AUGUST CALENDAR

Tuesday, August 3

Washington Section Administrative Committee Meeting

Time: Dinner at 6:00 pm; meeting at 6:30 pm
Place: Allie's American Grill, Bethesda Marriott, 5151 Pooks Hill Rd., Bethesda, Md.
Directions: From the north, take 270 South to 355 and exit at Wisconsin Ave. From the south, take 495 exit 34 (which is Wisconsin Ave.) to Pooks Hill Rd.
More info: All interested IEEE members are welcome to attend.
Contact: Jackie Hunter 703-803-8701 or
j.hunter@ieee.org. Please include the term IEEE in the subject line of your e-mail.


Wednesday August 4

WIE Executive Committee Meeting

Time: 6:00 pm
Place: University of Maryland College Park campus in the A. V. Williams building in room number AVW 2168
Contact: Dr. Kiki Ikossi, 703-960-0261 or
ikossi@ieee.org

More info: The Washington Area IEEE - Women in Engineering (WIE) Affinity Group will not have an Executive Committee meeting in July 2004. The next meeting will be on Wednesday, August 4, 2004. The Chairs of the IEEE Washington, Northern Virginia, and Baltimore sections, as well as the regional representatives and interested members are invited to attend. Please visit our web site http://ewh.ieee.org/r2/washsec/wie/.


Wednesday, September 1

Women in Engineering Dinner Meeting

Sponsor: Washington Area Women in Engineering (WIE) Affinity Group (Washington, Northern Virginia, and Baltimore Sections)
Place: La Madeleine, 7601 Old Georgetown Road, Bethesda, Md. (301-215-9192)
Time: 7:00 pm (7:00-7:30 dinner; 7:30-8:30 meeting)
More info: All interested IEEE members, associates, and friends are invited to attend. The Web site is
http://ewh.ieee.org/r2/washsec/wie/.
Contact: Dr. Kiki Ikossi, 703-960-0261 or ikossi@ieee.org


Tuesday, September 7

Washington Section Administrative Committee Meeting

Time: Dinner at 6:00 pm; meeting at 6:30 pm
Place: Allie's American Grill, Bethesda Marriott, 5151 Pooks Hill Rd., Bethesda, Md.
Directions: From the north, take 270 South to 355 and exit at Wisconsin Ave. From the south, take 495 exit 34 (which is Wisconsin Ave.) to Pooks Hill Rd. More info: All interested IEEE members are welcome to attend.
Contact: Jackie Hunter 703-803-8701 or
j.hunter@ieee.org. Please include the term IEEE in the subject line of your e-mail.


Wednesday, September 8

Northern Virginia Section Administrative Committee Meeting

Sponsor: Northern Virginia Section
Time: 6:30 pm
Place: Corner Seven Café, Tysons Corner Marriott, 8205 Leesburg Pike at the corner of Crescent Towers Drive
Directions: From the east or from I-495 take Route 7 West. Turn right on Towers Crescent Drive, then immediately right into the Marriott parking lot (free parking).
More info: The Northern Virginia Section Administrative Committee meets regularly. All interested IEEE members are invited to attend.
Contact: Jackie Hunter 703-803-8701 or
j.hunter@ieee.org. Please include the term IEEE in the subject line of your e-mail.


Thursday, September 9

Emerging Nano-enabled Weapons

Sponsor: Industry Applications Society of the Washington and Northern Virginia Sections
Place: Alexandria Research Institute, 206 North Washington Street, 4th floor, Old Town Alexandria
Time: Refreshments: 5:30 pm; presentation: 6:30 pm
Speaker: Mr. Forrest E. Waller, Jr., chief scientist, Systems, Strategy, & Policy Operation, SAIC
Cost: Free to members and student members, $10 for guests
Contact: Monica at 703-535-3446 or
amarjeet.basra@ieee.org


Thursday, September 9

How Does a Project Get To Be a Year Late?

