Technical Tour - Systems Engineering University In Philadelphia
In the early days of Philadelphia, residents like founding father and America's first scientist and electrical engineer - Benjamin Franklin - dabbled in electricity, wind patterns, printing and beer, such that science, engineering and the education of both have held an integral role. Today, the city continues this proud tradition at two of the country's major universities: Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania.
A tour has been developed to show you what each school has done in the past, continues to do in the present, and is planning to do in the future with the state of engineering education. During this tour, you will be taken from the symposium hotel to the University City section of Philadelphia to begin a walking of tour of various exhibits at each of these fine institutions. The group will start with a tour of Drexel University, followed by a 30-minute break, and continue with a tour of the University of Pennsylvania. The tour will conclude by returning you to the hotel. It is expected that the full tour will last a total of four hours with at least 90 minutes spent at each university.
At Drexel University, attendees will head to 34th and Market Streets to visit the university's Expressive and Creative Interaction Technologies (ExCITe) Center, a hub for highly multi-disciplinary collaborative project teams made up of students, faculty and entrepreneurs to work together. Examples of such collaborations include music and robots, fashion design and material science, and mobile application development for live performance. The Center emphasizes and explores the benefits of arts integrated learning [STEAM over STEM] for both research and education as well as connecting knowledge resources across Philadelphia through partnerships with other area schools and organizations (civic, arts, and industry). The Drexel Tour of the ExCITe Center will last 45 minutes once inside the front doors, including a brief period for Q&A. While at Drexel, additional tours will be offered to showcase the Papadakis Integrated Sciences Building BioWall and its research labs.
With numerous interdisciplinary Centers and Institutes, there will be plenty to tour. For example, founded in 1979, the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) lab houses the growing field of swarm technology in robotics as well as the fields of vision, perception, control, automation and learning. In PRECISE, the Penn Research in Embedded Computing and Integrated Systems Engineering, the areas of cyber-physical systems, distributed, real-time, and embedded systems, formal specification and verification, control theory, and trust management converge and are applied to various application domans.
