As part of a test of technology, we are offering video/audio clips of Tom Burbage's, executive vice president and general manager of the Joint Strike Fighter for Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company, presentation on October 9, 2003. The technology, developed by Sister TV is being by the Office of the Vice President for Research & Graduate Education as a way of offering lectures to the public after the fact. Please take a look at let us know what you think by writing keithly@utdallas.edu.

Several of the clips are about the Joint Strike Fighter program in general. There also are some segments about the impact on the JSF program on the DFW Metroplex. Just click on the thumbnails in the film strip and enjoy the show!

Noelia Rodriguez , former press secretary to First Lady Laura Bush, will speak about her journey to the White House and Washington politics at 10 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 15 in the Conference Center at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD).

Rodriguez's lecture, "The Voice Behind The First Lady…Lessons Learned, Lessons Shared," is co-sponsored by UTD's School of Social Sciences and the Career Center with the support of the Multicultural Office and the Center for U.S.-Mexico Studies.

Rodriguez, a lifetime Democrat, stepped down from her position as Mrs. Bush's press secretary and director of communications last month to work with billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist Eli Broad, as chief of staff and director of external affairs for The Broad Foundation. Prior to joining the Bush administration, Rodriguez was the president and chief executive officer of LA Convention 2000, the host committee for the first democratic national convention of the 21 st Century and the first political convention in Los Angeles since John F. Kennedy was nominated in 1960.

In Los Angeles , Rodriguez served as press secretary to Mayor Richard J. Riordan from 1994 to 1998, when she was promoted to deputy mayor responsible for communications and scheduling. At City Hall, Rodriguez managed and executed a variety of communications and public relations campaigns, involving such issue as Los Angeles' recovery from the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the Federal Crime Bill and the 1999 Charter Reform campaign.

Prior to embarking on a career in public service, Rodriguez worked at the United States' second largest electric utility company, Southern California Edison. As part of the Corporate Communications department, she performed in a wide array of communications efforts, including advertising, media relations, educational and consumer services and employee communications. For her accomplishments and community services, Rodriguez was named one of Edison's top 10 women leaders.

Her media appearances include ABC's Good Morning America , CBS This Morning, MSNBC, KNBC's News Conference , CNN with Paula Zahn, CBS The Early Sho w and Despierta America , among others. Rodriguez earned her associate of arts degree with honors from East Los Angeles College in the evening while working full time, and her bachelor of science in business administration from California State University , Los Angeles .

The event is free and open to the public. For more information please contact Sheila Amín Gutiérrez de Piñeres, associate dean , School of Social Sciences , at 972-883-6228, or e-mail her at pineres@utdallas.edu.

Girls and their mentors will experience the true meaning of "sole" sisters when they team up in a competition to design athletic shoes.

In designing an athletic shoe, the girls will use math and science to create the shoes, including learning about:
-The biomechanics of the foot;
-The differences between male and female feet;
-Creative and analytical thinking skills;

It's A Girl Thing: Engineering and Sports will begin at 9 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 15, at the Junkins Building on the Southern Methodist University (SMU)campus. The competition is targeting middle school girls in order to interest them early in a career in engineering and technology. The competition is part of the SMU School of Engineering¹s strategy to achieve a 50 percent female enrollment, or gender parity, over the next five years.

To sign up for the competition, teams will need to call 214-768-1732 or visit the Web site www.engr.smu.edu. The Institute for Engineering Education will provide all materials necessary to girls and their mentors for the shoe designing competition.

Texas Systems Day is a one day symposium in the areas on communications and signal processing. The program will feature distinguished speakers from academia and industry and will be held in Dallas Hall, Room 306 (McCord Auditorium) on the Southern Methodist University campus. For more information, see http://www.engr.smu.edu/~rajand/TSD2003/

Supply networks and E-commerce will be the topics of the third and final set of this year's lectures presented by The University of Texas at Dallas' McDermott Library. The lectures, which are free and open to the public, are featuring professors from the School of Management and will be held at 2:30 p.m. on Monday, Nov. 17 in the McDermott Suite on the fourth floor of the library.

School of Management Dean Dr. Hasan Pirkul will introduce the program, which will feature Dr. Suresh Sethi and Dr. Vijay Mookerjee.

Sethi is the school's Ashbel Smith Professor of Operations Management and director of the Center for Intelligent Supply Networks. His topic will be "Supply Networks: Challenges and Research."

Mookerjee is the school's coordinator for Information Systems Area and an expert on information systems issues of E-commerce. His presentation will be titled "Customer Delay at E-commerce Sites: Capacity Planning and Differentiated Service."

