As we ring in 2022, there are a number of remarkable innovations that have happened across all engineering fields that we would like to share. 2021 was an unprecedented year. We broke new grounds and boundaries of science engineering and innovation were stretched. So the choices are plenty.
 
Our pick of top 5 advances this year to highlight for our readers
 
1. AI/ML : Artificial Intelligence solves problems using neural networks which are based on partial differential equations that are hard to solve. Two new neural networks - DeepONet and Fourier neural operators make this easier.
2. Spacetech: As we watch James Webb Space Telescope launched in space it is rewriting cosmic history. 
3. QuantumComputing: Google, using a quantum computer, created a time crystal that would flip back and forth between two distinct states forever, with no energy lost or gained. This violates the second law of thermodynamics
4. Neuroengineering : Rethinking how the brain works: there is not a right brain/left brain distinction anymore. It seems both halves are actually connected.
5. Cleantech: Green Steel plants that emit less than 2% of carbon dioxide emissions as compared to 7-9%.
 
Additionally, please enjoy our curated list of more interesting links to explore advances in science and engineering further and deeper:
Year in Math and Computer Science
Year in Physics
Year in Biology
Deep Space Exploration with JWST
Best of What’s new with Popular Science 
Engineering Innovations 
Interesting Engineering Highlights 
Ten People who shaped Science  in 2021 
 
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Article by Amrish Chopra - Life member from  ASEI SiliconValley . Amrish is a Senior R&D manager with VMWARE and has over 25 years of experience in high tech industry
He has been a founding member of the ASEI News and Editorial team that brings out regular blogs and publications
 
 

It is dubbed as the single most complicated  project that has perhaps been attempted till date and it took over 25 years and $10B in the making! Yes, we are talking about   James Webb Space Telescope (JWST )
 
This year, every woman and man on this planet received a Christmas gift. And probably the greatest gift in the history of mankind. The gift came from NASA (along with European and Canadian Space Agencies). While the world was celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ on Dec 25, 2021, NASA launched an Ariane 5 rocket to carry JWST so that we may see the birth of the Universe- the Big Bang and the aftermath for millions of years 
 
The human-made engineering, technological and scientific marvel launched into space -JWST is the most powerful modern space telescope created and it is just beginning its month-long journey to give us the most intricate images of our universe, galaxy and solar system.
 
Over 25 years in the making through a joint effort lead by NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration along with contributions from the European Space Agency - ESA and the Canadian Space Agency | Agence spatiale canadienne, this new telescope is designed to see farther in space and, therefore, further back in time than any other telescope including the Hubble Space Telescope. The JWST primary light gathering mirror is 21 feet across, about three times bigger than Hubble, and seven times more sensitive.
 
This telescope will peer to see the longer infrared wavelength light from infant stars and galaxies from as early as 13.7 billion years ago soon after the “Big Bang” formation of our known universe about 13.8 billion years ago as well as make observations much closer to home for infrared signatures of oxygen and water on exoplanets in our own Milky Way galaxy.
 
By this coming summer, if all goes well with the various steps needed for a successful orbit, deployment and activation of the various systems, astronomers and cosmologists will start receiving data on the initial observations. 

As Bill Nelson, NASA Administrator said: "This is one-of-a-kind. It is the most advanced technology that is going to, if successful, open up secrets of the universe that will be just stupendous, if not almost overwhelming, providing a quantum leap of understanding of who we are, how we got here, what we are and how it all evolve."
 
In a sense, the JWST is a time-traveling machine that can see what happened in the universe in the distant past. Dr. Kevin Hainline, an astronomer on the JWST NIRCam science team has given a number of lectures on the project including kid friendly version here that many of you may enjoy as well. On the NASA website, we can track the JWST as it makes its way to be deployed in space near the Sun–Earth L2 Lagrange point, about 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 mi) from Earth - about 3.9 times further from us than the moon. As we wait to be “wowed” by what we learn and even more so by what we can accomplish when we put our best minds to tackle what seems impossible.

At ASEI, we celebrate the role of women in STEM and encourage DEI in workplace so  it is quite heartening to note that two out of four lead researches of the four most complex instruments (MIRI, NIRCAM, NIRSpec and NRISS) on JWST are women; Marcia Rieke, astronomy professor at the University of Arizona who worked on designing the Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam) and Gillian Wright, Director of the UK Astronomy Technology Center in Edinburgh, who worked on the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI)
 
As the world is captivated with recent advances in Aeropace - be it improving life on earth through exponentially efficient and economical space travel and  exploration  technologies or  space tourism or the possibility of colonizing Moon and Mars, ASEI is bringing some of our Aerospace experts together to conduct a one of kind event - the Aerospace Symposium for everyone. This will be the first event as part of our 34th National Convention on Jan 15th&16th , 2022 . Register now and mark your calendar. Don't miss it! 
 
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Post by Piyush Malik, President ASEI 
If you are looking to know more about the Aerospace symposium and opportunities to sponsor, feel free to reach out to Piyush or either of the Aerospace  Symposium Chairs Dr Shreekant Agrawal and Dr Ajay Kothari

 
YTE Application Deadline is now Dec 31st, 2021  See details and Apply today
 
 

The December  2021 edition of ASEI Newsletter was sent to all those who are on our mailing list till November end. In case you missed it, here is the web version. We also try to post it on our social media handles so you may want to engage with us there directly for feedback as well 
Happy reading and catching up on all that happened in the last month and what lies ahead with your society especially the elections and the Aerospace Symposium as part of upcoming ASEI 34th  National Convention!
 
ASEI is a volunteer run professional organization and we welcome your involvement. We request feedback and especially welcome any articles, blogs or ideas you would like to contribute. Please be in touch with anyone from the content/editorial team. 
 
In case you are  not receiving our emails, please check your spam/junk or promotions folder and change the settings in your mailbox to deliver ASEI emails in your in-box. If you still did not find our newsletter please send an email to info@aseiusa.org for us to investigate. 
 

Leaders who aspire to influence and shape the next generation of leaders  look for young minds to share their experience with. ASEI MentorConnect is one such avenue to build connections with leaders, drive meaningful relationships and grow your leadership muscle. The first cohort of this structured program was launched earlier this year and will continue to invest time in those looking to learn from established mentors in the industry. MentorConnect is a benefit that the professional ASEI members can avail of every year  getting matched with a mentor from their own industry and is based on an initial screening process at the start of each cohort.
 
