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-- Thoughts on data analysis, software
development and innovation management. Comments are welcome
Post 6
Prof. David E. Goldberg at La Salle #1
10-Dec-2008
Today, professor David E. Goldberg, a worldwide renowned American computer scientist, father of genetic algorithms,
has given the first of the two speeches arranged for this week at La Salle, titled
"The Creativity Imperative and the Technology Professional of the Future", a business-centered perspective
of engineering.
A man in his mid-fifties, experienced professor in the United States and author of such an innovative machine
learning tool, the genetic algorithms, a scientist to admire. His time reference is
set to WW2, enough time for the country that eventually has been acknowledged as
the first superpower in the world. How on earth have the States been
so successful? He attributes it to the Government funds that the the american universities received after
the war. Nowadays, some of these universities lead the research threads in the scientific community.
He has seen how the Cold War engineering paradigm has been tumbled by the economic changes that worldwide
networks have provided, to live today in an era described by creativity. A topic that has been the
conductive thread of his speech. Having a slideshow support on a MacBook, he has referred to Jobs and Woz
as tech visionaries, people able to spot problems in customers, to then make a huge profit from providing solutions to them.
This is a kind of intelligence that nowadays isn't instructed at the university.
But what about those people that instead of finding problems create necessities? Should I ask.
Is change prone to happen?
Not so fast unfortunately. A funny term: NIMBY. This stands for "Not In My BackYard", meaning that if the
new stuff is not already in one's possession... "scratch my back and then I'll scratch yours". And the
world remains the same.
If an effort has to be made in order to solve a problem, let it be a good profit-making problem, according
to Prof. Goldberg. I won't be playing the devil's advocate here
putting his comment out of context, it was none of
his intention I suspect, but
a lot of non-profit research has yet to be done in the world, an effort
that the countries that need it the most can't afford it, or even worse, by awful political or tyrannic situations won't
permit it. Then what? Not always the Big Bucks Theory should precede the Big Bang Theory!
Scientific papers are the railroad to a good academic career. Definitely true.
Philosophy leads to qualitative reasoning. Certainly. Must we all be creative
engineers who produce unarguable successful products with the talent of an artist?
Well, probably we'd all be delighted to. But that's not the job of an engineer,
to my mind. We would rather be doing the job of a businessman or businesswoman. One should profit from
the best one can do, which in engineering it should be something like the solution to real world problems,
and specialize. Anyway, Woz did the electronics part while Jobs
selled all the stuff. Wasn't it like this? Teamwork? Isn't it the fashion that they proved to be successful?
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