IEEE Madison Section - 2015 Meeting Archive

December Section Meeting "Campfires Seen from Orbit: Audio and Computer Music in the Present Age"

Thursday, December 17th, 2015, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Social gathering starts a 11:45 AM--talk at noon

Talk

Fractured communities, democratized tools, and cultural shifts as viewed through the act of making noise. We are not really talking about music anymore.

Bio

Gregory Taylor is one of those visual artists who discovered that the process of using the recording studio as a compositional tool was more personally rewarding than waiting for the paint to dry and opted for a life creating imaginary cultural artifacts of an audible nature. He has studied central Javanese gamelan and electroacoustic music in the U.S. (Cornell, UW-Madison, New England Conservatory) and the Netherlands (Instituut voor Sonologie), written for publications such as Wired, Recording, Array, and Option, and hosted a radio program of contemporary audio on WORT-FM since 1986 (http://www.rtqe.net/RTQE.html). After a hiatus from his work in the cassette culture movement of the 1980s, he returned to regular recording and live performances as an improviser in both solo and group contexts in the late 1990s. His solo recordings are available on the c74, Palace of Lights, Flood, and Stasisfield labels and online (https://soundcloud.com/gregory-taylor).He has remixed and collaborated with a diverse group of artists (Kim Cascone, BMB.com, Scott Fields, The Yearlings and K. Leimer), and performs as an active member of PGT (a dual-laptop and acoustic mandolin trio with Brad Garton and Terry Pender), The Desert Fathers (a duo with trumpeter Jeff Kaiser), and "the quartet" (with percussionist Tom Hamer, analog synthesist Darwin Grosse and visualist Mark Hendrikson). He currently labors on behalf of the new media software company Cycling '74, where he is in demand as a workshop facilitator and content creator.

December ECN Meeting "Year End Meet and Greet for Consultants/Entrepreneurs"

Thursday, December 3rd, 2015, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Social gathering starts a 11:45 AM--talk at noon

Talk

This meeting will give you a chance to meet other ECN members socially and professionally.  Be prepared to tell everyone what you do and are interested in.

November Section Meeting "Osteoporosis: The Road to Discovery"

Wednesday, November 11th, 2015, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Social gathering starts a 11:45 AM--talk at noon

Talk

Osteoporosis is a major public health problem in the elderly, manifested by the presence of low bone mineral density, lessened skeletal integrity and an increased risk of fractures.  Loss of skeletal integrity is multifactorial. These factors include human genetics, diet, exercise, best rest, weightlessness, cellular sensation of internal and external environmental forces, disease, and the aging process.  The skeleton has two major functions in the body: it provides structural support and serves as a mineral reservoir.  The strength of the structural support is dependent on a homeostatic balance of the systemic and local bone modulators, mechanical loading and nutrition. Changes in any one of these components, common in the elderly, can influence the modulation of systemic and local factors in bone turnover or cause a modulation in the sensitivity (set point) of bone to mechanical loading.  The road to discovery in our, research is to investigate ex vivo bone core response to induced mechanical loads and known biochemical modulators of bone turnover.  We have developed the Perfusion Loading System to apply consistent, measurable loads to trabecular bone cores. The techniques for bone core collection have been standardized for orientation, bone core size of 5mm in height and 10 mm in diameter, with a load of  +/- 2um, and for sterility. The perfusion media flow rate, and flow pattern have been shown to be adequate to maintain cell viability for at least 31 days. In studies up to 60 days in length we have observed active osteoblasts, osteoid, and multiple osteoclasts in Howships lacunae. In preliminary studies, we have shown similar bone mineralization patterns in human cores through 35 days and bovine cores at 21 days. We have chosen bovine bone samples in some of our study because we may obtain all of our cores for one animal, with the same genetic and certified to be healthy tissue and readily available at a known time. Further we have seen evidence to suggest that PGE2 levels transiently increase in response to loading and that the magnitude of the response increases with days loaded as well as IGF-1.

