MIT MechE Symposium: Mechanical Engineering and the Information Age - Masayoshi Tomizujka, E. Daniel Hirleman, Ian Hunter, Seth Lloyd and Panel

[MUSIC PLAYING]

PRESENTER: You know, I'm a member of our systems and controls division. And we're always being told how we need to catch up to Berkeley there because they have the best division of systems and controls. But I guess the only consolation we can get from is that Professor Tomizuka is, in fact, an MIT graduate. So he'll be talking to us about making products of Y2K status report. Professor Tomizuka.

TOMIZUKA: Thank you very much.

AUDIENCE: That was a bad introduction.

[LAUGHTER]

PRESENTER: It makes us look more humble than we actually are.

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: Humble?

TOMIZUKA: Yes. Thank you very much for including somebody not from MIT.

[LAUGHTER]

On day four. I would take this opportunity to really go through what we are doing in the area of mechatronics at Berkeley. And I'll start with some general comments on the mechatronics. But also yesterday, there was some good talk mentioning about mechatronics. I don't have to, but I have been giving this kind of talk on similar advances,

I just changed the title. I think it's [INAUDIBLE] Y2K saved us before. And if we say mechatronics, there are also mechatronics devices in the market. But given some fine data, I'm not really defining mechatronics in narrow sense, just be part of these product. And in fact, the definition has been evolving. Started in 1969, Japanese started using it. And at the beginning, people really deferred to electromechanical systems.

I was doing the chief editor of the IEEE transactions on mechatronics up until December 1999. There, we used [INAUDIBLE] through the different synergetic integration of mechanical engineering with electronic and intelligent computer control in the design or manufacture of industrial products and processes.

Now if we-- this was in 1996-- but now everybody is talking about information technology. If we would have started journal, maybe instead of electronics, we would have, say, something information technology. And instead of computer control, I would have put more abstract wild-like complex decision making. So therefore, the Y2K definition may need something like the synergetic integration of physical systems with information technology and the complex decision making.

The other part, if you and-- you can still keep, but it's not that important. When we say information technology, I think Nam Suh had some good definition of what is information for information technology, but it's essentially the same thing. I'm putting some devices, which would store information and so forth, but starting from electronics, micro processor in 1970s to some network communication internet embedded DSPs.

Those are home phone, what I mean here by information technology here, and decision making site, I am referring to my favorite area, control theory, design methodology, while in more recent development in the area of hybrid system theory and so forth. So in the mainstream, of course, there is the physical systems. And physical systems, I see gaining one more importance in our life is something like bioengineering and medicine, energy transportation or intelligent transportation systems, environmental engineering, and manufacturing.

I picked this list from a recent publication from ASME. It said, mechanical engineering in the 21st century. And it came out September, 1999. Last year. It's one of a few publications from ASME which I quite agree very much and see quite useful. And by the way, they are listing 10. And of course, at the top, something which would make the difference in the next century, say put information technology.

And the way I see is that the first three more or less talking about some [INAUDIBLE] and everything technology. And merely the last five defining some exciting area. And mechatronics somehow come here to synthesize and utilize a neighboring technology in each specific domain area to make things more exciting.

Now of course, the driving forces of mechatronics was I put information technology with making mechatronics more and more exciting, but suddenly of course, need from industry. And those two combined are introducing new ways of doing things, new patterns of thinking. Some people prefer to call mechatronics simply as a best practice. So certainly that best practice is evolving as the technology develops.

Need from industry. This is from a talk by Mike Masten, Texas Instruments. He put together a general trend in industry. And lots of things already said yesterday. And some other thing which may end up having explicitly said, but I think you know most of the things here. And one thing probably, which interesting is this teams-- team works are preferred approach.

So I would comment later about some of the courses that we teach in this area, we try to teach some teamwork through the project work. Now let me go through some decent research at UCB in the area of controls of mechatronics. And good part of the topics that myself and my control colleagues. But I added something which is really relevant to information technology, which is not quite my area, but I cite work by Professor [INAUDIBLE] and some of the [INAUDIBLE]'s work. I think she's a member of the Advisory Committee and she'll be coming tomorrow.

Now the area of computer disk drive-- this research is conducted in the computer mechanics laboratory. And it's a consortium of industrial consortium. And in the controls area, myself and Professor Horowitz have been looking into this area. And really to answer to the need from the hard disk industries. They are striving for higher density storage, faster seek time, and of course, lowering cost.

