THE IMPORTANCE OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS

Telecommunications and Society

The societal importance of telecommunications is well accepted and

broadly understood, reflected in its near-ubiquitous penetration and use. Noted
below are some of the key areas of impact:

Telecommunications provides a technological foundation for societal

communications. Communication plays a central role in the fundamental
operations of a society—from business to government to families. In fact,
communication among people is the essence of what distinguishes an
organization, community, or society from a collection of individuals.
Communication—from Web browsing to cell phone calling to instant messaging—
has become increasingly integrated into how we work, play, and live.

Telecommunications enables participation and development. Telecommunications

plays an increasingly vital role in enabling the participation and development of
people in communities and nations disadvantaged by geography, whether in rural
areas in the United States or in developing nations in the global society and
economy.

Telecommunications provides vital infrastructure for national security. From

natural disaster recovery, to homeland security, to communication of vital
intelligence, to continued military superiority, telecommunications plays a pivotal
role. When the issue is countering an adversary, it is essential not only to preserve
telecommunications capability, but also to have a superior capability. There are
potential risks associated with a reliance on overseas sources for innovation,
technologies, applications, and services.It is difficult to predict the future impact
of telecommunications technologies, services, and applications that have not yet
been invented. For example, in the early days of research and development into
the Internet in the late 1960s, who could have foreseen the full impact of the
Internet’s widespread use today?
Electronic Engineering: Innovation, employment and career prospects
Published: Jan 17, 2018 By Seema Sharma

Electronic engineering has long been a pioneering field, with its roots in ground-
breaking inventions in the late 19th and early 20th century including radio,
telephone and television. The modern day field has morphed into a diverse and
dynamic area, covering everything from mobile phones to robotics. In this article,
we take an incisive look at how the field emerged and what to expect in
employment, including the training and skills required.

Background

Electronic engineers are responsible for the design, development and testing of
devices, components or systems with an electrical power source. This area of
engineering is often viewed as a subfield of electrical engineering. The distinction
usually drawn between the two is the focus in electronic engineering on circuitry
and design of individual components of a device, whilst electrical engineering is
broader, centring on power generation and transmission. It is of note that many
universities have joint departments for electronic and electrical engineering, due
to their inherent interconnection.

The field owes it origins to a number of innovations that took place at the
end of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. These included the invention
of the radio — accredited to Guglielmo Marconi and Karl Ferdinand Braun by the
Nobel Prize committee in 1909 [1]. The related work In 1904 by Professor John
Ambrose Fleming, at University College London, who invented the first radio tube
— the diode. This was followed by the independent development of the amplifier
tube two years later, known as a triode, by Robert von Lieben and Lee De Forest.
The latter became incorporated into radios worldwide and allowed for long-
distance telephone calls.The subsequent invention of television, use and
development of communication systems like sonar and radar in World War II, and
the transistor in 1947, laid further foundations to the discipline. Other key 20th
century inventions include the microprocessor in 1969 by Marcian Edward (Ted)
Hoff, through his work at—what was then a small Silicon Valley start-up, Intel.
Microprocessors have become integral in personal computers, and have also
allowed for electronic technology development in any device that requires
computation power, for example. cars and mobile phones.

Electronic engineering, in the form it exists today, can include the conception and
design of electronic components and systems for a wide range of commercial,
industry, or scientific research applications. A graduate degree is usually a pre-
requisite for all entry-level roles. You can further specialise in sub-disciplines that
include control engineering, signal processing, telecommunications engineering,
computer engineering (including embedded systems) and instrumentation,
through further postgraduate study. The world’s top ranked academic research
centres for electronic engineering in 2017 included— Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT), Stanford, University of California - Berkeley (UCB), University of
California - Los Angeles (UCLA), Cambridge University and the Nanyang
Technological University, Singapore [2].

International funding for research comes from a wide variety of sources, including
national research councils and additionally, industry funders, due in part to the
direct practical applications of projects. In the UK, the primary governmental
funding body is the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
At the EU level, a number of relevant funding opportunities are available under
the current Horizon 2020 framework under its Industrial Leadership pillar
 New Telecommunications Engineering MSc Programme to Support
Sector

The programme can be evaluated as Ethiopians replace foreigners in

infrastructure design and installation

A long-awaited Master of Science programme in Telecommunications

Engineering is soon to be launched at the Addis Abeba Institute of Technology
(AAIT).

The programme was designed with the primary goal of supplying the nation’s
telecoms sector with local professionals. The two-year programme was jointly
designed by AAIT and ethio telecom, and will cost approximately 23m Br over five
years (not counting laboratory equipment). Other partners in the design and
implementation of the project are Aalto University in Finland, and various Chinese
universities and telecoms companies.

