Grand challenges for engineering in the 21st century, and how they relate to mechanics

Big challenges usually make people dizzy and disoriented, feelings that then translate to indifference.  It might be a useful exercise to reduce a big challenge to small pieces, solvable problems that are meaningful to individual people.  In particular, we can discuss in iMechanica how these challenges relate to us mechanicians.  When you click on each challenge above, a short essay appears, written by a committee of experts.  The essay serves as a starting point for discussion.

I'll start with the challenge to advance personalized learning.  Of course, learning has always been personalized, so long as we talk about learning done by humans, as brains appear to be individualized.  The real challenge, then, is personalized teaching, or more generally, providing an environment to help each individual learn.  Here is what the master teacher Feynman had to say:

"I think, however, that there isn't any solution to this problem of education than to realize that the best teaching can be done only when there is a direct individual relationship between a student and a good teacher--a situation in which the student discusses the ideas, thinks about the things, and talks about the things.  It's impossible to learn very much by simply sitting in a lecture, or even by simply doing problems that are assigned.  But in our modern times we have so many students to teach that we have to try to find some substitute for the ideal."

Feynman said these words in 1963.  The biggest changes between then and now have to do with computers and the Internet.  So far as I can tell, this grand challenge is essentially reduced to creating substitutes for the ideal by exploiting computers and the Internet. 

In a blog entry posted on Friday, Robert Cringely said that "we're moving from a knowledge economy to a search economy, from a kingdom of static values to those that are dynamic."  As usual his blog entry is both perceptive and provocative. As I read, I was nodding one moment and rolling my eyes another.  His entry has already received over 100 comments.  While many commenters have misgivings about "new ways of learning", few have dismissed the values of Google and Wikipedia to education.

The "old ways of learning", symbolized by lectures and books, have been refined ever since humans learned to tell stories around campfire.  It will be naive to think that the Internet will change all that over a decade or two.  The change will take a long time.  We will have to invent and experiment with various new ways, just as engineers always do when presented with new opportunities.  Thus this grand challenge for engineering of the century.  

The Internet has made ours a uniquely exciting time to be an engineer in the business of education.  And iMechanica is one experiment.

Now it is your turn to pick a grand challenge in the NAE list, and relate it to us mechanicians.

Thank you so much for posting this list. It is very timely and useful. I agree with Zhigang “it might be a useful exercise to reduce a big challenge to small pieces, solvable problems that are meaningful to individual people.”   

Challenges mean opportunities! What roles can we mechanicians play in those challenges?  Although contributions from different disciplinary fields as well as teamwork are essential, findings from individual people may also lead to significant advances. I would like to start with solar energy (number 1 in the list of the challenges). 

“But today’s commercial solar cells, most often made from silicon, typically convert sunlight into electricity with an efficiency of only 10 percent to 20 percent, although some test cells do a little better. Given their manufacturing costs, modules of today’s cells incorporated in the power grid would produce electricity at a cost roughly 3 to 6 times higher than current prices, or 18-30 cents per kilowatt hour [Solar Energy Technologies Program]. To make solar economically competitive, engineers must find ways to improve the efficiency of the cells and to lower their manufacturing costs.”   

The challenges include (but are not only limited to) the development of new materials and corresponding manufacturing processes.  As pointed out in the essay, “for enhancing efficiency involves developments in nanotechnology, the engineering of structures on sizes comparable to those of atoms and molecules, measured in nanometers (one nanometer is a billionth of a meter).”  

“Recent experiments have reported intriguing advances in the use of nanocrystals made from the elements lead and selenium.” “Lead-selenium nanocrystals enhance the chance of releasing a second electron rather than the heat, boosting the electric current output.”  This prediction shows a new and exciting field: “nano/energy technology.”    

Even more promising, “theoretically the nanocrystal approach could reach efficiencies of 60 percent or higher, though it may be smaller in practice. Engineering advances will be required to find ways of integrating such nanocrystal cells into a system that can transmit the energy into a circuit.” This presents a real challenge to us mechanicians – mechanics and reliability of nanocrystal cells as well as their interconnects. The current J-Club issue on “Impact of Chip-Package Interaction on Reliability of Copper/Low k Interconnects and Beyond” can be extended to this topic. In addition, manufacturing processes require knowledge of nano mechanics.  I would like to suggest a J-Club theme – Mechanics in Energy Materials and Systems. We need to catch up this wave and show our potential in the challenge.

I am a bit underwhelmed by this particular list, for a few reasons.  The list really under-represents the value and importance of human medicine and bioengineering.  Overall, big changes in medicine are coming about due to the influence of engineers, and in particular this includes mechanicians.  The three "health" topics they picked for the list:

# Advance health informatics
# Engineer better medicines
# Reverse-engineer the brain 

are not readily mechanics topics at all.  Health informatics is a computer science question, medicines and pharmacology are more biochemistry (I'd question if this one is really engineering at all!), and neuroscience is more of an electrical/information engineering question.

So to this list, I would add the following, my own "grand challenges in engineering" that have a particular focus on biomechanics.

