Global Engineering Technologies - 1

This is part 2 of 3 in the series of articles about the recently concluded 33rd Annual Convention organized by ASEI (American Society of Engineers). Part1 is here.

As the Content Chair for this Convention, I am indebted to all the amazing speakers, session owners/moderators and the volunteers who helped in making this virtual convention a success. So a big THANK YOU from the bottom of my heart in making this the best and richest content filled event ever ASEI has hosted.

Curating content for a conference is a fun yet stressful job especially when no one is getting paid and on top of it you are asking the speakers to show up on a weekend!. There's not much flexibility in the schedule so when in the reimagined event format, speakers have technical challenges with sound or video or for that matter they fail to show up before time or adhere to content and time guidelines, it can be super stress inducing! My blood pressure broke all records as a result!

Now that the event is over, let me summarize what transpired on day 1 of the Convention and key take aways from that. Read on and stay tuned for Part2!

December 5th, 2020 - We started with a Welcome address by ASEI President Jwalant Lakhia and the ever enthusiastic emcee Anu Gopalakrishnan chirping at the beginning of each session and continued to regale as she enthusiastically glued the entire event as speakers and moderators came in and out.

Our first keynote speaker Deval Desai , VP Magna Int. spoke about contributions of Indian technologists and weaved the storyline from mythology to historic to modern era in a very short span of time. From making the best steel in the world to teaching the world to count, India was actively contributing to the field of science and technology long before the modern world evolved. One of the oldest civilizations in the world, India has a strong tradition of science and technology. Many theories and techniques discovered by the ancient Indians have created and strengthened the fundamentals of modern science and technology. While some of these groundbreaking contributions have been acknowledged, some are still unknown to most, and he shared some of the profound inventions that have and will continue to shape the future of humankind. It was heartening to see the contribution of Indian women scientists and engineers highlighted in a field typically dominated by men. There were so many factoids about things and achievements of unsung heroes shared that would make anyone hailing from the Indian subcontinent proud!

Our technical keynote session was by Dr Robert Sutor, VP Quantum, IBM Research and we learnt how to get started in Quantum computing by Dancing with qubits. Quantum computing aims to solve complex problems the world's most powerful supercomputers cannot solve. Leading the race in this field is IBM, though Google, Microsoft, Amazon and lot of others are all putting heavy investment bets in Quantum as well. Considering application in life sciences, lets. take an example. On average, it takes 10 to13 years and more than $2.5 billion to bring a new medical therapy from the discovery bench to the patient. The odds of success are overwhelmingly weighted in favor of failure. Harnessing the power of quantum computing can deliver the potential to significantly accelerate the timelines for, and enhance the quality of various stages of pharmaceutical research and development processes. That was very futuristic and sounded exciting.

We heard from Dr Sutor that Quantum promises to tackle classically challenging problems across a variety of industries, from optimizing traffic control to refining supply chain logistics, and from discovering new drugs to detecting fraud more rapidly. Also, anyone can now try out the power of quantum on the IBM cloud for free with toolkits and resources available freely! I was a bit worried about the possibility ofAI on Quantum would upend our lives but reconciled that this is still too faraway in the future.

As we moved to in depth technical topics, starting with Agritech innovations for a SmarterVillage, we heard from Prof Solomon Darwin, Often known as the"Father of SmartVillage movement ", Dr Darwin shared howUC Berkeley Haas School defines the concept and after that shared about his books and publications in addition to the agricultural innovations that have the potential to make villages smarter with minimal resources.

User Experience Design (UXD) is a design process whose sole objective is to design a system that offers a great experience to its users. Thus UXD embraces the theories of a number of disciplines such as user interface design, usability, accessibility, information architecture, and Human Computer Interaction. In this next session, Urmila Kashyap talked about UX design systems for enterprise products based on her 10+ years of UXD experience working with large companies like Moody's & VMware. Surbhi Kaul, GM and head of product at Juniper Networks built on it and shared from her own experience of building and launching products over two decades at Netflix, Cisco, Youtube , Google and Juniper Networks covering why UXD is critical to a product’s success and highlighted design systems using examples of AIML products she has helped launch.

Of course we could not do a conference without talking about AI ..its in the news almost daily ..many times for the wrong reasons but you might imagine that artificial intelligence is only something the big tech giants are focused on, and that AI doesn't impact your everyday life. In reality, artificial intelligence is increasingly penetrating both our work and personal lives. Yet, many organizations in traditional industries are still grappling with justifying the ROI beyond proof of concept stage and struggling with operationalizing AI/ML. From a research to engineering to business perspective, a complete CXO view is needed and so we had an IBM Fellow and Master Inventer with over 45 patents to her name - Rama Akkiraju , CTO AIOps addressing this daunting challenge and shared some best practices in this session on Artificial Intelligence in the Enterprise

Autonomous Vehicles and Future Transportation is an interesting topic in which Jeff Hannah - Director, NA SBD Automotive & Akshay Desai, Associate Partner, McKinsey presented their POVs and tried separating fact from fiction about autonomous cars .Whether you are an automotive expert or newbie, I'm sure you gained valuable insights into the future of mobility and learned exciting ways to participate in this growing industry and liked this discussion with Akshay Desai on the future for autonomous vehicle adoption and the changing AV mobility market. 

We ended the day with some amazing YouthTechnologyExposition (YTE) finalist students showcasing their work followed by facing a barrage of questions from our judges Amrish Chopra and Mutthu Sivanathan.

The message about the engineering profession and relevance of ASEI from Dr Sam Pitroda- the father of Indian IT, Computers and Telecom revolution was the icing on the cake with which, we concluded day1 of ASEI National Convention.

Stay tuned for Day 2 report !