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Calendar Archive, October 2007
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Washington Section Administrative Committee Meeting
Time: Dinner at 6:00 pm; meeting at 6:30 pm
Place: Agio, Bethesda Marriott, 5151 Pooks Hill Rd., Bethesda, MD
Directions: From the north, take I-270 south to Route 355 and exit at Wisconsin Ave. From I-495, take exit 34 (Wisconsin Ave.) to Pooks Hill Rd. Validated parking.
More Info: All interested IEEE members are welcome.
Cost: $30 for optional dinner. Agio has a contemporary Italian menu.
Contact: Please RSVP to Debra Meale at 703-492-0047 or nca-admin@ieee.org. Please include the term IEEE in the subject line of your email.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Capitol College Graduate School Virtual Open House
Sponsor: Capitol College (IEEE Education Partner)
Time: 7:00 pm
Place: Online
Directions: N/A
More Info: Learn more about Capitol College and their master's degree programs, meet faculty and staff, and experience the online classroom. RSVP required.
For information about tuition discounts for IEEE members, go to
www.capitol-college.edu/academicprograms/partnerships/ieee/index.shtml.
Contact: RSVP to Laura Hustead at
gradadmit@capitol-college.edu. Please include your name, email address, phone number and program of interest. For a list of the master's programs, see
www.capitol-college.edu/academicprograms/graduateprograms/.
Sponsor: Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, George Washington University
Speaker: Anand Anandkumar, Magma India
Time: 3:30-4:30 pm
Place: 309 Tompkins Hall, George Washington University, 725 23rd St. NW, Washington, DC
More Info: See Diamond story below.
Contact: Dr. Harrington at
rharring@gwu.edu.
Sponsor: Robotics and Automation Society
Time: Business meeting 6:30 pm; speaker 7:00 pm
Speaker: Dr. Henrik Christensen, Georgia Institute of Technology
Place: University of Maryland, Kim Engineering Building, Room 1105, College Park, MD
Directions: From the north or I-495, take Route 1 South. Approx. 2 miles south of the Beltway, turn right onto Campus Drive, then immediately turn right onto Paint Branch Drive and the Kim Engineering Building will be on the left (after a stop sign). From the south on Route 1, turn left onto Campus Drive, and follow above directions. Free parking after 4:00 pm in Lots T and XX. See
www.parking.umd.edu/themap.
From the College Park Metro Station (Green line), take the free UM campus shuttle, get off at the first stop, walk back for a hundred yards, turn left onto Paint Branch Drive and look for the Kim Engineering Building on the left. See shuttle schedule at www.transportation.umd.edu/routes/schedules/CollegeParkMetro.pdf.
More Info: See Diamond story below. A brief business meeting for members will be conducted before Prof. Christensen kicks off the Guest Speaker Series at approx. 7:00 pm. Refreshments will be provided.
Contact: Raj Madhavan at raj.madhavan@ieee.org.
Sponsors: Vehicular Technology Society, Land Transportation Committee; American Society of Mechanical Engineers
Speaker: Courtney Wilson, Executive Director, Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum, Baltimore, MD
Time: 11:30 am
Place: American Public Transportation Association, Conference Room, 11th Floor,
1666 K Street NW, Washington, DC
Directions: Take the Metro to Farragut North station (Red Line, use K Street exit) or Farragut West station (Orange & Blue lines, use 17th Street exit).
More Info: All interested persons are invited to attend our monthly luncheon meeting.
Cost: $15 cash at the door for lunch.
Contact: Please make reservations by 4:00 pm on Friday, Oct. 5 by contacting Ken Briers at ken.briers@parsons.com or 202-775-3397, or Lou Sanders at LSanders@apta.com or 202-496-4886.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Northern Virginia Section Administrative Committee Meeting
Time: 6:30 pm
Place: Olive Garden Restaurant, 12980 Fair Lakes Shopping Center, Fairfax, VA
Directions: Take I-66 to Fairfax County Pkway, Route 7100 (Exit 55B towards Reston - Herndon). Turn left onto Fair Lakes Pkwy. Turn left at Fair Lakes Shopping Center, and left again to stay on Fair Lakes Shopping Center to the Olive Garden.
More Info: All interested IEEE members are invited to attend.
Contact: Debra Meale at 703-492-0047 or nca-admin@ieee.org. Please include the term IEEE in your subject line.