1.  Build replacement body parts.  There are many sets of circumstances in which replacement body parts are needed, of which the most obvious (disease, such as cancer, or damage, such as war or car crash injuries) represent both a large number of parts and fairly complicated functional replacements. In some cases, the missing parts have direct mechanical functions.  In other cases, there may be functions that are not primarily mechanical, but the inclusion of "correct" mechanical responses is required for the body to accept the replacement.  To date, tissue engineering has not yet seen its full promise, and mechanical aspects in tissue engineering are under-studied compared with other aspects.  We are still a long way from being able to build functional, multi-tissue constructs for severe injuries, missing limbs, etc.

2. Diagnostics.  Much of the potential advancement in disease diagnosis is associated with the fact that the mechanical properties of diseased tissues are often different than normal tissues.  Since I work on indentation and contact mechanics questions, I often joke that doctors do far more indentation tests than the entire nanoindentation and nanomechanics community, they just do them with a very sensitive pressure transducer called their fingertips.  Recent advances in medical imaging have also had a mechanical focus, with ultrasound and MRI elastography taking advantage of the mechanical property differences in diseased tissues to make new imaging modes.

3. Biomimetics.  This is less a healthcare question and more of a general engineering question.  As was discussed in the recent j-Club on the topic , Julian Vincent's group has done some fantastic analysis on how nature solves problems versus how engineers tend to solve problems.  We as engineers almost universally fall short in complexity and overuse raw energy.  As such, biomimetics has the potential to directly influence many other fields by "learning from nature" how better to use the energy that we have, and how to develop alternative schemes from those in traditional (industrial revolution-based) engineering. 

4. Cell mechanotransduction.  This is another topic recently discussed in the j-Club and involves our continued lack of basic understanding about how cells actually function.  Without better understanding of cells, we don't understand life in general! 

Most of My Posts in IMechanica is Related to How we can find direction of ongoing science! Teach people (like me) how to choose their research topics! Such lists are GREAT! this help us not to forget the mission of science. 

but this 3 topic are too general

1. Engineer better medicines
2. Engineer the tools of scientific discovery
3. Advance health informatics

This is just like to say making human life better! I hope NAE makes this missions more clear.

IMechanica is a great Forum. does any body know such Forum in Biochemistry?!

Roozbeh Sanaei.

Cellular and Molecular Bioengineering Lab.

National university of Singapore

The US National Committee on Theoretical and Applied Mechanics (USNC/TAM) has just had its annual meeting on Friday and Saturday.  Prior to the meeting, Ravi-Chandar suggested that the Committee should discuss the NAE Grand Challenges.  It turned out that many on the committee were aware of the NAE list, and the Grand Challenges did enter our discussion prominently at several points. 

Many members of the Committee felt that it is important to relate mechanics to societal challenges.  Even though some of the Grand Challenges look unrelated to mechanics, and the NAE list may not please everyone, it is still significant to examine our discipline from the perspective of our customers:  the society.  And the NAE list can serve as a starting point.

It will not be credible for us to claim that mechanics will solve energy crisis.  But no discipline can make that claim.  It is entirely within our reach, however, to make a convincing case that mechanics will play a significant role in advancing energy technologies.  Indeed, mechanics will play a significant role even if we do not try to make a case now. 

Then why bother to make such a case?  Here are some obvious reasons.  The Grand Challenges will help us place our daily work in context, inspire us to be more creative, and help us recruit young people to the discipline.  And of course, many of us need to write proposals for funding.  

Several of us on the Committee have been tasked to think how to effect a discussion of the Grand Challenges in the broad community of mechanics.  Some initial suggestions include

• Use iMechanica to gauge interest of the community, and to collect resources compiled by related disciplines.  The thread of discussion on Grand Challenges will be kept on the front page for some time.
• At some later point, write a short document to distill the discussion, and make a case for mechanics.
• Organize panel discussions at national conferences.

By now we have known something about Pasteur's quadrant, and should not fall back to yet another one dimensional thinking that only the societal needs can motivate good research.  So let us not rehash the old debate about applied vs. pure research. 

Let us know your thoughts on the Grand Challenges, and how you connect them to mechanics.

What we need is a version of Hilbert's problems in (preferably theoretical) mechanics. My opinion is that these problems need to be well defined because I find the NAE list quite vague.

-Amit

Zhigang and Michelle

   I cannot avoid a few remarks. The NAE challenges don't seem to raise interest, if it wasn't for you two trying to pull the discussion on your side, with Michelle who clearly would redesign completely the Challenges and, like me, thinks she could have done it better!!) but others not very interested, while Zhigang tries hard to be positive and suggest we need solvable problems.

   I disagree with both!    Challenges for next centuries are the cry for vision!  When Leonardo planned his "grand horse" it was an impossible project.  If you limit yourself to what you consider feasible, you will never achieve if not an incremental paper --- like of course 99% of scientists do, and it is only 1% of scientists who do the 99% of innovations.