Ethiopia, a nation of about 90 million, has one of the lowest Internet

penetration rates in the world, with just 0.75% of the population online. The
numbers for cell phones and land lines are much higher, and ethio telecom is one
of the largest providers in Africa, but much of the design and installation work for
the infrastructure is being done by foreigners. Changing this was the rationale
that inspired professors at the Electrical & Computer Engineering Department at
AAIT, to come up with the idea for the project.The curriculum has been designed
and finalised and after a workshop on Saturday, October 17th, the programme
will be presented to the head of the university for final approval. The plan is for
the programme to begin this year and produce 300 experts by the end of the
second Growth and Transformation Plan in five years.Yalemzewd Negash (PhD),
dean of the School of Electrical & Computer Engineering at AAIT said that
previously, there existed a Communications Engineering programme that many
found to be far too theoretical and was failing to produce experts. That
programme lacked the requisite practical and laboratory education that telecoms
experts need to possess. Mostly, the former programme was designed to cultivate
academics for teaching posts in the country’s many nascent universities.The new
programme was designed over the course of one year, with approximately 38
separate meetings between eight professors from AAiT and three experts from
ethio telecom. The curriculum is based on an analysis of over 1,000 courses and
involved discussion with ethio telecom, international vendors and operators and
other colleges. Among the new innovative courses is “Power Management”,
particularly formulated with ethio telecom in mind as 30pc of the monopoly’s
expenses go to power. The curriculum itself will be divided into two streams; one
for network engineering, which deals with infrastructure, and the other for
information systems, which deals with services. In addition, students will be
allowed to choose between a thesis and non-thesis version of the programme.
Foreign professors will be brought in to teach some of the more complex subjects,
such as fibre optical systems, at least for the first batch, said Dean Yalemzewd.

The programme is in keeping with the recent trend of collaboration

between government and academia. The Ethiopian Roads Authority trains road
engineers through AAIT and the Ethiopian Railway Corporation sends its
employees to the Institute to study electrical, mechanical and civil
engineering.Experts at Ethiopia’s Telecommunications & Post Office Development
Office have welcomed the new programme, decrying the lack of local expertise in
major technical posts in the country’s telecommunications sector. Two experts
from the office who talked to Fortune mentioned many areas of the sector that
are growing, including e-banking, rural connectivity, e-learning at the universities,
SchoolNet for elementary and high school students, telemedicine and AgroNet,
the network for farming research centre. While these areas are developed by
local expertise, the infrastructure supporting them also needs to be locally
designed and installed, according to the experts. Though there is some training
for local professionals, more often than not, it does not last more than a few
months and takes place outside the country (for example, in Japan through the
Japanese International Cooperation Agency), said Bekele Jegora, an expert at the
Telecommunication and Port Development Office.
 Engineering Intelligent Electronic Systems Based on Computational
Neuroscience

A. Understanding and Emulating Biological Intelligence

For millennia, humans have observed animals performing physical feats that we
could not match. Insects and birds fly, horses run at high speeds with great
endurance, and fish survive their entire lives under water. Eventually we
mastered mechanical design and energy storage to the extent that we can mimic,
and in many cases surpass, the physical abilities of other animals.

It is, therefore, arguably the case that two of this century’s grandest scientific
challenges are to:

discover and understand the neurobiological mechanisms that support

processing, learning, and intelligence in biological brains;

design engineered systems that replicate the capabilities of biological intelligence.

In 2013, the importance of these challenges was recognized by the European

Union, who have provided more than $1 billion to research in the area of
computational neuroscience, in the form of the “Human Brain Project.” This
project’s stated aims include advancing knowledge about brain function and
creating new brain-inspired computation technology. Subsequently, in 2013, the
United States announced the similarly large-scale BRAIN initiative.

This special issue is, therefore, especially timely because these initiatives coincide
with tremendous progress recently in the field of computational neuroscience,
some of which has been specifically enabled by electrical, electronic, and
computer engineers. Many of these achievements are described in the papers of
the issue, as summarized in Section II. First, however, we discuss historical
context, as many readers may be unfamiliar with this field of research.

B. The Origins of Computational Neuroscience and Its Historical Links With

Electronic Engineering
Given that neurons exhibit electrical activity, there are natural research links
between electronics and neuroscience. For example, Alan Hodgkin and Andrew
Huxley published a famous paper in 1952 entitled “A quantitative description of
membrane current and its application to conduction and excitation in nerve” [1],
in which they proposed an electrical circuit model of current flow across a nerve
membrane. The model included resistive, capacitive and voltage-dependent ionic
currents. The work of Hodgkin and Huxley was recognized by the 1963 Nobel Prize
in Physiology or Medicine, jointly with John Eccles.

