Lecture 13: Broader Engineering Perspectives

EEN 112: Introduction to Electrical and Computer Engineering

Professor Eric Rozier, 4/8/13

Engineering Impact

• Engineering Programs in the US are subject to accreditation by ABET– Accreditation Board for Engineering and

Technology– Cannot become a licensed engineer without a

degree from an accredited program.

Why?

Engineering Impact

• The solutions we provide have a major impact on the world– Economic– Environmental– Societal– Safety

• Our designs and solutions can have serious consequences, forseen and unforseen.

Pentium FDIV Bug

• Intel’s Pentium 5– Professor Thomas Nicely noticed inconsistencies in

calculations when addingPentiums to his cluster

– Floating-point divisionoperations didn’t quite comeout right.Off by 61 parts per million

Pentium FDIV Bug

• Intel acknowledged the flaw, but claimed it wasn’t serious. Wouldn’t affect most users.

• Byte magazine estimatedonly 1 in 9 billion floatingpoint operations wouldsuffer the error.

Pentium FDIV Bug

• Total cost to Intel?

$450 million

Pentium FDIV Bug

• What could Intel have done?• What was Intel’s responsibility to its

customers?• What was the impact to

Intel?• What could it have been?

Korean Air Flight 801

• Route from Seoul, Korea to Asan, Guam• Normally flown by an Airbus A300, replaced

by a 747-300• Night flight

Korean Air Flight 801

• Air Traffic Control Minimum Safe Altitude Warning system – lets pilots know when they are too close to the ground.

• System in Guam had been giving off spurious alarms, and prevented the airport’s other systems from detecting aircrafts approaching below minimum safe altitude

• Engineers modified the system to limit alarms.

200 Deaths

Korean Air Flight 801

• What were the engineers trying to accomplish?

• What could they have done?• What ethical duties do we have as experts in

these situations?

Social Media

• Social media has become massively popular• Privacy controls hard to manage, not the focus

of the user experience• Some employers (like Virgin Atlantic) keep

tabs on their employees.– Have even fired some

over posts

Social Media

• Companies are starting to ask employees to log in and show their Facebooks as part of the hiring process

• Illinois recently made this illegal. Still legal in most states.

Social Media

• What responsibilities do companies have for their user privacy?

• What sort of ethical implications do seemingly benign technologies have?

The Importance of Trust

• Sarbanes-Oxley Act• HIPAA• California Proposition 11• FISMA• Massachusetts

201 CMR 17.00

Over 10,000 regulations

Users expect data to be stored indefinitely…

Reliability

• What responsibilities do we have as engineers to preserve information?

• Should we be liable if our systems fail in these ways?

• What limits should there be to liability?• Can a system ever be fully reliable?• What responsibility do we have to report the

limits to our systems reliability?

High Frequency Trading

• Algorithmic trading, seeks to exploit small differences in prices, millions of programs running

• How do they interact?• How does something

written by Company Aaffect somethingwritten by Company B?

High Frequency Trading

• 2010 Flash Crash – largest intraday point loss– Losses recovered in minutes, but scared regulatory

bodies• US SEC and CFTC

consluded that HFTcontributed to thevolatility.

High Frequency Trading

• SEC and FTC stated – “market makers and other liquidity providers widened their quote spreads, reduced liquidity, and withdrew from the market”

• Some signal set offtheir algorithms,caused a jointmovement whichhelped cause the crash

High Frequency Trading

• What responsibility do we have to prevent disasters?

• What happens when our duty to our employer might conflict?

• How do we weighour responsibilities?

The broader world is complex

• Critical thinking• Awareness of situations and consequences• Working with regulators, and employers• Maintaining integrity