Department of Computer Engineering
The leading technology areas in 2020 were Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics, Edge (Cloud) Computing, Virtual Reality, Cybersecurity, Blockchain, the Internet of Things, and Bioinformatics. Advances in computers and electronics are having a profound impact on today's society, affecting the fields of communications, medicine, science, and engineering. The first general-purpose computer, the ENIAC, had a footprint of 135 m² and could perform 5,000 sum operations per second, and cost $400,000. The ENIAC computer was used to perform the calculations necessary to build the first hydrogen bomb. When it needed to solve a different problem, reconfiguring the ENIAC and making the connections took a few days, enough time for it to be considered roughly programmable. Today, a $25 motherboard can include WiFi, Ethernet, Bluetooth, a full HD monitor output, several gigabytes of memory, and a quad-core ARM processor capable of adding 40 million decimal places per second. It can be used as a desktop computer with the Linux operating system installed. These small, low-energy computers, powered by solar energy, can be used in multimedia sensor networks (including cameras and microphones), security surveillance, industrial control, and smart city applications.
In 2010, the world's fastest supercomputer cost 40-50 million euros and was capable of performing 2000 Teraflops (1 trillion decimal arithmetic operations per second). Today, a single graphics card costing 5000 euros can have 100 Teraflops of processing power. Graphics cards were originally designed and used for game programming, but due to their high data processing power, they can now be used by skilled and well-trained computer engineers for weather forecasting and, through molecular simulation, for determining the properties of molecules that have potential for use in drugs. This method allows the rapid identification of molecules that could be used as solutions against Covid-19, and researchers can perform molecular-level simulations to predict how these molecules will interact with the virus from the very beginning, quickly eliminating useless molecules, and this can lead to drug use. By accelerating the development process, it minimizes the thousands of human lives lost every day and the damage caused by the global economic crisis. By using parallel processing, very difficult engineering optimization problems, such as aircraft/ship/truck transportation fleet optimization, are solved and planned, and cargo can be routed to thousands of different recipients in the shortest possible time at the lowest cost. With similar systems, pilots and cabin crew are assigned to hundreds of passenger aircraft every day, ensuring they work in accordance with flight plans to maximize revenue, minimize fuel consumption, and minimize delays for passenger satisfaction. To implement these applications, computer engineers must have a thorough understanding of modern computer technologies and be able to select and correctly use the best and most appropriate data structures and advanced algorithms for the specific problem. This is the only way they can design and build software systems that solve these challenging problems at the lowest cost.
Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are all computer/software companies and are among the world's five most valuable brands. Amazon, the world's most valuable company, started e-commerce by selling books online and now uses computer systems and software to sell everything online. Each of these software companies is worth five to ten times more than the most valuable automakers, such as Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Volkswagen. There are many employment opportunities for computer engineers, including computer game development, e-commerce applications, e-government applications, business software development, database design and management, and computer system and network administration. The future demand for computer engineers is clear and will continue to grow with advancements in computer electronics and software.