IEEE Boston Section

Entrepreneurs’ Network Attendees will have the option to join us in-person at Lasell University, Newton, MA or online via Zoom. Most of your prospects determine who they’ll buy from before they even contact you. Buyers go to the web and search or seek recommendations from word-of-mouth. Sellers of products or services should become publishers of content appropriate for their audiences and distribute it widely. A panel of marketing communication professionals will help you understand what to share and where so that prospects, prospective employees, and/or investors find you. Among the topics to be discussed are social media platforms, search engine optimization and marketing, PR, and how AI can be applied to email marketing. You will learn when to make or outsource (copywriting, multimedia, podcasts, etc.) based on your existing material, your capabilities, and budget. Event Schedule 7:00 PM ET – Introduction – ENET Chairperson’s announcements 7:10 PM ET – eMinute Pitch – Up to 3 Startup pitches 7:25 PM ET – Expert Panel – 4 expert speakers on the night’s topic 8:10 PM ET – Q & A – Moderator and Audience Q & A with the speakers 8:30 PM ET – Networking – Panelists will be available afterward for responses to individual questions. Additional information and registration Speakers Mark O’Toole – Consultant Mark works with businesses to establish their rallying cries, improve their storytelling, and explore technologies and channels to best share company stories. A gold medal award winner from the Content Marketing Institute for his team’s viral SlideShare about looking for your first job out of college, Mark believes a strong story coupled with exploration of content distribution is under-utilized by businesses. A lifelong Massachusetts native, Mark has experience across PR and marketing disciplines. He works with technology brands, especially in robotics and automation, and cleantech and medtech businesses among others. Mark is also deeply immersed in Greater Boston’s cultural and tourism industry, serving as chair of the board for the iconic Freedom Trail. Brittany Di Capua – Founder, The Boston Food Journal Brittany started The Boston Food Journal in late 2015. With a degree in biomedical engineering and a background in software, she wanted to create a platform that combined her skills and experience in technology with her long-time love of food. When she moved to Boston in 2014, she was enamored by the authentic food scene and on a complete whim started The Boston Food Journal. In late 2019, Brittany resigned from working the corporate 9-5 to pursue the Boston Food Journal and launch her boutique digital marketing agency, Eleven Seven Media. At Eleven Seven Media, Brittany and her team craft custom digital strategies for clients across multiple verticals, leveraging both creative expertise and analytical insights. Angela Pitter – CEO, LiveWire Collaborative Angela Pitter is the founder and CEO of LiveWire Collaborative, a digital marketing consultancy. We collaborate with clients to build comprehensive solutions that help them find their target communities and convert them into customers. Our superpower is helping business owners understand how their digital footprint shows up for their customers and clients and where it isn’t showing up so they can close the gaps and find the people who need their help most. LiveWire Collaborative offers various services, including Online Strategy Development and Implementation for mid-size businesses, Social Media Analysis, Facebook Ads, and Email Marketing. Additionally, LiveWire Collaborative specializes in social media training for corporations and organizations, both onsite and virtual. Previously featured on the TV series Chronicle, WCVB, Angela is a highly sought-after speaker who has personally trained thousands of CEOs, business owners, and consultants worldwide on her signature LinkedIn Influencer framework. She is the recipient of numerous awards and was recently recognized by the Charles River Regional Chamber of Commerce and GetKonnected as one of the Top 50 Most Influential Business People of Color. She is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and holds both her M.S. in Administration and B.S. in Computer Engineering from Boston University. Angela currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Charles River Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Moderator & Organizer

Howard Sholkin – VP, ENET

Howard Sholkin has several decades of marketing communication experience across industry sectors. Since 2018, he has served as President of Newton Community Pride, a non-profit supporting a few dozen events in the city where he is a lifelong resident. In 2014, he formed Sholkin Consulting to deliver digital marketing services to technology and financial services companies. He also served on the adjunct faculty of Boston University and Lasell College for five years. In 2003, he was hired as director of corporate communications at International Data Group (IDG) where he served Founder Pat McGovern. Sholkin later became director of communication and marketing programs for the CEO of IDG Communications, a global technology media and events subsidiary. IDG brands include Computerworld, PCWorld, Macworld, and CIO. Sholkin has held senior marketing and communication positions at technology product and services companies such as Computervision; Technology Concepts, a subsidiary of Bell Atlantic; Corporate Software; and, Digital Equipment Corp./Compaq. He was a columnist for PR News and for Personal Branding magazine, one of the first publications on social media. Since 1990, Sholkin has been active in the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) where he once served as president of the Boston chapter. Currently, he is co-chair of the national PRSA Investment Committee. He serves on the boards of three non-profits: Newton Community Pride, Boston Entrepreneurs Network (ENET) and Temple Shalom of Newton.