Bio

Dr. Smith is an Associate Professor Emeritus at the UW-Madison Department of Preventative Medicine. He has been a Fellow, American College of Sports Medicine since 1978, was elected Associate Fellow, American Academy of Physical Educators in 1986.  In 1985, he was given an award from the Association of American Publishers, Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division, for the 1985 Best Single Issue, for Topics in Geriatric Rehabilitation as issue editor. He was a member of the FICSIT trial Monitoring Board from 1991-1993. In addition, he is or was on the Editorial Board of Topics in Geriatric Rehabilitation, Calcified Tissue International, and Journal of Aging and Physical Activity.  He has been a referee for  Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, Journal of Bone Mineral Research, Bone, Osteoporosis International, Journal of Applied Physiology, Journal of Gerontology, Physician and Sports medicine.  His activities include President, National Institute of Biogerontology 1980-2007 and Director Biogerontology Laboratory University of Wisconsin 1975-present. In addition to his extensive research, Dr. Smith is President/CEO of Regin B&C Bioengineering from 2008-present.

October Section Meeting "The Challenges and Opportunities Using UAS Imagery"

Thursday, October 15th, 2015, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Social gathering starts a 11:45 AM--talk at noon

Talk

Aerial Systems (UAS) are exploding as a cost effective solution for geospatial data collection. However, many people jumping into the UAS foray are finding that the production of accurate geospatial products, capable of effectively tying into their enterprise geospatial environments, is not as straight forward as they thought. Struggles arise with understanding data accuracies, knowing the limits of what content can be automatically extracted versus manually derived from the imagery, as well as the challenges around data management. To help understand how to mitigate those struggles, Continental Mapping will present some best practices for deriving map products from UAS imagery as illustrated through several project examples. The talk will provide a solid understanding of the accuracies that can be derived from UAS imagery as well as best practices for manipulating UAS imagery into geospatial Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) are exploding as a cost effective solution for geospatial data collection. However, many people jumping into the UAS foray are finding that the production of accurate geospatial products, capable of effectively tying into their enterprise geospatial environments, is not as straight forward as they thought. Struggles arise with understanding data accuracies, knowing the limits of what content can be automatically extracted versus manually derived from the imagery, as well as the challenges around data management. To help understand how to mitigate those struggles, Continental Mapping will present some best practices for deriving map products from UAS imagery as illustrated through several project examples. The talk will provide a solid understanding of the accuracies that can be derived from UAS imagery as well as best practices for manipulating UAS imagery into geospatial data products.

Bio

Mr. Braun has over 25 years of experience in GIS and geospatial technology. As Vice President of Sales and Marketing, he is responsible for global sales and marketing efforts. Paul is also the founder of Taking Autism to the Sky (TATTS), a volunteer run, non-profit organization that leverages drones to develop social and employment skills for people on the autism spectrum while building quality, 3D products.

October ECN Meeting "Intellectual Property and Patent Issues"

Thursday, October 1st, 2015, 11:30 PM - 1:00 PM

Social gathering starts a 11:30 AM--talk at 11:45 AM.

Talk

Patrick Stiennon will talk about intellectual property and patent issues from the perspective of both a patent attorney and an engineer with patents. He will also discuss the rising incidence of patent trolls and what can be done to avoid the pitfalls of the patent process.

Bio

Patrick Stiennon is a partner at Stiennon & Stiennon, formed in 2003 by former partners in the Madison, Wisconsin, law firm of Lathrop & Clark LLP. The firm's practice is exclusively intellectual property law, with an emphasis on providing patent prosecution services for corporate and in-house counsel. In 1978, Patrick was awarded B.S. Mining Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in 1982, his J.D. University of Puget Sound School of Law, Tacoma, Washington. From 1984–1989, Patrick was an engineer at Lockheed Missile and Space Corporation. He is also co-author of a novel "The Rocket Company", a fictional account of the development of a commercial two stage to orbit (TSTO) reusable launch vehicle (RLV).

September Section Meeting "War Stories from the Cloud and 5Nines Tour"

Wednesday, September 16th, 2015, 11:30 PM - 1:00 PM

Social gathering starts a 11:30 AM--talk at 11:45 AM.

