Developing New Technologies in Final Term Projects: an Industr

One of the most challenging problems that the engineering educators face today, is how to prepare the future engineer for a ever-growing High Tech, Information Based market, where the development of new technological applications is a basic need. The solution adopted at Faculdade de Engenharia Industrial is to make partnerships with leading companies and industries, which enable students to work with state of the art technologies and give enterprises the possibilities to develop projects at low cost. Another aim of the industry is to foster the formation of new entrepreneurs in technological businesses. Partnerships have given good results in applied research and final course projects. Two of these have been selected to illustrate these results. One of them, the “Pager Based Email Service” aims the development of a system that enables a notebook user to receive emails without the need to connect to the Internet. This is achieved with a pager connected to the computer. Another project is the “Estimation of Object Volumes based on Computer Vision”, developed with the aim of introducing new technologies in industrial automation applications. Its goal was to estimate the volume of objects on an automatic production line. Partnership in final course projects has permitted that students obtain practical results and good training, for their future and demanding high-tech career, and that private enterprise get new technological applications.