Global Engineering Technologies -Day2

This article is 3rd in the series summarizing ASEI 33rd National Convention held Dec 5&6 , 2020. You may access Part 1 and Part 2 here.

December 6th, GET 2020 Day 2 Began with ASEI president welcoming the audience back and laying out the plan for Day 2. At the outset it became pretty clear to the audience that we would have some high powered content led by industry leaders lined up for the day. 

Opening keynote on Leadership in turbulent times was delivered by  Dr Satyam Priyadarshy, Chief Data Scientist & Technology Fellow, Haliburton. Leadership in turbulent times is a critically important topic and pertinent considering the current socio-geo-politico-economic scenario in the COVID era. Dr Satyam Priyadarshy, is a globally recognized leader for his expertise in leveraging disruptive technologies, strategies and talent transformation to increase business value. He applied ancient Indian wisdom from Hanuman Chalisa to talk about a framework to face disruption in tumultuous times. Every challenge from the past looks smaller. Paradigm shifts, Leading the transformation with a mnemonic “Karma Matters” and putting the essence of all management texts with 20 words from the religious prayer, he beautifully showed us some leadership lessons that have helped him as well as the teams he has led from academics to corporate life.

The next Keynote session Career Management in a Disrupted Economy was delivered by Dilip Saraf who is an IIT Alumnus and has reinvented himself 5 times to be a Career and Life Coach besides being an Author and speaker. Dilip very succinctly brought out the problem and solution pertinent to those facing career challenges during this Covid-19 pandemic which has jolted us into action with a career wake-up call with uncertainty about how future jobs will emerge. 

Using examples from his own career shifts as well as couple of his high profile clients, Dilip’s talk on career management was about strategies available to all of us to better manage our career and to develop resilient options for us to deal with this uncertainty and to stay in control of our own destinies. This talk covered strategies from the everyday to the exotic, all of which have been tried in various circumstances—from the Dotcom bust of 2001 to the economic downturn of 2008 to the Covid-19 onslaught. Anyone interested in understanding the basics of career management could have benefited from this talk—from high-school students to the retired professionals to entrepreneurs, and anyone in between. 

I may be biased, but based on the feedback received, the next session turned out to be the most energizing session of the entire convention and by far the most inspiring fireside chat I’ve ever hosted! Talking about Exponential Technologies for Humanity’s Grand Challenges, Naveen Jain, CEO Viome & Founder/Chairman - Moon Express and yours truly engaged in a high energy conversation on Exponential technologies and life sciences. For the uninitiated, exponential technologies are those which are rapidly accelerating and shaping major industries and all aspects of our lives. For a technology to be “exponential,” the power and/or speed doubles each year, and/or the cost drops by half. As in Moore’s law!

Exponential technologies include artificial intelligence (AI), augmented and virtual reality (AR, VR), data science, digital biology and biotech, medicine, nanotech and digital fabrication, networks and computing systems, robotics, and autonomous vehicles. Solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges lie at the intersection of these exponential technologies. I’ve covered it in more detail in Part1 of this series.

Cybersecurity has taken center stage in the enterprise executive mind as cases of ransomware and denial of services attacks and data breaches have kept the CISOs of the nation occupied. However,.our biggest threats are often also the biggest opportunities. Cybersecurity is imperative for enterprises as well as nations today. Projections are that cybercrime will exceed $6 trillion annually by 2021 up from $3 trillion in 2015, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. Probably the most significant factor driving this acceleration is the increasing efficiency of cybercriminals. The dark web has become a thriving black market where criminals of all means can gain the capabilities necessary to launch sophisticated cyberattacks.

In the next session Cybersecurity:Opportunity of Threat? the audience learned about the latest trends in cybersecurity from Anand Oswal, SVP and GM at PaloAlto Networks and was joined in conversation with popular cybersecurity strategist and influencer Matthew Rosenquist who is currently the Chief Information Security Officer at Eclipz

Anand talked about the 3 concurrent mega transitions in enterprise IT that are impacting network security viz. Rise of a mobile workforce, Shift to hybrid cloud and Direct to app architectures. The fireside chat drew a number of interesting questions from the audience which kept the session flow lively.

The enterprise technology landscape has increasingly become difficult to manage for a CIO whose role has evolved from a Chief Information Officer to a Chief Innovation Officer in the past few years. With digital transformation mandate becoming table stakes, rapid adoption of Cloud and work-from -anywhere becoming a norm, the technology woes of an enterprise CTO or a CIO seem to be unending and may have been exacerbated due to the current pandemic.

Next session was the powerful  CXO fireside chat  focussing on Innovation in the Enterprise with  Manoj Prasad, VP & Global CTO, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Prakash Kota, CIO Autodesk, moderated by Rakesh Guliani. What does a CTO of a public company worry about? How does the CIO become indispensable in M&A decisions? How will this pandemic change the pace of innovation in enterprise technology? These and many more topics were central to this conversation where we also found how Thermofisher Scientific is at the forefront of fight against COVID!

“Space - the final frontier” These words from Star Trek can hardly be erased from memory of many of us who grew up watching the science fiction TV series. Many of the innovations shown have transcended from fiction into reality as commercial space tourism is set to start and our exploratory missions to either colonizing the moon or to become a multi planetary species have been progressing well with many successful missions with robots to Mars and beyond in the past decade thanks to NASA, ISRO, EuropeanSpaceAgency, SpaceX and other commercial aerospace companies. For our next technical talk, we had a super smart NASA/BAERI Space scientist Dr Sreeja Nag who also happens to be a Robotist at Nuro. Speaking on Robotics and Space, she shared her experiences on autonomous robots that work on earth as well as space  

    The last session of the Convention was the ASEI Awards which was anchored by Dr Thomas Abraham,Chair Awards Committee. Chief Guest Ambassador Amit Kumar, Consul General India - Chicago presided over the function where 8 industry and ASEI awards were given out and each recipient gave a brief acceptance speech 

ASEI Lifetime Achievement -Naveen Jain

ASEI Entrepreneur Of The Year - Jyoti Bansal

ASEI Engineer Of The Year (Mech/Solar) - Dr Yogi Goswami

ASEI Engineer Of The Year (Industrial OperationsManagement) - Deval Desai

ASEI Service Excellence Award – Rakesh Patel

Hari Bindal ASEI Founders Award - Vatsala Upadhyay

Leadership and Contribution to ASEI - Rakesh Guliani and Sunita Dublish  

Dr Neeraj Bindal, son of ASEI Founder Late Dr Hari Bindal gave a moving tribute to his father as he presented the Founder’s award to Vatsala. More details on the awards are published here.

The results of YouthTechnology ExpositionYTE 2020 held the previous day were also declared and all 6 finalists were commended. It was heartening to see that top 3 prize winners (Nidhi, Jyoti & Isha) were girls and high schoolers from California. More power to diversity and STEM!

The event concluded with a vote of thanks by convention chair Bhavesh Joshi to all Speakers and volunteers and ASEI board members.

"Now that our mega convention is wrapped up, we will be formulating teams and BOD for the next year. On behalf of ASEI, I invite all engineers, technologists and scientists to join hands with us. Feel free to share your thoughts and opinions and get engaged - Piyush Malik"