I2e Version5

Invention, Innovation and Entrepreneurship (i2e) Across the Curriculum Bruce Garetz, Chemical & Biological Sciences Joel Wein, Computer Science and Engineering Polytechnic Institute of New York University Brooklyn, New York

i2e The vision: Engineering Schools should be made to include invention as a third pillar along with research and teaching

Overview Polytechnic doing many things to integrate i2e Incubators New freshman courses “ Freshman Forum” course that introduces the notions of i2e to students during first semester “ Introduction to Major” courses that may also have an i2e component New graduate MS program in Biotechnology & Entrepreneurship Inno/Vention contest Branding/Message definition

NYU:Poly website home page, featuring i2e elements in faculty research

This Project: i2e Across the Curriculum Inspired by “Writing Across the Curriculum” Basic principles of WAC ( http://wac.colostate.edu ) As one response to students' lack of writing practice throughout the university curriculum, Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) programs emerged in the 1980s. The philosophies underlying these programs generally agree on certain basic principles: that writing is the responsibility of the entire academic community, that writing must be integrated across departmental boundaries, that writing instruction must be continuous during all four years of undergraduate education, that writing promotes learning, and that only by practicing the conventions of an academic discipline will students begin to communicate effectively within that discipline.

Educationally, i2e embodies: Delivery of science/math/technical foundation in the context of technological inventions/innovations, carrying through to market place inception Enabling students to partake in these activities with increasing degree of originality and independence, beginning with a freshman forum and culminating in a capstone project: i2e spine

i2e Across the Curriculum Basic Idea: Make discussion of i2e something that happens in many student courses. Designate certain courses as i2e-intensive Require students to take a spine of these courses. Currently being piloted in Chem/Bio and Computer Science.

What is an i2e-intensive course? Goal: Make students aware of i2e. Encourage students to think about i2e as something they can do.

What is an i2e flavored course? Computer Science – integrate modules about high-impact or high-interest i2e ventures. where relevant integrate insightful anecdotes about the creative process. prepare students for an i2e-focused senior project option. Chem/Bio – integrate modules about innovators in the fields of chemistry and biology. include laboratory experiments that encourage innovative thinking.

What is a high-impact or high-interest i2e venture? Ideal examples: Something that combines an interesting technical paper patent A commercial venture you can learn something from, succesful or not..

Spine of Computer Science courses to include an i2e component Introduction to Engineering Freshman Forum Introduction to Major Computer Architecture and Organization Operating Systems Senior Project Algorithms Elective: Graphics or Parallel & Distributed Systems Software Engineering and Design YEAR 1 YEAR 2 YEAR 3 YEAR 4 SPRING FALL

Computer Science Course Modules Examples Operating Systems: Virtualization, VMware. Academic project  $2B company that has dramatically changed how people think about computing. LINUX Mobile Operating Systems Algorithms Google Algorithm design Graphics Academy Awards Graphics processors

Parallel and Distributed Systems

Parallel and Distributed Systems Insight into the creative process: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/pubs.html

Jim Gray once told me that he had heard two different opinions of this paper: that it's trivial and that it's brilliant. I can't argue with the former, and I am disinclined to argue with the latter. The origin of this paper was a note titled The Maintenance of Duplicate Databases by Paul Johnson and Bob Thomas. I believe their note introduced the idea of using message timestamps in a distributed algorithm. I happen to have a solid, visceral understanding of special relativity (see [4] ). This enabled me to grasp immediately the essence of what they were trying to do. Special relativity teaches us that there is no invariant total ordering of events in space-time; different observers can disagree about which of two events happened first. There is only a partial order in which an event e1 precedes an event e2 iff e1 can causally affect e2 . I realized that the essence of Johnson and Thomas's algorithm was the use of timestamps to provide a total ordering of events that was consistent with the causal order. This realization may have been brilliant. Having realized it, everything else was trivial.

… This is my most often cited paper. Many computer scientists claim to have read it. But I have rarely encountered anyone who was aware that the paper said anything about state machines. People seem to think that it is about either the causality relation on events in a distributed system, or the distributed mutual exclusion problem. People have insisted that there is nothing about state machines in the paper. I've even had to go back and reread it to convince myself that I really did remember what I had written.

Spine of Biomolecular Science courses to include an i2e Component General Chemistry Introduction to Major Physical chemistry Analytical Chemistry Senior Research Project Biochemistry Prototyping Laboratory Senior Research Project YEAR 1 YEAR 2 YEAR 3 YEAR 4 SPRING FALL

Examples of i2e components of Chem/Bio courses Honors General Chemistry for Engineers Each week features Chemical Innovators. A few examples below: Week 1: Daniel Fahrenheit and his temperature scale Anders Celsius and his temperature scale William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and his temperature scale Week 5: Alfred Nobel and the invention of Dynamite Week 9: Fritz Haber and the synthesis of ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen Ernest Solvay and the industrial production of sodium carbonate Week 12: Charles Martin Hall and industrial production of aluminum Week 13: Henry Perkin and the synthesis of the first synthetic dyes Felix Hoffman and Arhur Eichengrun –synthesis of Aspirin Stephanie Kwolek and the synthesis of Kevlar

Examples of i2e components of Chem/Bio courses General Chemistry Laboratory From soap to nanotechnologies. Objective: To make soap and to discuss its structure and properties. To relate soap and surfactants to the self-assembly principle and the basis of inventions in the area of nanotechnology. Discussion includes: Soap molecules and surfactants Liposomes Cell membranes Self-assembled monolayers Coatings technology and sensing applications Innovation and invention: students challenged to come up with other applications of the self-assembly principle.

Examples of i2e components of Chem/Bio courses Physical Chemistry Laboratory Floating glass beads on water. Objective: To learn surface properties such as surface tension and contact angle, how to measure contact angle, how to modify the surface of glass, and how surface modification changes the surface properties. Module consists of: Silane chemistry (lecture) Thermodynamics of a surface (lecture) Measurement of contact angle (lab) Surface modification of microscope slides (lab) Surface modification of glass beads (lab) Innovation and invention: students asked to come up with other methods of measurement, other uses of methods learned.

Examples of i2e components of Chem/Bio courses Summer Internship “ Seek and Destroy” for Undergraduate Lab Training Objective: To engineer a strain of E. coli bacteria that can search out nerve toxins and destroy them. Exposes students to cutting edge research in the area of synthetic biology, whose aim is to re-engineer cells/organisms to perform a defined task. Students pursue the genetic engineering as part of a summer research internship. If successful, the engineered bacterium would also be submitted to the iGEM (internationally Genetically Engineered Machines) competition for undergraduates held each year at MIT. Invention and innovation: students given a toolbox of genes from which they can create/invent their own cell/organism.

Examples of i2e components of Chem/Bio courses Senior Capstone Laboratory Invention Prototyping Laboratory Objective: To provide students with the toolboxes and guidance they need to build and test a prototype of an invention, such as a biosensor. Students are provided with optical, electrical, mechanical, etc. toolboxes from which they can build a prototype. Senior Research Project Objective: To expose students to a modern research laboratory and the opportunity to interact in research with faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students. Students are required to carry out an original research project, under the guidance of a faculty member.

Summary Piloting the notion of an i2e spince across the curriculum. There exist great opportunities for doing this in a natural and non-disruptive fashion in our undergraduate majors. [email_address] , [email_address]

Acknowledgement We thank the office of the Provost at NYU:Poly for supporting this pilot program to incorporate i2e in the undergraduate curriculum through an “Angel funds” grant.

I2e Version5

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