIT's premier program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, we are assuming a lead position in this broad area of Information Engineering. All of these factors, together, define our unique position in this realm.
Measures of success:
The School of Engineering is undertaking the creation of novel technologies and novel systems in information engineering that the world of the future will use. We measure success by our long-lasting impact on the world, whether through specific technologies and systems or software applications that use those technologies. We also expect to have a long-lasting impact through our graduates. We are educating the leaders in information engineering – graduates who will create novel devices and novel products, or help orchestrate and coordinate large project teams, help manage large information infrastructures, and contribute to enterprise planning. Many of our graduates will shape the evolution and direction of information engineering. That's quite an achievement!