Talk

Anton (Tony) Kapela will discuss the technical aspects of managing a data center and and extensive communications links from his unique perspective.  Following the talk, there will be a tour of the 5Nines data center.  Tony joined 5NINES in 2006 as an employee and was invited to become a member of the LLC in 2007. Tony provides expert level network design and architecture consultations to clients as well as manages 5NINES own wireless microwave network which covers most of Madison.  In fact, this network is so solid, there has only been two brief outages in 5 years of uptime. Tony has been in the telecommunications and Internet routing field for over ten years. A frequent NANOG contributor and presenter, he's been involved with developing unique solutions to difficult networking problems. He has also been a primary researcher in the BGP security field and is responsible for the architecture and operations of the 5NINES network.

August ECN Meeting "Linux SoCs"

Thursday, August 6th, 2015, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Social gathering starts a 11:45 AM--talk at noon

Talk

This session is aimed at "System on a Chip" products like the BeagleBone Black and the RaspberryPi.  These powerful single board computers running Linux are beginning to appear in products all over the world.  Tom Kaminski will bring example systems and discuss tools and processes for developing applications that include hardware and software.  Are you working with one of these SoCs?  Bring it and your war stories for show and tell.

June Section Meeting: "Write Once, Read Forever: Truly Archival Storage"

Thursday, June 18th, 2015, 11:35 PM - 1:05 PM

Social gathering starts a 11:45 AM--talk at noon

Talk

In 1908 Gabriel Lippmann was awarded the Nobel Prize for a development he made in 1891: making full color images using silver halide black and white film. The images, many of which remain, display astonishing fully saturated colors. I will discuss how the Lippmann process works, why it was never commercialized and its current implementation to permanently and unalterably store data. Applications range from very-long-term data archiving (centuries) to authentication of BIOS and boot programs to detect their illicit alteration.

Biography

Clark E. Johnson is a physicist specializing in magnetics especially as it relates to data storage. He spent 9 years in the Central Research Laboratory of 3M Company involved with magnetics technologies and subsequently as entrepreneur founding several companies working in data storage, telecommunications and later in image capture, processing and display.  One of these, Vertimag Systems, played a significant role in the development of perpendicular magnetic recording technology, now used in virtually all disk drives.

He is currently a Director of Iowa Pacific Holdings, LLC, a short-line railroad holding company and president of its High Iron subsidiary. He is Senior Scientist at Creative Technology, LLC, which is commercializing WORF technology. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), former president of the Magnetics Society and holder of over 30 U.S. and foreign patents. He was a science advisor to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1988-89. He holds a BS and MSEE degree in Physics from the University of Minnesota.

June eLearning Lunch and Learn: Smart Grid 101: The “Smarter” Grid – What is it?

Monday, June 11th, 2015, 11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Social gathering starts a 11:45 AM--talk at noon

Talk

This module describes the various definitions and focus areas of smart grid and explains their commonalities. It reviews the current state of smart grid applications and how these drive infrastructure requirements; the challenges in deploying smart grid; smart grid research, development, and demonstrations; and how industry is working together to build out the smart grid..

June ECN meeting: 3D Printing at Sector67

Thursday, June 4th, 2015, 12:00PM - 1:00 PM

Social gathering starts a 11:45 AM--talk at noon

Talk

Chris Meyer is a local expert on 3D printing and allthings related to Hacker Spaces. He will give a brief presentation on the Sector67 3D printing technology and demonstrate how it is done. Heis also planning to discuss the Rapid Prototyping of PC boards. If you are not familiar with them, do check out their web site atsector67.org--you will be amazed at the things that are happening at Sector67. Notes: This will be during the IEEE-MSN-ECN meeting time forJune.

April Section Meeting: "LENR:  Energy 2.0"

Wednesday, April 15th, 2015, 5:30 PM - 7:00 PM  Note: This is NOT the usual meeting DAY or TIME.

Social gathering starts a 5PM--talk at 5:30PM

Talk

At the moment the most promising forms of LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions some times incorrectly referred to as Cold Fusion) are those that are able to operate using nickel and hydrogen — both plentiful and inexpensive natural resources. In LENR reactions no pollutants or emissions are produced, neither are harmful radiation or radioactive waste. This makes LENR a clean and sustainable form of energy. We are in the very early days of research and development in this field, and much about this phenomenon is poorly understood. There are competing theories proposed that try to describe the exact mechanism by which this anomalous heat is generated, but none has as yet been accepted as authoritative. There are many researchers and companies studying LENR at the moment, and it appears that we are on the verge of seeing commercial-grade LENR reactors appear in the marketplace. Ultimately LENR has the potential to revolutionize the way that energy is produced — cleanly and less expensively than current energy sources, and from elements that are cheap and abundant — making it a truly ‘2.0’ technology that we feel should be promoted for the benefit of humanity.