Computer Society and GBC/ACM

Location:  MIT Room 32-G449 (Kiva) and online via Zoom

Speaker:  Kevin Esvelt

Please register in advance for this seminar even if you plan to attend
in person at:

https://acm-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/1416829920200/WN_5PoH3WWnRgSS6cImHyr6yQ

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Indicate on the registration form if you plan to attend in person. This will help us determine whether the room is close to reaching capacity.

We may make some auxiliary material such as slides and access to the recording available after the seminar to people who have registered.

Printing custom DNA sequences is essential to scientific and biomedical research, but the technology can be used to build plagues as well as cures. Just as ink printers recognize and reject attempts to counterfeit money, DNA synthesizers and assemblers should deny requests to make viral DNA that could be used to ignite another pandemic. There are three complications. First, we don’t need to update printers to deal with newly discovered currencies, whereas we’ll constantly learn of new viruses and other biological threats.  Second, anti-counterfeiting specifications on a local printer can’t be extracted and used to help terrorists – unlike DNA blueprints for hazards. Third, a list of all the DNA orders placed by a biotech company could paint a detailed portrait of its R&D program, so any screening system must protect the privacy of each customer’s orders as reliably as their banks safeguards their finances. Cryptography, the foundation of modern computer security, can do the same for synthesis screening. We will discuss SecureDNA, an internationally developed and fully automated system capable of securely screening all DNA synthesis that will be made freely available by the end of 2023.

Bio:  Kevin Esvelt is Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, NEC Career Development Professor of Computer and Communications and director of the Sculpting Evolution group at the MIT Media Lab. His group invents new ways to study and influence the evolution of ecosystems.

He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University for inventing a synthetic microbial ecosystem to rapidly evolve useful biomolecules, and subsequently helped pioneer the development of CRISPR, a powerful new method of genome engineering.

In 2013, Esvelt was the first to identify the potential for CRISPR “gene drive” systems to alter wild populations of organisms. Recognizing the implications of an advance that could enable individual scientists to alter the shared environment, he and his colleagues chose to break with scientific tradition by revealing their findings and calling for open discussion and safeguards before building the first CRISPR-based gene drive system and demonstrating
reversibility in the laboratory.

An outspoken advocate of sharing research plans to accelerate discovery and improve safety, Esvelt’s MIT lab seeks to accelerate beneficial advances while safeguarding biotechnology against mistrust and misuse. Projects include building catalytic platforms for directed evolution, pioneering new ways of developing ecotechnologies with the
guidance of local communities, developing early-warning systems to reliably detect any catastrophic biological threat, applying cryptographic methods to enable secure and universal DNA synthesis screening, and advising policymakers on how best to mitigate global catastrophic biorisks.

His work has been published in Nature and Science, covered by the New York Times and Washington Post, and featured on Last Week Tonight and the Netflix special Unnatural Selection.

This joint meeting of the Boston Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society and GBC/ACM will be hybrid (in person and online), part of getting back to normal after the COVID-19 lockdown.

Up-to-date information about this and other talks is available online at https://ewh.ieee.org/r1/boston/computer/.

You can sign up to receive updated status information about this talk and informational
emails about future talks at https://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/ieee-cs, our self-administered mailing list.

Robotics & Automation Society and Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society

Registration:  https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/360942

From the development of foundational state space estimation tools like the Kalman filter to state of the art machine learning techniques for sensor fusion and decision making, probabilistic models and reasoning algorithms are the “lingua franca” for modern robotics and autonomous systems. The COHRINT Lab at CU develops and leverages probabilistic AI in new and unique ways to tackle fundamental research questions for current and futuristic systems. Dr. Nisar Ahmed will highlight his lab’s recent work on human-machine/robot interaction for collaborative information gathering and reasoning, using probabilistic Bayesian state estimation and decision-making algorithms. These methods not only plug in seamlessly to existing autonomy architectures, but also exploit the ability of human collaborators to provide semantic data (via user-friendly interfaces) that is rich with useful “out of band” information for autonomous platforms. In essence, these methods open the door to “soft re-programming” of autonomous reasoning from the outside by end-users (who are not robotics experts or computer scientists). Aerospace applications such as integrated UAS surveillance/reconnaissance, UAS-enabled wilderness search and rescue, and remote robotic space exploration will be demonstrated and discussed.

Dr. Nisar Ahmed

Dr. Nisar Ahmed is an Associate Professor and H.J. Smead Faculty Fellow in the Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is a member of the Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles (RECUV) and directs the Cooperative Human-Robot Intelligence (COHRINT) Lab. He received his B.S. in Engineering from Cooper Union in 2006, his Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University in 2012 through an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, and he was a postdoctoral research associate in the Cornell Autonomous Systems Lab from 2012 to 2014. He was awarded the 2011 AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference Best Paper Award; an ASEE Air Force Summer Faculty Fellowship in 2014; and the 2018 Aerospace Control and Guidance Systems Committee (ACGSC) Dave Ward Memorial Lecture Award. His work has been supported by the Army, Air Force, DARPA, Navy, NASA, Space Force, and multiple industry sponsors. He has organized several international workshops and symposia on autonomous robotics, sensor fusion, and human-machine interaction. He is a Member of the IEEE and the AIAA Intelligent Systems Technical Committee, and he is the CU Site Director of the NSF IUCRC Center for Aerial Autonomy, Mobility, and Sensing (CAAMS).

