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Industry Perspectives on Engineering

Moderator: Keith Glover
Travis Engen
John Grace
Robert Lucky
March 29, 2004
Running Time: 1:07:48
About the Lecture

About the Lecture

The business leaders in this panel suggest that systems engineering may help reinvent entire industries. Travis Engen described Alcan’s enormous, global aluminum enterprise, involving bauxite mines, smelters, casting plants, and product and packaging facilities employing 88 thousand people in 60 countries. Alcan’s activities pack an enormous environmental punch -- particularly when it comes to water, which Alcan uses for power and aluminum processing -- so the company has turned to the notion of sustainability as an organizing principle. This is “elegant systems thinking,” Engen says. “From bottom to top…sustainability allows us to maximize value and helps us with external constituencies.”

At ArvinMeritor, engineers have traditionally viewed the vehicle components they create in a piecemeal way. Now, says John Grace, the company is trying to think differently and produce door and braking systems. This means looking simultaneously at how a component is used, its architecture, and the regulatory environment. “We’ve got to move to a different paradigm,” says Grace. “We’ll face a critical time where we have to change ...” When Robert Lucky looks at the Internet, he sees “a living thing of monstrous complexity.” How do you analyze its behavior, much less guide where it is going? Forces threaten to pull the Internet apart, and countervailing forces keep the network together. While the center is holding for now, Lucky believes the Internet badly needs a vision of the future.

    Lecture Details

  • Location: Wong Auditorium

“In the Yellow Pages in London, (I looked up) the entry for civil engineering. Under civil engineering, it said “See Boring.” The good news is that systems engineering does not yet have an entry in the Yellow Pages. ”

Travis Engen

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About the Speakers

About the Speakers

Moderator: Keith Glover

Head of the Department of Engineering
University of Cambridge Fellow of Sidney Sussex College

Keith Glover received a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Imperial College, London (1967), and the S.M., E.E., and Ph.D. degrees from MIT in Engineering with a specialization in Systems and Control (1971, 1971, 1973). He held a Kennedy Scholarship at MIT and has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering, and the IEEE, also receiving the IEEE Control Systems Award (Technical Field Award).

His research has been concerned with the analysis and design of control systems in the face of disturbances and system uncertainty. This program has ranged from mathematical developments, through design methodologies to practical applications in flight control and automotive engine management systems.

Travis Engen

President and CEO, Alcan Inc.

John Grace

Vice President of Engineering and Technology, ArvinMeritor Inc.

Robert Lucky

Telcordia Technologies, Inc. (retired)

Moderator

Speakers

About the Host

About the Host

Engineering Systems Division

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The information on this page was accurate as of the day the video was added to MIT World. This video was added to MIT World on August 1, 2004.