What are current/future trends in Elec Eng and Comp Sci?

[rm]

Hi.

I was wondering if people could provide some opinions -- preferably
well thought out and non-speculative -- on trends in EE and CS.

That is, I'm asking about specifics on which areas of EE/CS are gaining
momentum, which are losing momentum, which have a long steady future,
and so forth. By "momentum" I also mean interest in the matter by the
technical community. As for "areas" I mean those like (just off the
top of my head) biomedical engineering, signal processing, image
processing, control systems, cryptography, neural networks, artificial
intelligence, ..., and any other major area of EE/CS.

Also, which areas are more research-geared and which are more
industry-geared, and are there areas that are finding applications in
both? For example, for PhD study, which areas of specialization could
be rewarding in terms of interest (a motivating factor) and even
post-PhD jobs?

(If there's a more appropriate newsgroup, then please let me know.)

[Randy]

Post by rm
Hi.
I was wondering if people could provide some opinions -- preferably
well thought out and non-speculative -- on trends in EE and CS.
That is, I'm asking about specifics on which areas of EE/CS are gaining
momentum, which are losing momentum, which have a long steady future,
and so forth. By "momentum" I also mean interest in the matter by the
technical community. As for "areas" I mean those like (just off the
top of my head) biomedical engineering, signal processing, image
processing, control systems, cryptography, neural networks, artificial
intelligence, ..., and any other major area of EE/CS.
Also, which areas are more research-geared and which are more
industry-geared, and are there areas that are finding applications in
both? For example, for PhD study, which areas of specialization could
be rewarding in terms of interest (a motivating factor) and even
post-PhD jobs?

I think there are at least two "trends in CS": academia vs. business.

I'm not sure where academic CS is heading at the moment. Probably your
best feedback would be to try to classify research papers (and funding)
via scholar.google or a similar medium. Presumably, CS research areas
that produce papers at increasing rates (vs other research areas) are
growing. Likewise with funding priorities from the NSF. Security is
big. Fault tolerance and performance predictability are big.

As to business computing, I have to imagine that most growth will be web
or telecommunication centric. Data communication and integration
standards (nee XML) and security are big. I think business process
engineering and process management is growing in importance (like CRM).

Probably you'll get the best idea about hot trends in academia from
scanning general purpose CS pubs like the CACM and IEEE Software. For
business trends, I'd scan pubs like Computerworld and Information Week.

And of course, it's useful to search for buzzword counts in Monster,
Careerbuilder, Dice, etc.

EE is outside my purview.

Randy