Sponsor: Engineering Management Society
Time: Dinner at 6:15 pm; program at 7:00 pm
Place: Allie’s American Grill, Bethesda Marriott, 5151 Pooks Hill Rd., Bethesda, MD
More info: Aaron Bukowitz is a veteran Project Manager and Certified Project Management Professional. Out of his years of experience he has put together some of the key lessons he has learned about managing the scope of a project and keeping it on track. Feature creep, requirements growth and changes are major causes of program delays. This presentation provides practical scope management techniques use by successful project managers.
Cost: Lecture free, optional dinner: $15.
Contact: Doug Holly at
dougholly@ieee.org


Thursday, September 16

Financial Planning Seminar

Speakers: Michael J. Manfredi and Robert J. Silva
Time: 6:30 pm
Place: Pavilion Room in Sheraton Premier Hotel, Tyson Corner, Va.
More info: Prior registration (free) is required. Participation by first 150 persons is assured. See
Diamond Story, below Spouses are welcome, and refreshments will be served.
Contact: To reserve space, please send email to j.hunter@ieee.org or sa@ieee.org.


Saturday, September 18, 2004

IEEE GOLD Picnic and Barbecue

Time: 1:00 pm to about 6:00 pm
Place: TBD
More info: Meat to grill and beverages will be provided. Bring a side dish to share.
Contact: RSVP to
cbaldi@ieee.org or syed.f.ahmed@ieee.org so we will know how much meat and drink to provide.


Wednesday, September 22

Linear Systems in Ranking Applications

Sponsor: Control Systems Society, Washington Chapter
Speaker: Mike Gilliom
Time: Noon. Lunch will be provided (Deli sandwiches).
Place: Fairchild Controls Corporation
Contact: RSVP to Richard Benjamin, Chair
(rbenjamin@fairchildcontrols.com) or 301-228-3471) by September 20.
More info: See Diamond Story below.


Thursday, September 23

Intelligent RF Systems and Antennas

Speaker: Professor Zoya Popovic
Sponsor: MTT Society Washinton/NoVa Chapter and the WIE Washington Area Affinity Group (Washington/Northern Virginia/Baltimore), joint meeting
Time: TBA
Place: American Center for Physics, College Park MD
Contact: Dr. Kiki Ikossi, 703-960-0261 or
ikossi@ieee.org or Dr. Eric Adler, eric.d.adler@us.army.mil
More info: See the WIE web site at http://ewh.ieee.org/r2/washsec/wie/.


Thursday, September 23

Intelligent RF Systems and Antennas

Sponsors: MTT and AP Chapters, WIE Affinity Group
Speaker: Professor Zoya Popovic, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Colorado, Boulder
Place: American Center for Physics, One Physics Ellipse, College Park, MD, (301) 209-3100
Time: Social: 5:30 pm (optional), Dinner: 6:00 pm (optional, but reservations required by Monday, Sept. 20), Lecture: 7:00 pm.
Directions: The American Center for Physics is located near the College Park Metro Station. See
www.acp.org/map.html for details.
Cost: Optional dinner $15, Social and Lecture are free.
Contact: For information and dinner reservations by Monday, Sept. 20, contact Roger Kaul, 301-394-4775, or r.kaul@ieee.org.
More Info: See Diamond Story, below. For additional information about this lecture please see http://www.ieee.org/mtt-wnva


Tuesday, October 5

Washington Section Administrative Committee Meeting

Time: Dinner at 6:00 pm; meeting at 6:30
Place: Allie's American Grill, Bethesda Marriott, 5151 Pooks Hill Rd., Bethesda, Md.
Directions: See September 7 listing.
More info: All interested IEEE members are welcome to attend.
Contact: Jackie Hunter 703-803-8701 or
j.hunter@ieee.org. Please include the term IEEE in the subject line of your e-mail.


Wednesday, October 6

Life Member Chapter Meeting

Active Behavior as a 4th Dimension for Identity Authentication
(Identity Gains Greater Importance in Era of Terrorism)

Speaker: Dr. Christopher Hekimian
Sponsor: LMC
Time: 1:00 pm, lunch will be provided.
Place: Marco Polo Restaurant, 245 Maple Ave. West, Vianna, VA
Directions: From Rt 66, take the Nutley St. exit North to Vienna, turn right on Maple Ave and look for Marco Polo on the left
Contact: RSVP by Email to
DBooth@ieee.org.
More Info: See Diamond Story below.