If we read across some schematics what's going on, there are two types of problem. And one is so-called track following-- the decoding head has to stay on the data track. And I think it's supposed to be circle, but it's not quite. There is some random error, while in case of removable storage devices, there might be some eccentricity. And there are also a lot going on, but some decent work is one of my students finishing in the area so-called repetitive control.

This is a methodology which vary data through its periodic disturbances. And repetitive control is ideally suited for this type of problem because disk is spinning at some fixed speed, so the same pattern appears many times. So it's essentially how you may drop sensitivity to almost to 0 at certain frequencies.

The disk drive industry use so-called sector drive. Sector drive is that the fact that this can be sliced into the area and so-called provisional information is not written only at the boundary. So you would like to keep a number of sectors small so you have more area for storing data. But sometimes that you cannot get enough-- the frequencies, medium end frequency for doing some fine control.

Now instead of adding the sectors and putting more information, there has been some work to increase some effective bandwidth by updating the input more frequent than the measurement frequencies. And that's called multi data control. And it's a very interesting area, both from control point of view and for this type of application point of view.

And another student is finishing her PhD-- in this case, she-- in this area. And also the traditional disk files that you find in your computer has got only one actuator [INAUDIBLE] motor, but everybody is now working on how you can introduce second stage actuator. Essentially you put more freedom. So for fine motion control. And the next there is immediately coming out in the market is on utilizing piezoelectric piezo transducer. And certainly we are working in this area.

Also my college Horowitz in collaboration with Pisano, they are really MEMS faculty member is looking into the next generation second stage actuator by utilizing MEMS technology. And this work is sponsored by DARPA. And they are working with IBM. So this is their rotary type actuator. They designed both rotary type actuator and the linear actuator, two point millimeter diameter, and they have already closed loop. And they have got the basic performance.

One area I'm working with Horowitz is an NSF GOALI project with Xerox corporation for making the paper handling part of the copying machine more desirable and more intelligent. And it's very a mechatronics product. And we are suggesting to introduce some mechatronics syncing in the product design. So we are looking into some new ways of handling the papers in the copying machine.

Traditional machine, essentially you can think about that there has got one big conveyor belt. Paper is fed from one end and will do the image transfer station. And there is some control going on, but from here to there, there is essentially no control, open loop control. So as a result, the problem you experience is so-called soft jam or hard jams, when some measurement station, they are checking whether the paper is present or not.

If the paper does not come at the expected moment, the computer, the controller, thinks that something went wrong and simply stops the machine. And even though the paper may not be jamming, but software found the jam, so it called software jam. And we are trying to make it better, at least remove software jam, by breaking up the conveyor, big conveyor, into several sections and add sensor and actuator at each stage.

Certainly, this will complicate the problem. And if you have many sensors and actuators, if you do not have a good way of deciding the control action, this is not the kind of scheme that you would like to employ. But with the power of the computer now, this is quite feasible. And so we are looking into this problem.

Still, we have to do some economic considerations, so what is the required number of actuator and sensors? We can not just add too many from cost point of view also, and also reliability and maintenance. And also the problem itself is quite interesting because paper is moving and there are lots of constraints generated when paper is handed from one station to another.

You do not want to back up or you do not want to stretch because you might end up adding some marks. And also if your purpose is to essentially control the distance from one paper to another-- so if it's too close, we would like to increase the separation. But there is only a limited time window that you can apply the control, feedback control.

So it turns out to be a nice example of the hybrid system, discrete event systems. And intellectually, it is very quite challenging. Most of the thing we do, we would like to do experimental check. Otherwise, people won't believe us. But also by working on the hardware, we find lots of interesting problems.

So in this case, we got part from Xerox and we made some desktop paper pass. And it has got essentially three parts. Each part can be independently controlled. And of course, we have some paper feeder. And paper can ease of going around for many times while we have some exit gate that controls so paper can come out.

This is a motor. And measurement at this stage is a motor measurement. And also the roller is very physically moving the paper. But we are measuring the position of the roller. It's best to measure where paper is, and also if we can measure the paper velocity. So we are also adding photo sensor to detect the position and velocity of the paper.

