Today was really fun .. We hosted a team from Spaulding high school in Barre for a project called BETALabs that my friends Tyler and Shannon are leading. The Teacher from Spaulding is my old freind Michelle LaFrancis (aka Lafran).. She’s the School to work coordinator at Spaulding and such a great advocate for her students. The idea of BETAlabs is to get teams of kids to take an open ended problem and implement a solution using the resources at Generator Makerspace and BETA . We’d collectively picked a pretty sophisticated project. It was the design and creation of a motor demonstrator that showed the relation between current and torque. The students had to design the physical components and cut them out with laser and print them on a 3-D printer. My awesome coworker Shannon helped them do all that fabrication. Then they had to design the electronics including the windings and battery power and switches to energize the coil. Finally they assembled the whole thing with scale to measure the torque. They have several weeks to do this including two visits to generator and two visits to beta.
Diane picked me up at the airport yesterday afternoon after coming back from Endicott.. We came home , had a quite night.. and spent today just workign around the house, running and basically relaxing..
Woke up this morning early and headed to the Atlanta Airport. I got there in time to watch the tail end of the coronation of King Charles III. Diane and I used to live in the UK (84-86) .. so I still have a soft spot in my heart for the people and culture of England… That said, it was weird to see all the pomp and circumstances around the coronation. I understand it cost the people of the UK more than a £100M.
As I watched the coronation in the United club. I saw that last nights main honoree, Vint Cerf.. the father of the Internet was there too. We got to talking and ending up spending a couple of hours together. We were on the same plane.. and we were sitting in adjacent seats. What a. treat. Vint is a very funny and very well traveled guy. It was great getting to know each other. It turns out that we have many things in common including that we both have great wives and that we are both in IMDB as part of our appearing in made for TV entertainment. MIne is for appearing on The Colony. Vint’s IMDB references is for Earth: Final Conflict VInt was a friend of Gene Rodenberry (star trek creator. and appeared in several episodes. I found him in the beginning here .
Vint has a wonderful trove of stories about people in tech. travel. wine and kids.e’s a very kind and brilliant guy.. .. and he has a Ronald McDonald watch to boot !
It was a pleasure to get to spend this much time with him . I hope our paths cross again soon !
Today was the all day VICS Conference. It’s when the IEEE gives out its highest medals and awards. I The day was full of talks, panels, and presentations. I got to see some old friends and got to meet and hang out with several of my technical heroes . I was there to present one of the two awards that IBM had sponsored. The award I presented on IBM’s behalf was the John Von Neumann award “for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology” . The recipient was Dr. Tom Leighton, the co-founder of the content distribution company Akemi. It was a real pleasure getting to meet and get to know Tom. The other IBM Sponsored award was the the new Fran Allen Award for “innovative work in computing that led to a lasting impact on the field of engineering, technology, or science. ” My IBM colleague and friend Andy helped present the award to Prof Lydia Kavraki from Rice University for her work on probabilistic programming for robotic motion planning. I was particularly happy to meet this awardee as Fran Allen was a friend of mine. She was the first Woman to become and IBM Fellow and the first woman to win the Turing Award ( sometime called the ‘noble prize of computer science”) . My favorite speech was by Dr Vint Cerf, the co-founder of TCPIP, the underpinning of the Internet. Vint was interviewed early in the day and gave a great account of his career and life. I was very taken by his story meeting his wife, who became deaf at age 3… and her path of getting a cochlear implant first at age 53 , then again at age 63. .. That allowed her to enjoy music and talk on the phone for the first time. He said when she got hte first implant it was like having a teenager in the house.. she wouldn’t get off the phone :-). What was so cool is that the husband and wife team of Dr’s Ingeborg & Erwin Hochmair won the Alexander Graham Bell. award that same day for their contributions to the invention of the cochlear implant !
I got to speak with Rodney Brooks the winner of the IEEE Founders meadla , an MIT prof I’ve always admired and the co founder of iRobot, Rethink robotics and several other companies. He showed me a pictureds of his hand build Relay logic computing engine. ALl hand made.. sooooo wonderfully geeky. What a guy. I alos got to meet Prof Hiroyuki Matsunami, winner of the Edison Medal who helped invent the Silicon Carbide transistors we use in the inverters that make our planes fly at BETA. It was also a pleasure seeing my old friends Prof Jose Moura , winner of the Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal and his wife Prof Manueala Veloso.,
I was also deeply touched by the story of one of the award recipients Ross Stone. the winner of the IEEE Richard M. Emberson Award. Stone died. just one month before the ceremony and hs wife Susan was there to receive the award. She carried a picture of her late husband up to the stage as she received the award on his behalf. I spoke with her about it.. she was happy, sad, proud and brave.
I also got to spend time with a bunch of younger IEEE members from several IEEE student chapters. It was great talkign with them. THey helped me brainstorm obout the ‘OnBoard’ program I’m working on to get high school and college kids to fall in love with making printed circuit boards ..
I was very grateful for the opportunity to attend. this event !
