Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine May 2018 - 90

News & Information

Figure 3.

RadarConf '17 Women in Engineering.

measure/sample/interpret hand gestures to control a wearable computing appliance. Prof. Ram Narayaran gave an overview of Noise
Radar with past accomplishments and future applications. Finally
Dr. Marco Lanzagorta, addressing an emerging sub-discipline,
introduced the conference to Quantum Radar; giving a physicists
perspective. The Plenary speakers are pictured in Figure 2.
Dr Irena Atov of Microsoft (former chair of IEEE Women in
Engineering) was instrumental in organizing the Women in Engineering program as well as serving as moderator. The event began with a plated lunch and continued with a panel discussion.
We were fortunate to have distinguished panelists from industry

and academia, including: Dr. Soyeon Yi (former astronaut), Dr.
Farbia Alamdari (VP Marketing, Boeing Commercial Airplane),
Prof. Maria Greco (Univ. of Pisa and IEEE Board of Governors),
Dr. Julie Jackson (Assoc. Prof. Air Force Institute of Technology),
and Chelsea Parkman (Project Engineer, Honeywell Aerospace). A
group of about 50 participated in the program, which was at the capacity of the room. A montage of the event is presented in Figure 3
The Student Program included the AESS Radar Summer
School (44 attendees), paper competition and travel grant program.
Corporate supporter contributions were matched with a National
Science Foundation grant and funds from the AES Society to provide a total $18k in travel grants to university students attending.
These were disbursed to 25 students who applied through the conference website. The conference was also pleased to host the announcement reception for the IEEE Young Professionals program.
Seattle offered excellent off-conference historical and cultural
opportunities for delegates and guests. Self-organizing tours were
coordinated which included the Gates Foundation, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle Underground and waterfront/aquarium and Chihuly
Garden, to name a few. Boeing provided tour busses to the Future
of Flight museum and the Everett Final Assembly facility tour on
the Wednesday of the conference, morning and afternoon. Approximately 65 people took advantage of the opportunity to tour the
building housing the largest usable space in the world, enclosing
the 747, 777 and 787 final assembly lines A heart-felt thank you to
the organizing committee (partially pictured Figure 4), as well as
the volunteer members of the Technical Committee, so essential in
the paper selection process. The final kudos go to Patty Woodard
and team of Simply The Best event planning, without whom event
this would not have been possible.

Figure 4.

Members of the Organizing Committee. Clockwise from upper left: Martie Goulding (Technical Chair), Irena Atov (WIE Chair) and Dan Sego (General
Chair), David Whelan (General co-Chair), Brian Cordill (Tutorial Chair), Derek Smolka (Student Chair), Hugh Griffiths (International Chair), Tim Lee
(Finance Chair), John Milan (Conference Advisor), and Bill Correll (Publicity Chair). Not pictured: Yasao Kuga and Dawn Gidner (Technical co-Chairs),
John Williams (Conference Advisor), and John Sahr (University Chair).

IEEE A&E SYSTEMS MAGAZINE

MAY - JUNE 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine May 2018