1. Note from the Editor

The election of new officers for the IEEE Baltimore Section will be taking place soon. I was asked to send out a July newsletter announcing the appointment of a committee to nominate new officers. Expect another newsletter next month regarding the elections.

2. Nominations Committee for 2008 Section Officers

At the 6/11/2007 meeting of the ExCom of the Baltimore Section of the IEEE, the following Nominations Committee for 2008 Section Officers was appointed:

Boris Gramatikov (Immediate Past Section Chair)

Jeff Friedhoffer (past Section Chair for two consecutive years)

Vil P. Arafiles (past Section Chair, R2 Nominations Officer, past Nomminations Committee Chair and member)

Jay Gamerman (Deputy Director, Robot Challenge Project)

Alan Presman (Chapter officer, Power Engineering, PE-31)

The guidelines can be found in Article VIII-Nominations and Elections, of the Section's Bylaws, accessible as the first link at the Section's web site. According to Section 2, no later than July 25, the Nominating Committee shall inform the ExCom and the Section Membership of its nominations for the four Section executive offices (Chair, Vice Chair, Secretary and Treasurer), and the Standing Committee Chairs. Nominations may also be made by petition of not less than 25 voting Section members, received by the Section Secretary (presently Dave Kisak) by August 22, or exactly 28 days after the announcement is made (please copy the Chair of the Nominating Committee too). Only Fellows, Senior Members and Members of IEEE of the Baltimore Section are eligible to hold office.

3. Calling IISc Alumni

The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) celebrates its centenary next year. All alumni of IISc are encouraged to visit http://www.iiscaana.org for further information.

IISc AANA is starting a chapter of in the North East Atlantic region, which includes, CT, DC, DE, ME, MA, MD, NH, NJ, NY, PA, RI, VA and VT. Dr. Nikhil Gupta, Dr. Sasidhar Tadanki, Dr. Madhavi Ganapathiraju, and Dr. Brian Sequeira have volunteered to assist in its formation. Please inform other alumni of this initiative and send your own information as outlined hereunder to neastcoast.chapter@iiscaana.org.

Last Name:

First Name:

Email:

Home Number:

Work Phone:

Cell Number:

Address line 1:

City:

State:

Zip:

Country:

Degree obtained at IISc:

Year of Graduation:

Branch -Discipline:

Company:

Additional Info (If Any):

IISc AANA looks forward to your participation in this endeavor.

4. Research on Software Measurement and Process Improvement

Below is a request that we received from Carolyn Seaman, Associate Professor for Information Systems at UMBC, to support dissertation research by one of her students on software measurement and software process improvement.

“Hello,

I am an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and a Consultant at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering. I am writing to ask for your input into a research project that I am involved in. One of my students, Medha Umarji, is doing her dissertation in the field of software measurement and software process improvement. It has been observed that the attitude of software developers towards software measurement is an important factor in the success of a software measurement program. As input to this work, we would like to hear what you think of the software measurement activities, if any, in your organization. If you are a manager, would you consider passing this along to the developers who work for you?

It is not required that your organization have a formal software measurement program in place. Any data that are collected within your organization - for example, effort data, milestone dates, etc., collected for project management purposes - would also be considered "software measurement" in our study.

We are seeking input through a web-based survey, which takes about 20 minutes to complete, based on our pilot study.

Here is a link to the survey:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=176643906577

We will make the results of our survey available to the SPIN mailing list, and these results will help you to learn more about implementation of software metrics in organizations. The results will be completely anonymous; you or your company will not be identified or associated with the data in any way.

Thank you once again for your participation.

Carolyn Seaman

Associate Professor

Information Systems

Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County”