In a way mentoring is a two way street and the ASEI MentorConnect made it possible for both mentors and mentees to gain from this experience as is evident from the success stories shared by participants at the culmination of the cohort last month. Here are a few testimonials from some of our mentees this year:
 
Muthu Sivanantham (Mentor: Mani Sundarajan)
Profile: People leader with 25 years of experience
 
“Thanks to his valuable inputs and simple steps to help me with my goals setting, I was able to set these two leadership goals for this year: 
- Display leadership and make a dent in our Solution Offers for year 2021

- Promote, lead and make significant contributions in a launch of a Leadership Program that my employer launched this year
In both of the above objectives I am proud to say I had been making significant contributions. Thanks to ASEI's MentorConnect program which was a catalyst to make this happen. I would be remiss not to mention the ASEI network as a whole which is an excellent platform to network, learn from, and share knowledge with a wide variety of like minded Engineers & Science and Tech folks.”
 
Saravanan Venkatachalam (Mentor – K V Prasad)
Profile: Technical expert with 20 years of experience
 
“I have created a draft 30-60-90 day plan for leadership role (Emulation) and walked through with Prasad, with minor correction from Prasad, i have tried to adopt wherever applicable and proactively started leading without title in certain areas and which helped me to build some allies in shared services areas. I got few spirit awards from other shared service partners for value add activities and also this month there was an org announcement that going forward i will be reporting directly to my Domain CIO, which will provide me more face time with the likes of Chief Architect, Digital CTO, Business directors, CTO and CIO to learn and contribute and grow.”
 
Hemanth Aroumougam (Mentor: Abhiram Iyengar)
Profile: Recent Engineering graduate, Purdue University
 
“I really enjoyed being a part of the MentorConnect Program. My mentor was Mr. Abhiram Iyengar and I had two 1-hour sessions with him. From just the two sessions, it was a great opportunity for me to learn a lot from him. I was able to get tips to improve the structure of my resume, obtained more knowledge about good strategies to tackle the recruitment process in the US, learnt a lot about his experiences and many more.  Thank you so much for giving me the valuable opportunity to be a part of this MentorConnect Program.”
 
Ranganath Gurram (Mentor Sham Kunjur)
Profile: Manufacturing Engineer, early in career
 
“Though it is the first year, ASEI has succeeded in making sure MentorConnect serves its purpose, 'To enable professional and personal networking relationships between mentor and mentee in a safe environment to share life experiences and guidance for professional and career development.
As someone like me who is in the initial stages of the career, this program will widen the career outlook. My mentor Sham Kunjur was very welcoming and approachable. I could learn a ton from his years of experience in the industry. I gained valuable insights to shape not only my professional goals but also personal goals. Many thanks to the ASEI team for this wonderful program, my mentor Sham Kunjur for all the time and support over the last few months, and Srinivas Gavini who introduced me to ASEI !! "
 
In addition to all of these practical tips and mentee experiences, we would like to leave you with 2 reading suggestions from our esteemed mentors on leadership:
Designing your life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans
 
Invisible Women 
 
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Sai Gopisetty is an ASEI member based out of Michigan and helps with coordinating  our MentorConnect program.
 
 

ASEI continues to cheer for the success of technologists and scientists amongst the indian diaspora. Given we have 12 of the top Tech companies being led by Indians now, we can only be proud and be happy for their success which obviously has come after  a lot of hard work of these successful individuals. Our best wishes! 
Pix 1 Source: www.TOI.in 

Here is an excerpt from our best wishes sent as the news broke out earlier today: :
 
PIx 2 Source: Twitter Feed from ASEI President Piyush Malik 

Dear ASEI Members,
  
The National Board of ASEI needs to conduct its election to fill the 2022 Board of Directors open positions. In accordance with section VI.2 of the constitution, we have appointed the following Board members to the Election Committee: 
Election Committee Chairperson: Jwalant Lakhia
Election Committee Members:  Dr. Thomas Abraham &  Suresh Ladva
 
Hence, the purpose of this communication is to request nominations from the membership for the ASEI National Board of Directors. There are seven open positions that will be filled through this nomination process.
 
You can self-nominate or nominate someone else for the ASEI National Board position. If nominating someone else, please get concurrence from your nominee before submitting the nomination.
 
To be eligible to become a board member, the nominee must be an ASEI paid member in good standing for one year, must have participated in ASEI activities at local or national level, and must have exhibited leadership qualities from experiences that would add significant value to the board and ASEI. The nominee must be ready and willing to participate in all (or almost all) board meetings and contribute by participating in ASEI activities including membership of various committees of ASEI. The nominees should become familiar with ASEI Constitution and Bylaws available at www.aseiusa.org   
 
Please click here to submit your nomination. The deadline to submit nominations is now extended till December 19th, 2021.
 
Sincerely,
Executive Committee of the ASEI National Board of Directors:
Piyush Malik -         President
Jwalant Lakhia -      Vice President
Ram Ramanujam -   Treasurer
Vatsala Upadhyaya - Secretary & IT Director
 
 
 

The Nobel Prize in Physics 1930 was awarded to Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman "for his work on the scattering of light and for the discovery of the effect named after him."
 
More details on Sir CV Raman and his work from the Nobel website 
 
There is a story that we would like to share here. Dr. C.V. Raman didn't have money to buy a spectrograph. So he shot a letter to G.D. Birla stating his demand in no less clear words: "Give me money to buy a spectrograph. And if you give me the money, I promise I will bring the Nobel Prize in one year." G.D. Birla fulfilled Raman's demand. And the rest is history..
 
Dr. C.V. Raman, who's birthday is today (November 7th) , went on to become the first non-white nobel laureate in any field of science.
 
"When you want something with utmost intensity, the universe conspires in helping you get it".
#science #physics #nobelprize

Greetings!
 
Wish you a very happy and prosperous Diwali! Did you know that there's a tech industry connection in getting a USPS  Diwali stamp ? Also, did you know how technology is making Diwali really happy for small mom-and pop retailers? All this and more in our newsletter that was sent out to all members at the beginning of this month.
 
The November   2021 edition of ASEI Newsletter was sent to all those who are on our mailing list till Oct  end. In case you missed it, here is the web version.  We also try to post it on our social media handles so you may want to engage with us there directly for swift interations.
 
Happy reading and catching up on all that happened in the last month and what lies ahead with your society!
 
ASEI is a volunteer run professional organization and we welcome your involvement. We request feedback and especially welcome any articles, blogs or ideas you would like to contribute. Please be in touch with anyone from the content/editorial team. 
 
