Futures in Engineering Conference
| June 14, 2019 | Posted by Frank Gomez under General, MTT/APS, Student Activities |
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By Ray Moreno
The Futures in Engineering Conference was held at Cal State University San Bernardino, in the College of Education Atrium on Saturday, April 13 2019. It was a fun and educational event. Things also got kicked off fairly early in the morning, as early as 9:00 am (event was scheduled to start at 10am).
The sponsoring group for this event was MTTS/APS. So it seemed only fitting that the conference’s first speaker was Dr. Lorenzo Lo Monte, Chief Scientist at Telephonics Corporation, a Radar and microwave specialist.
His topic was titled “History and Future of Radar and Electronic Warfare”. It focused on Military development and application of Radar. In general it did not delve into technical details or the science behind this invention.
Dr. Lorenzo began by describing his company, Telephonics, as a company that does not make telephones, “We are a technology company and a defense contractor.”
Then he started in earnest with the history of Radar. He mentioned Heinrich Hertz and Watson as the earliest contributors to Radar. His talk made it very clear that war very much so accelerated the development of Radar and Radar in turn had profound effect on warfare.
Pulse-Doppler Radar, Monopulse Radar, Phased Array Radar, Electronic beam steering, SAR, and weather related applications were all covered. Then he stepped into EW, or Electronic Warfare. This is very sophisticated jamming techniques. ECM, or Electronic Counter Measures are measures used to make Radar jam resistant.
Now there were other speakers. I will briefly mention some of them: Mr. Sam Chan who is the IT Director for the Giant Magellan Telescope Organization (GMTO). He gave an excellent talk on the big project that GMTO is doing in cooperation with the Chilean Government to build the world’s largest telescope. I personally I had a lot of questions.
Next was lunch break with great food served! There were also many student project and exhibits of interest!
After lunch Dr. Sidharth Misra spoke on the CubeSat Radiometer. This is a NASA/JPL project, which got a lot of attention from students.
Professor Sven Koeing, from USC spoke on Multi-Bot systems. He was the best speaker or at least put a lot of passion and energy into his talk.
Last was Garner Holt. His talk was not technical, but was highly inspirational.
All together there were about 80 people attending, mostly students , and it was a nice way to spend the day. Arusik and other volunteers put a lot of work into making this happen.
IEEE Foothill MTT/APS Chair – Max Cherubin
IEEE Foothill MTT/APS Co-Chair – Ramon Moreno