April ECN Meeting: "Ionic: A New Way to Build Mobile Apps"

Wednesday, April 1st, 2015, 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM

Talk

Mobile app development is a growing field with plenty of promise. It used to be that hybrid mobile apps weren’t ready for prime time -- they were slow and unattractive. Then, along came AngularJS, which changed the way developers built apps for the web. Ionic, made by Madison-based software start-up Drifty, is built on top of AngularJS and has dramatically changed the way developers build mobile apps. It’s open source, easy to use, beautiful, and ready to perform. In this talk, Perry Govier, a Drifty developer, will walk through Ionic's features and structure.  Time allowing, he'll run a quick live demo of how to get started building your own mobile app using web technologies.

March Section Meeting: "Dash-7 Wireless Standard"

Thursday, March 19th, 2015, 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM

Talk

A new up-coming international wireless standard that evolved out the Savi “container seal” IEC18000-7 standard has unique advantages over other protocols such as Zigbee.  It is a long range, low data rate, sub-GHz, low power protocol.  It uses ad-hoc time synchronization that allows a router to remain battery operated on sensor networks that access data infrequently.  This means that a wireless sensor network can be installed in minutes rather than a day without requiring a specialist.  The ability for any node to talk to any other node or group of nodes is an enormous advantage in many situations.  In summary, it is a BLAST…..Bursty, Light, Asynchronous, Stealth, Transient protocol.

March Life Member Affinity Group Meeting

Monday, March 16th, 2015, 9:00 PM

Agenda

This initial organization meeting is to select the meeting schedule for the LM Group and set up the organizational structure.  Please attend if you are interested in the group.  The meeting is open to all members, but is organized by Life Members whose combined age plus years of IEEE Membership exceeds 100 years and the Member is 65 years or more old.  If you are interested in the group, but cannot attend, please contact Tom Kaminski (tjkaminski at ieee.org

March EMB018 Meeting "The Biomedical Entrepreneur"

Monday, March 16th, 2015, 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM

Talk

The job of the entrepreneur is to come up with a solution that can save lives, save money, or produce a better solution that is more precise and/or accurate. I will discuss some of the do-s and don't-s for an entrepreneur and spend the rest of the time discussing how to find the significant problems that need to be solved and how to develop the solution to solve these problems ("how to think out of the box"). I will use examples from my own work including a signal extraction method called the Period Transform, the narrow band auscultatory blood pressure measurement, and a method to detect and quantify hemorrhage during significant trauma.

March eLearning "Non-Linear Control Techniques 
in Photovoltaic and Fuel Cell Power Processing Systems"

An IEEE eLearning Course, details at this link.
Note: This is an EVENING MEETING at MATC.

Thursday, March 12th, 2015, 5:30 PM - 6:30 PM

Agenda

Talk: In the field of renewable energy designing power processing systems characterized by high efficiency (>98%) and reliability (MTBF>20-25 years) remains a challenge. Only when systems exhibit these key features will renewable sources really be competitive with traditional ones. Even though a number of new topologies and electronic devices have been proposed for improving the converter characteristics, these efforts have fallen short. This is because there has not been a similar evolution in control strategies, where the classical linear approach continues to be applied intensively. The objective of this tutorial - which is part of the IEEE eLearning Library Industrial Electronics Series - is to introduce the basic concept of nonlinear control by focusing on an emergent control technique which can be used for improving the performances of photovoltaic and fuel cell power processing systems.

Tour: There will be a short tour of the new MATC Ingenuity Center after the seminar.

February Section Meeting: "Trends in Energy"

Note: This is an EVENING Meeting!

Thursday, February 19th, 2014, 5:30 PM ~ 7:30 PM

Talk

Scott Olsen will summarize the current trends and news making topics in the energy world.  This brief high level review will cover the three sectors,
Buildings (Commercial & Residential), Industrial, and Transportation. The talk will also highlight gas and electric utility issues including a bit on
the fuels used: energy efficiency, gas, nuclear, coal, wind, solar, and hydroelectric. The speaker will be expressing his views only and encourages a civil discussion at the end of the talk.