 
In case you are  not receiving our emails, please check your spam/junk or promotions folder and change the settings in your mailbox to deliver ASEI emails in your in-box. If you still did not find our newsletter please send an email to info@aseiusa.org for us to investigate. 
 

 
@ASEI is a non-profit organization dedicated to creating a network for engineers of Indian/South Asian origin to drive increased collaboration across USA and India. 
 

 
 
Leaders are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.
                                                                      --- Vince Lombardi
 

A great leader creates happier teams, drives increased productivity and is supportive of their team member’s growth. All this results in a thriving culture within any organization. The members at ASEI had the opportunity to hear from two shining examples in our community SomaSundaram (President and CEO, ChampionX) and K. Venkatesh Prasad (Ford) on Oct 24th as part of our #MentorConnect Initiative.  They shared tips and insights on how to build your own leadership muscle and engaged in a conversation with ASEI members. Below are 5 key pillars and related practical tips from their experience.
 
Before jumping into the pillars, you must be committed to this journey of transforming from a good into a great leader. That requires a degree of self-awareness to drive a baseline and identify personality traits that drive strength and those that require change. Once you are committed to the driver’s seat on this journey, you realize that a few small changes made everyday create the right behavioral patterns in you and your team to drive a better culture for your organization.
 
Pillars of Leadership
 
1 Trust: Be authentic and show up that way so your team feels safe to show up likewise. This can easily be broken through a small incident but it takes time, dedication and effort to build. 
2 Alignment: The power of a team or an organization is increased manifold once alignment is created around key values and goals
3 Values to Value Journey: While a ToDo list is important, equally important is a NotToDo list. Eliminate noise for your teams and ruthlessly prioritize. 
4 Conflict Resolution & Innovation: Respecting alternative perspectives is a must but understand that disagreements will be resolved by aligning the values of the organization with your own. These usually result in innovation in processes and products. 
5 Culture: Intentionally create an env that creates exposure to different experiences - > creates a belief system - > results in behavioral shifts
 
Our board at ASEI and their members share deep gratitude to these two leaders for sharing their time and valuable experience with our members. 
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Divya Ashok is a ASEI Lifemember and serves on the ASEI Silicon Valley Board in addition to her leadership  role at Salesforce.com 

Question: What do you get when left brained engineers and scientists meet right brained creative designers? 
Answer: A melding of logical and creative minds to bring together an inspirational event titled ASEI Design Summit.
 
On October 9th, the American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin (ASEI) convened this Design Summit with a number of academics,  authors, speakers and practitioners covering innovation in Design from multiple perspectives.
 
After a brief introduction to the organization  by ASEI executive council member Vatsala Upadhyay, and a tribute to design maestro Steve Jobs marking the 10th anniversary of his passing by ASEI President Piyush Malik, he shared his forward thinking views on Design based on his field experiences and learnings working with nimble silicon valley startups as well as fortune 500 corporations around the globe. These opening remarks centered around the importance of Design as a discipline and Design Thinking methodologies adapted from IDEO, Stanford’s d.school and IBM’s enterprise design thinking approach a.k.a  IBM Garage, which is an end-to-end model for accelerating digital transformation. 
 
The keynote speaker Prof Sanjay Gupta who is the founder and Vice Chancellor of World University of Design (WUD) shared his vision illustrating the difference between User Interface (UI) and User Experience  Design (UXD). He also  spoke  about applications of emerging concepts  such as AR/VR (augmented reality /virtual reality ) and innovation in design  in his talk titled “Importance of design for engineers”  based on his many decades of multidisciplinary design experience across Engineering, Architecture, Fashion and Academics.
 

 
Engaging Dr Gupta in a fireside chat following this address, Piyush shared some industry trends based on analyst reports and they discussed the impact of design on creator economy with NFT (Non-Fungible Tokens), Blockchain,  AR/VR  etc. Dr Gupta acknowledged the ASEI community and shared the impact WUD has had in its nascent life since inception and cited the importance of partnerships with industry bodies including Assocham, CII and now ASEI to expand its sphere of influence.
 
Dolly Parikh, Founder and CEO of Aloki Labs, a boutique design studio in California traced her inspiration to the 1977 film “Power Of 10” and shared learnings  from her UX Strategy and Design career across companies such as Apple, Verisign, Experian, Intuit, Medallia, Aviso, Automation Anywhere, InfoStretch, ARM and MindTickle.
 
UX Architect Noah Iliinsky,  a popular speaker and author of 2 O'Reilly books on visualization enthralled the audience with his data storytelling approach and  emphasised the 4 pillars of effective design viz. purpose, content, structure and formatting. His versatile technique can be applied to not only data visualization but all forms of communications. The illustrations of data in tables versus charts and graphs and when to  choose pie versus line versus bar graphs were eye opening. 



In the next section of the Design Summit focusing on career guidance, Sabira Gupta who is a Software engineer turned Principal UX Designer at Informatica shared her tips for those transitioning into Design careers. She showcased formatting as well as language do‘s and don'ts to inspire the budding designers aspiring for new opportunities  amongst the audience. 
 
Veteran designer Ches Wadja spoke on “Intuition, humility and collaboration in service of design innovation”. Sharing personal stories from his time at Experian as the design head to being the first designer when LinkedIn was a year old startup, Ches mesmerised the attendees with the captivating story of power of being open to ideas and how being agile  and scrapy enabled his seemingly small effort to show marked improvement in Linkedin’s adoption by the masses.The legendary designer also happened to be the first designer at Youtube (which was later acquired by Google) and his designed logo is still used by the company after all these years. It was indeed a pleasure to watch his serene and  calm persona field questions from the audience after the newly minted designer Shrinal Patel  showcased her portfolio and sought feedback from experienced professionals Sabira and Ches to critique as well as give suggestions for improving candidate portfolio presentations. 


Shrinali  then moderated the brief panel discussion with speakers after which Surbhi Kaul acknowledged all volunteers  and proposed the vote of thanks to the speakers. 
 

 
Surbhi,  a Vice President  at Juniper Networks was a speaker at ASEI’s 33rd National Convention  and is an ASEI Life Member who serves on the Silicon Valley chapter board. She also gave a “heads-up” & call for volunteers as well as  next year’s board member nominations across all 5 professional chapters.
 
The moderated Q&A session then “graduated” to  social audio Clubhouse room “Engineering Tales”, where the event continued with a few of the Design summit speakers. It included more non-ASEI members too, all of  whom  were given a chance to interact with speakers of this Summit. John Rodriges moderated the session, sharing his experiences as a UX designer with Citigroup and past jobs. The quality of conversations there once again proved the value of this topic and popularity of design as a discipline  amongst techies as well as non -technical folks.
 