    But I am following closely the discussion to see how to shape my own European Challenges program.  I have started to mounted the site, and the personal one is ready www.micheleciavarella.it

I remind you my previous contributions:  

Why Raul Castro can teach NAE how to appeal to the US people, and why the Engineering Challeges doesn't seem to raise interest!   http://imechanica.org/node/3151    

American Paradox, http://imechanica.org/node/3144
 
I am trying to setup a Engineering Challenges project which may be with more "sex-appeal"

  Michele  www.micheleciavarella.it

First, thanks to all of you who welcomed me back to this forum.  My day was brightened considerably by your messages.

After seeing Michele's latest message I went to his site and was met by the picture of Benoit Mandelbrot.  I remember stealing off during the Turin ICF 11 conference to visit the  Museum of Egyptiology in Turin.  I wasn't the only one who had taken the day off - Mandelbrot was also there looking listlessly at the huge scrolls.  I didn't have the courage to disturb the man and have a photo clicked with him :)

A few months in India have helped me reorient my view of what the grand challenges of the future are.  One one hand there are the challenges for the mind involved in  research for the sake of better understanding.  On the other hand there are challenges facing humanity and the planet.  I feel that, as mechanicians, we should keep these big challenges in mind when we try to seek problems to solve.

In my opinion, the main challenges for mankind are:

1) Food :  How can we produce, preserve, and distribute food most efficiently and with the minimum of waste?  The production part may involve things such as tilling (e.g., how to design a blade that can till the land with the least energy wastage).  Preservation may involve the development of refridgeration systems that use heat pipes and there are many mechanics challenges in efficient drilling.  Distribution involves transportation and the development of the most energy efficient infrastructure possible.  These technologies may either require revolutions or steady evolution.  However, the mode does not matter as long as we have a solution/s.

2) Water : How can we provide and distribute clean water efficiently?  Once again, I can see a number of great mechanics challenges here - from the nanoscale to the macro scale.

3) Shelter : How can we provide cheap and energy efficient shelters to people? Once again, the solution will need a mechanics, thermodynamics, and a host of other skills.

4) Energy:  Bits of this have been addressed by the NAE report.

5) Health:  Once we have the first three, a signifant range of health issues will have been dealt with.  Some of the rest have been addressed by NAE and previous commentators.

6) Education:  Given the previous 5 items, education becomes easier to provide.   Among many things that may be done, the issue that I see needs urgent action from engineers and scientists is the creation of a scientific mindset among populations around the world.  Surely, that's a grand challenge?

I feel that we, as mechanicians, should keep in the back of our minds some of these grand challenges and direct our research towards contributing to solve these problems.

Surely we are imaginative enough to come up with ways to help humanity, in our own special mechanician ways?

-- Biswajit 

I liked the message from Biswajit Banerjee because I can see it was free from the usual approach scientists do.

1) here are my ideas

2) let's read the calls for proposals around

3) let's see how I can fit my ideas in 1) to the proposals in 2)

Sometimes, it is the best scientists which do that, and of course this means not much discussion and thinking behind the entire process, about the real need for humanity.  I suspect this is the limit of Michelle's approach.  She had decided her own priority, could not see any in the Grand Challenges and was disappointed.

Biswajit at least made quite an effort, as his proposals do not seem to have anything in common with the topics he has in his web page.  Congratulations! 

So ideally, in a good Project we should NOT let a panel decide the topic, we need more (still top scientists) people to decide the topics, for as good as it may be (and the very good one means that they are not likely to work hard on this, so behind the huge level of quality there in the panel, I doubt there is much work and interaction, as witnessed by the fact that 14 themes are too many).

One way around that is that I can decide only 4 or 5 macroareas and then let people write possible themes.  This is NOT in contrast to the work of NAE, so Michelle, Zhigang and  Biswajit are welcome to contribute.

Zhigang, since my WEB Site will take about 3 weeks to be completed, why not start this discussion in imechanica?  If you agree, tomorow I will post one such message.

Thanks 

Very interesting posts and messages. My opinion is that science is moving forward as fast as in the days of Leonardo. How does one feel about reaching the space to find other places to live, and/or going nano? As you add to the heap of stuffs (be it anything), as the pile is getting bigger and bigger, any individual contribution is becoming more and more unnoticed.

Gopinath

Graduate Student

University of Oklahoma 

I feel that we need a list of ten outstandingly important problems in applied mechanics/mathematics that can be tackled
by a postdoc or a ph.d. student without the necessity of external funding.

 -Amit 

One of the Grand Challenges, advance health informatics, seems to be unrelated to mechanics, but is related to every mechanician.  Google has just rolled out a new product:  Google Health.  Each user can maintain his own Google Health account, just as he maintains his own email account.  I went to my Google Health account, and added a condition I had, and a medicine I took.  Google pointed me to references about the condition.  I can let my doctor access my account.  Presumably she will be able to add to my record.  If I start with a new doctor, I should not need to fill new forms.

If you have a gmail account, you can go directly to Google Health.

Engineering Happiness

The G8 Science and Technology Ministers’ Meeting Chair’s Summary for science and technology

Mankind has made a great breakthrough in exploring the planet, the space and the waters in the last couple of centuries.  People would surely use certain amount of reasonable ideas given here in order to write my dissertation abstract at essaylib.com someday. Feeling high to find one more clever
person. That was a case of a talent to see such a degree of thinkings.