East Tennessee Section Report, October 2007 Section Officers: Chair: Craig Deibele Vice chair: Terry Kurtz Secretary/Treasurer: Steven Bunch 2007 was a good year for the East Tennessee Section. Professional Activities: 1) William Milam, of Telesensors gave a talk at a section meeting on Smart Sensorrs. 2) George Mathews and David Hotz of the NWS gave a lecture at a section meeting on the National Weather Service and included a tour. 3) Stuart Henderson of Oak Ridge National Laboratory gave a lecture at a section meeting on the Spallation Neutron Source, which included a tour 4) Jeff Sams of ARC gave a lecture at a section meeting on Manufacturing Airbag Inflators and tour of tour of their facility. 5) We will be having a meeting by Stephen Levy on Solar Power for a section meeting. 6) Teacher-in-Service is scheduled for Knox County Schools on Nov 14th Student Activities 1) Last year we support several student teams in robotics compeititions. One team placed 6th out of 38, even though they were 1 of only 2 two year colleges to compete 2) Met with the officers of two local student branches and offered our assistance. Participation by local student branches in section meetings has increased. Challenges: 1) Reaching out to our members. Even though our section has about 960 members, participation in section activities could be improved. We are attempting this via our website, which is updated and contains many of the IEEE member benefits 2) Addition of section blog and rss to our website. 3) Continuing Education credit for section technical meetings Goals for 2008: Plan to establish Membership, Student Activities, and Programs Committee for the section next year. Plan to start a Computer Society Chapter. There are over 700 section members who belong to the Computer Society. (The poll that I included on the meeting RSVP form has yielded several names of members who would like to volunteer.) Plan to start a Gold Affinity Group. There are about 50 graduates of the last decade in the section. Plan to expand the awareness of IEEE in the community by establishing a blog and online calendar to share meeting information with other technical associations in East Tennessee and invite them to share their meeting notices and website links. This will also afford our section members the opportunity to attend other technical meetings in the area.