Please respond to ronald_aloysius@ieee.org if you are planning to attend this meeting. Also, let me know if you will be joining us afterwards at Ruby Tuesdays for dinner so I can make reservations. Only the speaker’s dinner is paid for. The rest of us need to pay our own way.

Abstract:

From Star Trek to Star Wars and through much of science fiction, seamlessness is a recurrent theme in human computer interfaces -- communicating with machines the way we communicate with other human beings. Thanks to advances in the last twenty five years, this vision is closer to reality than one may suspect. Yet, we are not around the corner from a day when an automated agent participates at a conference table by taking notes and digging out facts from a database in response to spoken cues. This talk focuses on the speech recognition aspect of human computer interaction.

This introductory presentation will begin with an overview of the evolution and the state of the art in automatic speech recognition. It will then illustrate the application of statistical modeling, optimization techniques and abstract algebra in transforming what was perceived as a pipe dream in the early seventies into a dictation system available today on a personal computer for $99 plus taxes. Classification and regression trees, hidden Markov models, multivariate Gaussian distributions, nonparametric estimation and finite state automata theory are but a few of the keystones in this ongoing march to success.

While it is only a matter of time before products employing speech recognition will be ubiquitous as the telephone, several challenging problems remain in this field. This presentation will also serve to familiarize the audience with current problems in automatic speech recognition.

Biography:

Sanjeev Khudanpur received a B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, in 1988, and a Ph.D. from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, in 1997. He then joined the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University, serving until June 2001 as Associate Research Scientist in the Center for Language and Speech Processing and, since then, as Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science. His research interests are in the application of information theoretic methods to human language technologies such as automatic speech recognition, machine translation and natural language processing. All these technologies make heavy use of statistical models of human language.

Directions to HEM:

The Historical Electronics Museum (HEM) is located near BWI airport. The address for the HEM is:

Historical Electronics Museum

1745 W. Nursery Road, Linthicum, MD 21090

410-765-0230

The directions for the HEM are as follows:

From Baltimore:
Route 295 South (Baltimore Washington Parkway)
Take West Nursery Road exit, turn left at light and go through four stoplights.
Museum is on the left, next to the Marriott Hotel.

From Annapolis:
Route 97 North
Take BWI Airport exit. Right at first light onto Aviation Boulevard.
Turn right at sixth light onto Elkridge Landing Road.
Turn right at second light onto West Nursery Road.
Museum is on the right, next to the Marriott Hotel.

From Washington:
Route 295 North (Baltimore Washington Parkway)
Take West Nursery Road exit, stay right on ramp.
Go through three stoplights.
Museum is on the left, next to the Marriott Hotel.

From Route 195:
Route 170 North (Camp Meade Road) towards Linthicum.
Left at first light onto Elm Road.
Left at light onto Elkridge Landing Road.
Right onto West Nursery Road.
Museum is on the right next to the Marriott Hotel.

From Interstate 95:
Exit onto 195 East to 295 North and follow directions from Washington (above)

2. PES Meeting Notice

Predicting the Next Major Blackout - PES 2007 Technical Presentation Series

The next presentation in the 2007 series of Technical Meetings is planned for May 9, 2007 @ 11:30AM. The meeting will be held at BGE’s Rutherford Business Complex - Lord Baltimore Building in conference room A-B-C located at 2900 Lord Baltimore Drive, Windsor Mill, MD 21244. We hope you will be able to attend and share in this very interesting topic: Predicting the Next Major Blackout. Our presenter, Mr. Tony Sleva, is a very distinguished and well recognized expert in the area of power systems analysis, Senior Member of IEEE and instructor at University of Wisconsin. Mr. Sleva will seek to answer questions such as: When will the next major blackout occur (the last great blackout occurred on August 14, 2003)? What is the most likely sequence of events? What precursors have occurred within the last ten years?

Make an extra effort to join us for this one. Please RSVP by Friday, May 4th via email to baltimorepes@ieee.org. Please indicate if you will be having lunch at a cost of $5.00, so we can make the proper lunch arrangements. Look forward to seeing you on Wednesday, May 9th.

Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact us at baltimorepes@ieee.org or you may contact any member of the PES Executive Team as shown on our website at:

http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r2/baltimore/baltimorepes

3. IEEE Education Society - Baltimore-Washington Chapter Meeting Notice

Date:

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Time:

6:00 - 7:30pm (6:00 - 6:30 social and 6:30 - 7:30pm invited presentation)

Location:

L. K. Downing Hall (Engineering Bldg), Howard University

Contact:

Charles Kim 202-806-4821 or ckim@howard.edu

Title of the presentation:

Creating Software Demonstrations and Interactive Simulations

Abstract:
When instructors teach complicated software applications, they often need to provide demonstrations for extra guidance. To make these tutorials more effectively explain complex procedures, they can add video clips of pre-recorded on-screen actions including mouse and keyboard activities. Simply recording these on-screen actions as tutorials however, results in little hands-on learning as well as massive video files that can make online delivery difficult. In addition, creating online interactive tutorials requires experienced web/multimedia developers.

Adobe Captivate, a screen-recording program, overcomes these issues by allowing instructors to record on-screen actions without any programming knowledge or multimedia skills. The program also allows for the simple addition of a variety of interactive elements, such as rollover captions and clickable and text entry boxes, and questions and instructional feedback to enhance the learning experience. Most importantly, Captivate publishes Flash (.swf) files that are small in size and easily published online. This presentation will demonstrate how to easily create software demonstrations and interactive simulations in the Flash format by recording all on-screen actions and adding interactivity and assessment elements with Adobe Captivate.

Presenter:

Dr. Taeyeol Park

Taeyeol Park is the Instructional Technology Specialist at the Faculty and Curriculum Support (FACS) Center at the Georgetown University. He instructs, supports, and guides the Georgetown faculty in integrating technology with their teaching activities. He regularly teaches faculty development workshops for multimedia training at the FACS Center. For the last six years he has co-led the interactive multimedia thematic track of the Technology Summer Institute for Faculty.

Driving and Parking, etc.:

http://www.hirstbrook.com/ED-BW.html

4. Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society

The Baltimore chapter of the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems (AES) society is recruiting for membership and speakers. The following is a note from Brian Womack, chapter chair of AES:

“The IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems (AES) society wants you! We are creating a community of defense and aerospace engineers in the greater Baltimore area. We want you to share your ideas about engineering and learn about new trends in a range of technology areas including data fusion, sensors, data alignment, control, and general defense topics.

We will have monthly meetings that alternate between Owings Mills and Westminster, Maryland since most of our members live or work somewhere between the two. We plan to have at least a third of the meetings as dinner meetings, so that we can socialize in an informal setting. The rest of the time, we hope that we can help each other learn more about the latest and greatest in engineering. For example, we would like volunteers to summarize interesting research papers or magazine articles that we can include on our website. Speaking of the website, please visit http://ieeeaes.com to register. You will be added to our mailing list and be able to participate in our member-only forums, where things like career opportunities, article summaries, and conference information will be posted. If you need help, feel free to email me. Our next meeting time and location will be posted on the home page, so please stop by regularly!”

If you are interested, please contact:

Brian Womack, PhD

Brian.Womack@ieee.org

5. Robot Challenge Results

The Robot Challenge was held this past Saturday and Sunday (April 28, 29), and 51 teams from 13 schools from across Maryland participated. 34 teams ran 2-leg robots and 17 teams had 4-leg robots. Not only was the number of teams participating a record since the Challenge began 11 years ago, but the quality of the robots has been improving every year, and 23 teams managed to complete the course, another record.

About 250 students, many of them women, made up these 51 teams who have successfully completed the 2 to 4 months of preparation; an equal number of teams (and a similar number of students) started the project but were unable to complete the requirements in time.

The IEEE supported the event with 55 judges, PIT specialists and administrators, some of who helped at events last Monday, Saturday, Sunday, and a few even coming again tomorrow. This is a fantastic contribution that our members are making to the next generation of engineers, providing them with an experience that these high school students might otherwise only receive after graduating from College. By obtaining the hands-on experience of building the robot while still at school, writing about it in the form of a 30 page Proposal, then defending the proposal and their performance at an Oral Presentation to a panel of judges, students are in a better position to determine whether Engineering would be the career of their choice. Even those who decide not to be engineers learn a lot from the experience.