 

The Design Summit showed the attendees the depth of Design experience and thought leadership amongst ASEI community members and gave a glimpse of the richness of  its collaborations with national and international professional bodies. 
 
As is evident from recent activities  and newsletters, ASEI has had an action packed 2021 so far with a large number of educational and networking opportunities  and new programmes such as MentorConnect, UniversityConnect and YouthPrograms to serve its members’ interests and inspire the next generation of engineers and technologists amongst the diaspora.
 
 

*The October 2021 edition of ASEI Newsletter was sent  to all those who are on our mailing list till September end. In case you missed it, here is the web version. Happy reading and catching up on all that happened in the last month and what lies ahead with your society! We have a series of events planned for this month representing #Innovation #Design,  #Youth Empowerment,  Knowledge sharing and Networking initiatives
* ASEI is a volunteer run professional organization and we welcome your involvement. We request feedback and especially welcome any articles, blogs or ideas you would like to contribute. Please be in touch with anyone from the content/editorial team. 
* In case you are  not receiving our emails, please check your spam/junk or promotions folder and change the settings in your mailbox to deliver ASEI emails in your in-box. If you still did not find our newsletter please send an email to info@aseiusa.org for us to investigate.
*** REMINDER***
Don't forget to join and subscribe to #asei Youtube channel to be reminded and notified when we livestream. We are also adopting new channels of communication including an open Linkedin page, Twitter, Facebook and Clubhouse to connect with you. Do join in, provide feedback and volunteer to  get engaged. 

(Part 1 covering “Why Cloud and Why now” was published here . This is part 2 of a point of view by the authors to give an overview of the cloud market and emerging opportunities in this second  article of a  multi  part series on cloud computing and application modernization as we explore and reason what has changed in the past 18 months and what does the post-pandemic era have in store for the cloud vendors and customers. )
Regulatory hurdles and concerns dissolve when you adopt Privacy and Security by design
In our experience, the biggest roadblocks for enterprises to accelerate cloud consumption are runaway costs and compliance/security concerns. Survey by IDG Cloud Computing (referred in part 1) validates this as well. 
Compliance and security concerns: One of the key concerns raised is the inability to protect sensitive data in the cloud. To overcome this concern, in addition to encryption of data in transit or at rest cloud providers have also started providing the ability to encrypt data even while it is in use i.e. while it’s being processed. There is no one-size-fits-all solution but cloud providers are working hard to provide “engineered-in, invisible security” that protects even the most sensitive data in the cloud. Public cloud providers are also providing offerings based on a zero-trust framework that will help governments be in compliance with President Joe Biden’s recent executive order on improving cybersecurity.
Cost: While the pay per use cost model and ease of provisioning is a great advantage of the public cloud model, it also means  that organizations that do not have a robust cost management practice are unable to build accurate cost estimates and are often faced with runaway charges in their monthly invoice.  The complexity of pricing, billing & cost attribution for public cloud services adds to this challenge.  However, public cloud providers have cost management tools that provide a holistic overview of costs with the cloud provider,  cost savings/right sizing recommendations, ability to set budget alerts and much more. By building a FinOps practice around them, enterprises can  derive cost savings that directly contribute to their bottom line.   
 
Industry matters  - Industry segments that are bullish on the cloud
 
Cloud computing is now intrinsic to businesses across almost all sectors. We will highlight some industry segments which have shown a lot of momentum and  continue to hold promise for the future:
 
Digital Native companies that exist primarily online and are “"born in the cloud", naturally lead in the adoption of ever evolving cloud technologies. Their infrastructures are already cloud-based, they are usually the first to adopt emerging cloud technologies and are able to derive maximum benefits from the cloud. This is much harder for traditional enterprises owing to their legacy technology, slower processes, staff skill mix and longer technology learning curves etc. Below is an example of how Box is leveraging Google Cloud’s advanced capabilities to enhance the scale, performance, and the intelligence of its cloud content management platform globally.
 
Retailers across the board are playing catch up to meet the evolving consumer needs for next-generation personalized experiences that blend the physical & virtual worlds and cloud is a critical enabler to make this happen. Retailers also need to be agile to adapt to sudden changes in demand especially during “surge demand periods” such as traditional holiday driven or seasonal fashion swings. To be able to do this, moving IT systems for retailers to the cloud is critical. Here’s an example of how retailer Kroger adopted Cloud to gain deeper insights into their business rapidly in a scalable fashion.
 
Public sector adoption has been relatively sporadic and low but is slowly picking up with government agencies in the US and across the world. Cloud providers continue to add to their certifications and compliance standards to meet needs of governments. Public health agencies at state and local government level have awakened and the need for quick and nimble apps such as covid contact detection, notification and vaccine distribution and post covid campus reopening led them to believe the transformational nature of cloud. Here’s an example of such solutions SpringML team has implemented  with Google Cloud technologies across the US Public sector and has even been recognized for a vast variety of impactful implementations.
 
In the case of the manufacturing industry, driven by early adopters of Industry 4.0 frameworks and now data-driven organizations embracing predictive technologies,  cloud is enabling new use cases across the value chain. Following are a few examples - 
 
Operational insights to invent more efficient ways of working on the shop floor
Resilient supply chain that can adapt to whatever uncertainty and disruption  is thrown at it, experts collaborating across factories
Engineers solving complex problems using large scale simulations
Solutions predicting machine failure and much more. 
This is being made possible by the access to innovation that hyperscalers are providing in their platforms in areas such as AI/ML, IoT, Analytics, Speech recognition, optimized computing resources on demand etc. 
 
Organizations in the Healthcare and Life Science industry are also adopting cloud technologies rapidly across the value chain. For example, they are leveraging cloud technology for real time collaboration to accelerate research efforts, sharing health data seamlessly across authorized providers & unlocking value from the data in real time to enhance patient care, deriving operational efficiency through pay per use models enabling them to reduce cost of care etc. As an example,  pharmaceutical and health care company McKesson migrated siloed legacy infrastructure to use high-performing Google Cloud databases to get the most out of their data and ultimately deliver a better healthcare experience to patients.
 