"Designing to See vs. Learning to See: Comparing Analytical and Adaptive Methods"
Sponsor: IEEE Computer Society
Place: Cosmos Club, Washington, DC
More Info: See Diamond story below and
www.aipr-workshop.org.
Contact: D. Schaefer at
schaefer@mason.gmu.edu.
Time: 6:30 pm
Place: Cafe Soleil, 839 Seventeenth St. NW, Washington, DC
Directions: Cafe Soleil is between H and I Streets, convenient to the Farragut West Metro station (Blue & Orange lines). See http://cafesoleil.net/directions.
More Info: Come meet other Women in Engineering members while experiencing Mediterranean cuisine! Nominations will be accepted for 2008 WIE officer positions. Voting will take place at the Nov. 8 technical meeting.
Contact: Please RSVP by Oct. 14 to Charity Burd at charity.burd@ieee.org.
Sponsors: Power Engineering Society, Industry Applications Society, National Capital Area Consultants' Network, Women in Engineering, Graduates of the Last Decade (GOLD), Life Members, and Society of Women Engineers (Baltimore-Washington)
Time: 5:00-8:00 pm
Place: Chevy's Fresh Mex Restaurant, Ballston Common Mall, 4238 Wilson Blvd., Arlington, VA
Directions: Ballston Common is two blocks south of Ballston Metro station (Orange line). Turn right at top of Metro escalator, then left on the street, proceed two blocks toward Macy’s, turn left and walk toward Ballston Commons Mall. Look for Chevy’s on the right. Street parking is limited, and underground parking typically costs $1 for 3 hours.
More Info: Refreshments, soft drinks and door prize awards will be provided. You may bring business cards and literature. Invite your friends, co-workers and anyone else who could benefit from networking with IEEE members. See Diamond story below. All are welcome. ¡Olé!
Cost: $5 for IEEE or SWE members, $10 for guests, free for IEEE or SWE student members.
Contact: Please RSVP to Monica Mallini at
m.a.mallini@ieee.org.
Friday, October 26, 2007
Disjoint Multipath Routing in Packet-Switched Networks
Sponsor: Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, George Washington University
Speaker: Srinivasan Ramasubramanian, University of Arizona
Time: 1:00-2:00 pm
Place: 640 Phillips Hall, George Washington University, Washington, DC
More Info: See Diamond story below.
Contact: Dr. Harrington at
rharring@gwu.edu.
Tuesday October 30, 2007
Analog Microwave Photonics Device & System Research
Sponsor: Lasers and Electro-Optics Society
Speaker: Dr. Keith Williams, Naval Research Laboratory
Time: Light refreshments and socializing 6:00 pm, lecture 6:30 pm, optional dinner following lecture with the speaker at a local restaurant.
Place: University of Maryland, Computer Science Instructional Center (CSI), Room 2117, College Park, MD
Directions: From I-495, exit at Route 1 South, proceed approx. 2 miles, turn right onto Campus Drive, then immediately turn right onto Paint Branch Drive. The CSI building will be on the right, just before the A.V. Williams Building. From the south on Route 1, turn left onto Campus Drive, and follow above directions.
Free parking is available after 4:00 pm in selected lots (read signs carefully). Recommended Lots are XX1, XX2 or I. See
www.parking.umd.edu/themap
or
www.inform.umd.edu/CampusInfo/About_UMCP/Maps.
From the College Park Metro Station (Green line), take the free UM campus shuttle, get off at the first stop, walk back a hundred yards to Paint Branch Drive. See
www.transportation.umd.edu/routes/schedules/CollegeParkMetro.pdf for shuttle schedule.
More Info: See http://ewh.ieee.org/r2/wash_nova/leos.
Contact: Dominique Dagenais at 301-951-7095 or
dominique_dagenais@avanex.com.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Infernos Adeat Labor: Musings of a General Electric
'A Course' Graduate
Sponsor: Life Members
Speaker: Wally Lee
Time: 12 noon to 1:30 pm
Place: Dolley Madison Library, 1244 Oak Ridge Ave, McLean, VA
Directions: Take Exit 46 from the Beltway and proceed on Route 123 North to McLean, VA, about 2 miles. After crossing Old Dominion Dr., turn left at the next street, Ingleside Ave., and then left on Oak Ridge Ave. The library is on the left.
More Info: See Diamond story below. Refreshments will be served.