A reception will follow the lectures. For additional information, please contact Tom Koch at 972-883-4951.

IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Communications and Vehicular Technology (CVT) Society is hosting Dr. Javan Erfanian of Bell Mobility in Canada. Dr. Erfanian will be discussing trends, technologies, services and the innovation landscape at this event at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, November 18, 2003 at the Holiday Inn Select located at 1655 N. Central Expressway in Richardson. Lunch is available for the first 120 who arrive - there is a $5 for IEEE members for the lunch and a $10 lunch charge for non-members. More information is available at www.cvt-dallas.org. For directions call 972 238 1900.

The Dallas Section Society of Women Engineers is hosting a meeting featuring Jill Almaguer and Rex Saoit of Fujitsu Networks at 6:15 p.m. on Tuesday, November 18 at Nedley's Restaurant located at 1801 North Plano Road (on the west side between Campbell and Collins Blvd). Participants are exposed to a 15 minute action learning simulation of trading colored beads. The exercise is fast-paced, easy to learn, and has extreme interaction. The object of the simulation is to transform the individual's mindset in 3 career setting principles. For more information, call 972-699-1649.

The University of Texas at Arlington's Computer Science & Engineering Department presents Dr. Mahadev Satyanarayanan, Carnegie Group Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Dr. Satyanarayanan examines the challenges in computer systems research posed by pervasive computing and identifies four new research thrusts: effective use of smart spaces, invisibility, localized scalability, and masking uneven conditioning. This presentation will be at 3 p.m. on November 19 in Nedderman Hall, Room 100 on the UTA campus. For more information, contact Peggie Evans, 817-272-1025.

The MIT Enterprise Forum of Dallas-Fort Worth, Inc. is hosting its next month meeting at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, November 19 at the TI Auditorium in the Engineering and Computer Science South Building on The University of Texas at Dallas campus.

The focus of the program is to offer technology businesses assets and resources to capitalize on UTD research, experts and other opportunities. Technology transfer is a well-known idea, but this program will focus on the "nuts and bolts" of how business owners and entrepreneurs can actually leverage the resources at UTD to build their technology-based businesses. In addition to presentation of an informative program, UTD's leading experts will be presented so informal networking can begin to spur the momentum of technology transfer to help businesses grow. A large software company and a large technology company will be presented as case studies of how UTD resources were used to help a new company succeed. The audience will be invited to participate in the interchange at the end of the formal presentation.

The presenters will be (in order of appearance) Michael G. Cameron, registered patent attorney at Jackson Walker, L.L.P.; Nicholas D. Evans, president & CEO, Emerging Foundations Inc.; Da Hsuan Feng, Ph.D., vice president for research and graduate education, and professor of physics at UTD; Rafael Martin, technology transfer manager, office of the vice president for research and graduate education at UTD, and Roman Kikta of the Genesis Campus
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There is a $35 charge to attend and a $10 cost for students. Reservations may be made by calling 972-377-4554 or by emailing mitforum@juno.com. More information on the MIT Enterprise Forum and this event may be found at www.mitforum.com.

K-Bot may be the most sophisticated robot head ever developed. Its builder, David Hanson, a graduate student at The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) who has garnered international acclaim for his work, has placed cameras behind the robot's eyes that can follow movements, and he has employed an advanced software system to control the motors under K-Bot's polymer skin that allows the robot to sneer, smile, frown and squint.

Hanson, whose research focuses on developing natural, human-like facial expressions in robots - a trait that will become increasingly important as humans and robots begin to have more face-to-face interaction in the coming years -- will discuss K-Bot's future and the future of social robotics in general at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 20 in Room 1.112 of the Conference Center on the UTD campus. Hanson's presentation, entitled "Breathe! How Science and Bio-Inspired Engineering and Art Will Bring Synthetic Humans to Life, " is free and open to the public. A reception will follow.

"Hanson's work is just one example of the amazing results from research interaction between arts and engineering," said Dr. Da Hsuan Feng, vice president of research and graduate education at UTD. "This type of interdisciplinary research can impact a variety of different fields, from defense to entertainment. Collaboration with the arts and hard sciences is critical in a successful research institution, and the results can be simply revolutionary."

K-Bot was shown at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February and received accolades for the variety and accuracy of its expressions. Before coming to UTD, Hanson worked for Walt Disney Imagineering, where he developed artificial muscles as part of the group building autonomous walking robots.

Science Magazine has dubbed Hanson "the head of his class" in sociable robotics development.

