Gender stereotypes about interests start early and cause gender disparities in computer science and engineering.

Societal stereotypes depict girls as less interested than boys in computer science and engineering. We demonstrate the existence of these stereotypes among children and adolescents from first to 12th grade and their potential negative consequences for girls' subsequent participation in these fields. Studies 1 and 2 (n = 2,277; one preregistered) reveal that children as young as age six (first grade) and adolescents across multiple racial/ethnic and gender intersections (Black, Latinx, Asian, and White girls and boys) endorse stereotypes that girls are less interested than boys in computer science and engineering. The more that individual girls endorse gender-interest stereotypes favoring boys in computer science and engineering, the lower their own interest and sense of belonging in these fields. These gender-interest stereotypes are endorsed even more strongly than gender stereotypes about computer science and engineering abilities. Studies 3 and 4 (n = 172; both preregistered) experimentally demonstrate that 8- to 9-y-old girls are significantly less interested in an activity marked with a gender stereotype ("girls are less interested in this activity than boys") compared to an activity with no such stereotype ("girls and boys are equally interested in this activity"). Taken together, both ecologically valid real-world studies (Studies 1 and 2) and controlled preregistered laboratory experiments (Studies 3 and 4) reveal that stereotypes that girls are less interested than boys in computer science and engineering emerge early and may contribute to gender disparities.

Area efficient camouflaging technique for securing IC reverse engineering.

Reverse engineering is a burning issue in Integrated Circuit (IC) design and manufacturing. In the semiconductor industry, it results in a revenue loss of billions of dollars every year. In this work, an area efficient, high-performance IC camouflaging technique is proposed at the physical design level to combat the integrated circuit's reverse engineering. An attacker may not identify various logic gates in the layout due to similar image output. In addition, a dummy or true contact-based technique is implemented for optimum outcomes. A library of gates is proposed that contains the various camouflaged primitive gates developed by a combination of using the metal routing technique along with the dummy contact technique. This work shows the superiority of the proposed technique's performance matrix with those of existing works regarding resource burden, area, and delay. The proposed library is expected to make open source to help ASIC designers secure IC design and save colossal revenue loss.

Mini-review: Rehabilitation engineering: Research priorities and trends.

Rehabilitation Engineering is the use of engineering principles applied to rehabilitation, disability, and independent living. Google Scholar is a searchable resource that allows people from around the world to create profiles of their interests and collaborations, and it provides a means to search the broad scientific and technical literature. Google Scholar was used to identify the 150 most cited people who listed Rehabilitation Engineering in their profile. Research impact, characteristics, and areas of research of the most cited rehabilitation engineers were examined. Furthermore, gender and geographical differences in research metrics of the highest citied rehabilitation engineers were investigated. Consumer priorities in rehabilitation engineering were identified using a voice of consumer (VoC) survey and recent literature based on VoC studies. Gaps between research publication and activities and consumer priorities were identified to recommend seven areas of research with high demand and opportunity for growth and innovation. Implications.

Kumaraswamy inverse Gompertz distribution: Properties and engineering applications to complete, type-II right censored and upper record data.

This article proposes and studies a new three-parameter generalized model of the inverse Gompertz distribution, in the so-called Kumaraswamy inverse Gompertz distribution. The main advantage of the new model is that it has "an upside down bathtub-shaped curve hazard rate function" depending upon the shape parameters. Several of its statistical and mathematical properties including quantiles, median, mode, moments, probability weighted moment, entropy function, skewness and kurtosis are derived. Moreover, the reliability and hazard rate functions, mean time to failure, mean residual and inactive lifetimes are also concluded. The maximum likelihood approach is done here to estimate the new model parameters. A simulation study is conducted to examine the performance of the estimators of this model. Finally, the usefulness of the proposed distribution is illustrated with different engineering applications to complete, type-II right censored, and upper record data and it is found that this model is more flexible when it is compared to well-known models in the statistical literature.

Temporal Limits on What Engineers Can Plan.

My question is: How far into the future is it possible for engineers as such to plan? For example, the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository was to have been designed to store nuclear waste safely for between ten thousand and one million years. Is that the sort of planning engineers as such can do? The planning engineers do would not be philosophically interesting were it not in general so often successful, much more successful than the gambles of ordinary life. So, how is such planning possible-and what are its limits. Is one million years beyond the limits of what engineers, as such, can plan? Is a thousand years? Is a hundred years? Is there an nth generation for what engineers can plan? The answer I consider here is that engineers can plan only as far into the future as they can reasonably expect engineers to be present. That is only a few generations at most.

Developing a new model for the invention and translation of neurotechnologies in academic neurosurgery.

BACKGROUND: There is currently an acceleration of new scientific and technical capabilities that create new opportunities for academic neurosurgery. To engage these changing dynamics, the Center for Innovation in Neuroscience and Technology (CINT) was created on the premise that successful innovation of device-related ideas relies on collaboration between multiple disciplines. The CINT has created a unique model that integrates scientific, medical, engineering, and legal/business experts to participate in the continuum from idea generation to translation. OBJECTIVE: To detail the method by which this model has been implemented in the Department of Neurological Surgery at Washington University in St. Louis and the experience that has been accrued thus far. METHODS: The workflow is structured to enable cross-disciplinary interaction, both intramurally and extramurally between academia and industry. This involves a structured method for generating, evaluating, and prototyping promising device concepts. The process begins with the "invention session," which consists of a structured exchange between inventors from diverse technical and medical backgrounds. Successful ideas, which pass a separate triage mechanism, are then sent to industry-sponsored multidisciplinary fellowships to create functioning prototypes. RESULTS: After 3 years, the CINT has engaged 32 clinical and nonclinical inventors, resulting in 47 ideas, 16 fellowships, and 12 patents, for which 7 have been licensed to industry. Financial models project that if commercially successful, device sales could have a notable impact on departmental revenue. CONCLUSION: The CINT is a model that supports an integrated approach from the time an idea is created through its translational development. To date, the approach has been successful in creating numerous concepts that have led to industry licenses. In the long term, this model will create a novel revenue stream to support the academic neurosurgical mission.

