Vacation in the Sun

There has been a brief interruption in my blog as I am spending a few days visiting friends and family in Florida. We passed an entertaining hour taking a tour of the town of Celebration on a Segway with my step-son and grandson. The first few moments were terrifying but I quickly became comfortable and roared off in pursuit of the younger generations.

Recently an Industry Day was held in New Jersey and was a great success with about 300 attendees and many industry leaders giving talks on the state of the Telecom industry in general and their company in particular. In order to build on that success the Region 1 Industry Liaison Coordinator is encouraging the Northeastern Region to hold a similar event in our Area. I have already spoken with Mimi Tam of the New Hampshire Section and agreed to participate in initial discussions on the topic when I return from vacation.

If you are interested in participating in the organization of such an event just let me know.

Update on TePRA Robotics Conference

We had another TePRA Steering Committee meeting this evening which I hosted at Textron. I am very pleased with progress. Taskin Padir has really put a lot of effort into molding the technical program, the Call for Papers and now the conference website. Michael Gennert and Bill Michalson from WPI are the Technical Program Chairs and Taskin, Also from WPI, represents them at committee meetings. The committee is reaching a consensus on many topics. We have agreed on the conference dates, November 9th & 10th, the milstone calendar of significant dates, such as abstracts being due on May 15th, and that we definitely want to have a student competition again.

Helen Greiner has agreed to be Conference Chair once again and Colonel Barry Shoop has agreed to represent the Military on our Steering Committee.

We are off and running. Once we finalise the Call for Papers in the next few days we will be pulling out all the stops to get publicity for the conference. We are better prepared than last year but we need all the help we can get.

Engineers Week

The Boston Engineers Week activities are now over. I think that they were very successful in spite of our concerns that the economic downturn might put damper on things. We had over twenty five company tables in the Career Fair on Thursday February 12th and over two hundred students were looking for jobs. A number of volunteers staffed the IEEE table spreading the word about the benefits of joining the IEEE. Thank you Rob Vise, Ted Kachanski, Palo Pierce and Jim Matthiesen for giving your time to the IEEE cause!

I made a point of asking as many attendees as possible for their impressions of the event. The response was overwhelmingly positive from both company representatives and from students. In fact the only mild criticism I heard was from a couple of Oceanic Engineers who pointed out that there were not many job opportunities for them at the companies participating. However they said they didn't really expect any!

The next day was the Luncheon when over 280 engineers, managers and students listened to Helen Greiner talk about a career in Robots and Amy Smith talk about a career in simple inventions that help the people of the Third World. Many awards were presented to enthusiastic youngsters who had decided to participate in engineering or science projects.

Next year I must involve more IEEE volunteers to raise the public profile of the IEEE organization. However I did meet Michael Smith of the ASME and agreed to work with him to put on joint events with our two organizations.

Volunteer Needed

While I was at the Region 1 meeting in Newark, NJ, this weekend I was approached by Jignasa Ray from the New York Section who is looking for Webmaster for the Region 1 GOLD website. The GOLD acronym stands for Graduates Of the Last Decade, so if you graduated less than ten years ago and you are interested in maintaining a website let me know and I will put you in touch with Jignasa, (with no committment on your part). You can then find out a little more about the job description to see if it suits your interests and availability.

New Appointment

An old friend of the Boston Section, Rob Reilly, has accepted the position of Montreal Sister Section Coordinator. In this role he will lead the Boston Section's efforts to develop opportunities for cooperative activiites with our new Sister Section. Rob will be assisted by Bruce Hecht, Uri Moszkowicz and Gil Cooke.

If you would like to help Rob in his new role let me know by posting a comment on this Blog.

Region 1 Winter Meeting

I am driving down to Newark tomorrow to spend an exotic weekend at Newark Airport. I will be representing the Boston Section at the meeting and reporting on my (limited) activity as Region One Conference Coordinator.

I enjoy Region meetings as they give you the oppportunity to exchange ideas with other Sectuion Chairs from the North East. Region one includes Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and half of New Jersy. (My apologies if I have missed anyone.)

I will be reporting on the TePRA robotics conference, our Engineers Week Activities, the numerous chapter meetings, our new relationship with Montreal and a host of iother topics such as membership, Industrial relations and the like. I will post my impressions ofthe meeting on my return.