Dr. Viswanath Annampedu - LSI Logic
Aur J. Beck - Advanced Energy Solutions Group, Inc.
Dr. Placid Ferreira - Nano-CEMMS Labs, UIUC
Kyle Harfst - The Office of Economic and Regional Development-SIUC
Lanita Robinson - Cisco
Jonathan Springer - Reservoir Labs
James Throgmorton - Scientist Superstar
EMAC Workshop
Dr. Viswanath Annampedu received the B.E. degree (University Gold Medalist for graduating at the top of the class) in electronics and communication engineering from Anna University, Chennai, India, in 1995; the M.S. degree in electrical engineering (Advisor: Dr. R. Viswanathan) from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Carbondale, IL, in 1997 and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, in 2007. His Dissertation got an award for the best doctoral dissertation for 2007 among all engineering and science majors at Lehigh University.
Since 1997, he has been with the Storage Products Division of LSI Logic, Inc. (formerly Agere Systems and prior to that the Microelectronics group of Bell Laboratories in Lucent Technologies), where he is currently a Technical Manager. At Agere, he leads the servo signal processing architecture group and is involved in research and development of architectures and algorithms for advanced read and servo channel integrated circuits for magnetic recording. He has contributed to many signal processing aspects of magnetic recording, including timing and gain recovery, equalization, analog front-end, coding, data detection and servo. He also contributed towards bit cycle accurate verification of signal processing circuits against design database.
His research interests also span to algorithms and architectures for ultra high speed processing of data with applications to pattern recognition. He is also interested in communication theory with emphasis on decision combining and antenna array processing techniques for spread-spectrum wireless systems. He has many technical publications, seven issued U.S. Patents and several other pending patent applications.
Aur Beck is the president & chief technician for Advanced Energy Solutions. He is putting his knowledge to great use promoting, installing, & educating about renewable energy. As the chief tech he is in charge of the Advanced Energy Solutions entire Midwest installer network and makes sure all the systems are installed to code.
Founder and on the board for both the Illinois Renewable Energy Association (www.illinoisrenew.org ) and the Southern Illinois Center for a Sustainable Future (www.sicsf.org ), he is actually proudest for having started Oil Addicts Anonymous International (www.IamanOilAddict.org ). Aur J Beck is also a long time host of a weekly radio talk show called Your Community Spirit (www.YourCommunitySpirit.org) dealing with environmental/social issues which airs every Friday morning on WDBX 91.1 Carbondale or online at www.wdbx.org .
Dr. Placid M. Ferreira is the Grayce Wicall Gauthier Professor of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Illinois. He is also the director of the Center for Chemical-Electrical-Mechanical Manufacturing Systems (Nano-CEMMS), an NSF-sponsored Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center. He graduated with a Ph.D in Industrial Engineering from Purdue University in 1987, M.Tech (Mechanical) from IIT Bombay, 1982 and B.E. (Mechanical) for University of Bombay in 1980. He has been on the mechanical and industrial faculty at Illinois since 1987, serving as the associate head for graduate programs and research from 1999 to 2002.
Professor Ferreira's research and teaching interests are in the area of industrial automation and include computer-controlled machine-tools, nano-manufacturing and metrology, computational geometry and solid modeling with applications to automated process planning, and the discrete-event control of large-scale flexibly automated systems.
Professor Ferreira received NSF's Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1990, SME's Outstanding Young Investigator Award in 1991 and the University of Illinois' University Scholar Award in 1994. He has served as an associate editor for IEEE Transactions on Design and Manufacturing and is currently an editor for IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering and is on the editorial board for the International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing.
Nanoscience – the ‘science of the small’ – produces stunning revelations that, almost daily, redefine the realm of the possible for each of the components of intelligent devices: sensing, actuation, data processing and storage, communication and energy conversion, and storage. Yet, the manufacturing processes and systems to transform this new knowledge into technologies and products that benefit us in our daily life is a crucial missing element. At Illinois, the (Nano-CEMMS) Center, a NSF-sponsored Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC), is exploring and developing new methodologies and tools that exploit chemical, mechanical, and electronic phenomena and processes for manufacturing at the nanoscale.