California has got a PATH program. It's a very big program. PATH stand for Partners for Advanced Transit and Highways. It started in 1986. And there are lots of interesting control programs in the PATH area. In particular, advanced vehicle control and safety systems, it's lots of interesting control problems for mechanical engineering student, mechanical engineers.

Professor Hedrick, a former faculty at MIT, and myself have been working a lot in this area. And especially from automated driving, AHS point of view. In 1997, we had a high point of the past work. This was a slide from the 1997 National Automated Highway Systems Consortium demo down in San Diego.

And essentially past work, the research work has past resulted into the demo by eight car platoon. So eight car is making some sort of chain operation. They have very tight longitudinal control. And Professor Hedrick's work really resulted in doing this tight longitudinal control. My group has been working on automated steering for many years. And that really helped doing this demo.

Essentially what we do is we put magnet in the middle of the road. Magnet is about four feet apart. And magnetometer sense distance and then steering action is figured out by computer. So it's completely hand-free driving. He's not putting hand. And now after this demo, of course, the National Consortium was disbanded, discontinued. But now California is continuing this automated highway effort with emphasis on these heavy vehicles.

So I'm currently working with my graduate student on the automated steering for this track. This is flatline track. In fact, this is our current test track. So magnet technology has being shifted, applied, to some of the maintenance, load maintenance work by Cal Trans people-- California Department of Transportation. We have some small countries and they have got the idea to put magnet and do some guide vehicle while for the maintenance operation, for safe maintenance operation.

They are not immediately interested in automating the operation, but try to come up with some way of assisting the human driver. When you removing the snow, when the wind blows, there is so-called white out conditions generated, thereby instantaneously you lose sight. So in that case, how is magnet information combined with some dynamic prediction of where the vehicle may be going may be displayed on the screen so the driver can easily detect-- why, he even can drive looking at the screen.

It's an interesting man machine interface design problem because you'd like to see that driver be not confused by looking at screen. He should be able to switch back and forth and still maintain some semblance of operation. And one student is finishing PhD currently on this subject. So this is a typical application. This is not snow plow. This is a snow blower.

And in case of snow blower, Caltrans are interested in control even with automated driving. So we are starting that project. The Kazerooni, Professor Kazerooni, he's a graduate of MIT also. He has been working on a combination of the human intelligence and the power available from the hardware devices.

And he has been coding extenders. He joined us from Minnesota probably five, six years ago. And this is a device he designed at Minnesota. But it's a very early version of really making his idea of human intelligence plus mechanical power into some hardware device. And more recently, he has been working on-- from arm to leg. And this is some of his recent work. Power blower extremity enhancer.

And you can see some device. And this is a recent experiment he conducted at Berkeley. And the idea is by having this device, people can carry lots of heavy things and some battleground and so forth. By the way, this is one slide he requested me not to put on the web. So I will just eliminate this slide when I give you a copy.

This is the Professor Wright et al. Sanjay can explain this slide much better than I do. But this is light has some interesting idea. Now everybody is talking about how you can make use of the resource available at remote locations to accomplish your job. So efficiently networked manufacturing service. And this area is very-- this activity is expanding. I think Ford Motor Company has donated quite a bit money to even try this kind of thing on the education side, education aspect.

Now this is a slide that I received from Alice Agogino. So I cannot add too much, except it is written down here. This is her research project, the concept database, an overview. It's essentially a multimedia network conceptual design support tool. And some smart navigation through a hypermedia database uplink design concept and electronic component catalogs.

And her present research address aspect this there here. Some of the things which I personally find interesting is to manage uncertainties in design decision making, intelligent real time design. So how real time-- this network based tool can assist the designer. She has made some prototype conceptual database.

And in fact, one of our goal here in mechatronics is a very important aspect in her research. I didn't quite mention, but at the bottom, she put that domain of application is mechatronics design. So it's highly relevant to mechatronics. And this is for assisting the motor selection. So she put lots of intelligence there.

Now let me just comment some indication of the challenge from mechatronics point of view. And in fact, we are doing at UC Berkeley, as far as I see it, all ME and EE student should be exposed to mechatronics thinking. So all of our student needs to experience some mechanical design information technology and so forth, to team through teamwork.