Engineering innovation in healthcare: technology, ethics and persons.

Engineering makes profound contributions to our health. Many of these contributions benefit whole populations, such as clean water and sewage treatment, buildings, dependable sources of energy, efficient harvesting and storage of food, and pharmaceutical manufacture. Thus, ethical assessment of these and other engineering activities has often emphasized benefits to communities. This is in contrast to medical ethics, which has tended to emphasize the individual patient affected by a doctor's actions. However technological innovation is leading to an entanglement of the activities, and hence ethical responsibilities, of healthcare professionals and engineering professionals. The article outlines three categories of innovation: assistive technologies, telehealthcare and quasi-autonomous systems. Approaches to engineering ethics are described and applied to these innovations. Such innovations raise a number of ethical opportunities and challenges, especially as the complexity of the technology increases. In particular the design and operation of the technologies require engineers to seek closer involvement with the persons benefiting from their work. Future innovation will require engineers to have a good knowledge of human biology and psychology. More particularly, healthcare engineers will need to prioritize each person's wellbeing, agency, human relationships and ecological self rather than technology, in the same way that doctors prioritize the treatment of persons rather than their diseases.

The role of ethics in science and engineering.

It is generally thought that science and engineering should never cross certain ethical lines. The idea connects ethics to science and engineering, but it frames the relationship in a misleading way. Moral notions and practices inevitably influence and are influenced by science and engineering. The important question is how such interactions should take place. Anticipatory ethics is a new approach that integrates ethics into technological development.

Eco-Efficiency Analysis of biotechnological processes.

Eco-Efficiency has been variously defined and analytically implemented by several workers. In most cases, Eco-Efficiency is taken to mean the ecological optimization of overall systems while not disregarding economic factors. Eco-Efficiency should increase the positive ecological performance of a commercial company in relation to economic value creation--or to reduce negative effects. Several companies use Eco-Efficiency Analysis for decision-making processes; and industrial examples of best practices in developing and implementing Eco-Efficiency have been reviewed. They clearly demonstrate the environmental and business benefits of Eco-Efficiency. An instrument for the early recognition and systematic detection of economic and environmental opportunities and risks for production processes in the chemical industry began use in 1997, since when different new features have been developed, leading to many examples. This powerful Eco-Efficiency Analysis allows a feasibility evaluation of existing and future business activities and is applied by BASF. In many cases, decision-makers are able to choose among alternative processes for making a product.

Designing resilient, sustainable systems.

Pursuit of sustainable development requires a systems approach to the design of industrial product and service systems. Although many business enterprises have adopted sustainability goals, the actual development of sustainable systems remains challenging because of the broad range of economic, environmental and social factors that need to be considered across the system life cycle. Traditional systems engineering practices try to anticipate and resist disruptions but may be vulnerable to unforeseen factors. An alternative is to design systems with inherent "resilience" bytaking advantage of fundamental properties such as diversity, efficiency, adaptability, and cohesion. Previous work on sustainable design has focused largely upon ecological efficiency improvements. For example, companies have found that reducing material and energy intensity and converting wastes into valuable secondary products creates value for shareholders as well as for society at large. To encourage broader systems thinking, a design protocol is presented that involves the following steps: identifying system function and boundaries, establishing requirements, selecting appropriate technologies, developing a system design, evaluating anticipated performance, and devising a practical means for system deployment. The approach encourages explicit consideration of resilience in both engineered systems and the larger systems in which they are embedded.

Industrial applications using BASF eco-efficiency analysis: perspectives on green engineering principles.

Life without chemicals would be inconceivable, but the potential risks and impacts to the environment associated with chemical production and chemical products are viewed critically. Eco-efficiency analysis considers the economic and life cycle environmental effects of a product or process, giving these equal weighting. The major elements of the environmental assessment include primary energy use, raw materials utilization, emissions to all media, toxicity, safety risk, and land use. The relevance of each environmental category and also for the economic versus the environmental impacts is evaluated using national emissions and economic data. The eco-efficiency analysis method of BASF is briefly presented, and results from three applications to chemical processes and products are summarized. Through these applications, the eco-efficiency analyses mostly confirm the 12 Principles listed in Anastas and Zimmerman (Environ. Sci. Technol. 2003, 37(5), 94A), with the exception that, in one application, production systems based on bio-based feedstocks were not the most eco-efficient as compared to those based on fossil resources. Over 180 eco-efficiency analyses have been conducted at BASF, and their results have been used to support strategic decision-making, marketing, research and development, and communication with external parties. Eco-efficiency analysis, as one important strategy and success factor in sustainable development, will continue to be a very strong operational tool at BASF.

Research issues in sustainable consumption: toward an analytical framework for materials and the environment.

We define key research questions as a stimulus to research in the area of industrial ecology. The first group of questions addresses analytical support for green engineering and environmental policy. They relate to (i) tools for green engineering, (ii) improvements in life cycle assessment, (iii) aggregation of environmental impacts, and (iv) effectiveness of a range of innovative policy approaches. The second group of questions addresses the dynamics of technology, economics, and environmental impacts. They relate to (v) the environmental impacts of material and energy consumption, (vi) the potential for material efficiency, (vii) the relation of technological and economic development to changes in consumption patterns, and (viii) the potential for technology to overcome environmental impacts and constraints. Altogether, the questions create an intellectual agenda for industrial ecology and integrate the technological and social aspects of sustainability.