April 2020 - A Letter from the Editor

April 2020

Letter from the Editor

The (post-pandemic) Functional Distancing & The Future of ECE

By Badri Roysam, University of Houston

Dear ECEDHA family and friends,

I remember the H1N1 pandemic of 2009 vividly – I was a faculty member at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute then. We were all terrified of this newly emerged virus. We ran through many boxes of alcohol wipes as we followed the guidelines. However, a decade later, we had largely gone back to business as usual. Given the much larger impact of Covid-19, combined with our improved understanding of pandemics, will we institute some permanent changes to our departmental operations, or go back to business as usual, perhaps soon after a vaccine becomes available? What will the changes be, if any, and what costs/tradeoffs will that entail? Can functional distancing (read below) become a viable alternative to physical distancing? What are the opportunities? Overall, where is the future of ECE headed?

 In this issue of the Source, we boldly choose to open a Pandora’s Box of questions. Importantly, ECEDHA is proud to introduce a Community Forum for members to hold spirited discussions on topics of their choosing.

Invitation to the Future! You are invited to discuss the future of ECE on the new ECEDHA Community Forum. We have created a new Topic “Future of ECE”. Click here for instructions on how to access this forum, and click here for a YouTube tutorial that walks you through the basics. Just remember to log in first, using the button on the upper-left corner of the ECEDHA website. 

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I remember the H1N1 pandemic of 2009 vividly – I was a faculty member at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute then. We were terrified of this newly emerged virus codenamed H1N1. We were told that alcohol killed the virus, so we ran through many boxes of alcohol wipes as we followed the disinfection guidelines. Phrases like social distancing were not prevalent than.

However, a decade later, we had largely gone back to business as usual. Memories of the H1N1 virus faded over time. Given the much larger impact of Covid-19, combined with our improved understanding of pandemics, will we institute some permanent changes to our departmental operations, or go back to business as usual, perhaps soon after a vaccine becomes available? What will the changes be, if any, and what costs/tradeoffs will that entail? What are the opportunities? Overall, where is the future of ECE headed?

Our students, staff, and faculty have demonstrated amazing resilience and a cooperative spirit as we were forced to make a sudden shift to on-line learning, and distancing practices. They have rapidly adopted new tools, created new pedagogies, tapped into new funding opportunities to try new ideas, and of course, innovated at every step. 

It is now clear that the summer courses will be taught online, and our research operations will proceed at a slower pace. Hiring freezes are going into effect across the country. Given the fact that a vaccine is unlikely to be broadly available by the Fall semester, it is not unreasonable to assume that the fall semester will be more of the same. What lies beyond that?

We are at a fork in the road, and the following diagram attempts to capture its essence.

Although, the basic rules of wisdom suggest that we take the second fork in the road, and establish permanent changes aimed at coping with the next pandemic, the question is will we? As I noted earlier, we mostly forgot the 2009 H1N1 episode, and went back to business as usual. We attended dense and large gatherings with abandon, shook hands, gave/accepted hugs when appropriate, talked a lot, spent time in packed labs, did not think too much of a sneeze here or a cough there, and we never wore masks (unless we were in one of our nanofab labs or animal facilities). Our enrollments grew faster than the available space, and our elbow room shrank as a result. We never really thought about viruses of the biological variety, and concerned ourselves more with viruses of the computational variety. Life was good.

Then Covid-19 happened.

If we work to establish a permanently altered new normal, the wiser alternative, what will it be like? Below is a list of things to consider: 

• Mandatory Vaccination requirements for faculty, staff, and students may be instituted by all employers. Currently the annual flu vaccine is optional.
• Faculty performance evaluations may need to reward the ability to teach online, and the ability to cope with major changes.
• Minimum Functional Distancing requirements may be instituted for classrooms and laboratories. In a nutshell, functional distancing is the ability to impede the transfer of a pathogen from one person to another. As an electrical engineer, I am tempted to define this proposed new term in terms of a circuit diagram, wherein we assign pathogen transfer impedances associated with the effectiveness of masks, effectiveness of hand cleansing and avoidance of contact, the physical separation over an airspace, and any lapses in protocol. If we had very good functional distancing in place, Person #1 and Person #2 could be in close physical proximity but nevertheless safe:

• Employee rights and responsibilities may need to be modified to mandate healthy practices aimed at the university community as a whole.
• Student owned equipment requirements, for example laptops, pen-equipped tablets, reliable network connectivity, scanners and printers, etc., may become more stringent. Happily, all of these items are more affordable now.
• Increased spacing or reduced occupancy requirements for classrooms and laboratories may be instituted. This can get expensive very quickly.
• We may need to bid a permanent adieu to handshakes and hugs.
• Departments will need policies and operating procedures that implement the CDC guidelines for universities affecting a wide range of issues ranging from student and employee training to foreign travel.

MOONSHOT-LIKE OPPORTUNITIES IN THE MIDST OF AN IMPENDING CRISIS?

The $8.3B U.S. Coronavirus Funding Bill was signed into law recently[1]. While the details are not fully available at the time of this writing, we can expect roughly $800M of this funding to go towards research and development. This is a significant investment, albeit short term (~ 2 years), and it is not unreasonable to expect federal agencies to set aside additional funds for R&D in the longer term.

Given just how tightly the economies of nations are interwoven in the modern global economy, and the near impossibility of decoupling these linkages, it is reasonable to assume that we must find ways to detect newly emerged pathogens as early as possible, and act in a globally coordinated manner to minimize the impacts of these germs on humanity. This is a perfect time to develop a global pathogen surveillance network.

This will require low-cost, mass-produced, wearable, wirelessly-networked, microfabricated bio-sensors that can detect and report previously unseen pathogens. This will result in massive streams of data that will require big-data analytic algorithms that can analyze the massive sensor data streams in real time, detecting the onset of new pathological conditions at the population scale, tracking their progression, an communicating their gene sequences globally so that nations can immunize their people rapidly. This will require the ability to prototype and validate new vaccines computationally. All of these capability present opportunities for ECE.

I sincerely hope that we are entering a new phase of “cooperative globalization” in which scientists and engineers are able to build, operate, and enhance the global pathogen surveillance network. It would not be unreasonable to expect ECE to play a central and enabling role in this new moonshot.

Badri Roysam, D.Sc., Fellow IEEE, Fellow AIMBE
Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen University Professor
Chair, Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of Houston
Houston, Texas 77204-4005
Phone: 713-743-1773
Email: broysam@uh.edu