This talk is a broad overview of the research within the Center. Specifically, it will describe heterogeneous integration in product design as a motivation for a repertoire of micro and nanoscale manufacturing processes. Processes such as micro-contact printing, electro-chemical patterning, micro-transfer printing, etc. will be described. The possibilities for patterning and integrating mechanical, optical and mechanical functions into materials will be discussed.
Kyle L. Harfst, Ph.D, is Interim Executive Director of Southern Illinois Research Park, Inc. at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC). The mission of Southern Illinois Research Park is to create a high tech and research hub for southern Illinois and to greatly expand knowledge-based investment and job opportunities in Carbondale and southern Illinois. This university related organization provides a direct linkage to the technology transfer office of the university. Dr. Harfst has served as Executive Director since September of 2006 and has been involved with the Research Park since its inception in 2001. He also serves as Director of the Small Business Incubator at SIUC.
Dr. Harfst holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Business from the University of Northern Iowa and a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is a Ph.D graduate in the College of Education at SIUC. Dr. Harfst’s dissertation title was Assessing the Impact of Small Business Training on Nascent Entrepreneurs in Illinois. Prior to his 12 years of university-based economic development, he was a banker in the State of Iowa.
UNDERSTANDING BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
Many people express an interest in starting and maintaining their own business. However, many individuals may not be familiar with what steps to take to ensure a viable business. Technical assistance providers, are critical in the process of a successful business startup. Many a times these services are available in the local area. This seminar introduces services that technical service providers can offer to Small Businesses. Legal forms of organization and business plan development is presented. A brief discussion related to the primary areas of intellectual property (patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets) is included. An introduction to Illinois Small Business Development Center at SIUC and the Southern Illinois Entrepreneurship Center will close out the session. This session is for a student entrepreneur or someone just interested in having a better understanding of business development.
Illinois Small Business Development Center at SIUC and the Southern Illinois Entrepreneurship Center, are available to assist people in starting and maintaining their own business. Those providers are available to assist start-up businesses in the southern Illinois region.
Nathan is a fervent Zend Certified Engineer who has settled on PHP and Web Application development as a career focus. He earned a degree in Computer Science at SIU in December 2004 and has gone on to work for several companies as well as several personal endeavors, the latest of which is a startup company, Moxune LLC.
Nathan will discuss interesting features and weaknesses of PHP, common design issues and show us powerful alternatives to typical convention. He will then introduce us to a gamut of related technologies that give us the potential to supercharge PHP applications and the development lifecycle --all of this delivered in an actual PHP Web Application that will be freely available to download.
Narayan Prasad received the B.Tech. degree in electrical engineering from the
Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, India, in 1999. He received the M.S.
and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of
Colorado, Boulder in 2003 and 2004. Since 2005 he has been with the
Broadband and Mobile Networking department at NEC laboratories America in
Princeton, where he is currently a Research Staff Member. His research interests
include multi-user space-time communications and information theory.
MULTIPLE-INPUT MULTIPLE-OUTPUT TECHNIQUES
Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) techniques that are key to increase the radio channel capacity of cellular systems, are poised for deployment. These techniques can enhance the channel quality at a given data rate leading to improved coverage and user experience. They also can improve the spectrum efficiency by enabling multi-stream transmissions. Moreover they can be easily combined with OFDM, which has been chosen as the air-interface technique for 4G. To fully utilize the potential MIMO gains, simple receiver structures, powerful space-times codes that are easy to decode and flexible feedback (link adaptation) mechanisms are necessary. Research on MIMO-OFDM techniques in our department has led to novel low-complexity MIMO receivers, new code designs as well as efficient feedback schemes. My talk will provide an overview of the MIMO activities in the Broadband and Mobile Networking Department at NEC Labs and also describe the status of MIMO in the 3GPP LTE standardization.
Jonathan Springer is a Managing Engineer at Reservoir Labs. He received a B.A.
in Computer Science and B.S. in Electrical Engineering from
Rice University in 1989, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1992 and 1996 respectively. While
at the University of Illinois, he worked on compilation and optimization
techniques, especially static analysis of functional langauges, and programming
language theory. Jonathan subsequently worked in Hewlett-Packard's High Level
Optimizer group, developing optimizations that were used in HP's primary
compiler toolchain.
