Technologies take center stage

One of the really cool things about coming to NIWeek is seeing their new products and even some future products demo’d during the morning key note addresses. This is when the products bask in the spotlight.
Today, NI Fellow Mike Santori took the helm and helped show off products ranging from virtualization with multicore processors to announcing NI’s new product the Real Time Hypervision Software, to a guitar playing robot to some future advanced wireless communications systems.
NI continuously advances their product lines and learns new ways to measure and test different things.
Tuesday, Vice President of Marketing and Customer Operations, John Graff, talked about releases they are coming out with right now, while Santori, for the most part, talked about technologies that will hit the street down the road.
Having an open discussion about these product lines may be one reason why in a down year registration for the event is up 5% over last year.
This is all a way users can learn how to advance their processes and maybe learn a way to make some new measurements.
“We need to make more measurements,” said Jeff Kodosky, NI co-founder and father of the flagship LabVIEW product line during his Wednesday keynote. Measurements are a key element to continue pushing the technology envelope, he said.
“We have been making measurements in testing for a long time, but we need to make more measurements in design.”
-- Gregory Hale

Crisis situation: We need more engineers

It would be very easy to talk about the global recession, everyone does, but National Instruments’ co-founder Jeff Kodosky wanted to talk today about a different crisis during his keynote: The shortage of engineers and scientists.
“We are not producing enough engineers and scientists,” said Kodosky, the father of National Instruments’ flagship product line LabVIEW during his keynote address at NIWeek09 Worldwide Graphical System Design Conference in Austin, Texas. “We need to change that. The only people that create wealth are engineers and scientists. We are in a (engineering and scientist) crisis situation and we have been in it for a long time. Students need to be energized for science and math; they need inspiration.”
In short, Kodosky said we have to bring back the concept that engineering is a high profile career that has real growth potential. The country needs to change priorities from the elementary level all the way up to the colleges and universities, he said.
On the university level, the engineering curriculum needs to change, he said. The schools need to get in the real world where they need to teach how to program parallel systems.
Yes, engineers need to learn the basics, but there are just too many traditional aspects to teaching engineering at the university level that just do not apply any more.
“Our universities not only need to teach the traditional tools, but they also need to teach real-life tools.
Kodosky talked to the audience about getting involved and all engineers should not rest on their laurels, but rather go out and make a difference. He suggested:
• You can help mentor, teach and counsel a pipeline of students.
• Be politically active and stand up for science education
• Show how productive you can be by using the proper tools.
“In short, just do more,” Kodosky said.
Talking about growing the potential for future engineers and scientists, Kodosky also discussed technology and how that will help lead the world out of the massive recession, but he did not go into blame anyone or anything, but rather what needs to happen for the future.
“We live in a technological era,” he said. “We have cars with anti-lock brakes. We can view our location with Google Earth.” But on the other hand we have an “electric power system where energy is distributed over an antiquated grid and prone to black outs.”
“Without technology, we could not support a planet of 6 billion people and growing.”
He said the U.S., and the world for that matter, needs to keep growing in terms of technology; not remaining content with what we have.
“We are on a technology treadmill and we can’t get off and the treadmill is speeding up.”
-- Gregory Hale

New version of LabVIEW hits the street

“We can’t be at the same level (of innovation) we have done over the past 10 years,” said John Graff, vice president of marketing and customer operations during his presentation at NIWeek 09 Worldwide Graphical System Design Conference in Austin, Texas. “We must find ways to do more.”
Those two words, “Do More” are now part of NI’s mantra. “We want to provide the tools and technologies we believe can help you do more,” he said.
One of those tools is what seems to be an annual rite at NI’s user group: A release of NI’s flagship product LabVIEW. This year’s new offering, called LabVIEW 2009 has some additions, one of which makes it possible to deploy code to wireless sensor networks to help engineers and scientists build smarter industrial measurement and monitoring systems and features new ways to test multiple wireless standards.
In addition, LabVIEW 2009 can simplify real-time math by streamlining mathematical algorithm design and deployment to real-time hardware.
Today’s engineering environment all comes down to cutting as much cost out of the system as possible. With virtualization technology, it is possible to run multiple operating systems side by side on the same multicore processing hardware to build more efficient systems.
NI’s new Real-Time Hypervisor software can now work with the LabVIEW Real-Time Module with general-purpose OS capabilities to reduce overall system cost and size. Using this software, engineers can run Windows XP and LabVIEW Real-Time side by side on the same controller, partitioning the processor cores among the two operating systems for more efficient use of system resources, NI officials said. The Real-Time Hypervisor works with dual- and quad-core NI PXI controllers as well as the NI Industrial Controller.

Real-time math can spur innovation

What a difference a year makes. You can apply that statement to just about any scenario in the automation environment, but it really applies when you go to user group meetings from year to year.
“It’s been an incredible year on the financial scene,” said Dr. James Truchard, chief executive and co-founder of National Instruments during today's keynote address at the company’s annual NIWeek 09 Worldwide Graphical System Design Conference in Austin, Texas.
“We have seen a lot of headlines on some of the reasons the crisis took place virtually everyday in the newspapers. Now, the books are even coming out. There seems to be a consensus forming that the models used by the Wall Street traders were too simplistic; they didn’t take into account the real world.”
One of the books came out and said the mathematical theories were part of the problem.
“I believe we have created a new way to use mathematics. Real world mathematics.”
Talked about in the last decade we have not had enough innovation in the United States. Truchard said innovation is what will get the U.S. back on track.
Talking about the NI users, Truchard said the trend was quite different.
“You guys here have been very innovative and counter to the trend to the overall U.S. industry. You have spurred innovation that has been definitely needed.”
With NI’s new product releases, “we now have a nice platform to deploy math in the real time.”
John Graff, NI’s vice president of marketing and customer operations, agreed innovation is the key to help get out of the recession.
“The financial engineers have really screwed this up,” Graff said. “It is now time for the real engineers to step it up.”
-- Gregory Hale