But also this area, technology keeps changing. So students should be trained to be forward-looking and curious. What we provide at the school will never be the all, and maybe in a few years it's just all this stuff. So unless they have trained to be study themselves or curious look into new areas, we are not doing the right job.

That last comment is more addressed when I give this kind of talk outside the United States. I suppose we are-- everybody is using English. Now, regulatory work is essential in this area. So we have both undergraduate and graduate courses to let students do some laboratory work. Often, we make a team. And through that, people will learn some complexity aspect, the system aspect we are doing.

So several things happens at the same time. Error depends on minor changes in timing. The best way to learn this type of aspect is through actually project work. This is a undergraduate course that Kazerooni is teaching. And so if you look at the syllabus, it's from some microcontroller electronic motors and so forth. So this is covered by the extra.

But on the top of that, he has a project everybody has to accomplish projects. By the way, when student takes this course, student has not taken necessarily feedback control courses. And we can never underestimate the creativity of an undergraduate student. Without control courses, formal control courses, students in fact, does lots of interesting projects.

This is one project from last year-- automatic bicycle gear shifter. It's quite innovative. And some walking robot. And it walks. And to change the direction, it has got another motor spinning. So depending on which way motor is spinning, it's not making a very interesting maneuvering.

This is from across developed by another MIT graduate, in fact. David Auslander. He has been a kind of leader in the area of introducing microcomputers to control [INAUDIBLE]. And this is a switching control. He calls switching control. But essentially it's a discrete event system. Many things happens and how that computer system can detect which operation he's in.

In this particular case, training is going around. At some point, train motion has to be synchronized with the motion of this conveyor, which is carrying some iron ball. Its a magnet. So by on off switch, magnetic can either on this side or magnet can be dropped. Or a ball can be dropped. So it's a loading-- some steel ball on the train while the train is in motion. So just by doing this, the student can lots of the interesting aspects for real-time programming.

Now at a graduate level of education, I have to really say that fundamentals important-- really you emphasize the fundamentals. Fundamentals are really fundamental. And I think we do quite a good job in this area also. Now topics for dissertation research. This is something quite opposite from what Professor Siu. Was mentioning yesterday. Two minutes?

AUDIENCE: Sure.

[LAUGHTER]

TOMIZUKA: So balance between theory and application, as I say, it's very important. Of course, it doesn't have to be 50/50 split. In my case, I'm quite adjusted to that type of a student. So it's customized. Some student [INAUDIBLE] The theory part could be 90% and application part could be 10%. Or the other way around. Somebody more technology oriented, I could put that and emphasize more this aspect.

But I think at some point in life, especially student life, students should be exposed to both. And of course, that's great to the research funding. But as we have been so far lucky to find some exciting project for student. And especially for PhD. I think at UC Berkeley our goal is to really train future leaders, both in academia and in industry. And so far, we have been quite successful.

When we say fundamental, essentially every aspect-- but if you look at the kind of research courses that we are giving at the graduate level, we are very happy that we have from both technology end and to the theory end. And especially the control theory side, we have a very good coverage and we make it sure that we give this kind of control theory courses every semester.

But it's not very control courses given for the curiosity of only faculty members. We are giving these courses for students. So even when somebody goes to sabbatical, we make it sure that the course is covered. This is another aspect probably of education. This is the outcome of Alice Agogino's effort of national coalition.

Since this coalition is now continuing as a need. National Engineering Education Delivery System Digital Library. And you can check this on the internet. So if you say mechatronics, you can go through some of the modules that she has developed or her group has developed-- not necessarily all from Berkeley.

So let me conclude my talk by stating that information technology and a new dimension to mechatronics. Mechatronics is essential in all of engineering in the information age and lifelong learning aspect is important. And so it's system level thinking and teamwork. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

PRESENTER: Thank you. Yes, Eric?

AUDIENCE: Tomi, you put a lot of stuff in at 25 minutes and talk, but you didn't mention where you guys going.

TOMIZUKA: I think that we are essentially going in the direction. Information technology area, we talked about whether we should make something option at this undergraduate level. There is some divided opinion. We are not quite convinced to make a two pass, because always there's a department did not come agreement. Somebody always wants to keep it the way that we have been doing.

And so then there's some new people would like to do some more emphasis on information technology. So for required courses, we once thought about whether we might be able to make two versions-- one with some computational information technology thing and the other one without. Just traditional way. But I think too large an idea is not a good idea.

