Events Listing

IEEE will be hosting a game night on Thursday, October 14. Join in for games, and free food, and socialize with folks in ECE!

Join us on Thursday, October 14th from 4:00-5:30pm CST/5:00-6:30pm EST for a virtual career networking opportunity with international peers across the Big 10+ network. This informal event will give you the opportunity to have career conversations in small breakout rooms to explore career interests and make connections in your career journey. We are also inviting several Big 10+ International Alumni to join the event to help facilitate networking conversations. Event registration via Zoom is required. We are looking forward to meeting you there!

Registration: tinyurl.com/Big10INTLconnect

The event is organized by Hire Big 10+ and Big 10 Academic Alliance. Email Jane Sitter with any questions about this event, sitt0036@umn.edu.

IEEE UMN holds its weekly board meetings on Sundays at 9:30am via Zoom. All are welcome to join as the committee plans, discusses, and organizes events and networking opportunities. This is a great way to become involved in the decisions that IEEE makes! 

Link for the Zoom meeting: https://umn.zoom.us/j/94707068539

IEEE will be hosting a tech talk by Banner Engineering, a leader in industrial automation and wireless technologies. Grab a slice of pizza and chat with electrical and software engineers from the company. 

Crystals that think about how they're growing

Biology offers inspiring examples of molecules that can process information to regulate the machinery of life, yet lacks design principles for manufacturing them. Much of synthetic biology relies on "alien technology": evolved proteins that, had evolution not furnished them, we would not know how to design.

DNA nanotechnology offers a different approach, enabling design of smart molecular systems from first principles. We report the design and experimental validation of a self-assembling DNA tile set containing 355 single-stranded tiles, reprogrammable by tile selection to implement a wide variety of 6-bit algorithms, including copying, sorting, recognizing palindromes and multiples of 3, random walking, obtaining an unbiased choice from a biased random source, electing a leader, simulating Turing-universal cellular automata, and serving as a period 63 counter. The system is quite reliable: averaged across the 21 implemented circuits, the per-tile error rate is less than 1 in 3000.

Bio of professor Dave Doty

David Doty is an associate professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Davis. He is broadly interested in problems at the intersection of physics, chemistry, biology, and computation. This does not mean the traditional "computation in service of natural science" (e.g., bioinformatics, computational chemistry, or molecular dynamics simulation). Rather, certain molecular systems — such as a test tube of reacting chemicals, a genetic regulatory network, or a growing crystal — can be interpreted as doing computation themselves... natural science in service of computation. He seeks to understand the fundamental logical and physical limits to computation by such means.

IEEE UMN holds its weekly board meetings on Sundays at 9:30am via Zoom. All are welcome to join as the committee plans, discusses, and organizes events and networking opportunities. This is a great way to become involved in the decisions that IEEE makes! 

Link for the Zoom meeting: https://umn.zoom.us/j/94707068539

IEEE and SASE are hosting their annual fall BBQ. Swing by any time for hot dogs, hamburgers, veggie burgers, soda, and company. 

Fields of Dream Machines and Processing a Paradoxical Past: IBM Systems Engineering, Gender, and the Irony of Big Blue’s Solutions

IBM has a larger historical literature than any corporation globally. With iconic IBM objects, actors, facilities, and moments as inputs, innovation narratives result as outputs. Even IBM’s early 1990s crisis set up CEO Lou Gerstner to “innovate” a new services’ focus, and with wizardry make the “elephant dance.” In demystifying Big Blue, I argue IBM was always in major part a services company. In embracing irony and inclusion, I offer a wholly different history of IBM, one braiding maintenance, the field, and Systems Engineering (SE). By valuing labor activity, and not just profit centers, field services women—IBM’s System Services Women’s Corps (SSWC)—come to the fore. As “hidden figures” providing maintenance, custom programming, and systems know-how, the SSWC became a model for IBM Systems Engineering in 1960. IBM SEs set it apart and defined a solutions company long before solutions (albeit whitewashing women’s roles) became central to IBM’s marketing.

Bio of professor Jeffrey R. Yost

Jeffrey R. Yost is Director of the Charles Babbage Institute and Research Professor in HSTM, UMN. He is a specialist in computing history and has published six books—most recently, Making IT Work (MIT Press)—and dozens of articles on the social, business, and scientific history of our digital world. Currently, he has three book projects he is completing under contract on computing cultures, cybersecurity, and inequality. He is a past EIC of IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, founding Co-Editor of Interfaces, and Co-Editor of the Computing and Culture book series for Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. He is among the most awarded PIs in the history of science in the nation (NSF, ACM, IEEE, DOE, Sloan, IBM, etc.).

IEEE WIE is excited to welcome Brooksource for an interview preparation session today September 28! Brooksource is a company that provides career advising, resume building, personal/professional development, and much more. Join us for this session to gain professional advice on how to ace an interview! There will be pizza!

Please RSVP using this form.

IEEE UMN holds its weekly board meetings on Sundays at 9:30am via Zoom. All are welcome to join as the committee plans, discusses, and organizes events and networking opportunities. This is a great way to become involved in the decisions that IEEE makes! 

Link for the Zoom meeting: https://umn.zoom.us/j/94707068539