Our vision—Columbia Engineering for Humanity—sets a bold path for a sustainable, healthy, secure, connected, and creative humanity. It is exemplified by the pioneering work our faculty and students are doing across departments and disciplines, in partnership with sister schools, institutes, government, and industry. We have never been more optimistic about the role engineering can play in the service of society and in bringing those advances to the many challenges facing our world. See the impact Columbia Engineering is having today. Soundtrack by $3.33

At Davos 2017, Dean Boyce spoke on a panel titled, "The Fourth Industrial Revolution: The Impact on Women." Hear her take on how STEM education can help accelerate progress for women.

In the first year, Columbia Engineering students take The Art of Engineering, a hands-on design course that introduces scientific concepts re-framed in engineering terms and introduces them to five major areas of technical inquiry: engineering, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and computer science. In this course, students see how their high school science and math knowledge can be applied in an engineering context to solve real world problems through classroom presentations and participation in an in-depth, hands-on project. Along the way, guest lecturers discuss social implications of technology, entrepreneurship, project management, and other important nontechnical issues affecting the practicing engineer.

In our Extreme Engineering series, former NASA astronaut Professor Michael Massimino joins Eitan Grinspun in the Computer Graphics lab to take a look at extremely creative computing. Extreme Engineering, Eitan Grinspun, Computer Graphics, Columbia Engineering, animation, simulation, Moana, Jungle Book, Disney, calculus of variations, geometry

Left: Neural activity across the dorsal surface of the awake mouse brain (imaged via Thy1-GCaMP6f expression in excitatory neurons). Middle: Same neural activity as left, but low pass filtered in time at 0.4 Hz to show slowly varying component. Right: Hemodynamics in the brain 1.2 seconds later (total hemoglobin concentration) showing the same spatiotemporal patterns represented. These patterns of spontaneous neural activity can predict slow changes in hemodynamics, that are likely the same as those detected in functional magnetic resonance imaging. We infer that this neural activity represents a neural basis for resting state functional connectivity mapping. (Credit: Ying Ma and Elizabeth Hillman/Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute).

by Dingzeyu Li, David I.W. Levin, Wojciech Matusik , Changxi Zheng ACM Transactions on Graphics (SIGGRAPH 2016) http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/lego Abstract: Acoustic filters have a wide range of applications, yet customizing them with desired properties is difficult. Motivated by recent progress in additive manufacturing that allows for fast prototyping of complex shapes, we present a computational approach that automates the design of acoustic filters with complex geometries. In our approach, we construct an acoustic filter comprised of a set of parameterized shape primitives, whose transmission matrices can be precomputed. We precompute its acoustic transmission matrix for all parameter values, then optimize both the arrangement and the parameters of the acoustic shape primitives in order to satisfy target acoustic properties of the filter. We validate our results against industrial laboratory measurements and high-quality off-line simulations. We demonstrate that our method enables a wide range of applications including muffler design, musical wind instrument prototyping, and encoding imperceptible acoustic information into everyday objects. http://dingzeyu.li/ http://diwlevin.webfactional.com/researchdb/ http://people.csail.mit.edu/wojciech/ http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~cxz/

This movie clip schematically shows the light emission from graphene and radiation spectrum engineering by strong optical interference effect. Vibration of graphene during light emission is due to the flexural mode of graphene at high temperature. Led by Young Duck Kim, a postdoctoral research scientist in James Hone’s group at Columbia Engineering, a team of scientists from Columbia, Seoul National University (SNU), and Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS) demonstrated an on-chip visible light source using graphene, an atomically thin and perfectly crystalline form of carbon, as a filament.

Magnetic actuation of the Geneva drive device. A magnet is placed about 1cm below and without contact with the device. The rotating magnet results in the rotational movement of the smaller driving gear. With each full rotation of this driving gear, the larger driven gear is engaged and rotates by 60º, exposing the next reservoir to the aperture on the top layer of the device.