Treehouse Meeting of 10/4

What is the difference between Science and Engineering?

To kick of our quarter-long (indeed, year-long) discussion of the research process in computational linguistics, we discussed the difference between science and engineering. I'm starting this page in the hopes that people will add to it.

Science

Trying to understand how the (natural or social) world works, by building models and testing their predictions

Engineering

Learning how to build better things that make some aspect of the (natural or social) world conform to human needs/expectations/desires

NB: Engineering research is more than just building something, it's exploring what techniques work better than (others, the status quo, ...) in building such things and why.

Back to Quarterly Schedule

-- EmilyBender - 04 Oct 2006