Month: May 2020

An Idea of Ideas

by Yu Gu, posted in Future, Ideas, Uncategorized

There are 7.8 billion people living on this planet and everyone’s brain is running, fast or slow. Most of the time, people are thinking about more or less the same things: sports, weather, girls/guys/kids, shopping, promotion, money, politics, to name a few. Imagine how many times the same thought on “which phone to buy” goes around the globe? (sounds like a lot of redundancy and waste here, but that’s for a different topic…)

Occasionally, unique ideas pop up in the mind of a person, any person, often because she/he is in the right place at the right time (e.g., what if the blanket can fold itself after I pick up the baby?).  These ideas could be trivial or infeasible. We might feel good about our creativity for a few seconds, then it would just slip away out of the memory. Not known what to do with the ideas, we are throwing away an enormous number of intellectual products each day (hint: at least write them down like what I am doing with this blog…).

At the same time, our world is in a desperate shortage of creative ideas (just watch a few recent movies or see the design of all the new cell phones…). Once someone is in need of a solution (e.g., stop the pandemic), good ideas don’t come by on schedule. Beaming a lot of brainpower by a few smart people is not necessarily the answer.

So what can we do? How can we involve everyone in the creative process everyday on solving the world’s everything problems? I think we can benefit from something like a “Wikipedia for ideas”, where millions of diverse ideas are shared, debated on, grow and connect, and found by people who need them. How to discover incentives for everyday people to join this collaborative effort would be an important question to answer. Any ideas?

Engineering, Science, and Engineering Science

by Yu Gu, posted in Ideas, Robotics, Uncategorized

When I was a kid, my dream was to become a scientist. I was fascinated with reading early discoveries in chemistry, physics, and biology. Those scientists were my heroes.

Following a series of random and not so random events in life, I end up being an engineer, which I am equally happy about.

For a long time, I didn’t see much difference between science and engineering. We are all researchers. That was until I had my first proposal rejected by NSF, the National Science Foundation.

Scientists and engineers have different goals. Scientists discover and engineers create. Scientists observe something already exists (e.g., nature, universe, human society) and try to explain it. Engineers dream up something new (e.g., a bridge, a rocket, a material) and try to make it real.

For these reasons, scientists and engineers think and work in nearly opposite ways. Scientists observe, ask questions, form hypothesis, and then design experiments to test them. Engineers conceive designs, build prototypes, integrate parts into a system, and then perform evaluation.

If you ask an engineer to tackle a science problem, say why migrant birds often fly in formation; she/he may say let’s make airplanes fly in formation first, take measurements, and see what the data tell us. That was the kind of the mistake I made in writing my first NSF proposal.

Can someone function with both scientist’s and engineer’s minds? It’s very difficult. If you have sat in a meeting with both scientists and engineers, you would know that they don’t really speak the same language or live on the same planet (imaging adding a few artists into the mix!). Heck, they don’t even look the same. But the ability to handle difficulty is what sets one apart from the rest. I don’t have enough knowledge to comment on the importance of engineering to science, but in my opinion, it’s unlikely someone can be a great engineering researcher without sometimes thinking like a scientist.

Take robotics for example, we can always dream up robots that are more refined and algorithms that can squeeze out a few percentages of performance gain. In fact, we always want to do that because as engineers we feel itchy about flaws we can see, and improvements not made. Most of us live comfortably (or not so comfortably) in the cocoons we carefully engineered for ourselves. Every piece of silk we lay makes our world smaller. We are occupied and always so busy; while in the meantime, we ask, why innovation is so hard?

If only we could use some of our silk to explore, to take us to the next tree, and help us see a different world! What about taking a break from solving problems; spend some time to observe, ask why instead of how? We would be thinking like a scientist with the creativity and hands of engineers.

Of course, it would take a risky and painful transition to break the cocoon. But there is also no reason this cannot be done. Someone clearly had the wisdom at WVU a long time ago. After all, my office is in the Engineering Science Building (ESB).