The 2004 Collin County Economic Summit, entitled "The Future is Now!" will be held on Tuesday, March 30 from 11 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. at the Collin County Community College District Spring Creek Campus, located at 2800 E. Spring Creek Parkway in Plano. A biennial event, the Collin County Economic Summit offers presentations and breakout sessions led by some of North Texas' most reputable economic experts. The 2004 theme, "The Future is Now", will focus on current economic conditions and its impact on businesses and communities today and in the future.

There is a $40 charge to attend, which includes lunch. More more information, or to register, see http://www.ccccd.edu/economicsummit/economicsummit.htm or email areynolds@ccccd.edu.

Texas Christian University (TCU) is inviting the public to attend the inauguration of its 10th chancellor, Victor J. Boschini, Jr., Wednesday, March 31 at 10 a.m. in Daniel-Meyer Coliseum. The ceremony, titled Vision In Action: Enhancing the TCU Experience, represents the university's official recognition of Chancellor Boschini as TCU's newest chancellor. The inauguration will begin with a processional of faculty, staff, student organization representatives and international students in their native dress. Dr. George Kuh, professor of higher education and director of Indiana University's Center for Postsecondary Research, is the keynote speaker. The Center is annually responsible for the National Survey of Student Engagement, or NSSE, which benchmarks college students' living and learning experiences.

A series of on-campus academic events during the week will add to the inauguration celebration, including TCU's Honors Program Convocation, the International Socrates Symposium, and the Latin American Arts Festival. Most events are free and open to the public. The inauguration will be followed by a noon luncheon on the Dee J. Kelly Alumni & Visitors Center patio.

Richland Community College is hosting a silent auction and presentation at 11 a.m. on March 31 in the Radisson Hotel in Richardson located on 1981 North Central Expressway. Author and speaker Al Lucia takes you on a JukeBox Journey to Success. Al combines practical tips and ideas for achieving success in your personal and professional life with something people of every age, gender and background have firmly planted in their memory banks--the sounds, lyrics and great feelings of Rock 'n' Roll music, a powerfully fun memory anchor. There is a $30 charge to attend.

Proceeds go to the Travel and Tourism program at Richland Community College.

For more information or to register, contact M.T. Hickman at 972-238-6097 or email mthickman@dccd.edu.

Maura Schreier-Fleming is presenting "Consultative Selling - Strategic Questioning" at 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, March 31 at the Holiday Inn Select Richardson, located at 1655 N. Central Expressway.

The goals of this seminar are to teach participants to:
-Guide customers to see there is an immediate need for the products
-Create customer awareness to buy now instead of postponing the decision
-Shorten sales cycle
-Increase trust with customers
-Find the areas that most concern customers
-Make selling easier and more successful
To register, contact: Maura@Bestatselling.com or 972 380 0200. There is a $79 charge to register, which includes lunch.

Former United States Secretary of State James A. Baker, III will deliver the inaugural address in The Leadership Center at UTD's Excellence in Leadership Speakers Series on April 1 in Dallas.

Baker, who currently is serving as a presidential envoy leading international efforts to restructure and reduce Iraq's foreign debt, will talk about "World Events: Implications for Leadership" at noon at the Hyatt Regency Hotel downtown.

The luncheon speech is open to members of the public. The cost will be $45 for members of the World Affairs Council and $75 for others.

Baker served as White House chief of staff and treasury secretary under President Reagan and was secretary of state during the first Bush administration.

For additional information about Baker's appearance or to make a reservation, please call UTD's School of Management at 972-883-2757.

Senior Research Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center, Kanna Rajan will be presenting a talk "From From Interplanetary Cruise to the Surface of Mars,Artificial Intelligence in Space: A Twisted Tale" at 2 p.m. on April 1 in the Nedderman Hall room 100 at The University of Texas at Arlington. Dr. Rajan will be honored as a UTA Computer Science and Engineering 2004 Distinguished Alumnus

In 1999, NASA flew the first artificial intelligence-based closed-loop control system in space, the Remote Agent Experiment, on the New Millennium Deep Space One spacecraft. This fundamentally changed the perception of artificial intelligence research within and without the agency and helped institute a robust funding program for autonomy and robotics research for NASA. While the promise of more applied AI and robotics systems within the space domain has yet to be realized, the agency is taking small and incremental steps toward realizing the ambitions of scores of researchers in the field. This talk is the story of why progress has been incremental and what it takes to get to deploy a mission critical application.

