Monday June 7th, 9 am - 5 pm,
at the University of Sussex, Brighton

Forty delegates attended the Academic Workshop hosted by the University of Sussex on Monday June 7, 1999. The workshop, which strongly supported the Symposium theme "Sharing the Future", was split into 3 main sessions:

• Teaching & Learning
• Researching
• Applying

Presentations were given by nine speakers drawn from Industry, Academia and the UK Research funding body (EPSRC).

In the morning topics included how systems engineering is taught and best practice introduced into UK industry. UK systems engineering courses and accreditation and the US Licensing approach were also covered, and a discussion session was ably led by Prof. Heinz Stoewer.

The afternoon session, moderated by Eric Honour, heard about the UK Systems Integration Initiative. This will fund major systems engineering research projects (www.ideo.co.uk/epsrc/sii), interdisciplinary research centres. Finally, on the "Applying" topic, the role that systems engineering has to play in e-commerce and global informatics was discussed.

The feedback from the workshop was very positive and, coupled with the success of a similar workshop last year at Vancouver, suggests that there is a need for this type of forum at future Symposia.

As Prof. John Boardman reported at the closing Plenary session, there were a number of key learning points which emerged from the day:

• Wrestling with Team Working
• Collaborative R&D
• SE underpins e-commerce
• Multi/cultural/lingual/jurisdiction requirements of e-commerce
• The need for soft systems engineering.

Mike Rose

In particular we will try to capture the requirements from both camps, in terms of learning, teaching, researching and practical problem solving. In this way we hope to enable everyone to play his or her part in satisfying the whole.

The first session looks at how organisations teach their staff systems engineering methods and how Companies can benefit from a shared learning approach.

Course content and teaching methods will be addressed in the second session

The UK approach to research funding with particular emphasis on a Systems Integration Initiative and interdisciplinary teams will be outlined.

The workshop will conclude with a review of how Companies and Universities are working together on multidisciplinary projects.