Valuable Sessions Continue on Day 2 of the 2019 ECC Conference

Joseph Gulla highlights sessions from the 2019 ECC conference.

In this post, I am sharing with you the complete program for Day 2 of the 11th Annual Enterprise Computing Community (ECC) conference. I am also including my notes in the form of a brief description for the sessions that I attended, including both the keynote and different concurrent sessions. The sessions on Tuesday were interesting and valuable and I didn’t have to worry about my own presentation as I had already delivered it.   

Morning Keynote Speaker

Prior to the first keynote speaker, we were invited to a hot breakfast at the great hall overlooking the Hudson River of the student center. Breakfast was sponsored by Mainline Information Systems. Our Tuesday morning keynote speaker was Jianying Hu, Ph.D and an IBM Fellow. She is the global science leader for Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Healthcare from IBM Research. Her presentation was titled “Computational Methods for Next Generation Healthcare.”
 
Dr. Hu’s message was about precision in medicine by taking account of the individual variability. Data has a big impact because, if you have the data, it is the way to identify and understand that individual variability. AI has a special role in this because it can be the basis for novel AI algorithms for learning and reasoning that can lead the way to better outcomes.
 
For more, please see her presentation. 

Morning Concurrent Sessions

For the first session, I attended  “Meet the IBM Z Ecosystem Team—Speed Round Edition” by Christy Schroeder, Theresa Hans, Misty Decker and Tina Tian from IBM. The focus of the talk was building the Z ecosystem with academia, clients, community and other related initiatives. This includes these main ideas:

• IBM Z Academic Initiative—Educating the next generation of Z talent
• Enabling clients to cultivate Z talent—ibm.biz/zskills
• Invigorating the IBM Z Community—IBM is focused on helping the IBM Z community to connect, accelerate and expand   

For more, please see their presentation. 
 
Other presentations at this time included “MUSE: Marist Universal Student Experience” by Eitel Lauría, Edward Presutti and Maria Kapogiannis from Marist College and “Facial Recognition and Automatic Self Unlocking Door” by Hema Chauhan, Deepthi Srinivasan, and Cindy Rodriguez from Marist College.
                                                           
For the second morning session, I attended “Helping Others MASTER THE MAINFRAME: How to Host a M­TM Meetup” by Misty Decker from IBM. Master the Mainframe is the world’s largest student mainframe competition. This unique, virtual contest is open globally to high school and college students to progressively teach mainframe skills in a real-world enterprise-computing environment. Since 2005, this competition has opened doors to amazing careers the students never knew were possible.
 
For more about the topic, please see her presentation. 
 
Other presentations at this time included  “History of AI at IBM and How IBM is Leveraging Watson for Intellectual Property” by Thomas Fleischman and Susan Hallen of IBM and “Secure Smart System Office” by Heesang Kim, Xiao Lin Chen, Mdzafar Sadak, and Aparicio Carranza from New York City College of Technology—CUNY.
 
For the 11:40 a.m. to 12:10 p.m. time slot, I attended “Creating a New Educational Tool for Instructing Orthopedic Manual Therapy with Fabric Sensor Technology” by John McGee, James Rauh, Donald Schwartz, Tyler Rimaldi and Daniel Grossman from Marist College. The main technology discussed was the sensor fabric, which was developed by Studio1 Labs that contains 30 sensors inside the fabric on a 5×6 grid. The sensors output a voltage, which increases with pressure applied. The values are unaffected by the bending of the fabric. This is the basic way it works. The fabric is shown below.

This fabric and the supporting IT helps to address challenges in educating students of how to apply the proper skilled intervention to the joint to relieve pain and normalize joint mobility.
 
For more, please see their presentation. 
 
Other presentations at this time included “What’s Behind Malware that Infects Healthcare Facilities?” by
Robert Cannistra of Marist College and “Shared Memory Multicore PageRank Estimation” by Piyush Garewal, Sindhu Kotapati and Teneka Opuba—from Marist College.
 
At 12:10 p.m. we had lunch: Great Hall overlooking the Hudson River on the second floor of the student center. The conference was sponsored by Broadcom, Inc.

Afternoon Keynote Speaker

After lunch, keynote speaker Gabriel Bell, a senior manager of Data and Analytics at Unigroup gave a talk titled “Can a Single Source of Truth be a Single Point of Failure?” His talk focused on data and data science. He discussed that data science needs to be more flexible and that data itself is not a problem but is however growing too fast to manage. With a focus on the need to support change, he indicated that it should be business as usual for data scientist—a constant. In addition, he spoke of the need for frequent communications within the community interested in making use of the data. I am not including a link to his presentation because I could not get the presentation to load from Prezi.

Afternoon Student Panel

After the 2:00 p.m. coffee break and technology showcase, there was a student panel focused on sharing of student success stories including a discussion to increase awareness of the needs and challenges of underrepresented student groups in technology to develop programs and curriculum to encourage and support underrepresented students to pursue and complete degrees in technology.
 
Ron Coleman from Marist College moderated the session. The panel included six students:

1. Delroy Mathieson, Marist College
2. Kaylin Moss, Marist College
3. Maria Khalitov, Bergen Community College
4. Juan F. Rueda, Central New Mexico Community College
5. Bria Bynum, North Carolina A&T State University
6. Emery Sutherland, Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute

This was one of the best sessions of the conference. The students answered questions like:

• “How did you get started in computing?”—In school, my Dad was in IT and a class in high school changed everything
• “Who was behind you?”—My parents, both went to school and I had a mentor in high school
• “What advice do you have for incoming freshmen?”—Be yourself, women are different so don’t undersell yourself
• “Any program that motivated you?”—Programs just for women are good (needed) also more fun in programs is useful
• “What has been your response to failure?”—Learning more, just keep trying, prepare yourself to fail understanding that its is OK, you will get better at it
• “What exposure did you have to open source?”—Mixed results with bugs but has been getting better with time
• “What will you look for in a job?”—I’ll try to use career fairs as meeting people is the better than online sites. You want employers to look into you face and see your curiosity and interest. I am looking for a job with a clear mission that I can get behind.
• “What can be done to prepare you for ways to find a job?”—Have a center at the university with that clear focus. Need a way to help discover our strengths. A course would be helpful—how to dress, talk, build a resume, etc.
• “What is your dream job?”—A place with a diverse environment with people like me where they accept my real self. Looking for a job where problem solving is the focus. Looking for a job that has a positive impact on people.

At 3:10 p.m., we heard closing remarks by Roger Norton, dean of Marist College. His closing remarks made us realize and appreciate all that we had experienced over the last two days.

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