ScienceEngineering < Main

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---+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.

[[QuarterlySchedule][Back to Quarterly Schedule]]

-- Main.EmilyBender - 04 Oct 2006
Topic revision: r1 - 2006-10-04 - EmilyBender