Wrapping up
Human species haven't stopped innovating since the early days of human civilization. The need for automation has been increasing historically since the Renaissance and days of the industrial revolution when the printing press replaced handwritten manuscripts. We are said to be in the fourth wave of industrial revolution since 2010 but the post Covid-era could be labelled Industry 5.0 ! The remarkable  pace of adoption of innovation and automation across industries especially with a customer service component can certainly be attributed to COVID induced lockdowns and fresh thinking and introspection when almost within weeks companies digitally transformed and  devised strategies to enable remote work for most of their employees without missing a beat. That would not have been possible without the progress in Internet, cloud computing and automation technologies in the past two decades. Since  2020  we increasingly come across exciting real life success stories  of Customer Service Innovation (e.g. Call Center AI ), Voice based user experience interfaces (e.g. Chatbots) and a plethora of AI/ML use case adoption (predictive maintenance, autonomous driving, advanced robotics etc to name a few). The common denominator is advancement in cloud technologies and its rapid adoption. The cloud market is growing fast and as various analyst reports have stated and is already huge but we are just getting started and may only have touched  less than 10% of its potential. We will deep dive further in subsequent articles in this series. 
 
About the Authors:
Himanshu Kapoor is a Customer Success & Professional Services Executive with extensive background in leading technology led transformation for clients and client facing teams at leading organizations like IBM, Cisco Infosys and currently Google. In addition to his expertise in Go To Market Strategy, he brings a deep understanding of public cloud platforms like Google Cloud & AWS. 
Piyush Malik is a veteran of data-driven  business transformations across multiple industry domains having served customers worldwide & leading multicultural teams spread over 40 countries and  helping with digital transformation, cloud adoption and applied data science/AI/ML journeys. Having served in strategy, management consulting and application software leadership roles at PWC,IBM, Cadence Design in US as well as product management with Tata group in India, he is currently a SVP at  SpringML,  a Premier Google Partner, besides being active with several industry bodies and non-profits including ASEI.

Sir M. Visvesvaraya was an eminent civil engineer, a scholar and a statesman who was awarded India's highest civilian honor Bharat Ratna in 1955. He is credited with inventing the automated steel doors that close the water overflows in dams. Sept 15th, his birth anniversary is celebrated as Engineer's Day.

Feel free to engage with us socially on Linkedin or Twitter to tell us about your #engineering hero 
 
Dedicated to all engineering friends in the US, India and beyond, Happy Engineer's day!
 

 
 
Sania Jain is a current sophomore at Prospect High School. When she was a little kid, Sania had an opportunity to go on a glacier trip in Alaska and she fell in love with the whale tails! Little did she realize that this moment sparked a passion for nature that would influence her creative projects from here on out.
 
     A creative writing course she later took during her third grade allowed her to channel her love for nature into writing when she published her first book, called, “The Great Forest Adventure”. Her parents tapped into her love for writing and encouraged it, allowing her to publish four more books on various topics.
 
     Wow! As if that was not enough, Sania’s endless creativity has led to several inventions and innovations. This includes SaniaBox, an add-on board “raspberry pi” kit to explore circuits and coding, and even a non-profit called Copper Bottles Series that spreads awareness about global warming, animal poaching, and ocean pollution.
 
     When asked how she was able to achieve so many things at such a young age, Sania humbly attributes her success to the support she has received from organizations like Moonshot Jr and many individuals who helped bring her ideas to life. That is why she believes in organizations like ASEI that help connect professionals together. With ASEI, Sania hopes to continue inspiring other kids to create, persevere, and try new things.
 
 
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This article is based on conversations Aditya Guthey, an ASEI Silicon Valley chapter member and a career coach has had with Sania Jain for ASEI Youth Corner. A short excerpt is here  ASEI has a partnership with MoonshotJr - a Silicon Valley based startup that accelerates youths' path from STEM education to entrepreneurship. Click to avail special offers for ASEI community.

The September  2021 edition of ASEI Newsletter was sent in the beginning of this month to all those who are on our mailing list till August end. In case you missed it, here is the web version. Happy reading and catching up on all that happened in the last month and what lies ahead with your society! We have a series of events planned for this month representing #YouthEmpowerment , #University Connect as well as Knowledge sharing and Networking initiatives
 
ASEI is a volunteer run professional organization and we welcome your involvement. We request feedback and especially welcome any articles, blogs or ideas you would like to contribute. Please be in touch with anyone from the content/editorial team. 
 
In case you are  not receiving our emails, please check your spam/junk or promotions folder and change the settings in your mailbox to deliver ASEI emails in your in-box. If you still did not find our newsletter please send an email to info@aseiusa.org for us to investigate.
 
 
*** REMINDER***
Don't forget to join and subscribe to #asei Youtube channel to be reminded and notified when we livestream. We are also adopting new channels of communication including an open Linkedin page, Twitter, Facebook and Clubhouse to connect with you. Do join in, provide feedback and volunteer to  get engaged. More info on our upcoming program this week is below
 
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This is a point of view by the authors to give an overview of the cloud market and emerging opportunities in this first article of a  multi  part series on cloud computing and application modernization as we explore and reason what has changed in the past 18 months and what does the post-pandemic era have in store for the cloud vendors and customers. 
 
Introduction
The pace of digitization accelerated nearly 7X globally during the pandemic, as huge portions of the economy moved to digital channels and these trends are here to last. Cloud infrastructure is a critical enabler for this digital transformation and in the post pandemic world this trend of cloud adoption is only going to accelerate. As per a study by Gartner,  worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecasted to grow 18.4% in 2021 to total $304.9 billion, up from $257.5 billion in 2020. Cloud is projected to make up 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spending market in 2024, up from 9.1% in 2020. 
 
However, a more granular view gives a better assessment of what happened, and where the trend lines are headed. In a report from CloudHealth, here are a few takeaways:
 
-Total cloud spending increased in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the leap in 2020 was not huge. This was partly owing to the free services offered by cloud providers during the pandemic and the cost optimization measures enforced by organizations in a bid to control operational expenses. However, in 2021 a significant jump of 18% is forecasted by Gartner in end user spending on cloud services. 
-Spending on compute services, which is by far the biggest spend, actually decreased in the same period
-Container usage saw a big increase in 2020, even in verticals that saw decreased total cloud spending. Increasingly enterprises are looking into moving applications from physical hardware and virtual machines (VM) into containers and deriving benefits such as increased portability, faster application development & deployment etc.
-Cloud vendors and their System Integrator partners are focussed on helping customers derive the maximum value from their cloud investments, with  strategic consulting and operational offerings.
 
Why Cloud and Why now ?
 
