16 Fall / Automne 2017 Andrew Goldenberg PhD, PEng, CEng, FIEEE, FASME, FAAAS, FCAE, FEIC Chief Technology Officer: - SuperRobotics Ltd., Hong Kong, China - ANZER Intelligent Systems Co. Ltd., Shenzhen, Guangdong, China - Engineering Services Inc., Toronto, Ontario, Canada Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto ...Continued on page 19 N.Ed.: Dr. Andrew Goldenberg is the 2016 recipient of the IEEE Canada McNaughton Gold Medal, the high- est award given by IEEE Canada. and entrepreneurship — uninten- tionally demonstrating that with hard work, focus and ambition, major career transitions could be extremely rewarding. Seemingly, I have been anticipating the future norm of career changes by several decades. PERSONAL CAREER STAGES My professional career is divided into six stages. FORMATION STAGE Early on after military service I only partially understood my choices of career; nonetheless I listened, observed and received clues from various sources. It end- ed up with a great choice of pro- fession: engineering — a per- petually challenging disci- pline — and electronics, which with the explosion of sensor and microprocessor technology has impacted every facet of engineer- ing. These choices were supported by selecting well-known academic PREAMBLE MY CAREER IN ROBOTICS has been marked by “unplanned stages,” nonetheless when they are combined they seem to indicate some upper level plan- ning. I doubt this planning was conscious, although I claim I did pursue all steps in accord- ance with my “best judgement” based on whatever information I had available at any given time, and also based on “gut feeling” and common sense that always served me very well. I have decided to write about my career with the hope that it will raise, in some ways, a potential interest because of the variety of roles I have played throughout my career. Increas- ingly, young professionals are told to be prepared for several different areas of employment in their professional life. I have followed a path that includ- ed higher degrees education, industry, academia, business O ne issue that has been pre- occupying me for a long time has been the relationship between academia and industry. I have read many reports in various media addressing the matter, but I have never found sufficient insight nor adherence to my views, until I read an article published in the IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, Sept. 2016 issue, “Robotics Academia and Industry: We Need to Talk!.” The arti- cle is authored by Professor Erwin Prassler from Hochschule Bonn-Rhein- Sieg, Germany. He addresses, in part, the long-standing need for greater industry participation in university research. I found the article very inter- esting, and his assessment of the div- ide between the two communities by- and-large in agreement with my own. In my experience, the issues raised in the article apply broadly to most industrialized countries. In this piece, I include many of the points made by Prof. Prassler, adding to them my own observations and beliefs. Whilst he wrote as an academic, I am largely claiming to present the industry perspective. Why should university research community attract industry? Because: (a) it is the major reason for its existence in terms of its role in education, training, and use of research results (b) focusing on research without solving operational problems of interest to industry leads to practical irrelevancy (c) by-and-large, industry needs the research community—especially in the context of modern robotics: logistics, autonomous mobility, human-machine interaction, reasoning, and machine learning (d) ongoing dialogue between the two communities builds understanding of their divergent scopes and object- ives: Research—publish or perish; Industry—economic relevancy What kind of industry the research community should aim to attract? (a) any industry that uses robotics (b) start-ups in robotics What makes robotics research attractive to industry? (a) industry does not perform basic research PRE MY C has be st s ages are co in i dica at ni ning. I I c consc ci di id d pu ance w based PERSONAL,TECHNOLOGY AND VIEWPOINTS (PART 1 OF 2) 16 Fall / Automne 2017