Directoris, an international portal with innovative services for online businesses, is hosting a new business showcase that will take place at 6 p.m. on Thursday, November 20 at the Cityplace Conference Center. This event is especially tailored for new businesses' owners (not only online) in need of useful and productive networking.

The meeting will convene with new up-and-coming and well-established business people, as well as representatives of professional clubs and trade organizations. There is a $65 charge to attend. For more information or to register, see http://us.directoris.com/events/booking/

The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center has scored baseball great Cal Ripken Jr. as the guest of honor for A Conversation with a Living Legend, the annual fund-raising luncheon scheduled for December 2 in Dallas.

Ripken, who retired from the Baltimore Orioles in 2001, holds Major League Baseball's record of consecutive games played, a coveted title held by Lou Gehrig for 56 years.

The news of Ripken's participation as M. D. Anderson's legend follows his Sept. 6 induction into the Baltimore Orioles Hall of Fame. That date was also the eighth anniversary of Ripken's record-consecutive 2,131st game.

CNN anchor Paula Zahn will interview Ripken at the Wyndham Anatole Hotel. Zahn, a 23-year news veteran, began her career at WFAA-TV in Dallas.

In its 14th year, the fund-raiser has historically filled the Anatole's ballroom, attracting a crowd of approximately 1,500 each year.

Previous sports legends have included Lance Armstrong (2002), Arnold Palmer (1993), Tom Landry (1991) and Nolan Ryan (1990).

For event information, please call 1-866-262-9029.

Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE)is presenting a presentation by Bob Larsen, the director of the Argonne National Laboratoy at 6 p.m. on December 9 at the Holiday Inn Select, located at 1655 North Central Expressway in Richardson. This event is free and open to the public. For more information, please contact Ron Ogan, Activities Chair, 972-894-6036 or rtogan@ieee.org.

FutureTruck is a unique five-year engineering program that brings together the resources of industry, government, and academia in a cooperative effort to address important environmental and energy-related issues posed by the growing demand for sport utility vehicles (SUVs). FutureTruck is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Ford Motor Company, and a variety of other sponsors and is managed by Argonne National Laboratory's Center for Transportation Research.

Larsen is the director of Argonne National Laboratory's Center for Transportation Research. He is responsible for Argonne's work in hybrid electric vehicle and fuel cell vehicle powertrain development, advanced engine research and exhaust emissions control technologies, alternative fuel vehicle and infrastructure technology, advanced technology vehicle competitions, technology assessments, and vehicle simulation and energy consumption modeling for the U.S. Department of Energy's transportation programs. He served on the Board of Directors of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) International from 1998 to 2001, is active on several SAE technical committees, and is currently a member of SAE's Finance Committee. A two-time winner of Argonne's Pacesetter Award and a recipient of a national Technology Transfer Award, Bob has been at Argonne National Laboratory for twenty four years.

The University Venture Forum, formerly the Telecom Corridor Technology Club, in collaboration with University of Texas at Dallas, will present an update on the state of research from Dr. Robert Helms, Dean of Computer Science and Engineering at UTD.

As a result of a major funding made possible through Texas Instruments and its selection of Texas for its next manufacturing site, more than $300 million in new funding from a combination of private and public sources will be directed to Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at UTD. Dr. Helm will discuss the University's research and growth plans made possible by this significant funding event.

This presentation and breakfast will be at 7:00 a.m. on December 11 at the UTD Conference Center in Richardson, Texas. The cost is $5.00/members, $10.00/non-members. For more information, visit www.universityventureforum.org, or email sandyb@utdallas.edu to register for the event.

The SMU School of Engineering will host the 2004 National Science Foundation Design, Service and Manufacturing Grantees and Research Conference, "Putting a Face on the Future: Engineering Emerges from the Lab," Jan. 5-8, 2004 at the Wyndham Anatole Hotel.

The National Science Foundation's Division of Design, Manufacture and Industrial Innovation has been the sponsor of this conference for more than 27 years, which, in the beginning comprised only 75 people with research grants, who met on a university campus. The 2004 conference, with over 600 in attendance, is North America's largest gathering of researchers in this field.

This year's conference focuses on three aspects of humanizing engineering:
-Connecting with cognitive sciences to enhance human performance
-Connecting with social and behavioral sciences to facilitate positive acceptance of change
-Building engineering education infrastructure to ensure continual growth.

Selected speakers representing industry, academe, national laboratories, consortia and federal agencies will examine topics relevant to the future of design and manufacturing research. Conference attendance is open to the public and industry representatives are encouraged to participate.
For more information on the conference, please visit http://engr.smu.edu/nsf2004/announce.htm.