I am concerned about the future of engineering research in Europe. The European Commission has been the main supporter of such research over the years, but for its next four-year plan of collaborative research there are worrying signs that the EC is turning its back on the difficult work of developing hardware and software technologies and expertise. Instead, there is likely to be much more emphasis on services and content.

It may be that other regions of the world are immune, but in Europe I see a dangerous cultural shift reflected, or perhaps instigated, by the European Commission.

In preparing its next four-year plan, known as the Fifth Framework, the Commission is doing away with what were previously separate programs in information technology and telecommunications. It has also sought to emphasize the effect of technology on society, in the form of the jobs created, the nature of the skills needed for those jobs and the electronics-enabled services that the general public may want to receive. The Commission also wants to move away from technology-push toward market-pull for the collaborative research it supports in the future.

You may say that all sounds very reasonable.

Yes, but what happens if the engineering is marginalized or omitted altogether? Unfortunately, there are signs of this, at least in terms of a couple of the conferences the European Commission organizes.

A recent conference that was held in part to report on progress within the Open Microprocessor Systems Initiative (OMI) to the European taxpayer, has been expanded to include multimedia and electronic commerce, and now goes under the abbreviation EMMSEC.

Of course, since potential services and systems can determine what needs to be engineered, that needn't be a bad thing, except where too many conference papers become sociological, or address themes such as marketing.

And then there is the forthcoming EC-sponsored conference on Information Society Technologies, which effectively replaces the old European Information Technology Conference held in Brussels each year. In the new conference there is a lot of society and very little technology.

When technology does get an outing, it is either in the form of general presentations on such things as intelligent software agents, microsystems or global optical networks, or it is in the guise of "well-known and respected futurologists" presenting their vision of life beyond 2002.

Unfortunately, it seems to betray an attitude that developing base technology is a secondary activity, perhaps even a trivial one. It bodes ill for the support of engineering under the Fifth Framework.

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