Tuesday, October 12

The Alfred T. C. Chang Memorial Symposium

Sponsor: Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS), Washington and Northern Virginia Chapter
Speaker: TBD
Time: TBD
Place: Visitor's Center of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
More info: In memory of Dr. Alfred T.C. Chang's contribution to Earth science, there will be an IEEE-sponsored memorial symposium held on October 12, 2004. The symposium will consist of invited and contributed presentations dealing with microwave remote sensing. See http://neptune.gsfc.nasa.gov for further information as it becomes available. See
Diamond Story for more on Dr. Chang.
Directions: See http://pao.gsfc.nasa.gov/vc/ directions_t.html
Cost: TBD
Contact: Jim Foster, James.L.Foster@nasa.gov


Wednesday, October 15

Northern Virginia Section Administrative Committee Meeting

Sponsor: Northern Virginia Section
Time: 6:30 pm
Place: Corner Seven Café, Tysons Corner Marriott, 8205 Leesburg Pike at the corner of Crescent Towers Drive
Directions: See September 8 listing.
More info: The Northern Virginia Section Administrative Committee meets regularly. All interested IEEE members are invited to attend.
Contact: Jackie Hunter 703-803-8701 or
j.hunter@ieee.org. Please include the term IEEE in the subject line of your e-mail.


Wednesday, October 20

Three Mile Island in Historical Perspective

Sponsor:  Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Chapter, Washington/Baltimore/Northern VA Section
Speaker: J. Samuel Walker, Historian, Nuclear Regulatory Commission
Time: Dinner: 6:00 pm; Speaker: 6:45 pm
Contact:  Harry Sauberman, P.E., at (301) 443-8879 or
HRS@CDRH.FDA.gov
Place: Allie’s American Grill, Bethesda Marriott, 5151 Pooks Hill Rd., Bethesda, MD
More Info: See Diamond Story, below.


DIAMOND STORIES

Thursday, September 16

Financial Seminar

Mr. Manfredi graduated from the United States Naval Academy in the Class of 1975 with a B.S. degree in electrical engineering. He served 7 years in active duty and 13 years in the Naval Reserve Intelligence Program, attaining the rank of commander. He is a graduate of the Smith Barney Consulting Group University Graduate School and Smith Barney Institute. He is a Certified Investment Management Consultant and Certified Investment Management Analyst and a member of The Investment Management Consultants Association (IMCA).

Mr. Silva graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a B.S. degree in mechanical engineering, and obtained an MBA degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Before joining Smith Barney, Mr. Silva was instrumental in starting Solarmetric, a Java data objects implementation. He also started a new international light business for Fresnel Optics, did statistical process work for Reflexite Corporation, and served as a project manager for 3M.


Wednesday, September 22

Linear Systems in Ranking Applications

In recent years in the business of college football, much effort has been spent looking for a way to rank NCAA teams effectively. Traditionally, rankings in the league have been determined by a ballot system where college coaches and press associates cast their votes.

Many argue that this system is flawed by its subjectivity. A new ranking system, the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), ranks teams based on several components of play and averages the scores arbitrarily. Even this system has serious faults, since there is no scientific basis to how the scores are weighted.

There is, however, a new possibility. Modeling the league as a linear system offers a surprisingly simple and accurate way to determine a relative raking for the entire league. The peculiar characteristics of this system offers insight to the twists and turns of both the ranking system itself and linear system theory as a whole.

This presentation introduces the system and analyzes the results to give verify the accuracy. The system is analyzed from a linear system perspective, allowing parallels to be drawn between the mathematics and the model.

Mike Gilliom graduated from Virginia Tech with a BSEE in the spring of 2002. He is currently working to complete his masters thesis which deals with complex control systems in the field of power electronics. He has been working with control systems in power electronics for 3 years and has a strong interest in bringing more powerful and complex controllers into the field of power conversion and motor drives.


Thursday, September 23

Intelligent RF Systems and Antennas

The current trend is to require more functionality of a portable or not-so-portable radio system: operate at many frequencies for more than one application, adapt to the signal space, adapt to changes in the environment, operate at low power levels (and cost nothing). As examples of current research areas at the University of Colorado at Boulder that address sub-sets of this problem, this talk will cover experimental adaptable (intelligent) microwave circuits which optimize power usage, and smart antennas with adaptive analog signal processing.

In specific, the design of an ultra-high efficiency 10-GHz transmitter power amplifier with dynamic power supply and MEMS tuning circuits will be presented. The power amplifier is a switched-mode amplifier and therefore highly nonlinear. The linearity characterization and improvements using dynamic biasing will be presented. Two smart antenna arrays will also be presented:
(a) a small 2-GHz array of 2 antennas which performs like a larger array of 5 antennas using signal processing analogous to sonar processing in bats, and
(b) an antenna array which can perform blind signal separation, i.e. separate completely unknown broadband signals scrambled through propagation.

