Greetings to all ECE (or related disciplines) department heads/chairs and welcome to the Fall 2010 edition of ECEDHA newsletter. These are challenging times for all science and engineering departments as enrollment, budget, hiring, teaching/research, accreditation, infrastructure and resources issues keep everybody busy but also we find opportunities for continuously improving our offerings and undergraduate/graduate programs. The board of directors met during July in Chicago, Dr. Bing Chen and the organizing committee are putting together another superb program for the 2011 Annual (March) meeting in Phoenix, Arizona. We are happy to report that the National Science Foundation is supporting ECEDHA again for organizing another workshop (Electric Energy and Power) in Washington DC, Nov. 1-3, 2010. We are experiencing growing interests in programs offered by ECEDHA and IEC in collaboration with professional societies such as IEEE and ASEE. The IEC's new office space and re-design of ECEDHA Web pages and extremely hard-working staff (including Michelle and Linda) make the organization to serve our membership with greater efficiency. We have frequent conference calls (sometimes weekly) to discuss upcoming workshops, meetings, conferences, a very hardworking board of directors is constantly looking for ways/means to improve the services/programs enabling our ECE/CS Department chairs to perform their duties efficiently and effectively. I know as ABET PEV when I visit different programs I see how difficult the job of chairs/heads are trying to continuously improve quality of their respective programs despite many difficulties and challenges that all schools are facing as we start the second decade in the 21st Century. With Ed's good leadership this year and Bing's hard-work on the 2011 program we welcome Gary as secretary/treasurer of ECEDHA as we move forward to accomplish our goals and objectives.

Best regards,

Hossein Mousavinezhad
Professor and Chair, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department,
Idaho State University
2010-2011 Editor, The ECEDHA Source

IEEE Real World Engineering Projects: Improving retention of first-year students

Could your department improve their retention of first-year students? The IEEE Real World Engineering Project (RWEP) program is a faculty resource designed to help with retention of students in electrical engineering, computer engineering, computer science, electrical engineering technology, and biomedical engineering.

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Model-Based Design, Industry to Academia
By Tom Gaudette

Talk Title: Innovation and System Perspectives via Model-Based Design

What can academia do to help prepare engineering students for industry? To answer that question, it helps to understand how industry design practices have evolved over the years to keep pace with advances in technology. The automotive industry provides an illustrative example. In the early 1970s, the most complex system in most cars was its radio. Today's automobiles feature exceptionally complex electrical systems, including adaptive controls, power management, and entertainment system to name just a few. By some estimates, more than 80% of the design time for cars today is spent on electrical components and integration of these components.

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Canada: CHECE/DGEGI               Central States Region: CSECEDHA

Western Region (WECEDHA)

ECEDHA has received NSF (ECCS Division) funding to offer a workshop for educational programs development in the growing area of Electric Energy and Power Systems (more information will be sent out from ECEDHA HQ to department chairs and interested faculty.) The dates are Oct. 31-Nov. 3, 2010, Westin Hotel, Arlington, Virginia. As you all know there are a lot of activities related to research and development regarding futuristic smart grid for generation, transmission and delivery of electric power to (smart) homes that are being designed now and in the next few years. Department of Energy (DOE) has several calls for proposals in this important area and ECE Department chairs had a lot of discussion on the subject during the Annual Meeting in Clearwater Beach, Florida this past March. As a result the ECEDHA leadership with help from colleagues in Canadian universities put together an NSF funding proposal for the first of the Energy/Power workshops to discuss with university faculty, industry and government the strategies for improving/re-design of the traditional power engineering curricula. Of course there are several universities that have on-going programs in these areas with a lot of demand by students to offer new courses in the emerging areas of renewable sources of energy. Another area of concern to be addressed in the workshop and other gatherings is the future of the workforce in this critical area for economic growth.

There is still time to renew your 2010 ECEDHA Membership online at www.ecedha.org. ECEDHA's new online system has been designed to allow department heads to easily download invoices and pay membership renewal fees online with a credit card.

Act now to take advantage of membership benefits including regional meetings, job postings, access to the ECEDHA Annual Survey results, and much more!

ECEDHA is collecting department information in a new ECEDHA online directory. Please visit www.ecedha.org to access your user account. Update your department information and register the department head and up to two colleagues (i.e. business office, department administrator) who can access the department's account to make payments and access other membership benefits as they are added. The directory information will be available online after the ECEDHA administrator processes the updates.

Captured live at the ECEDHA Annual Conference, ECE Spotlight Sessions offer the opportunity to view short corporate presentations and to learn more about what these companies can offer you.

Featured ECE Spotlight Sessions:

Presenter: Presenter: Joe Harris, General Manager, Digilent Inc. View Digilent ECE Spotlight

Presenter: Sunny Ray, Academic Solutions Advisor View The Quanser ECE Spotlight

IISM 2010

I had the opportunity to attend the 2010 International Conference on Intelligent Information Systems and Management (IISM 2010) hosted by RVS Engineering College, Coimbatore, India to give a keynote presentation on Wireless Communications and Networks (co-authored by Dr. Steve Chiu, EECS Department, Idaho State University and Dr. Wen-Chen Hu, CS Department, University of North Dakota. (see photos below)

Other keynote speakers included Dr. Subra Ganesan, Oakland University and Mr. Ramki Iyer, US Army TACOM.