Contact: Amarjeet Basra at 703-324-2821 or amarjeet.basra@ieee.org.
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Effective Discovery of Geospatial Data: A Geospatial Catalogue's Perspective
Sponsor: Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society
Speaker: Dr. Yuqi Bai, Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems, George Mason University
Time: Social period 3:00 pm; lecture 3:30 pm
Place: NASA Goddard Visitor Center, Greenbelt, MD
Directions: See
www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/visitor/directions/index.html.
More Info: See Diamond story below, and
http://ewh.ieee.org/r2/no_virginia/grss for updated information. This lecture is also being offered at George Mason University on Monday, Nov. 5.
Contact: James C. Tilton at james.c.tilton@nasa.gov.
Diamond Stories
Designing for low power has become increasingly important in a wide variety of applications, including wireless communication, mobile computing, and other hand-held devices. Therefore one of the key focus areas in modern-day IC design is on power management. Power management can be defined to be the control of power consumption across the entire design over all abstraction levels. It differs from power optimization, which is the minimization of power at a given abstraction level. Thus to achieve a truly power efficient design, not only must one optimize power at each level, but one must also manage power consumption over the entire design.
Some of the methodologies being used to address the problem of power management are: Multiple voltage island based design, multi-voltage design techniques, clock gating, and transistor sizing techniques. Modern EDA tools comprehend these techniques and more accurately model the effects they can have on IR drop, delay deration etc. It is also very important that these tools have the capacity to handle mammoth design sizes. To fully manage and optimize power consumption, a design methodology must address power consumption issues at each stage of the design process and at each level of design abstraction. Target power specifications must be developed at the very beginning and the design should be checked against these specifications at each abstraction level. The design can be optimized, either manually or automatically, at each level with the most effective optimizations available at the higher levels of abstraction. This talk will highlight the latest techniques being used in the semiconductor industry to design Power Aware IC's!
Anand Anandkumar is a chip design technologist and entrepreneur with over 18 years of experience in the electronics design automation (EDA) and semiconductor design space. In his current position as founding managing director of Magma Design Automation India (www.magma-da.com), he is responsible for driving key facets of R&D, product engineering, sales, business development and overall operations. Magma India is the largest operation for Magma outside its headquarters in California. Magma India has sites in Bangalore, Noida and Mumbai.
Dr. Anandkumar's expertise area covers not only IC design, design services, applications engineering, but also founding global footprints for multi-national companies. He is the founding member and former vice chairman of the India Semiconductor Association. He began his career at Hughes Network Systems where he became a senior ASIC designer for the chipsets used in the DirecTV set-top boxes. Next he worked at Cadence Design Systems, where he held various engineering and management positions acting in both technical leadership and program management roles for several successful projects in the North American and Japanese design services markets. He relocated to India in 2000 to set up a start-up company called Spincircuit, which was acquired by Cadence in 2002.
He earned his bachelor's degree in electronics and communications from the College of Engineering Guindy (Anna University) and went onto complete his M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from George Washington University. He holds two patents in the satellite communications area. He also has seven years of part-time teaching experience, teaching digital and analog VLSI courses for graduate programs.
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The presenter will argue that cognitive systems only make sense in the context of an embodied agent, such as a robot. To build systems that can represent the external environment, reason about future activities and automatically acquire models of the environment, there is a need to consider basic problems on representations, architecture, perception-action integration, learning, planning and autonomy, the role of language, and methods for systems integration. To manage the complexity of the problem three topical demonstrators have been designed: the explorer, the playmate and the philosopher.
The basic problems will be discussed, and the three demonstrators will be presented both in terms of main challenges and progress on systems design. Results from operational systems will also be presented. The presentation will discuss aspects of mapping, manipulation, human-robot interaction and systems engineering.
Henrik I. Christensen is the KUKA Chair of Robotics and the Director of the Georgia Institute of Technology Center for Robotics and Intelligent Machines. Dr. Christensen earned M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Aalborg University Denmark, in 1987 and 1990. He does research on mapping, estimation, systems integration and HRI. Dr. Christensen has published more than 230 contributions across vision, robotics and AI. He served as the founding chairman of the European Network of Excellence in Robotics (EURON, 1999-2006) which involves more than 200 universities across EU member states.
