Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory

In a comment on an earlier post Nosophorus asks “What is General Engineering?” I’m glad you asked. General Engineering is my home department and the home department of the Illinois Genetic Algorithms Laboratory (IlliGAL). General Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) goes back to 1921, when a curriculum study at the behest of Chicago-area industrialists wondered why engineering education was tilting so heavily toward technical topics and away from the business topics necessary for success. A degree program was created to balance technical topics with topics useful in business such as law and economics. Subsequently the teaching mission of a department called General Engineering Drawing was merged this degree program to form the department now known as General Engineering.

During the Cold War, the GE degree took on a systems engineering flavor, and an MS degree was added in the 70s. More recently, a PhD has been added, but a PhD in General Engineering sounded like something of an oxymoron, so the PhD offered was called Systems and Entrepreneurial Engineering (SEE). This degree is something of a cross of offerings in Management Science and Engineering (MS&E) at Stanford and the programs in the Engineering Systems Division (ESD) at MIT.

The undergraduate program in General Engineering is one of the most popular at Illinois with nearly 600 undergraduate students. The new SEE degrees have attracted applicants from around the world, and is growing rapidly. More information is available on the GE website here.