Intelligent Adaptive Cyber-Physical Ecosystem for Aerospace Engineering Education, Training, and Accelerated Workforce Development

Transformative changes are on the horizon in aerospace engineering education and learning in general. These changes are attributable, in part, to the developments of a number of aerospace, learning and other leading-edge technologies and their synergistic combinations and convergence. The related technologies include ubiquitous, cloud, and petascale/exascale computing; ultrahigh-bandwidth networks; pervasive wireless communication; intelligent autonomous robotics; artificial general intelligence; powerful game engines and facilities; networked immersive virtual environments and virtual worlds; augmented and enhanced reality; and novel human-technology interfaces. This paper describes some of the frontiers of, and challenges in, future aerospace systems and the drivers for transformative changes in aerospace engineering education. The need to have a holistic perspective and a comprehensive approach for aerospace education, research, training, and accelerated workforce development is outlined. A starting point to accomplish this task is the development of an intelligent adaptive cyber-physical ecosystem for the aerospace workforce. The continuously expanding major components of the ecosystem include integrated knowledge discovery and exploitation facilities; novel agent-supported visual simulations (with cognitive learning and understanding abilities); immersive three-dimensional (3D) virtual world facilities; intelligent, multimodal and humanlike interfaces; and smart mobile wireless devices. The ecosystem will provide timely, engaging, personalized/collaborative, and tailored visual learning. It will stimulate creativity and innovation and prepare the learners to work in future global virtual collaborative enterprises and become leaders in a world of growing complexity. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)AS.1943-5525.0000128. (C) 2011 American Society of Civil Engineers.