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"Designing to See vs. Learning to See: Comparing Analytical and Adaptive Methods"
Many research and development efforts within the imagery pattern recognition field have focused either on technical approaches that require an a priori detailed analysis of the underlying imagery mechanisms (“design”), or on techniques that dynamically modify their operation in response to some established performance measures (“learning”). The AIPR 2007 Workshop will examine the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches and their potential to lead to new, successful applications. The program will include paper presentations, poster and demonstration sessions, panel discussions, and a moderated debate on a key but contentious technical issue.
The purpose of the Applied Imagery Pattern Recognition (AIPR) annual Workshops is to bring together researchers from government, industry, and academia in an elegant setting conducive to technical interchange across a broad range of disciplines.
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In 2005, the local chapters of the Power Engineering Society and Industry Applications Society hosted the first annual Fall Power Fiesta, the premiere networking event of the National Capital Area, attended by 50 IEEE members and guests. The Fiesta was very successful in that the mix of attendees -- students, GOLD members, representatives of industry, consultants, life members -- resulted in "a fantastic synergy," as one attendee described the atmosphere. Another said, "I don't believe I have ever attended an IEEE event that had such a great mix of the IEEE community... that was the magic of the evening!" A third person described the Fiesta as "intellectual and social salsa!"
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Friday, October 26, 2007
Disjoint Multipath Routing in Packet-Switched Networks
Packet-switched networks traditionally forward packets to a destination along one path. However, forwarding packets over disjoint multiple paths help achieve load balancing, congestion reduction, and robustness to link and node failures. Implementation of disjoint multiple paths in packet-switched network poses two significant challenges: loop-free route computation and efficient forwarding of packets. In this talk, we will introduce a novel approach called "colored trees" that addresses the above two challenges. In this approach, two trees, namely red and blue, are constructed rooted at the destination such that the path from any node to the destination on the two trees are (link- or node-) disjoint. We develop a distributed algorithm to construct the trees with only neighborhood information. The message and time complexities of the algorithm are linear in the number of links and nodes, respectively. We will extend the colored trees approach to dual-homing networks and sensor networks, where data may be transmitted to a few of many possible destinations. In applications where a node may simultaneously transmit data on both the trees, the two trees will need to be reconstructed after a link or node failure. We develop an algorithm to reconstruct the colored trees upon failures with only local repairs. We will demonstrate that the colored tree construction and reconstruction algorithms developed outperform previously known techniques in the literature. Finally, we will highlight possible extensions of the colored trees concept for tolerating multiple link/node failures.
Srinivasan Ramasubramanian is an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Arizona. He received the B.E. degree in electrical and electronics engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, India, in 1997, and the Ph.D. degree in computer engineering from Iowa State University, Ames, in 2002. He is a co-developer of the Hierarchical Modeling and Analysis Package (HIMAP), a reliability modeling and analysis tool, which is currently being used at Boeing, Honeywell, and several other companies and universities. His research interests include architectures and algorithms for optical and wireless networks, multipath routing, fault tolerance, system modeling, and performance analysis. He has served as the TPC co-chair of BROADNETS 2005 conference and is an editor of the Springer Wireless Networks Journal.
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Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Infernos Adeat Labor: Musings of a General Electric
'A Course' Graduate
Long ago in Schenectady, New York, when he was working for General Electric's Gas Turbine Division, Wally Lee learned of a program called the "ABC Course" where one could earn a master's degree in engineering. Lee already had a master's degree, and he envisioned the program as a jump-start on his Ph.D. on the company nickel. He approached his manager and convinced the company to approve his studies. Little did he know what he was getting into. The first installment of the program, the "A Course," was an intensive year-long study of engineering analysis with an equal emphasis on style and substance in the graduate level homework assignments. Many were not up to the challenge, but Lee and a dozen or so fellow GE engineers toughed it out for the entire year.
Fast forward to 2007. Eager to impress his bride, Lee went to retrieve his enormous notebooks of "A Course" materials and homework exercises, only to find that they had been discarded. This was the beginning of a quest to recover the "A Course." In the ensuing months, Lee located his instructor, Dr. Donald R. Mack, now retired from GE and from his illustrious service to IEEE as associate editor of Potentials Magazine. He located his classmates. And he recovered the enormous notebooks, on loan from his old homework partner, George Reagan, who lives in Dumfries, Virginia.