February eLearning Meeting: "Introduction to Batteries"

An IEEE eLearning Course, details at this link.
Credits available: 0.1 CEUs, 1 PDHs Certified--free for IEEE Members, $10 Registration for Non-IEEE Members

Thursday, February 12th, 2015, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Informal networking will begin at 11:45 AM. Presentation will begin at 12:00 PM.

Talk

There is a great deal of interest in batteries today, particularly in lithium-ion batteries. This tutorial is one of five in a series developed by Robert Spotnitz, President of Battery Design, LLC. In this first tutorial Dr. Spotnitz provides an overview of batteries, including a brief history of battery development. Interest in lithium ion batteries centers around their vehicular applications. and Dr. Spotnitz reviews the types of batteries currently used in hybrid electric vehicles (HEV), plug-in hybrids (PHEV) and vehicles fully powered by batteries (battery electric vehicles or BEV). In a detailed discussion of batteries, he introduces the terminology, the battery market, types of batteries currently available, and the battery specification process. Finally, Dr. Spotnitz discusses Smart batteries and the various standards available for batteries.

February ECN Meeting: "Home Automation"

Thursday, February 5th, 2015, 11:45 AM - 1:00 PM

Agenda

Talk: Tom Spinoso will discuss components of Home Automation and give a brief introduction to J&K Secuitry's Smart Home.

About J&K Security: Jeff and Kim Beckmann opened J&K Lock Service and Supply in June of 1987. The following month Jeff's brother, Steve Beckmann, joined in on the adventure. Built on a core foundation of customer service, J&K began as a small lock and key shop serving the Greater Madison Area. The company ventured into the electronics security world by the mid-1990s as their business continued to grow. Today, J&K prides itself on being efficient in a vast majority of residential and commercial security services. J&K Security Solutions remains family owned and operated over 25 years later, while still abiding by the same core principal it was founded upon—serving the customer.

January Section Meeting: "LED Lighting: Innovation in the Marketplace"

Lecture, Tour and snack--appetizers and beverage. 

Thursday, January 15th, 2015, 5:30 PM ~ 7:00 PM

Agenda

Talk: Ingrid McMasters will discuss the reasons why LED lighting is quickly becoming the most specified light source in the market and provide a reality check on the pros and cons of the technology. She will share some of the most common applications and identify some of the myths of LEDs. She will also touch on why LEDs can be difficult to specify and use when compared to traditional lighting technologies.

Tour: Following the talk we will have a tour of Electronic Theater Controls facility. ETC is a global leader in the manufacture of lighting and rigging technology for entertainment and architectural applications. Founded in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1975, ETC was a college project that grew into a major business, with Fred Foster as the current chief executive officer. ETC’s international headquarters is located in Middleton, Wisconsin. The company also has offices in Mazomanie (Wisconsin), New York, Hollywood, Orlando, Hong Kong, Copenhagen, Ede (the Netherlands), Rome, London, Berlin, and Holzkirchen (Germany). ETC employs nearly 900 people around the globe.

January eLearning Meeting: "Solid State Lighting"

eLearning Course on Basics of Solid State Lighting, details at this link.
Credits available: 0.1 CEUs, 1 PDHs Certified, free for IEEE Members, $10 Registration for Non-IEEE Members

Thursday, January 8th, 2015, 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Informal networking will begin at 11:30 AM. Presentation will begin at 12:00 PM.

Talk

This course presents an introduction as well as reference materials for professionals working in solid-state lighting. Course materials include the operating principles, device physics, fabrication, and applications of light-emitting diodes. Course materials also include a detailed discussion of daylight illumination sources, planckian sources, human vision, eye sensitivity, photometric and radiometric quantities, and color rendering capabilities of light sources.

Keywords: Planckian radiator, chip shaping, external quantum efficiency, extraction efficiency, internal quantum efficiency, luminous efficacy of radiation, luminous efficiency of a source, power efficiency, radiometric units, wavelength converter

Entrepreneurs & Consultants Network (IEEE-MSN-ECN)

Regular meetings are held on the first Thursdays of even-numbered months 11:45 AM - 1:00 PM