Currently, Jonathan works for Reservoir Labs, where he leads the Java Virtual Machine project and the on-line verification project, among other efforts. He has developed key virtual machine performance and reliability technology for Reservoir's corporate clients, which include some of the world's largest server vendors. For Reservoir's research work, he has won and led grants in the areas of verification and code protection. His research interests span compilers, virtual machines, and programming languages.
MODERN COMPILERS
Compilers are often a secondary consideration in today's computing platforms. Yet current architectures are now more than ever in need of advanced compilation techniques that can take full advantage of hardware's capabilities. Additionally, the compiler's role is expanding to tighter integration with increasingly sophisticated runtime systems. In this talk, I will illustrate the role of modern compilers with Reservoir's recent work, and offer some thoughts on where we are headed.
TELEPRESENCE: CHANGING THE WAY WE DO BUSINESS GLOBABLLY
TelePresence is an innovative new technology that combines rich audio, high-definition video, and interactive elements to deliver a unique, in-person experience over the network. It is designed to bring users closer to the important people, places, and events in their personal and professional lives.
The first application, the Cisco TelePresence Meeting solution, creates a live, face-to-face meeting experience, empowering users to interact and collaborate like never before.
The Cisco TelePresence Meeting is purpose-built to be a completely different meeting experience, taking interaction and collaboration to a new level. Because it feels like everyone is in the same room, remote interactions are just as natural and effective as in-person communication. This simplifies and accelerates information sharing throughout your organization, and enables you to scale yourself, your teams and your business in new ways.
Associate professor at SIUC since 1993, B.S. and M.S. in Industrial Engineering,
M.S. in Manufacturing, M.B.A. in Administration, and Ph.D. in Industrial
Engineering. Research and Teaching interests in the areas of Quality,
Reliability, and Artificial Intelligence applied to Manufacturing.
APPLICATION OF SIX SIGMA AND LEAN ENTERPRISE TOOLS TO EDUCATION
Lean Enterprise and Six Sigma are both powerful tools used to improving quality, productivity, profitability, and market competitiveness. Educators can benefit from using the same tools and methodologies found in Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma to find solutions to problems related to Education, and to achieve continuous process improvement in this environment.
Dr. John Waclawsky joined
Motorola in August of 2005 as the Chief software architect for the Motorola
Software Technology Groups. He is also responsible for leading the Motorola
Software team in concert with the Motorola Business Units, Labs and the CTO
organization in constructing unified software architecture for Seamless Mobility
useful across Motorola’s business units for coordinated product and solution
development. His main architecture role is to guide the development of reference
components that strategically leverages Motorola software assets and promote
their large-scale re-use.
John has an extensive telecommunications background with broad skills and practical experience with most LAN and WAN architectures as well as project management and systems management disciplines. Dr. Waclawsky is consistently innovative and holds thirty-eight US patents with over a dozen pending, was awarded IBM’s top $150,000 suggestion award and has published more than thirty external technology papers and industry articles.
Prior to Motorola, Dr. Waclawsky defined the next generation IOS software for Cisco Systems and served as a technical leader for the Mobile Wireless Group at Cisco Systems, where he was responsible for the definition of mobile wireless and broadband architectures and the identification of solution requirements and eco-system partners that supported the convergence of wireless networks and the Internet. Before joining Cisco, Dr. Waclawsky spent more than 20 years at IBM. His numerous IBM contributions included pioneering work that lead to the development of a number of profitable services, including a Network Traffic Analysis expert system, still in commercial use today. He has in-depth experience specifying networking and software architectures and served as a founder and member of the IBM Consulting Board for the networking, application, database and the systems management consulting practices
John holds a bachelors degree in Mathematics from Drexel University, a Master's degree in Computer and Information Sciences from the University of Pennsylvania, and a Master's Degree and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland.
Dr. Waclawsky was the Technical Plenary Chair of the Mobile Wireless Internet Forum and a member of the Open Mobile Alliance board as well as editor of the WiMAX Network Working Group.
AN ASSESSMENT OF FIXED MOBILE CONVERGENCE
FMC (Fixed-Mobile Convergence) is discussed as an approach for converging wireless and wireline networks. Techniques to accomplish FMC are overviewed. Even though FMC has a number of appealing aspects, it also has significant technical, political and competitive problems.