These are walking Robots and they can be controlled manually or both manually and automatically (for extra credit). The results are as follows:

2-leg Robots

First place Overall: Team #34, "Team Rooster", Eastern Technical High School

2nd. place Overall: Team #55, "Inspector Gadget", Charles H. Flowers High School

3rd. place Overall: Team #57, "Team Robata", The Barrie School

3rd. place Manual: Team #19, "The Royal Family Robot" Maryvale Prep.

4-leg Robots

First place Overall: Team #120, "Team Shaft", Beth Tfiloh Dahan High School

Best Manual and 2nd. place Overall: Team 128, "Team America", Western School of Technology and Environmental Science

2nd. place Manual: Team #135, "The Green Bananas", Charles H. Flowers High School

3rd. place Overall: Team #118, "Frank the Tank", Beth Tfiloh Dahan High School

3rd. place Manual: Team #101, "Team Superman", Charles H. Flowers High School

We'd like to thanks all the people that helped make this a success - please go to our web page at http://www.robotchallenge.com for those who gave so generously of their time. More detailed results are shown there, as well as several hundred photos that were taken at the two events. Please take a look and learn about one of the activities that are sponsored by the Baltimore Section of the IEEE. For more information, please contact Nevilleed@aol.com.

6. IEEE’s Teacher In-Service Program (TISP) Training Workshop

Calling all Engineers in Region 2!!!

Are you interested in working with your local schools, school districts and teachers? Do you want to help improve the level of technical literacy of teachers and their students in your local community?

Then you should attend IEEE’s Teacher In-Service Program (TISP) Training Workshop!

Started in 2001, TISP features IEEE volunteers developing and presenting technologically oriented subject matter to educators in a professional development or “in-service” setting. In the last several years, IEEE volunteers have made more than 50 presentations to over 1200 pre-university educators within the United States, Asia and Africa. These educators reach over 130,000 students!

Now you can be a TISP Champion! The IEEE Educational Activities Department, Region 2 and the Baltimore Section are hosting a TISP Training Workshop: September 7-8, 2007, at the BWI Marriott and Historical Electronics Museum in Baltimore, MD.

The workshop will cover how to organize volunteers for TISP and how to bring the program to teachers in your local schools and school districts. Thanks to the support of IEEE USA, the event is free for all IEEE members and invited educators! (There will be a $75 fee for non-IEEE members). IEEE will reimburse members for travel-related expenses for this workshop.

To register for the workshop, visit:

http://icm3.ieee.org/eventmanager/onlineregistration.asp?eventcode=XB6

The event will begin on Friday, 7 September at 4:30 pm with a 2 hour presentation followed by a dinner at 7:00 pm at the BWI Marriott.

On Saturday, 8 September, the event will run from 9:00 am to approximately 4:00 pm at the Historical Electronics Museum and will include hands-on presentations, a question and answer period as well as discussion on numerous topics such as: program background and scope, getting started, potential costs to sections and educators, suggestions on making contact with your local pre-university community, and the alignment of an activity with educational standards. Breakfast and lunch will be provided.

The goal of the training session is to impact at least 1,000 pre-university educators in Region 2 and to help IEEE volunteers implement TISP in their local pre-university education communities.

During an actual TISP presentation, IEEE volunteers provide teachers with activity materials and help them work their way through the activity. Working through the activity together helps the teachers to feel more comfortable with the activity. The idea is for the teachers to bring the activity back to their classrooms.

For more information on this upcoming TISP training session or TISP participation, please contact:

Doug Gorham

Director of Educational Outreach

+1. 732.562.5483

d.g.gorham@ieee.org

Jessica Czeczuga

Project Administrator

+1.732.562.5496

j.czeczuga@ieee.org

7. Volunteers Needed for Formation of a VT Chapter

Volunteers are needed for the formation of a local chapter of the Vehicular Technology Society. If you are interested, contact ronald_aloysius@ieee.org and I will forward your name to the local officers.