The pandemic has brought to the forefront a number of fundamental shifts which are driving growth in cloud adoption, few examples:
-Increased focus on business continuity planning & agility in the business
-Increased demand for e-commerce, e-learning, telehealth, video-on-demand etc
-Explosion in demand for remote work, hybrid work will continue to be the preferred model in the post-Covid world
-Dramatic swings in demand cycles increasing the importance for pay per use models
 
Conversations with enterprises on the rationale for moving to the cloud is now much broader than simply saving costs & having a better infrastructure. It is now about cloud making the business more adaptable & agile, about enabling innovation, reinvention and growth. Public cloud providers continue to make huge investments to enhance their platforms and move up the stack providing key capabilities that enterprises had to earlier build themselves. This is allowing enterprises to focus on capabilities that truly drive innovation & differentiation in their business. There are still some enterprises in the early stages of cloud adoption that are migrating workloads to the cloud solely for cheaper compute & storage. They are doing a simple lift & shift of their on-premises workloads to the cloud and are often disappointed with the ROI unless they include other critical aspects of the cloud migration such as automation of IT processes, leveraging cloud native technologies, cloud ecosystems and marketplaces etc. 
The trend of companies adopting  multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategy continues to accelerate, almost all large enterprises are deploying workloads on more than one public cloud while also keeping some data on private clouds if necessary owing to data residency/sensitivity, regulations, latency and other reasons. Per an IDG Cloud Computing Survey, over half  (55%) of organizations who have embraced cloud,   currently use multiple public clouds, with 21% saying they use three or more. This is further corroborated by analysts at IDC who project that more than 90% of enterprises will use a mix of public, private and on-premises environments by 2022. That said, the disruption of traditional IT caused by cloud computing is here to stay and we should be moving from fear-uncertainty and disinformation (FUD) and chaos during the pandemic to a rapid and  orderly adoption and refactoring of traditional applications in the post pandemic era.
 
Looking forward
 
Human species haven't stopped innovating since the early days of human civilization. The need for automation has been increasing historically since the Renaissance and days of the industrial revolution when the printing press replaced handwritten manuscripts. We are said to be in the fourth wave of industrial revolution since 2010 but the post Covid-era could be labelled Industry 5.0 ! The remarkable  pace of adoption of innovation and automation across industries especially with a customer service component can certainly be attributed to COVID induced lockdowns and fresh thinking and introspection when almost within weeks companies digitally transformed and  devised strategies to enable remote work for most of their employees without missing a beat. That would not have been possible without the progress in Internet, cloud computing and automation technologies in the past two decades. Since  2020  we increasingly come across exciting real life success stories  of Customer Service Innovation (e.g. Call Center AI ), Voice based user experience interfaces (e.g. Chatbots) and a plethora of AI/ML use case adoption (predictive maintenance, autonomous driving, advanced robotics etc to name a few). The common denominator is advancement in cloud technologies and its rapid adoption. The cloud market is growing fast and as various analyst reports have stated and is already huge but we are just getting started and may only have touched  less than 10% of its potential. We will deep dive further in subsequent articles in this series. 

About the Authors:
Himanshu Kapoor is a Customer Success & Professional Services Executive with extensive background in leading technology led transformation for clients and client facing teams at leading organizations like IBM, Cisco Infosys and currently Google. In addition to his expertise in Go To Market Strategy, he brings a deep understanding of public cloud platforms like Google Cloud & AWS. 
Piyush Malik is a veteran of data-driven  business transformations across multiple industry domains having served customers worldwide & leading multicultural teams spread over 40 countries and  helping with digital transformation, cloud adoption and applied data science/AI/ML journeys. Having served in strategy, management consulting and application software leadership roles at PWC,IBM, Cadence Design in US as well as product management with Tata group in India, he is currently a SVP at  SpringML,  a Premier Google Partner, besides being active with several industry bodies and non-profits including ASEI

Dr Shreekant Agarwal is a quintessential ASEI “Lifer” In this conversation with ASEI President Piyush Malik, he shares his professional journey as well as origins of his ASEI Involvement till date. He also shared how he selected his engineering branch and followed his passion for Aeronautical engineering and how he has been involved with design and development of Flight systems,  defence fighter jets, missiles as well as now very cool urban air mobility autonomous machines. It was fascinating to learn more about his passion for his chosen field where he uses principles of maths and physics on a daily basis on the job till date!
His journey from India  to US started from IIT Kharagpur where he earned a BTech degree and came to US for Masters at University of Maryland. He went on to get his Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan. 
 His  involvement in ASEI started in 2005 when he planned for and  chaired a successful National Convention in Los Angeles held in 2006. He was an executive board member of the Southern California chapter from 2004 until 2009. He served as the president of the SoCal chapter from 2007 to 2009. He also served as the treasurer and board member of the ASEI National from 2010 to 2011, and then as the chairman of the ASEI National from 2011 to 2013. Since then, he has served as an advisory board member. 
Dr. Agrawal has been in the aerospace profession for 4 decades. For his contributions to the industry, he  was selected Engineer of the Year by the Chinese Institute of Engineers, USA,in 2004.
 He is currently the head of Flight Technology at the Urban Air Mobility Division of the Hyundai Motor Group. He joined at the beginning of 2021. Earlier, he was at the Northrop Grumman Aeronautics Systems in Redondo Beach, CA, where he worked for over 6 years as a director of Flight Sciences within the Vehicle Engineering directorate. In that role, he provided functional excellence in terms of people, processes, tools, and products.  Prior to joining NorthropGrumman, he worked at the Boeing company for about 29 years, where he had a variety of assignments in functional, program management, and technology management, and was a technical fellow since 1996 in the Boeing Research & Technology Flight Sciences organization,managing and working on supersonic low-boom research projects, strategic planning for technology development for future products, and corporate initiatives.
 He also spoke about an interesting stint where he has served as the chief operating officer and director of operations for a joint venture between Boeing and Tata in the Boeing Defense Military Aircraft Division. 
He was the program manager for the Boeing Defense Engineering common process development and implementation across all sites and new programs. He also worked in the Boeing Defense Air Force Space Systems engineering management organization, where he led the processes and tools effort (systems engineering, program management best practices, CMMI, etc.) for military satellites, and was the sector technology integration leader. 
As a leader of the High-Speed Aerodynamics Technology group and as a leader of the NASA/Industry High Speed Research program, he led the aerodynamics, flight controls, stability control, laminar flow control, propulsion/airframe integration, and sonic boom research efforts.
His contributions range from developing and applying advanced aerodynamics/computational analysis and design optimization methods for military aircraft, supersonic commercial transport, hypersonic missiles, and space launch vehicles. He has contributed to the development of products such as F/A-18E/F, T-45, Air Refueling Tanker, hypersonic missiles, and several development programs. He has 12 publications in the archival journals, over 50 papers in various conferences, and 1 patent on supersonic aircraft design.
 
