Beginning next fall, the School of Engineering and Applied Science will offer a master's degree in embedded systems. In the current academic year, the school also created a master's in integrated product design.
The IPD program also includes classes taught in Wharton and the School of Design, since engineering, business and aesthetics are the three aspects of product design, according to IPD director and Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics professor Mark Yim.
"There is increasing demand for people who are able to cross disciplines," he said.
The program allows students to "identify a product, build it and sell it," said Matthew Owens, Engineering and Wharton senior, who is submatriculating into IPD. In the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology, he said the integrated master's program is a "natural extension of what I did for undergrad."
Yim said there are "maybe three or four other programs around the world that are similar," but Penn's new IPD program is "fairly unique."
Ding Liu, who is pursuing a master's degree in architecture from the School of Design in addition to IPD, said the program is about "problem solving."
It's about "how to make people's lives better," he said.
The embedded-systems program, like IPD, integrates two disciplines - computer science and electrical engineering.
According to Computer and Information Sciences professor and program director Rajeev Alur, an example of embedded systems is computing systems that interact with the physical environment, such as a car's collision avoidance or cruise-control software.
Traditionally, embedded systems were designed by engineers with a degree in either electrical engineering or computer science, but the new master's ensures that embedded-systems training is "not just on-the-job training," said Alur.
"Lots of industries want to hire students in this area, but there are not programs to train them," he said.
Clare Schramm, a software engineer at Lockheed Martin and a part-time computer science master's student, said there is "a lot of interest among my group at Lockheed Martin" in embedded systems.
"Dr. Alur wanted some industry support for the new program, and Lockheed Martin has been trying to get into some new markets, and embedded systems is certainly a new technology," she said. "It involves the programming, hardware and engineering aspect - it really ties everything together since it's a new field."
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