Before this, in the 1940s, Norbert Wiener and many colleagues developed an
interest in studying problems that are common to both biological organisms and
machines. In 1948, Wiener gave a name to this topic in his book Cybernetics: Or
Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine [2]. Chapter V of
Wiener’s book, “Computing Machines and the Nervous System,” discusses
computation in the brain in terms of the properties of neurons and synapses.
Other work by Wiener and his contemporaries was instrumental in the
development of modern control theory, which is today important in
understanding biological motor control in computational neuroscience (see, for
example, the papers by Kao et al., Franceschini , Sejnowski et al., and Stewart &
Eliasmith in this issue).

Going back further in time, famous names in the history of electrical engineering
also made seminal contributions in the discovery of electrical activity in the
nervous system, including Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta, and Hermann von
Helmholtz.

There is also some interesting history in this area within the Proceedings of the
IEEE. For example, in 1959, a paper entitled “What the frog’s eye tells the frog’s
brain,” by Lettvin, Maturanat, McCulloch, and Pitts was published in
the Proceedings of the IRE (the original name for the Proceedings of the IEEE) [3].
Another example from the same journal was the 1962 paper “An active pulse
transmission line simulating nerve axon,” by Nagumo, Arimoto, and Yoshizawa
[4], which articulated a model that was to become known as the “Fitzhugh–
Nagumo neuron model.”
More recently, electronic engineering intersected with computational
neuroscience in Carver Mead’s influential work on neuromorphic engineering,
described in his 1989 book Analog VLSI and Neural Systems [5]. This field of
research employs analog very large-scale integration (VLSI) electronic circuits to
mimic neurobiological circuitry. Mead and other pioneers of this field founded the
Telluride Neuromorphic Engineering Workshop, which has been meeting annually
since 1994. Twenty five years after Mead’s book, neuromorphic engineering
continues to flourish, as evidenced by papers in this special issue, such as those of
Benjamin et al., Hamilton et al., and Rahimi Azghadi et al.

Today, there are numerous research avenues that link study of the nervous
system with electronics, physics, mathematics, computer science, and technology.
Such research has been described using any number of names. When such
research has a scientific focus, it is labeled, for example, as computational
neuroscience, systems neuroscience, theoretical neuroscience, mathematical
neuroscience, neural modeling, neural coding, theoretical neurobiology, and
integrative neuroscience. This kind of research can also be thought of as a
subfield of computational biology or systems biology. Research with a dominant
engineering design focus has been called, for example, neuromorphic
engineering, neuro engineering, neurorobotics, and neural engineering.

Although this diversity of names for highly interrelated research is suggestive of

both major and slightly different focuses and methodologies, it is arguably more
significant for two facts that it also highlights:

understanding the principles of computational brain function is a hard and

complex problem;

The second fact is a current challenge in brain research. Researchers with

different disciplinary training tend to approach the problem of understanding
computation in the brain using methods that have been successful for other
problems in their fields, and communicate their results in their “native”
disciplinary language; this can be reflected in how the research becomes labeled
 What is Telecommunications Engineering
Telecommunications Engineering is focused on the devices and mediums used to
transmit communications information in the form of words, sounds or images
over great distances. The main mediums a Telecommunications Engineers
develops systems and solutions within are telephone, radio, television and the
internet.

Project planning, supervising and organizing and overseeing the installation of

these devices are tasks that Telecommunications Engineers may perform as part
of their daily duties. One of the most important skills that any good
Telecommunications Engineer must have is in both digital and analog signal
conditioning and processing. This is because all telecommunications are
eventually (if not already) converted into electrical signals which can be modified,
improved and enhanced.
History of electronic engineering

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The history of electronic engineering is a long one.[citation needed] Chambers

Twentieth Century Dictionary (1972) defines electronics as "The science and
technology of the conduction of electricity in a vacuum, a gas, or a
semiconductor, and devices based thereon".[1]

Electronic engineering as a profession sprang from technological improvements in

the telegraph industry during the late 19th century and in
the radio and telephone industries during the early 20th century. People
gravitated to radio, attracted by the technical fascination it inspired, first in
receiving and then in transmitting. In the interwar years, the subject was known
as radio engineering. The word electronics began to be used in the 1940s[3] In the
late 1950s the term electronic engineering started to emerge.[4]

The electronic laboratories (Bell Labs in the United States for instance) created
and subsidized by large corporations in the industries of radio, television, and
telephone equipment, began churning out a series of electronic advances. In 1948
came the transistor and in 1960 the integrated circuit, which would revolutionize
the electronic industry.[5][6] In the UK, the subject of electronic engineering
became distinct from electrical engineering as a university-degree subject around
1960. (Before this time, students of electronics and related subjects like radio and
telecommunications had to enroll in the electrical engineering department of the
university as no university had departments of electronics. Electrical engineering
was the nearest subject with which electronic engineering could be aligned,
although the similarities in subjects covered (except mathematics and
electromagnetism) lasted only for the first year of three-year courses.)

Electronic engineering (even before it acquired the name) facilitated the

development of many technologies including wireless
telegraphy, radio, television, radar, computers and microprocessors.