Engineering Seminar Topics and Seminar Topics

Up until the past couple of years, most televisions have been built around the same technology. This technology is the cathode ray tube. In CRT televisions, a gun fires a beam of electrons into a large glass tube. The electrons send phosphor atoms to an excited state that causes them to light up. They have good images, but they also have one big problem. They take up a lot of space and are very heavy.

Now scientists wanted to find a better way to fit a big television in a small room. They came up with the plasma flat panel display. They still come in large sizes, but are only about six inches thick. Plasma televisions illuminate tiny colored fluorescent lights to form an image. Each pixel is made up of three fluorescent lights. A red, green, and blue light. The plasma display varies the intensities of the different lights to produce a full range of colors like the CRT televisions. plasma displays, a small electric current stimulates an inert gas sandwiched between glass panels, including one coated with phosphors that emit light in various colors. While just 8 cm (3 in) thick, plasma screens can be more than 150 cm (60 in) diagonally.

Cryptography presents various methods for taking legible, readable data, and transforming it into unreadable data for the purpose of secure transmission, and then using a key to transform it back into readable data when it reaches its destination.The study of cryptography is advancing steadily, and scientists are rapidly creating mechanisms that are more difficult to break. The most secure type of cryptography yet may be quantum cryptography, a method that has not yet been perfected, which instead of using a key, relies on the basic laws of physics, and the movement and orientation of photons to establish a connection that is absolutely secure and unbreakable

DNA computing is a form of computing which uses DNA and molecular biology, instead of the traditional silicon-based computer technologies.

This field was initially developed by Leonard Adleman of the University of Southern California. In 1994, Adleman demonstrated a proof-of-concept use of DNA as form of computation which was used to solve the seven-point Hamiltonian path problem. Since the initial Adleman experiments, advances have been made, and various Turing machines have been proven to be constructable.

There are works over one dimensional lengths, bidimensional tiles, and even three dimensional DNA graphs processing.

On April 28, 2004, Ehud Shapiro and researchers at the Weizmann Institute announced in the journal Nature that they had constructed a DNA computer. This was coupled with an input and output module and is capable of diagnosing cancerous activity within a cell, and then releasing an anti-cancer drug upon diagnosis.

DNA computing is fundamentally similar to parallel computing in that it takes advantage of the many different molecules of DNA to try many different possibilities at once.

For certain specialized problems, DNA computers are faster and smaller than any other computer built so far. But DNA computing does not provide any new capabilities from the standpoint of computational complexity theory, the study of which computational problems are difficult. For example, problems which grow exponentially with the size of the problem (EXPSPACE problems) on von Neumann machines still grow exponentially with the size of the problem on DNA machines. For very large EXPSPACE problems, the amount of DNA required is too large to be practical. (Quantum computing, on the other hand, does provide some interesting new capabilities).

In the broadest sense, remote sensing is the measurement or acquisition of information of an object or phenomenon, by a recording device that is not in physical or intimate contact with the object. In practice, remote sensing is the utilization at a distance (as from aircraft, spacecraft, satellite, or ship) of any device for gathering information about the environment. Thus an aircraft taking photographs, Earth observation and Weather satellites, monitoring of a fetus in the womb via ultrasound, and space probes are all examples of remote sensing. In modern usage, the term generally refers to techniques involving the use of instruments aboard aircraft and spacecraft rather than other fields which are considered to be under medical imaging or photogrammetry.

While all astronomy could be considered remote sensing (in fact, extremely remote sensing) the term “remote sensing” is normally only applied to terrestrial observations.

The world of science and engineering is filled with signals: images from remote space probes, voltages generated by the heart and brain, radar and sonar echoes, seismic vibrations, and countless other applications. Digital Signal Processing is the science of using computers to understand these types of data. This includes a wide variety of goals: filtering, speech recognition, image enhancement, data compression, neural networks, and much more. DSP is one of the most powerful technologies that will shape science and engineering in the twenty-first century.