So eventually what I am thinking, what I'm seeing, is we will be introducing more and more information technology, at least to use a computational thing in the education of undergraduate education. So that's definitely happening. Now, and also I mentioned yesterday a little bit, but we are at a situation that maybe close to the Silicon Valley. Student attention is very much directed to computer science.

And we have to really make a good case how mechanical engineering will grow in that environment. So one idea, which was the idea discussed among the college was that probably, because our information technology computational things does not have to be taught on the all in computer science, but if we do, whether we can set up an attractive courses that we can draw lots of students.

But at least when we are hiring new people, we are looking into what kind of expertise new guy has so they can naturally participate in the area of computational engineering information technology aspect. So that's one thing we have been looking into. And maybe from a research point of view, it all depends on the individual faculty member.

It's more the background environment. Probably MIT's situation must be the same. It's pretty much bottom up. Each individuals faculty member's interest is-- and everybody is sensitive, so they are introducing some new idea into the research. But we do not have any really strategic thing, except that we say that, OK, we emphasize bioengineering. Mechanical engineering saying that we would emphasize bioengineering manufacturing for a long period.

But bioengineering is certainly not just mechanical engineering subject. So the college started the department of bioengineering a few years ago. So it's the single independent department. So that that's a kind of new thing happening.

PRESENTER: More questions? Let's thank our speaker--

[APPLAUSE]

Our next speaker is Professor Dan Hirleman. He's a professor and department head at Purdue University. And he'll be telling us about the mechanical engineering and information technology at Purdue. Oh, and while he's switching over, let me just make a comment, which is Professor Tomizuka's talk reminded me that, after all, information has been in technology for a long time.

When I'm teaching the big undergraduate control theory course right now. And every control theory book points out to you that the whole reason that the watt is called the watt is not because Watt invented the steam engine, but because he invented the governor for the steam engine. The governor is a simple feedback device. Its goal is simply to process information.

And it was the governor that made the machine actually a useful tool, upping its efficiency, power, capacity by many factors of 10-- I'm sorry, by factors of 10 to 100. So I mean, information technology has always been in mechanical engineering. And mechatronics, I think particularly these beautiful examples that we just heard, shows you how that has blossomed as the capacity for information processing have grown. Professor--

HIRLEMAN: Thank you, sir. Well as he said, my name's Dan Hirleman. I'm at Purdue University. And I accepted the invitation to speak here and then saw the program and saw that I was last on the program. So I began to check into that and I know the reason now-- I have no connection with MIT.

[LAUGHTER]

Never been here. Actually, that's not totally true. I did an interview here, I guess you'd say, when I was looking to where to go to school for a PhD with John Hinkley when I was in the combustion business. But ended up choosing to go to Purdue, so maybe that's another reason--

[LAUGHTER]

The school of ME at Purdue has a long history. And just to put it in context with the MIT group, we graduate a little under 300 students a year. So we sort of graduate the size of MIT's undergraduate program each year. So we're three or four times that in size. We have about 50 faculty. Something like 300 grad students.

And we've definitely begun to focus on IT and how that will play into our school. I think that's still in process. One of the exciting things, opportunities we have, is a professorship, the Feddersen Professorship, focused exactly on that interface between ME and IT. So that's something we're in the process of filling.

Now information technology, don't want to exactly define it, but we sort of view it as where computing and communications come together, and ask the question, how does that influence mechanical engineering, both practice and education? Now if you look at the spectrum, another way of sort of thinking of information, this is kind of a progression. You start with data and assemble it in ways to make information.

In principle, you package information and we pass on or help our students acquire knowledge. I guess at the top of this food chain is wisdom. So information is down here in information technology. Another way to think of it is how do we package it and convert it into knowledge of our students?

Just a thought as we think about education-- this is something attributed to Benjamin Franklin, but out of a reference listed there. "Students are not receptacles. Information transfer alone is not education. Education is what remains after the information and training have been forgotten." So we do need to convey information, but we but we certainly don't want to stop there.

Now in terms of my talk, I think of sort of these four facets of ME and IT. And certainly there are many ways in which our profession contributes to the information technology revolution. We've heard some good examples of that just previously. The other side of that equation is that information technology certainly will impact mechanical engineering practice. And then there's a couple other educational contributions as well.