The conversation also touched on the latest space industry trend- Space Tourism and the commercial and entrepreneurial opportunities it offers. He shared his thoughts about the euphoria on opening up space tourism with Sir Branson and Jeff Bezos going onto space in July and all the hoopla  about us becoming a multi planetary species. He had a clear message for audience wanting to explore Space Tech- “it's red hot and get involved!”

During this discussion Dr Agrawal also emphasized the role that  organizations like ASEI play and their importance and why should folks join hands with ASEI. This very inspiring discussion went from zoom to youtube live chat to an extended audio chat session on Clubhouse, the latter being the latest “experiment” in social media that we at ASEI are exploring for spreading our message to a wider audience. Would love your feedback on our programs, especially this episode of Engineering Tales!

Volunteerism and resilience amidst trying circumstances and lessons learned from COVID
 
While the world watched, India went through a horrific 2nd phase of COVID earlier this year, taking over 450K lives. Almost everyone lost someone they knew, if not multiple folks; and the impact on families was devastating. However, there were several positives that came out of this disaster around resiliency of the human spirit and allyship.
 
While doctors and nurses are truly national heroes, it was heartening to see several companies and individuals unite to offer their help through money, time and partnering with NGOs in this time of need. Salesforce has always been a champion of business being the greatest platform for change. Employees are always empowered to champion causes and take the lead in showing up for our communities. This is precisely the spirit that led me to reach out to our leadership to create awareness and build a strategy to help our colleagues, their families and the community in India.
 
I started a small taskforce with colleagues given our personal impact. Little did we know that it would grow into almost 1300 volunteers in a few days! We ran a 24x7 global taskforce to run several initiatives. We built and staffed a volunteer hotline using our platform for our employees, their families and friends. Our brave volunteers curated on the ground information and handled every call with the utmost care. We delivered multiple planes filled with life-saving medical equipment and supplies. We ran medical sessions online to create awareness and help people where we could at home. We raised several millions of dollars to be utilized by our vetted partners in the region and we saw the impact. Our leadership prioritized employee well-being and safety and made every effort (moved deadlines, discounted hotel rates and provided wellness benefits) towards this goal.
 
While the onslaught was brutal, we fought back bravely. Several volunteers faced personal loss and despite their circumstances, they showed up for each other. We will always remember sweet memories of those we lost, but more importantly we must carry forward the allyship, sincerity and kindness showcased into our daily lives. It is a shared purpose, along with values-based organizations that will take us forward as humanity.
 
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Divya Ashok is an ASEI Life member and serves on the board of Silicon Valley chapter. Professionally, she is a Vice President at Salesforce. Divya is a leader with 12 years of experience building and scaling global initiatives from the ground up. As Vice President of Strategy and Innovation, she is charged to lead the strategy around Salesforce’s India business and champion initiatives around India in San Francisco. Prior to her new role, Divya was in Product Management. Her teams led Salesforce’s efforts around scale, where she championed and delivered over 500+ unique product enhancements. She led product readiness for 50+ of Salesforce’s largest and most complex customers globally. 
 
Divya’s passion for the empowerment of women and children led her to co-create the Salesforce Women's Network. While she was Global President, membership increased by 350% to over 9,000 allies and expanded to 48 chapters globally. As for her accomplishments, Divya has been selected to join Fortune's Most Powerful Women Next Gen global community 3 times to exchange ideas and perspectives with a select group of trailblazing women from across the world.  

Do you have a passion for engineering or just doing a job? ---- A practical approach to Success! By Dilip G. Saraf
 
In Part-1 of this series, Dilip explained his observations having  worked with thousands of clients  about the distinction between having a passion for engineering versus just doing a job. In this part-2, he explains the model he has developed to explain how actualization drives passion.Once you embrace this notion, you’ll change how you look at your career and how you manage it! 
 
The starting point for this model or framework (shown in Figure here ) is identifying your aptitude (your genius or your uniqueness). A dictionary defines aptitude as both a natural or acquired capacity or ability. This definition in my mind addresses both aspects of someone’s aptitude. So, it is alright not to know what your natural ability is, but if you pursue something out of curiosity, interest, or mere serendipity and you acquire that ability by whatever means, then what you have acquired can be defined as your aptitude.

As this figure depicts, Aptitude directed with deliberate effort allows you to develop a skill that gets increasingly better with greater effort. To ratchet this effort further, Toil makes you achieve Mastery over what you are pursuing. Here Toil refers to what Malcolm Gladwell calls “putting in 10,000 hours of focused effort.” In Sanskrit it is called Tapasya, which requires 12 years’ highly concentrated effort on one pursuit (this  can far exceed Gladwell’s 10,000 hours’ requirement, which I view as typical). The result in this model is the Mastery of your subject (in Sanskrit it is called Sadhana). Thus, the work you put into your talent has a dual effect: First it helps you develop your Skill and then with Toil, you go on to Master it. (Each element in this figure is capitalized, for ease of identification in the accompanying Figure even though it is a noun in everyday usage.)
 
While Toil is a singular pursuit, just focusing on improving your technique, Effort entails a broader perspective: Developing new relationships with other professionals, researching different techniques, understanding how others are practicing their craft, going to events where other players showcase their craft, among other avenues. Thus, Effort and Focus result in Growth that comes, both from a broader perspective and from learning how true Growth requires a multi-dimensional effort. 
 
Creativity stems from working on your Skill to deepen it. Using trial-and-error, intuition, experimentation, and design one can engage in Creative pursuits to further their Skill and get incrementally better at how they manifest their Skill.
 
Similarly, a state of Flow is reached when Growth and Inspiration work together to propel your abilities to greater heights. The concept of Flow was proposed by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Mihi Six-ent-mihi) a Hungarian-American psychologist. In his model of getting to a highly focused mental state one constantly elevates their Ability to the level of challenge they meet, and when this reaches a state of equilibrium, they reach the state of Flow, where things happen magically. Navigating through the elements on the left side of the center in this figure, Purpose and Focus play a strong role in how you develop your talent further. At the intersection of Focus and Purpose is what comes to you as your Inspiration. But mere Inspiration without Toil cannot allow that Inspiration to culminate into any meaningful Impact that others can see or feel. 
Thus, Toil plays a dual role: Once in transforming your Skill into Mastery of that Skill and then in transmuting your Inspiration into an outcome that creates Impact. Additionally, once you discover your Purpose, Toil results in actualizing that Purpose. At the center of all these intersecting circles in the Brand. A Brand is a culmination of all these factors that uniquely come together for the world to recognize you as a thought leader of a worthy stature to be reckoned with. It is apparent that passion is nowhere in this framework; it is because it plays no part in manifesting yourself as an actualized professional. Passion is defined in a dictionary as an object of desire or interest: something that commands one's love or devotion. 
 