 

Entrepreneurs’ Network

Information for this event will be posted soon. 

Event Schedule

7:00 PM ET – Introduction – ENET Chairperson’s announcements

7:10 PM ET – eMinute Pitch – Up to 3 Startup pitches

7:25 PM ET – Expert Panel – 4 expert speakers on the night’s topic

8:10 PM ET – Q & A – Moderator and Audience Q & A with the speakers

8:30 PM ET – Networking – Panelists will be available afterward for responses to individual questions.

 

Magnetics Society

Speaker – Xiaoyan Zhong – TRACE EM Unit and Department of Materials Science and Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, P. R. China

The atomic-level knowledge of local spin configuration of magnetic materials is of great importance to predict and control their physical properties. However, it is highly challenging to experimentally characterize magnetic properties of such materials with atomic scale spatial resolution. One of the best options to push the spatial resolution of magnetic imaging lies in the electron energy-loss magnetic chiral dichroism [1], which is also called electron magnetic circular dichroism (EMCD). Physically, X-ray magnetic circular dichroism (XMCD) and EMCD share the same underlying physics in which the angular momentum transferred during X-ray absorption or inelastic electron scattering can selectively excite magnetic sublevels in atoms. The structured electron beams generated through interference of suitably phased plane waves can produce beams with orbital angular momentum. Electron beams can be easily focused compared with X-rays, allowing for atomic scale magnetism to be probed. Previously, we have found a strong EMCD signal in transition metal oxides allowing them to use standing wave methods to identify the different spin states of Fe atoms with site specificity [2].

In principle EMCD can offer higher spatial resolution and greater depth sensitivity due to the short de Broglie wavelength and penetration of high-energy electrons compared to XMCD. Recently by using EMCD and achromatic electron microscopy, we are able to access the magnetic circular dichroism with atomic plane resolution [3]. Combining with advanced capability of structural and chemical imaging by using aberration-corrected transmission electron microscopy, all the information including magnetic polarization, atomic configurations and chemical states can be simultaneously accessed from the very same sample region. In the examples of complex oxides e.g. Sr₂FeMoO₆ [3], nanocomposite Sr₂Fe_1+xRe_1-xO₆ [4] and antiphase boundary of NiFe₂O₄ [5], we would like to show how to achieve atomic scale magnetic, chemical and structural information and understand the structure-property relationship of these magnetic materials at the atomic level.

Dr. Xiaoyan Zhong is currently an associate Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at City University of Hong Kong. He received his B.S. degree in Materials Science and

Engineering in 2001 and PhD degree in Materials Science and Engineering in 2007 at Tsinghua University. After three-year postdoctoral research at Argonne National Laboratory in USA, he began his independent academic career as assistant professor and associate professor at Tsinghua University from 2010 to 2020. He joined Department of Materials Science and Engineering at City University of Hong Kong since May 2020. His current research interests involve methodology development of transmission electron microscopy and spectroscopy and their application in solving new challenges in magnetic materials. Recently Zhong's group has developed the quantitative atomic-plane resolved electron magnetic

circular dichroism method and pushed spatial resolution of magnetic circular dichroism into atomic level by achromatic electron microscopy, which was published in the peer-reviewed journals such as Nature Materials, Nature Communications and Advanced Functional Materials. He received “Ten Major Scientific and Technological Progress of China's Colleges and Universities” awarded by Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China and the Excellent Young Scholar

References

[1] Schattschneider, P., et al., Detection of magnetic circular dichroism using a transmission electron microscope. Nature, 2006, 441, 486-488.

[2] Wang, Z.Q., et al., Quantitative experimental determination of site-specific magnetic structures by transmitted electrons. Nature Communications, 2013, 4, 1395.

[3] Wang, Z.C., et al., Atomic scale imaging of magnetic circular dichroism by achromatic electron microscopy. Nature Materials, 2018, 17, 221-225.

[4] Ho, P.-L., et al., Effect of cation ratio and order on magnetic circular dichroism in the double perovskite Sr₂Fe_1+xRe_1-xO₆. Ultramicroscopy, 2018. 193. 137-142.

[5] Li, Z., et al., Atomic Structure and Electron Magnetic Circular Dichroism of Individual Rock Salt Structure Antiphase Boundaries in Spinel Ferrites. Advanced Functional Materials