Now as the department head, when I knew that I was going to give this talk, the first thing I do-- it sounds like the same thing Professor Tomizuka did-- is you send out an email or chat with folks and say, I'm going to talk about IT and ME. Do you have anything you'd like me to show? And then I get about 500 slides.

So I'm going to move into that. I haven't checked this with chairperson, but I'm going to take a chance that you'll stipulate that I could show you a lot of slides of ME faculty that do really need things related to ME and IT. And I'm going to skip those. And if you don't believe me that I could do that, then look on the web afterwards and check it out.

But certainly there's a lot of contributions I believe our faculty have made, are making, and have made. Computation, in many ways, virtual sensors, heat transfer for the industry, data storage technology, wafer inspection handling, and the like. There's certainly a large contribution that our school and our faculty have made, as have the MIT and Berkeley faculty as well.

Now in terms of how we are implementing information technology in our education, this is a slide that I showed yesterday. I'm going to briefly talk about these, and then really kind of switch gears toward the end of my presentation. But we're trying to do web-enhanced, web-based courses. We've done distance design teams-- again, the communications aspect of technology enables that.

We have an interesting project teaming business and engineering students around some information technology. We certainly are including advanced simulation tools in our undergraduate courses. That allows you to do some more interesting things. And then we're certainly in the domain of doing virtual lab experiments.

Now in terms of web-enhanced courses, we have a number of experiments going, as do you. And most of you, I'm sure-- so we use streaming video and PowerPoint notes and chat rooms and frequently asked questions. And we think that is a way to certainly leverage faculty time and expertise and make a better educational experience for some of our students.

Mentioned the other day about how we use communications technology and some other types of information technology for distance design teams across schools, across countries, across companies. This was a project I mentioned the other day, yesterday in the panel-- a joint where we tried to team business MBA students with PhD students and accelerate that commercialization step into the last couple of years of PhD project. And we're doing some virtual lab experiments as well, as are a number of you.

I'll skip over these. Now actually for the rest of the talk, I'm going to take a little different approach. I think I won't come up with conclusions that are startling based on our conversation. I guess you'd say it's a different way of looking at the rationale. If you think about the impact on education and then delivery, I think delivery enables mass customization. The information technology and the potential in delivery can allow-- this is something that was talked about yesterday as well.

We may be able to tune our delivery to learning styles and that's effectively mass customization. I think it also reduces some of the repetitive aspects of faculty student interaction. These frequently answered question postings that we have have been a very interesting concept, chat rooms and the like.

So there are some things where faculty time can be diverted, I guess you'd say, to other types of things. And some of the aspects of faculty student interaction can be taken over by IT. It increases the reach of mediated material. You know, our school has I think 18,000 alums. If any of them do lifelong learning, I'd like them to take it from Purdue, not anywhere else. IT enables distance product realization teams. It enables this more realistic performance models in design and process.

I'd liked to now think about what I call some dislocation cases in businesses. So I'm sort of changing gears here and I want to step back and think about the impact of IT on some business sectors. And then toward the end, I'll try to bring it into our domain of engineering education-- in particular, residential university engineering education.

And these are some case studies I'd to talk with you a bit about. Encyclopedia Britannica, your local retailer, car dealerships, insurance agents, and then ask the question about the residential university. So let's look at Encyclopedia Britannica. Now anyone that grew up in the states-- I'm assuming that if you grew up in the US, you had a set of encyclopedias on your bookshelf at your house.

And my guess is, no one here didn't have that. How many one here has bought a set of encyclopedias in, say, the last 10 years? I don't believe anyone will raise their hand. So that's a very interesting case study. Very big business. Every American home, I believe, that had kids where their parents envisioned that they would go to college had a set of encyclopedias. And that's gone from 100% market penetration to 0. And it all happened just a few years back.

So what was going on there? Well, one thing is that the information conveyed in the product or the service/product was tied up in the physical books. So effectively, we all, all American kids, had about a meter of encyclopedias in a bookshelf at home. They used a parental guilt trip as a very effective marketing tool. Do you want your kid to be behind his or her peers? No. Then buy these encyclopedias. We all buy-- my parents bought--

Now what began to happen is not too many years back, Bill Gates went to-- my guess is, Bill Gates went to Encyclopedia Britannica and said, why don't we work together? And they said no thanks. And he said fine, I'll just give away encyclopedias then on CD-ROMs. And that's effectively what happened. Sales went to 0 overnight.