He will briefly discuss the results of the deployment so far, which has exceeded expectations, for the Mixed-Initiative Activity Plan GENerator (MAPGEN) that is used by the rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and will take you along on the wild ride they went through in becoming a critical part of NASA's most complex scientific mission to date.

For more information, contact Peggie Evans, pevans@cse.uta.edu or 817-272-1025.

Carl Djerassi, professor emeritus at Stanford and internationally recognized chemist, will give a colloquium in conjunction with The University of Texas at Arlington's Annual Celebration of Excellence by Students (ACES), an event highlighting research and creative activity by undergraduates and graduates.

Dr. Djerassi will present "Noble Science and Nobel Lust: Disclosing Tribal Secrets" Friday, April 2 beginning at 6pm in Nedderman Hall, 416 Yates Street. A reception for Djerassi will begin at 5pm in the atrium.

Carl Djerassi received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1945. He taught at Wayne State University and Stanford University. Concurrent with his academic positions, he worked for such companies as CIBA Pharmaceutical, Syntex, and Zoecon. Djerassi is one of the few American scientists to have been awarded both the National Medal of Science (for the first synthesis of a steroid oral contraceptive--"the Pill") and the National Medal of Technology (for promoting new approaches to insect control). A member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as many distinguished foreign academies, Djerassi has received 19 honorary doctorates together with numerous other honors, such as the first Wolf Prize in Chemistry, the first Award for the Industrial Application of Science from the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Chemical Society's highest award, the Priestley Medal.

The University of Texas at Dallas is featuring a presentation by Dr. Eli Yablonovitch of the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of California Los Angeles. The presentation will be held on Mon. April 5 at 2 p.m. in the TI Foundation Auditorium, Room 2.102 in the Engineering and Computer Science Building South on The University of Texas at Dallas. Yablonovitch will be presenting " Classical and Quantum Information Physics" and will discuss the future of quantum information technology based on the evident successes of classical information technology. This event is free and open to the public.

Eli Yablonovitch graduated with the Ph.D. degree in Applied Physics from
Harvard University in 1972. He worked for two years at Bell Telephone
Laboratories, and then became a professor of Applied Physics at Harvard. In
1979 he joined Exxon to do research on photovoltaic solar energy. Then in
1984, he joined Bell Communications Research, where he was a Distinguished
Member of Staff, and also Director of Solid-State Physics Research. In 1992
he joined the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is Professor
of Electrical Engineering.

His work has covered a broad variety of topics: nonlinear optics,
laser-plasma interaction, infrared laser chemistry, photovoltaic energy
conversion, strained-quantum-well lasers, and chemical modification of
semiconductor surfaces. Currently his main interests are in optoelectronics,
high speed optical communications, high efficiency light-emitting diodes and
nano-cavity lasers, photonic crystals at optical and microwave frequencies,
quantum computing and quantum communication.

Yablonovitch was a Founder of the W/PECS series of Photonic Crystal
International Workshops that began in 1999. (PECS V will be held in Kyoto in
March 2004.)

He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, the
Optical Society of America, and the American Physical Society. Yablonovitch
is a Life Member of Eta Kappa Nu, and a Member of the National Academy of
Engineering and the National Academy of Sciences.

For more information, call 972-883-4154.

June Nash, distinguished professor of anthropology emerita at The City College and Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY), will deliver the fifth George and Mary Foster Distinguished Lecture in Cultural Anthropology at Southern Methodist University.

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. and will be in room 201 of Florence Hall, 3330 University Boulevard. Parking is available in the Dedman School of Law parking garage located at the corner of Daniel and Hillcrest Avenue.

Nash studies the peasant societies of Latin America, and her lecture, ³The Image of the Limited Good and the Specter of the Unlimited Good,² will address the common concept that peasants share about material goods. The peasants believe valued material images in the world are in limited supply and other peoples¹ possession of these goods is at their loss.

Nash received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago and has conducted anthropological field research in Mexico, Burma, the United States and Bolivia. She has worked on problems of women workers in the international division of labor, on the impact of globalization on local communities, and on indigenous rights, most recently in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, where peasants have been engaged in a new social and political movement to air their grievances. She is perhaps best known for her work on the tin miners of Bolivia, published in her book "We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines."

The Early Childhood Education Committee of the Federation of North Texas Area Universities will host its 2004 Spring Symposium on Tuesday, April 6 at Texas Woman's University (TWU) with keynote speaker Dr. Lillian Katz. Dr. Katz, an internationally respected authority on early childhood education and parenting, is professor emerita of early childhood education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The symposium will be conducted in the Multipurpose Classroom and Laboratory (MCL) Building, located off Bell Avenue. A graduate seminar is scheduled from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. in room 812. The keynote address will be from 6:30 to 8 p.m. in the MCL Auditorium. Graduate students may attend both the seminar and the keynote address for $5. Cost for the keynote address is $5 for students and $10 for all others.

