TOWARDS EVOLVING ENGINEERING EDUCATION BASED ON SYMBIOTIC COGNITIVE DIGITAL TWINS

Abstract

In the long past, professional education lasted for a lifetime. Since then, the industrial revolutions have accelerated the pace of knowledge doubling from a lifetime to months, and shortened the half-life of pertinent knowledge. Those changes have altered the working environment of professionals who have to move between many jobs in their life. Are we capable of adjusting to that pace? How can we learn all that is needed in the old Prussian model of education based on one-program-fits-all? We should revamp the educational system at the core. The new system must be personalized to match the diversity of individual abilities and styles of learning. The new system must also be based not only on the body of knowledge (BoK), but body of experience (BoX) and body of humanity (BoH). The new personalized system of learning must be sufficiently agile and interactive so that it would become evolving in its symbiosis with humans. For that to happen, we must coexist with symbiotic autonomous cognitive systems, specifically involving digital twins. This paper addresses some aspects of this view.