8. Petition Candidate for the IEEE 2008 President-Elect

The following is a note from Dr. Ralph W. Wyndrum Jr.:

“I need your help to become a petition candidate for the IEEE 2008 President-Elect position. I will need 3000+ signatures to appear on the ballot. Not only are IEEE Members, Senior Members, Life Members and Fellows eligible to sign, but also the newly dedicated class of Graduate Student Members.

You and your colleagues may individually petition by logging on to www.ieee.org/petition; you will need your member number and pin, OR your IEEE user name and password (i.e., IEEE web account information). This will take you to my petition which you can sign electronically. For more information on my qualifications, I invite you to visit my personal website at www.wyndrum.com/election. I have served as TAB VP, IEEE-USA President, and earlier as Publications VP.

Please remember that by signing the petition, you are not voting for me as President, nor are you obligated to vote for me in the election. By signing the petition, you are simply making me eligible to be a candidate in the election. Please sign the petition as soon as possible, since I cannot officially campaign until I gain the required support of 3000+ signatures.

Thank you for entertaining this request, and I will surely appreciate your support.

Sincerely,

Dr. Ralph W. Wyndrum Jr., F.IEEE

2006 President, IEEE-USA

CEO, Executive Engineering Consultants”

9. GLOBECOM 07

GLOBECOM 07 will be held in Washington DC 26‑30 November 07. This is one of the two annual premier IEEE Communications Society conferences.

Jeff Friedhoffer (jafried@ieee.org) is chair of the Design and Developers Forum. The design and developer forum is aimed at communications practitioners vs. academics and the papers should reflect topics of interest to these practitioners. These session might include talks on emerging technologies that will lead to new products, new products to help designers.

Suggestions for Topics for this year include, but are not limited to:

Cognitive Radio

Communication Standards

-IEEE

-IETF

-ITU

Delay Tolerant Network Applications

E911

-Wireless VoIP

-Wired VoIP

Instrumentation

-RF

-Network protocols

-Optical Networks

IPTV

IPv6 status

Network Security

Quality

-QOE (Quality of Experience)

-QOS (Quality of Service)

Quantum Communications

Regulation and Communications

RFID

Software development tools

VoIP and applications

-Presence

-SBC

Wireless technologies

-3G

-4G

-WiMax

Help is needed as follows:

Expanding on the above list of Topics for the Sessions/Panels

Reviewing proposals

Chairing Sessions

For more information on Globecom 07 see:

http://www.ieee-globecom.org/2007

Topics at the 06 conference can bee seen at:

http://www.ieee-globecom.org/2006

Click on Design & Developers Forum on the left side.

For those interested in presenting a paper the deadline is 15 March for abstracts.

Please pass this on to your colleagues.

10. IEEE EDOC Conference

The Eleventh International IEEE EDOC Conference (EDOC 2007) “The Enterprise Computing Conference” will be held in Annapolis, MD 15 – 19 October 2007.

The EDOC 2007 Organizing Committee is looking for volunteers to work with the committee in support of local arrangements, registration, publications and publicity.

About the conference:

Formerly known as the enterprise distributed object computing conference, EDOC 2007 will be the eleventh event in the series of conferences, which since 1997 has brought together leading computer science researchers, IT decision makers, IT architects, solution designers and practitioners from academia, industry and government to discuss enterprise computing challenges, models and solutions. Enterprise computing is based on a wide (and ever growing) range of methods, models, tools and technologies traversing a broad spectrum of vertical domains and industry segments, from electronic and mobile commerce to real-time business applications for collaborating enterprises.

The EDOC 2007 Conference will emphasize the integration and management of enterprise computing research and development as well as novel implementation approaches and technologies related to business processes integration, management, execution and monitoring at any or all of the business, application, middleware and technical levels.