Registration is scheduled from 4 to 4:30 p.m. and 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. in the MCL foyer. For more information, call the TWU Department of Family Sciences at (940) 898-2685.

The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Consultants' Network is presenting Mike Shea, the COO of Biznet Software on Monday, April 12 at 6:15 p.m. in the Holiday Inn Select Richardson, located at 1655 N. Central Expressway. The presentation is entitled "Challenges and Triumphs of Developing Small Businesses." There is a $5 for IEEE members and a $10 charge for non-members which includes a buffet. For more information, see www.ieee.org/dallascn

The Dallas Section of IEEE (INstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) is presenting Joe Costantino, the president of Einstein's Eyes who will give a talk entitled "The War on Spam" on Tuesday, April 13 at 6:30 pm. In the Holiday Inn Select Richardson, located at 1655 N. Central Expressway.

Joe Costantino has been in the web business since 1999. As president of Einstein's Eyes, a Richardson-based web design and hosting company, his company has been responsible for managing and working on over 100 sites. Joe's mission is to eliminate spam for all his clients. Joe has been in the Dallas area since 1991. Previous to being in the web business, Joe was a software engineer working in a variety of projects with TI, Raytheon and E-Systems.

All Section meetings are free of charge, and open to all interested in attending. For more information call Dr. Mark Allen, IEEE Activities Chair 972-747-1490 mark.allen@ieee.org.

The University of Texas at Austin is hosting an ethics conference on April 16-17 in the Lyndon B. Johnson Auditorium on campus.

In the wake of a rash of ethics scandals, this conference will consider from a variety of perspectives the claims of universal values in guiding moral instruction. The three areas to be covered in the conference are:

The Problem and the Challenge:
The lack of coherent and observed societal ethics revealed by business and other scandals challenges our culture to consider the role of education in responding to the current ethics crisis.

The Viability of Different Universal Theories:
What sorts of claims and warrants can any system or any synthesis of systems posit for a set of universal principles to respond to the ethical demands of our times?

Foundations of Ethical Pedagogy:
Is an ethical pedagogy centered on universal principles possible in our age? What are the theoretical or practical constraints on such a project?

To assess contemporary concerns and evaluate the shape of the communications industry of tomorrow the Global Communications Strategy Forum is being organized by the School of Management at The University of Texas at Dallas. It will be held on the campus of The University of Texas at Dallas on May 5-7, 2004.

This forum is designed to assist senior executives in getting engaged in debates that provide strategy shaping and policy making skills with an opportunity to learn how the sector is reacting to current policies. If you are an entrepreneur or investor and are still wondering where to place bets this forum will shed light on where the industry is headed. If you are an academic the forum will help you understand the contemporary phenomena that impact industry evolution and the contours of corporate and business level strategies. If you are a network operator or service provider you will get to know what technologies to invest in and where the markets are heading or what services or products might look promising.

Scheduled speakers include Professor C.K. Prahalad of the University of Michigan and Professor Gerry Faulhaber of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania

Find more information about the forum see http://som.utdallas.edu/gcsf. To download a PDF version of the program please go to the weblink: http://som.utdallas.edu/gcsf/program.

The Center for Intelligent Supply Networks in The University of Texas at Dallas School of Management is offering a Certificate in Supply Chain Management. This three-month program begins on May 14 and ends July 24. The program highlights include:
-Focuses on end to end supply chain
- Fast track certificate on completion of six modules of two days each in about three months
- Convenient schedule for working professionals with Friday and Saturday classes that meet two weekends each month
- Industry site visit

The program costs $3600 if registration is complete by March 31 and $4200 starting April 1. Individual classes are $950 each.

To learn more and register http://som.utdallas.edu/c4isn/c4isn_programs.htm

The ACM SIGGRAPH International Conference on Virtual-Reality Continuum and its Applications in the Industry (VRCAI 2004) will be a forum for researchers, educators, developers and users to share the latest development of the state-of the-art technology in Virtual Reality Continuum. Special emphasis will be placed on growing application areas in Defense and Military Science, Life Science, Design and Engineering, Education and Entertainment. The conference will be held at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore from June 16-18. For more information, see www.seagraph.org/vrcai2004.