So interesting case study. Let's look at another one. Your local retailer. I think I can tie this to IT but let's think about it. Basically this is the small mom and pop shop. They have a relatively small selection, relatively small amount of things in stock. The proprietor carries the information content on these products. You went in, you chat with them, they know what's available, what they have.

They know a lot about their products. You know, you think of the hardware store. And there is certainly some social value, some community in that local shop. But what's happened, as you know, is the larger stores in the malls have begun to impact that. And you see they're not totally disappeared, but they're certainly an impact on that business sector.

Now one of the things that you might think about is, why is that? Well, one way to think of it is, as the malls are there and the Walmarts, basically the information available to the consumer has increased greatly. And so we don't really rely on that proprietor to give us information about the products. So that's one aspect probably of what's going on.

Think if you were in the car dealership business. And think of the trends. You know, many years ago, if you think of what's happened in the last 20 years, I think you see a trend toward greater selection with sort of fewer stops. So you think of auto malls where all the dealers that are competitors are clustering together in one place. I think certainly in the cities I've lived in, you find single dealers that are in-- now they have not only Fords, but they have GMs and international cars as well. So single dealers with a wider and wider selection of products.

Now there is this some people enjoy making the deal and enjoy the face to face battle with the car dealer and the information that they tell you about. There's probably some value in physically test driving these cars, but my guess is I would not want to be in the car dealership business depending on walk-in sales anymore. I think the internet opens up so much information that we don't really rely on the car dealership for any of that. We know exactly what they pay for the cars and we know all the cars that you can get and when you can get them.

The very last little case study I'll talk about is sort of your local insurance agent. There's a major dislocation going on in this business as well. You might, if you think back 20 or 30 years or something, I guess you'd say your friendly Allstate agent, your local agent, was the one that helped you if you had a loss of a car or a flood or tornado or hail or something like that. They came out. They helped you. And there was that sort of information.

Let me tell you how we can sort this out. And I think in time, you've gradually seen a bifurcation in that. I don't know. You know, the last time I got hit in my car, I drove it to a claim station who looked at it. My agent was never involved. Now I didn't like the way the whole thing was handled because it turns out I ran into somebody that had insurance from the same company.

And instead of arguing about it, they just blamed us both. And I didn't think that was quite right, so I called my agent. And basically my agent said, well, I don't have anything to do with that. You're talking to the wrong group. I'm the front end. You need to talk to some other division. So what's happened is that the whole industry has been broken apart. The claims is one place. If you want to argue about how they handled your claim, you don't call your agent. You call somebody else.

And I think if you read the paper, you see major changes that are going on in these large companies. And I guess the value added is in question. What does that local agent provide to you? So again, I think I read something that Allstate was doing something with a huge fraction and effectively laying off a huge fraction of their local agents.

So what are the themes in these case studies? And I hope they relate to what we're talking about today. Well, all of them had-- in the beginning, there were physical aspects of the product or the service. And the information content was integrally tied with the physical content. Think about the encyclopedias. All the information was in the physical books. Same with the car dealership. The information that the dealer or the agent conveys to you is tied with the fact that you go to the shop and see the cars or go to the hardware store and see the material.

Now the dislocation occurs when you can split the information content from the physical content of the product. I would say anyone that's working in a sector where your physical content and your information content can be split, I would beware. Now what's another sector that has exactly that potential? That's us. Think of a residential university. Well, our value added is the education and learning that our students extract from the experience on campus.

We facilitate it by faculty, and historically sage on the stage, good lectures, large classrooms, large physical plant, lecture halls, labs, student unions, dorms, study areas, all of that physical infrastructure that supports the learning environment that we think is important. But here's the question-- can the students, can our society, separate the information content of what we deliver from that physical plant?

And if so, we're in trouble. So a sobering thought maybe. But not a new one for you. So what do we do about that? So how does a residential university like Purdue and like the schools that are represented here deal with this? I think we-- and it's what we're working on, is we are working very hard to define exactly which educational experiences are really value adding. And I'm looking for the ones where the physical and the information content cannot be separated.