Lee was born in Memphis, Tennessee. A University of Tennessee engineering physics graduate, his blood runs orange. (How ‘bout them Vols!) He also holds an M.S. degree in physics from the Florida Institute of Technology. He has a broad engineering background in integration and testing of large hardware/software systems, and his specialty is writing technical proposals in systems engineering and network communications. He owes much of his capability to the excellent training that he received from Dr. Mack in the General Electric "A Course," which he completed in 1974.
At Lee's Life Members talk, you will learn all about the General Electric “A Course” and its long history, feel the pain of weekly homework marathons, hear about pies in the face, and see the enormous notebooks that started and ended the quest. Oh, yes... Lee will explain Infernos Adeat Labor.
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Wednesday, October 31, 2007
Effective Discovery of Geospatial Data: A Geospatial Catalogue's Perspective
Every scientist has his own way of finding satellite images of interest for their research work. But they might not notice that many research efforts have been directed behind the scenes to fulfill this "geospatial data discovery" task. This presentation will touch on the following aspects of data discovering issues:
1) Basic knowledge of Internet, HTTP protocol and GET/POST bindings. -- It would be appropriate to know some underlying techniques that enable digital information being transformed between publishers and consumers.
2) Metadata: problems, background, standards (ISO, OGC, US), use cases -- Metadata plays a key role in facilitating information discovery. The way of promoting indirect geospatial data discovery through direct discovery of metadata has been extensively used worldwide.
3) Catalogue system: problems, background, systems (e.g. NASA EDG, NASA ECHO), standards (OGC). -- Besides metadata information, the protocol, message and binding issues are dealt with in catalogue systems.
4) Catalogue federation: problems, challenges, pioneering systems (GMU CFS) -- It is very desirable if those catalogues can be integrated into a catalogue federation, which will present a well-known metadata model and interface protocol to users and hide the complexity and diversity of the affiliated catalogues behind the interface. Challenges and problems in dealing with the metadata conceptual models, query languages, and communication protocols will be analyzed and proposed federation strategies and the operational federation system will be introduced.
Dr. Yuqi Bai is a research assistant professor at the Center for Spatial Information Science and Systems (CSISS) of George Mason University (GMU). He has more than 10 years of dedicated research on Web-based geospatial information interoperability and integration, Geospatial Metadata, Geospatial Catalogue Service, and Geospatial Catalogue Federation. He received his B.S. in computer science and M.S. in software engineering from China University of Geosciences in 1997 and 2000 respectively. He earned his Ph.D. in cartography and geographical information science from the Institute of Remote Sensing Applications, Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2003.
Dr. Bai is the author of GMU CSISS Catalogue Federation Service, a system capable of performing distributed and integrated metadata discovery over three distinct geospatial catalogue services: the NASA Earth Observing System (EOS) ClearingHOuse (ECHO), the GMU OpenGIS Catalogue Service for Web (CSW), and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Earth System Grid (ESG) Simulation Data Catalogue. This product is operational in the NASA funded GeoBrain project. It enables education community users to discover the online datasets in NASA data pools, the GMU Spatial Database, and the DOE ESG LLNL Simulation Database in a convenient and standard way. Yuqi is the author of the GMU CSISS OGC CSW Wrapper for NASA ECHO. This product provides an OGC-compliant Catalogue Service discovery interface for NASA ECHO. This is the only available operational system that provides this value-added functionality for NASA ECHO. This package was initially developed in 2004, and has been continually updated to be compatible with each ECHO release after that.
Dr. Bai is the task lead and a key developer in implementing the GEOSS Registry System. This system will develop Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI), OASIS ebXML-ebRS, and OGC CSW interfaces to be accessed by other GEOSS applications, including GEOSS Web Portal solutions. This system is the backbone of the GEOSS Clearinghouse, a new international effort of providing integrated search capability across the distributed and heterogonous catalogues and their registered resources.
Dr. Bai is also providing technical support to the NASA Goddard Earth Science Data and Information Services Center (GES DISC) on NASA ECHO system integration, and image subsetting for the Coordinated Energy and Water Cycle Observations Project (CEOP).
His findings, lessons-learned and research results have been published in several professional journals, books and international meetings, including the Journal of Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing, the Encyclopedia of Geographical Science, the Encyclopedia of Geoinformatics, the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, and the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing technical meeting.
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Please send meeting announcements, corrections and comments
to ncac-scanner@ieee.org.
Updated 10/31/07
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