The main conference will be preceded by two days of workshops for which a separate call for proposals will be issued. For example, EDOC 2006 workshops included: VORTE: Vocabularies, Ontologies and Rules for the Enterprise; MWS: Middleware for Web Services; and, AQuSerM: Advances in Quality of Service Management among others

Topics:

The EDOC 2007 program will include papers addressing the domains, the life-cycle issues and the realization technologies involved in developing, deploying and operating enterprise computing systems. Topic areas include:

- State of the art in distributed enterprise applications

- Enterprise computing metrics and environment

- SW engineering approaches to distributed enterprise applications

- Web services

- Business Process Management (BPM) Systems

- Business Rules

- Identity Management and Distributed Access Control

- Information and Data Integration

Conference Schedule

Abstract submission (optional) 30 March 2007

Paper submission due 1 May 2007

Acceptance notification 30 June 2007

Workshop Schedule

Workshop proposals due 6 April 2007

Workshop selection TBD

Paper submission due TBD

Acceptance notification 30 June 2007

11. Engineering Seminars for Soft Skills

We are asking if there is potential interest in engineering seminars that discuss soft skills. The seminars are described at the following website:

http://www.carlselinger.com/seminars.html

Here is an excerpt from this web site describing the seminars:

“Carl Selinger’s “Stuff You Don’t Learn in Engineering School” seminars, articles and book help younger engineers and emerging project managers – indeed, all professionals -- learn the non-technical soft skills that are important to be more effective and happier in the real world. These skills include making decisions, setting priorities, running meetings, speaking, writing and listening better, leading teams, dealing with stress and having fun, and understanding themselves and others. Lisa Belkin has talked about Carl and “Stuff” in her Life’s Work column in the New York Times.

His book Stuff you Don’t Learn in Engineering School: Skills for Success in the Real World has been published by Wiley-IEEE Press.

Articles on these themes are now appearing regularly in IEEE Spectrum magazine where Carl is a Contributing Editor (go to http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers).”

If there is interest in seminars of this type, please let Boris Gramatikov know. His email address is as follows:

Dr. Boris Gramatikov

Bgramat@jhmi.edu

12. Continuing EE Education

We are re-running this request for interest in a continuing education program. This program will be in the format of seminars focused on a particular topic of interest. The seminars may run either during the week after work hours or possibly on Saturday. The idea for the program is described below.

Name of project: Continuing EE Education (“CEEE”)

Goal: A section-level program aimed at:

Updating the IEEE members on new developments in the EE field.

Familiarizing engineers with basic new tools, products and techniques as well as giving them the initial knowledge and skills to use them.

Inviting representatives from different vendors to present leading novel products.

Giving tutorials in new areas.

Helping IEEE fellow members become more competitive, especially in times of uncertain jobs, off-shoring and salary stagnation.

Facilitating networking.

Broadening the horizon of each IEEE member.

Fostering collaboration between members of different societies as well as generation of new ideas (“cross-pollination” element).

The program should be open to all IEEE members, including students. It is meant to be a cross-societies initiative, i.e. should not be limited to narrow topics serving the interests of a single chapter only. Emphasis should be placed on meeting with experienced experts from different fields. Critical comparisons between different solutions of EE problems are expected to be made, and trends should be discussed.

Potential topics of interest could include, but are not limited to:

Software tools:

Programming languages

Compilers

Real-Time Operating systems

Debuggers

Emulators

Hardware tools:

Novel electronic components

Single-Board Computers (SBC)

Embedded solutions

FPGAs

Printed circuit board design (schematics capture, layout)

Circuit simulation (PSPICE)

Portable devices

Signal and image processing (examples, tools, help)

Wireless devices:

Theory

Standards

Available OEM products

Trends

Internet-based methods and devices:

Standards

Available tools

Web Page Design

Contemporary design tools (like AutoCad and Solid Works)

Reliability and Compliance issues

We plan to invite qualified speakers from academia, industry and governmental institutions. The speakers will be professionals who can give first-hand information and share front-line experience on the technology, methods and tools being presented.

We plan to organize 2-4 meetings annually. Each meeting is planned to last for 2 hours or more. We could meet on weekdays, or on Saturdays.

Please send us your suggestions and preferences regarding topics, time and place of meetings, the name/acronym of the program etc.

The URL to the CEEE home page is:

http://ewh.ieee.org/r2/baltimore/continuing_education/CEEE.htm

There is also a link to it from the Section's web page.

Boris Gramatikov

Baltimore Section

Bgramat@jhmi.edu