"Imagine a circular classroom, surrounded by white boards and populated with movable chairs. Energized students are mesmerized by the tales of the Greek myths, the power of Zeus the god of the sky, and stories of the great Hercules—his son—whose strength was legendary.  

Suddenly, a timeline is projected onto the middle of the floor. Children whisk away their chairs to stand in the present, ready to move backward and descend into the year 300 BC—a year in which they will encounter a new reality. They enter the metaverse of Greek culture. Carts buzz by them, traders in marketplaces surround them and high atop the hill, they see—with their own eyes—the temples of the gods and the people who worship them. They explore, they ask questions, they ponder, they learn!"

"It is hard to represent our spherical world on flat piece of paper. Cartographers use something called a "projection" to morph the globe into 2D map. The most popular of these is the Mercator projection.

Every map projection introduces distortion, and each has its own set of problems. One of the most common criticisms of the Mercator map is that it exaggerates the size of countries nearer the poles (US, Russia, Europe), while downplaying the size of those near the equator (the African Continent). On the Mercator projection Greenland appears to be roughly the same size as Africa. In reality, Greenland is 0.8 million sq. miles and Africa is 11.6 million sq. miles, nearly 14 and a half times larger.

This app was created by James Talmage and Damon Maneice. It was inspired by an episode of The West Wing and an infographic by Kai Krause entitled "The True Size of Africa". We hope teachers will use it to show their students just how big the world actually is."

"Twitter has an enormous goal: the company wants to add another 100 million daily users by the end of 2023 -- a growth of about 50 percent from where it is today. To do that, Twitter is going to need to add users at a far faster pace than it has in recent years, launching and iterating on new products and getting users to engage with the app more regularly."

As we close 2021 and look forward to 2022, the biggest stories of our time are full of hope and promise. Just as we were able to apply a 20-year-old technology to rapidly create vaccines to save humanity, innovations in battery technology promise to make the world greener. This is the essence of engineering: not to settle, to keep innovating, to adapt proven principles to new situations, and to keep pursuing new methods.

"We got very lucky. The two most effective vaccines against the coronavirus are based on messenger RNA, a technology that has been in the works for 20 years. When the covid-19 pandemic began last January, scientists at several biotech companies were quick to turn to mRNA as a way to create potential vaccines; in late December 2020, at a time when more than 1.5 million had died from covid-19 worldwide, the vaccines were approved in the US, marking the beginning of the end of the pandemic."

"Electric vehicles come with a tough sales pitch; they’re relatively expensive, and you can drive them only a few hundred miles before they need to recharge—which takes far longer than stopping for gas. All these drawbacks have to do with the limitations of lithium-ion batteries. A well-funded Silicon Valley startup now says it has a battery that will make electric vehicles far more palatable for the mass consumer."

As enterprises grow, traditional programming or simple automation will not scale. Autonomic systems are self-managing physical or software systems that learn from their environments. Unlike automated or even autonomous systems, autonomic systems can dynamically modify their own algorithms without an external software update, enabling them to rapidly adapt to new conditions in the field, much like humans can. 

“Autonomic behavior has already made itself known through recent deployments in complex security environments, but in the longer term, will become common in physical systems such as robots, drones, manufacturing machines and smart spaces,” said Groombridge.

Right now, Volkan Yazici is working 22 hour days for free. Yazici is a member of the Log4J project, an open-source tool used widely to record activity inside various types of software. It helps run huge swaths of the internet, including applications ranging from iCloud to Twitter, and he and his colleagues are now desperately trying to deal with a massive vulnerability that has put billions of machines at risk. 

As pressure and critics pile on the Log4J team, old questions of fairness are being asked about the open-source world. “Fairness is a problem,” says Ceki Gülcü, who founded Log4 . “There’s this weird imbalance, where you profit from something but you don’t give anything back.” The public is also almost completely ignorant of the immense role—and risk—of the free-labor-powered open-source software that runs the internet. OpenSSL powers encryption, for example, and Linux is behind the most widely used operating systems on the planet, including Android. 

"Get ready for Software 2.0, where neural networks and machine learning write code and create new software. “This tech trend makes possible the rapid scaling and diffusion of new data-rich, AI-driven applications,” according to McKinsey.

In part, it could see the creation of software applications far more powerful and capable than anything available today. But it will also make it possible for existing software and coding processes to be standardized and automated."

When you build great software applications, people notice. You can sell what seems like a simple to-do app for a price of $100 million to $200 million to the software giant of our times. Software engineering innovations has a bright future.

“Microsoft first acquired Wunderlist back in 2015, for a rumored price of between $100 million and $200 million. The software giant has since launched its own Microsoft To-Do app, and it’s clear the Wunderlist acquisition has been complicated. Wunderlist’s API runs on Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft decided to rewrite everything rather than attempt to port it directly over to Azure.” 

Since then, "Microsoft redesigns To Do to make it look more like its Wunderlist predecessor"

We are offering two graduate level software engineering courses for spring 2022. Both courses are being developed from the ground up with fresh content and an eye towards bringing compelling and engaging experiences to our students. 

SENG 645, Advanced Software Engineering: This course will teach students how to create macro architectures for modern information systems. Students who are interested in building a new application, a new smart app, a new information system or creating their own startup, or looking to realize an idea that can be built with software are encouraged to take this course. The course will cover modern approaches to software development: requirements analysis, system design techniques, formal description techniques, implementation, testing, debugging, metrics, human factors, quality assurance, cost estimation, maintenance, and tools. This course will be taught by a software engineering practitioner who managed the design and architecture of several large-scale information systems and led global software engineering teams distributed across multiple continents.