Electrification. Air-conditioning. Radio. The Internet. No one can doubt they are among the 20th century’s greatest engineering achievements. But can we predict the technical triumphs of the century to come?

The U.S. National Academy of Engineering hopes it can, but it wants help. It’s holding a worldwide brainstorming session and asking experts in science and engineering, as well as the general public, to send it their ideas and the reasoning behind them. The NAE plans to distill them into 20 or so projects for the century ahead that it terms the Grand Challenges for Engineering.

Organizations have issued grand challenges to engineers in the past in the hopes of finding solutions. The NAE’s purpose, however, is not to solve problems but to raise public awareness of them.

Since the NAE began the project in January, it has received hundreds of suggestions. They range from finding alternatives to fossil fuels and developing next-generation communications to opening space flight to the average person and desalinating water cheaply.

At a May assembly of engineering societies convened by the NAE in Washington, D.C., IEEE President Leah Jamieson weighed in with a list of important challenges where the IEEE expects to play a central role. The list includes earth observation systems, health-care technologies, and security systems for protecting a city’s infrastructure of power, telecommunications, and data systems. Also on the list were issues of concern to megacities—those with more than 10 million people—whose numbers are growing.

“The work of our members will be pivotal in addressing these huge issues,” Jamieson told The Institute.

Jamieson’s list also included the challenges of education at the pre-university and university level, the necessity for lifelong learning, and the role to be played by professional societies in their members’ education. In particular, engineers will have to deal with technologies that may not have existed when they were in school, Jamieson noted.

“Engineers will have to be incredibly well qualified and well educated and have a much broader range of skills than in the past,” she says. “They’ll need to work across disciplines, and with teams from around the world.”

WEIGH IN It’s not too late to send in your grand challenge suggestions to http://www.engineeringchallenges.org. You have until 17 August.

The NAE says it will develop its final list with the help of a committee of technical thinkers, including William J. Perry, former U.S. defense secretary and now an engineering professor at Stanford University, and IEEE Honorary Member Dean Kamen, the founder and president of DEKA Research and Development Corp., in Manchester, N.H., who invented the Segway transportation device.

The committee plans to issue a white paper presenting the challenge projects. It will then be up to the engineering community to tackle them. NAE is scheduled to announce the final list in October.

The Grand Challenges for Engineering project is sponsored by a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation. For more information, visit http://www.engineeringchallenges.org.