The Future of Computer Engineering

There are four driving influences in the future of computer engineering: artificial intelligence, ubiquitous embedded computing, supercomputing, and quantum computing.

Artificial intelligence will become a part of every product and product development pathway in computer engineering. Already, power tools are being developed by training machine learning models on a bigger computer and then putting a hard-coded version of the result on a tool. As processing power increases, the training will done on the devices themselves. AI will be used to write code and design hardware with human guidance.

Computing devices will continue to bifurcate into the really big and the really small. Technology will become increasingly ubiquitous until it becomes essentially invisible, requiring both the big computers and the tiny ones. Wearable technology, medical technology, and similar products will become more powerful, more readily available, and cheaper. There will be a strong reliance on big supercomputers for more detailed simulation, machine learning, and general computation. This will also require high-bandwidth, secure communication channels.

Quantum computing is a technology that will change everything about how we design and use computers. It will require new methods of manufacturing computing devices, new algorithms, and new programming methods.