IEEE Smart Tech Workshop, Huntsville

Posted on November 12, 2011 by Tommy McGuire
Labels: conference

Last weekend, I spent a couple of days going to the IEEE Smart Tech metro-area workshop in Huntsville, AL. The Metropolitan Area Workshop is a traveling conference sponsored by the IEEE Power and Energy Society, IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Communications Society, and IEEE-USA, with tracks on software engineering, wireless communications, smart power grid and, in our case, career assistance. In Huntsville, it was November 4-5 at the Von Braun Center.

Overall, the workshop was pretty decent. About 120 people attended; breakfast (pastries), lunch (boxed sandwiches), and a reception with enough food for dinner were provided; the price for IEEE members was $119; and there were no major catastrophes. (And I'm not just saying that because I set up the wireless access point that seems to have survived pretty well. Go DD-WRT!)

Software engineering essentials

Friday, I went to the "Software engineering essentials" track session, which was billed as:

Designed for software development professionals interested in confirming knowledge of industry-standard software practices.

The reality was not quite as expected. The class was taught by Dr. Tom Hilburn, Professor Emeritus of Software Engineering and Distinguished Engineering Professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. It briefly reviewed the following Knowledge Areas:

There were more details on:

The workshop was focused on the CSDP Assessment Course. The detailed information about requirements and testing was presented by going through the assessment course sections on those KAs. As a result, the course was described by one participant as an "advertisement" for the assessment course.

As a result, it failed as both an introduction to the essentials of software engineering and as a preparation for the CSDP. Like the Head First... books I have read, it was too focused on the assessment (in this case) to work as a tutorial on the given topic. And, because it spent so much time on the detailed topics, there was no time or effort put into trying to cover the scope of the CSDP.

The two images are taken from CMU/SEI technical report CMU/SEI-96-TR-004 / ESC-TR-96-004, A Mature Profession of Software Engineering, Gary Ford and Norman E. Gibbs, January 1996. The first, Figure 1-2, was was used by Dr. Hilburn as an illustration of a profession for software engineering; the second, Figure 1-3, is a little clearer about what is going on.

Introduction to the smart grid

The course I attended on Saturday was another kettle of fish. It's billing was:

Recommended for all technology professionals

The class not only covered all that, it was entertaining to boot. The class was presented by Jerry Melcher of Quanta Technology and included a stack of random factoids:

Unfortunately, since I know almost nothing about electrical power technology, most of the details of the class were not terribly useful for me.

active directory applied formal logic ashurbanipal authentication books c c++ comics conference continuations coq data structure digital humanities Dijkstra eclipse virgo electronics emacs goodreads haskell http java job Knuth ldap link linux lisp math naming nimrod notation OpenAM osgi parsing pony programming language protocols python quote R random REST ruby rust SAML scala scheme shell software development system administration theory tip toy problems unix vmware yeti
Member of The Internet Defense League
Site proudly generated by Hakyll.