Area 6 Report


April 22, 1998
Darrell Piatt

Mississippi Section

The Mississippi Section is experiencing a drop in participation at the meetings. This section only has one officer at the present time. They have conducted three meetings since January of this year.

Northeast Mississippi Subsection

The Subsection is seeing a decline in participation. They had no activity last year.

Mobile Section

Dr. Adel A. Sakla is the Section Chair. Since the September social meeting, average section meeting attendance has been 25+ for technical meetings featuring talks on networking fundamentals, the future of programmable logic controllers (PLCs), fractal image compression, and industrial power distribution systems.

The Mobile Section participated in National Engineer's Week by helping with the Mobile Area Council of Engineers (MACE) annual banquet that honored all disciplines of engineering. The Section Chair, Dr. Adel Sakla, received the Mobile Area Engineering Educator of the Year award.

At the April 21st meeting, five teams from the University of South Alabama will present their designs for the SoutheastCon '98 "Knight Mine" hardware contest. An in-house competition will follow to

determine which teams will be going to SoutheastCon '98 in Orlando. The IEEE Mobile Section is the proud sponsor of the South Alabama teams. This is the first year that the Mobile Section has helped sponsor the teams and they hope to continue their involvement with this educational experience. They are also taking this opportunity to help recruit graduates to continue their involvement with IEEE.

The topic for the May meeting will be on the Verilog Hardware Description Language.

Huntsville Section

The Huntsville Section is pleased to report on some of the current activities and plans for the rest of the year. Huntsville is very well recognized as a high tech city in the southeast. IEEE Huntsville is a vibrant organization serving this technical community. Currently they have a very active and successful Computer Society lead by Mr. Joe Bullington which draws a large number of attendees every month. Additionally they have an equally successful Control Systems Society that is lead by Dr. Yuri Shtessel. They have a very close working relationship with the Huntsville Association of Technical Societies. IEEE Huntsville has acted as a catalyst between academia and industry for the past several years and will continue this relationship. For instance, they support The Regional Science and Engineering Fair sponsored by Calhoun Community College and State Science and Engineering Fair Sponsored by University of Alabama at Huntsville. In addition they support a group of UAH students that participate in the SoutheastCon competition by designing an intelligent race car. Every year they organize an IEEE computer show, which draws nearly 25,000 people. For this year they are planning to revive some of their dormant societies. They feel Huntsville now is ready to host large conferences such as AUTOTESTCON and they have submitted a proposal to host this for the year 2002.

Alabama Section

The Program Committee's theme of Leading Edge Electrotechnology this year has provided outstanding meetings for our members. The five Technical Society Chapters have held regular meetings. The Significant Bits newsletter is published monthly via the web, e-mail, and paper

mail. The PACE committee has provided newsletter articles relevant to our profession. The members enjoyed a field trip to the Mercedes Benz plant in Vance, Alabama. The GOLD and Education committees have helped a local high school with an electronic lab equipment setup, which was funded by the Section. The Section will receive the Exemplary Section Award.

Montgomery Subsection

The Subsection has a nominal level of activity with monthly meetings. They are working on plans to grow the attendance as well as the level of activity.