The dynamic holographic optoelectronic processor for this antenna system is a collaborative project with the University of Colorado physics department.

Zoya B. Popovic received her Dipl. Ing. degree from the University of Belgrade, Serbia, Yugoslavia in 1985, and Ph. D. degree from Caltech, Pasadena, California, in 1990. She joined the faculty of the University of Colorado in Boulder in August 1990, where she became a full professor in 1998. She has developed five undergraduate and graduate electromagnetics and microwave laboratory courses and co-authored (with her father) a textbook Introductory Electromagnetics (Prentice Hall) for the junior-level core course for electrical and computer engineering students. Her research interests include microwave and millimeter-wave quasi-optical techniques, high-efficiency microwave circuits, intelligent RF front ends, RF-optical techniques and low phase noise oscillators for atomic clocks. She is the winner of the 1993 Microwave Prize from the IEEE MTT Society for the best journal paper.


Wednesday, October 6

Active Behavior as a 4th Dimension for Identity Authentication

Identity Gains Greater Importance in Era of Terrorism

Computerized identity authentication systems (CIAS) have traditionally been based on 3 independent concepts:

  1. What you know (passwords, PINs),
  2. What you have (Smart Card, ID badge), and
  3. What you are (biometric and natural behavior systems).
A fourth authentication concept incorporates deliberate perturbation of natural behavior in an authentication test, which may provide an inexpensive dimension to the authentication process. Research under way is focused on determining whether such a technique could be used to advantage without incurring an excessive penalty.

Several disadvantages need further exploration. The research process invokes comparisons of theoretically developed active behavior versus the real world environment. Using an Active Behavior Test Bed revealed a practical entropy significantly lower than that calculated by probability calculations. Future research will explore practical entropy limits and correlations.

George Washington University information security researchers consider authentication system effectiveness in terms of vulnerability to attacks, effect on human factor vulnerabilities, and effects on authentication entropy. Entropy is an information technology concept that provides a measure of the theoretical uncertainty associated with guessing a password, etc. The George Washington University Information Security Group has developed and studied a system called Time Domain Sensitive Password Protection, which shows promise for providing protection from various forms of attack.

Dr. Christopher Hekimian is the research director for Adams Security Research Associates, LLC. He received the Ph.D. degree in systems engineering management at GWU in 2004. He earned the MSEE degree in 1955 at the California Polytechnic University in Pomona. Dr. Hekimian is the founder of DXDT Engineering & Research, LLC. He has three patents-pending on techniques for the security of biometric authentication systems and has a patent pending for a TV-interactive technique.


Tuesday, October 12

The Alfred T. C. Chang Memorial Symposium (Sponsored by W/NV GRSS)

Dr. Alfred T. C. Chang, IEEE Fellow, graduated with a degree in physics from National Central University in Taoyuan, Taiwan. He then received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees, also in physics, at the University of Maryland. He was employed by NASA at Goddard Space Flight Center from 1974 until his death on May 26, 2004.

Dr. Chang's main area of research was the use of microwave instruments for remotely-sensing properties of the atmosphere and land. Most of his illustrious career was spent on analysis of microwave data of snow cover and rainfall, and he produced several seminal papers on these subjects, beginning in the '70s, that are still being referenced today. Dr. Chang published more than 100 journal articles, and among his many honors and awards is the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement.


Wednesday, October 20

Three Mile Island in Historical Perspective

On this 25th Anniversary of the worst accident involving a nuclear power plant in the United States, it is important to understand what actually occurred at Three Mile Island. The event which began at 4:00 a.m. on March 28, 1979 was watched by the entire world.  Authorities at the highest level were called  to the crippled plant as they as they sought to prevent the emission of dangerous quantities of ionizing radiation into the environment. Sam Walker will provide an analysis and overall perspective of the human drama that unfolded on that fateful day and for the weeks and months that followed the accident.   He will provide a clear picture of the human drama that surrounded the accident while placing it in the context of the intense debate that was occurring over the benefits of using nuclear power for the generation of electricity.  The presentation will cover questions relating to studies of  the long-term health effects from the accident and will offer a unique perspective into the issues of dealing with a critical event in today’s world.

J. Samuel Walker is the official historian of the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission.   He has held academic positions at Georgetown University and the University of Maryland.  He is the author of numerous publications.  Previous books include "Permissible Dose: A History of Radiation Protection in the Twentieth Century" and "Containing the Atom: Nuclear Regulation in a Changing Environment."


9/6/04