Q: What do a company that makes watches, a company that makes handheld devices to steady camcorders and a business that provides after-school educational activities for children have in common?
A: All are beneficiaries of a joint pilot program in entrepreneurship being carried out by CSUN’s College of Engineering and Computer Science and College of Business and Economics.
The program, which was launched in fall 2010, brings engineering and business students together in teams to work as consultants to local small businesses that have been referred by the Wells Fargo Center in the College of Business and Economics. For its inaugural term, 15 undergraduate engineering students who were enrolled in MSE 415, Product Design, and 11 graduate business students who were enrolled in an honors course, Business 691, Small Business Consulting, worked together in cross-disciplinary teams to help the three businesses.[Read more…]
Picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) have been hailed as the state of the art in storage, retrieval and access to digital medical images and are a critical part of the effort to convert the nation to electronic medical records. Because they archive the images from CT and PET scans, X-rays, MRI exams, etc. on computers and allow practitioners at multiple sites to access them remotely, PACS are a boon to physicians and are being phased in at medical centers and practices throughout the country. But like any technology, they are subject to human and computer error. Just as we sometimes accidentally save a file to the wrong folder on our computers, hospitals are finding that the PACS images sometimes go missing, with potentially catastrophic results.
It attracts just a tiny fraction of the attention its famous namesake commands, and most people have never heard of the games it features. But for some of the world’s most elite—and dedicated—artificial intelligence game programmers, the annual International Computer Olympiad, held this past fall in Kanazawa, Japan, is a big deal, attracting contestants from around the world. And for the last six years, one of the most dedicated—and successful—contestants has been CECS’s own Richard Lorentz, a professor of computer science.
Five years ago, after many months of planning, the college launched a brand-new degree program within the Department of Civil Engineering and Applied Mechanics. The program, in construction management technology (CMT), was specifically designed to meet the needs of the construction industry, which had provided considerable input during the formative stages. On campus and within industry, it was considered a strong program, but until the first class had graduated, it couldn’t be accredited.