You work for a company that delivers real-time and embedded system design and implementation services for its clients. The VP of Engineering has assigned you a special project. She is concerned that the company's edge in the market may be fading because your engineers are not tracking the trends and directions for the design and implementation of real-time and embedded systems. She wants to start a few projects which will explore new technologies that the design teams will have to know about for the company to remain competitive in getting contracts. Several engineers are working on this task individually. A meeting has been scheduled with senior management where each engineer will make a short presentation of the engineer's individual research findings and recommendations. After this meeting, the VP of Engineering and other senior managers will create projects to explore the topics they feel have the most potential.
Your deliverable for this assignment is a 3 to 4 page Executive Summary and a 10 minute presentation outlining your research findings on trends in real-time and embedded systems. These trends can be in hardware technologies, software technologies, or both. Identify what you think are the two or three most promising trends. Pick the one that you think has the most promise for your company and provide more detail about that trend area.
Use whatever references you can find. From a technical perspective, IEEE Spectrum devotes one issue to the future of several areas. IEEE Computer and IEEE Software have also in the last several years devoted special issues to real-time and embedded systems. The editor of those special issues often writes a summary article that describes the state of the art in these areas. The ACM has also done a similar thing. From a practitioner perspective, trade journals such as EE Times, Control, and Embedded Systems have articles about the future of the field. You can often find these on the journal's website. From a more business perspective, the Gartner Group issues reports that cover these areas. You have access to Gartner Group reports through the RIT library.
Provide some additional guidance for the next time this is run. Make sure report introduces several trends but goes into full detail on one including why it is the most promising for the company. In presentation, one slide can be used for all trends, then the rest of the presentation should highlight the most promising one because that is what the VP would be interested in during a presentation on this project. Assume a level of knowledge equal to what the class has. Make sure that the trends are really aimed toward RT-E systems and not a trend in more general systems. Presentation is 10 minutes - each slide is important, maybe don't use a minute on an agenda slide.
Your paper and presentation will be evaluated using this rubric.