And I believe we need to focus on those very quickly because the University of Phoenix and other folks are going to come after that sector of our business where you can separate the physical from the information content. So where is physical presence not equal to wireless presence? Where is presence not the same as TelePresence? Those are the things that I believe. And at Purdue, we're trying to focus on.

So those activities. Hands on labs I believe are one of those. Now you might argue that I can do with haptic interfaces, you might argue that I can do virtual labs and do everything that a hands on lab does. I think in my heart of hearts, I don't believe that. Now it may be that I'm putting my head in the sand. But that's an interesting discussion. Will we ever be able to do with virtual labs what you learn-- when I talked yesterday about taking apart a lawnmower engine and putting it back together, every piece by piece and starting it and getting it to run, or taking part of a washing machine.

Can we really replicate that with virtual labs? Good question. I think a lot of-- I think mentoring, I think the faculty to student mentoring, that relationship, is one thing that you cannot do in a distance mode the same as you can do with physical presence. That's probably debatable. Some folks are going to be telling the world that's not true. They're going to tell the world, you don't need to go. You don't need to send your child to MIT or to Purdue.

They can stay at home or at least kick them out of the house, move them to an apartment nearby. But they can get everything they need wireless. So I think that's not true. Collaborative learning. I believe there's a lot of a learning environment that involves working with other students. That's the dorm. That's the midnight discussions. That, I believe, is a part of our physical plant and the physical and learning environment that cannot really be separated from the information content.

So when I think about building a new wing on the ME building, which we're trying to do, I think about how can I make that place, the place-- the one, the best place in the country and the world where this full educational environment can be experienced? I want the students to be fighting their parents to say, send me to Purdue, because I think it's going to get more and more competitive as time goes on.

Now that might be a little more provocative, but I guess the question is, what do we do with those aspects of our-- we're not a business, but those aspects of our enterprise that are subject to dislocation? One approach is say we just give those up. We're going to focus all our energy on those few activities where we truly provide a value that can't be split between the physical and the information content.

So I'm not proposing this, but that might say, let's get out of the internet web course delivery development, turn that over to the folks that are going to go after that anyway and let's spend all our time on these things. You know, I want to be the supplier of choice for the labs when all those distance education things realize that we can't get it across without a lab, then I think they'll be sending them to MIT and Purdue to get that component of their experience.

So I'm not exactly-- we're not actually doing that. We're doing a lot to develop web courses. But that would be one approach that a business would take. If you see a sector that's going to be eaten up, you just spin that off and let them fight on that battleground by themselves and we'll focus on our core value added. So--

PRESENTER: Great.

[APPLAUSE]

HIRLEMAN: Be willing to answer questions, or maybe that's a piece of the discussion for the panel.

PRESENTER: No, as I said, the panel will be on applied issues, so let's have questions now.

HIRLEMAN: John?

AUDIENCE: Dan, I think maybe to your last point, you might want to consider what businesses consider-- something called asset management. And if you did that, maybe you'd see that-- how to leverage all of these things as opposed to disposing some and keeping others. Because really what you're really talking about is what are these assets and how to best use them?

HIRLEMAN: And surely the educational content is going to come from Purdue faculty and MIT faculty. So--

AUDIENCE: Well, there might be other business, academic interaction which could allow for that leverage.

HIRLEMAN: Right. Like we chatted last night.

AUDIENCE: I have a question about all of the virtual laboratories. And have you done any quantitative assessment of your success with them all?

HIRLEMAN: We have not in a scientific way. We have anecdotal evidence.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] for an engine, we've had to add streaming audio in order to give people enough feedback. So then have your information about metrics or virtual laboratories.

HIRLEMAN: And my feeling would be you cannot do it. So my anecdotes go along with that, though it's certainly not an unbiased representative sample. And I also know that I probably bias a sample myself and then who you hear from-- so I think that's an important thing. I mean, to decide what the metrics are. And I thought the work we heard yesterday from Dave Wallace, I guess it was-- It was not on virtual labs, but the idea of how do you assess the effectiveness is a very important thing.

AUDIENCE: Yeah. Some of the comments you made and some of the questions were a lot of very good points. The one thing that is not there that separates whether you use [INAUDIBLE] MIT from the scenario to presented is that part of what we do [INAUDIBLE] well, we research universities, is we really research and graduate education.