About Professor C.V. Ramamoorthy

Dr. C.V. Ramamoorthy's Ramamoorthy earned his two undergraduate degrees in physics and textile technology from the University of Madras, India, two graduate degrees in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley and a Masters and Ph.D from Harvard University in Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics (Computer Science) in 1964. His education was supported by Honeywell Inc.'s Computer Division, Waltham, MA with whom he was associated til 1967, last as Senior Staff Scientist. He then joined the University of Texas, Austin as a Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. After serving as Chairman of the Computer Science Dept. for a short time, he joined the University of California, Berkeley as Professor of Electrical Engineering ad Computer Sciences in 1972, a position that he still holds. He has supervised 73 Ph .D students, who include Vice Chancellor, Deans, Dept. Chairmen, Chair Professors, the CEO's including, most recently, the President of the IEEE Computer Society. He has held the Control Data Distinguished Professorship at the University of Minnesota and the grace Hopper Chair at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School, Monterrey, California. He was also a Visiting Professor at the Northwestern University and Visiting Research Professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

He is a Senior Research Fellow at the ICC Institute of the University of Texas, Austin. He has received the IEEE Computer Society's Group Award in Education, the Taylor Booth Award for Education, the Richard Merwin Award for Outstanding Professional Contributions, the Golden Core Award, the IEEE Centennial Medal and the IEEE Third Millennium Medal. He is a Fellow of IEEE and of the Society of Design and Process Sciences, from which he received the R.T. YEH Distinguished Achievement Award in 1997. He also received a Best Paper Award from the IEEE Computer Society in 1987. Three international conferences were organized in his honor as well one UC Berkeley Graduate Student Research Award and two International Conference/Society Awards have been established in his name.

He served as the Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions of Software Engineering, and the founding Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions of Knowledge and Data Engineering. He is also founding Co-Editor in Chief of the International Journal of Systems Integration and of the Journal of the Society of Design and Process Sciences.

SOFTWARE ENGINEERING APPROACHES TO THE CHALLENGES IN TECHNOLOGY EDUCATION AND SYSTEM DEVELOPMENT IN THE SOFTWARE ECOSYSTEM ENVIRONMENT

There exist several challenges in the current science, engineering, mathematics (STEM) graduate education. We are continuously inundated with great volumes of information from our portable communication devices, lap tops, television etc., continuously. We do multitasking to assimilate the information resulting developing short attention spans. Our current digital generation spends enormous amount of time on social networking, video entertainment and video games. Science and engineering subjects require long and deep attention spans to learn and to contribute. We discuss some of the successful methods that can help us to focus on the deep topics of engineering and technology. These include video narratives, entertainment and gaming. We consider the instructional methods developed by ancient Greeks (Aristotle, Socrates etc.), and the teaching of moral principles by means of parables and narratives by Buddha and Christ. We consider the successful interest and curiosity creating violin teaching methods of Suzuki. We study the talent discovering and skill enhancing instructional methods of Montessori. The social networking and interactive type of instruction was used by Escalante to overcome academic weaknesses. The tweet- and- repeat methods of the Khan Academy also provide useful ideas for improving our teaching process using ICT technology. We propose a comprehensive cocktail (mixture) of methods as the transformative means to upgrade of STEM higher education based on similar ideas proposed and successfully used by Norman Borlaug, the Nobel Prize-winning agricultural biologist in agricultural crop production. His methods eliminated the unfortunate annual food famines in Mexico, China, and India. We propose a comprehensive software supported methods using graphical animation, using virtualization, immersion and video gaming techniques to capture interest and enhance creative skills. It is well known that we use only a small fraction of the total visual and sensual bandwidth that our nervous system and brain can process at any instant. We can expand our educational communication bandwidth input by innovative interactive graphical and aural presentations of our academic material for maximum advantage to create both interest, learning and to develop creative skills.

We introduce the theme of 'Needs Engineering' into our technical educational curriculum. This topic emphasizes the importance of problem (needs) finding, problem discovery and problem anticipation. We associate a 'problem' with a specific need. Needs and necessities are mothers of invention and innovation and therefore the prime factors in creative thinking. We describe the classification of problem-solution pairs using the Remsfeld paradigm of knowns-unknowns and their importance in creative problem finding and solving. Our educational system emphasizes problem solving under a known and well understood framework of theory and knowledge. It does not lead to creative thinking beyond the 'box'. It has been said that 'main object of teaching is not just how to solve problems and give explanations, but to knock at the doors of the mind'. Problems and needs- finding approaches are indeed the mothers of creative innovation. We quote a well known ICT company CEO:
"Today it is the minds, not the megahertz or the gigabytes that are scarce. Use IT (information technology) to enhance them and use them to deliver sustainable and survivable products to support our developing world".
In the second part of the presentation, we shall concentrate on software ecosystems and the sustainability issues of software entities. We see a large proliferation of platforms, app's, operating systems, designs, patterns etc. The concept of software ecosystem tries to develop an environment which nurtures, supports and evolves sustainable software systems. As in the natural ecosystem sustainability implies survivability in the short term and evolution and growth in the long term under changing environments, such as operating systems, languages, platforms, services etc. We develop a simple model of growth and give some examples. The theory involves the three basic resources, namely, intellectual resource (I), manual resources (M), and physical (P) resources, essential for our living. Intellectual resources grow in accordance with the law of increasing returns (Arthur and Romer); the manual resources follow the Churchill's suggestion of using minimum manual effort, and the natural physical resources follow the law of diminishing returns. We show that the basic tenets of our growth theory are similar to theory of evolution of human development. It is not a perfect theory. We are still working on it. It is just an hypothesis and yet provides another abstract way to look at evolution and provides some valuable insights on the software engineering trends of the future.