Innocenti Strings

Enjoy some beautiful music by Innocenti Strings (https://www.innocentistrings.com/) as we gather together to celebrate the Magic of Engineering. This program has been customized for this event and is a surprise. 

If you recognize the pieces played, and if you write them down, the list might be useful later on in our banquet. 

Biography:

https://www.innocentistrings.com/post/what-instruments-are-in-a-string-quartet-arrangement

In the mid 1700’s, the string quartet was invented, and since then it has remained one of the most popular choices of entertainment. Composer Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) quickly caught on to this new trend in classical music, having composed 69 works for string quartet and is known as the “Father of the String Quartet.” The power of this combination of instruments is even stronger today. Please join us for coffee and appetizers and let the music speak to you.

Joe Mystic Magic

Magic is described as the power of apparently influencing the course of events by using mysterious or supernatural forces. Engineering reassures us that nothing happens outside the bounds of physics, that the universe is knowable, controllable, and predictable.

What does engineering look like to people outside our profession?

When we do it well enough, it looks like Magic. 

After our banquet buffet lunch, please be entertained by our very special guest, Joe Mystic. 

Thomas

Go Big or Go Home: The First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable and the Troubled Birth of EE

We electrical engineers are the children of a failure so colossal and traumatic that we don't even talk about it. American paper magnate Cyrus West Field decided one day in the 1850s to span the Atlantic with a telegraph cable; it was the Victorian era's moon-shot. Amplifiers would not exist for another half-century, so success would require mastery of technologies not yet developed. Regrettably, the project's technical head was a medical doctor, so hilarity ensued. A British board of inquiry convened to assess the inevitable disaster noted that the "electrical arts" lacked a vocabulary even to describe the failure quantitatively. William Thomson was eventually named the new technical lead, and drove the project to final success in 1866. The volt, ohm and ampere were formally defined shortly thereafter and the profession of electrical engineering was born. Thomson -- arguably the first professional electrical engineer -- became Lord Kelvin, and EEs have been busy making mischief ever since.

Biography:

BIOGRAPHY
Thomas Lee received his degrees from MIT, where his 1989 thesis described the first CMOS radio. He established the Stanford Microwave Integrated Circuits Laboratory in 1994, after having worked at Analog Devices, Rambus and other companies. He's helped design PLLs for several AMD and DEC microprocessors, and founded Matrix Semiconductor, ZeroG Wireless and Ayla Networks, among others. He is a Ho-Am (Samsung) Prize laureate, an IEEE and Packard Foundation Fellow, has won "Best Paper" awards at CICC and ISSCC; an Honoris Causa doctorate from U. of Waterloo (2013); and the 2021 IEEE Gustav Kirchhoff award. He was awarded a U.S. Secretary of Defense Medal (2012) for his work as Director of DARPA's MTO, and served as a Director at Xilinx up to its acquisition by AMD in 2022. He owns thousands of vaccum tubes, hundreds of oscilloscopes, and countless obsolete semiconductors. No one, including himself, quite knows why.