This implies that passion has a strong emotional component to it. Anyone can display passion about a topic, but that does not mean that they have an inherent aptitude to help them excel at it (the topic). As the model in Fig shows, anyone can work on their natural ability, build a Skill, and Master it through the many elements outlined in that model.
 
So, after reading this approach to career management, if you are still waiting to uncover your passion to get going on the right career path, you may want to rethink and start going with something you know you are good at and then applying yourself meaningfully with Effort, Toil, and Focus! It worked for me in all my five careers and for my clients working with them as their career coach; it can work for you, too! 
 
Good luck! 
 
About the author:
Dilip  Saraf is a highly sought after career coach who keynoted at ASEI's 33rd Annual Convention last year and seeing the value ASEI provides, joined as  a professional member of  our SiliconValley chapter. An IIT and Stanford alum, he has leveraged his experience going through five different careers to establish a career coaching practice, which enjoys global clientele. www.Dilipsaraf.com

The August  2021 edition of ASEI Newsletter was sent in the beginning of this month to all those who are on our mailing list till July  end. In case you missed it, here is the web version. Happy reading and catching up on all that happened in the last month and what lies ahead with your society!
 
ASEI is a volunteer run professional organization and we welcome your involvement. We request feedback and especially welcome any articles, blogs or ideas you would like to contribute. Please be in touch with anyone from the content/editorial team. 
 
In case you are  not receiving our emails, please check your spam/junk or promotions folder and change the settings in your mailbox to deliver ASEI emails in your in-box. If you still did not find our newsletter please send an email to info@aseiusa.org for us to investigate. 
 
 

 

Article by Raju Shreewastava
Being an engineer teaches us to be tactical, but leadership is about soft skills. Different roles throughout one’s career span calls for different skills. So when it comes to managing your own career, how do you prepare yourself to move up? What skills should working executives hone as they strive to reach the next level? What do leaders need to become a C-suite executive? This  "masterclass" with a leading CEO Coach Asha Saxena provided the opportunity for engineering managers and  executives to have in-depth conversations about how they can maximize their own individual leadership skills and build high performing teams.
In this Leadership Masterclass Asha simplified the key things any aspiring C-Suite should keep in mind. 
Top 10 Ten things to keep in mind:
Vision
Alignment
Delegate
Customer Focus
Know your Numbers
Measure what Matters - Weekly 1-3 things to measure
Be a Good Communicatir
Clarity and Consistency
Power V/s Influence
Culture - Core Values
My personal favorite quote by her was  “Leaders are lifelong learners”.
Q &A session:
Her experience coaching CEOs of Startups to Fortune 500 companies was very evident during the Q & A session. A varied range of questions were dealt with in a concise but impactful way with examples making it a true masterclass.
Here are notes from some of the very insight responses:
Question : What would be the top few things to keep in mind for the first 30 days of becoming a leader?
Answer: Depending on the size of the organization it would be vary but the high level would look something like below 


30 days - Listening


60 days - Design and strategy


90 days - Executing



 Question : What would be your suggestion on how to have tough conversations with non-performing or challenged employees/managers reporting to you?
Answer: It is important to deliver a tough message but the approach taken would determine the chance of success. Mixing the response with positive appreciation in the success area would be helpful to get the message delivered across. This would need one to be very observant to catching people doing the right thing while ensuring the appreciation is authentic.
The event was moderated by Vatsala Upadhay , Piyush Malik ( ASEI president) and Aina Aliieva and streamed live on YouTube and Clubhouse
If you missed the session , the YouTube recording  is a must watch for anyone aspiring C-suite.
About the Speaker
Asha Saxena is a strategic, innovative leader with a proven track record of building successful tech businesses for the last 25 years. With a strong academic background, creative problem-solving skills, and an effective management style. She has been instrumental in building business models for success.
Asha Saxena is a CEO Coach with CEOCI, the leading coaching firm for growth-focused CEOs and entrepreneurs, where we follow a practical and proven methodology to help CEOs and their teams perform at their very best and achieve their business goals.
 

 
This article is an event summary of the Leadership Masterclass with CEO Coach Ash Saxena was held  on 10th July 2021 as a FREE interactive event for ASEI members  hosted by ASEI. Raju Shreewastava is an ASEI Silicon Valley chapter member and founder of silicon valley company Big Data Trunk helping clients accelerate innovation through corporate training. He is the author of two books and has been in the data and analytics space for the past 2 decades.

Having made enormous fortunes on Earth, billionaires are now racing each other to space. Former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the richest person on the planet was one of four “space tourists” on his private space company Blue Origin’s inaugural human spaceflight that successfully completed on July 20, 2021, the anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Virgin Galactic owner Richard Branson to speed up his own planned space trip and launch himself into space, nine days before Bezos on July 11th .

 
Fellow tech billionaire, and third richest person on Earth, Elon Musk is often the most vocal about his space company, SpaceX, and his plans to make humans an “interplanetary species.” Bezos, however, is just as obsessed with outer space as the Tesla founder is. The billionaires concur that it is humanity’s destiny to settle the stars. And, without much real public debate, private space corporations appear to have settled the matter: space will be humanity’s next frontier.
As exciting as it is to see private entrepreneurs blast off for space, the burgeoning race between billionaires Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk has its fierce detractors. Proponents say these efforts will whet the public’s appetite, help expedite technological advancements and pave the way for economies of scale that will make such journeys relatively affordable. Let’s dig a little more into both sides of the argument.
 
Affordability and Economics : According to Jon Cowart, a longtime chief engineer and mission manager with NASA who’s now a systems director for the Aerospace Corporation, the price per pound of getting to orbit has decreased tenfold in the past 50 years. Projecting that pace to pick up considerably, Cowart envisions trips to space becoming affordable for the general population by 2060. According to Mory Gharib, director of the aerospace program at the California Institute of Technology, competition from commercial entities seeking to cash in on the new market, technologies of scale and enhanced computational power will drive prices down. Per Garib, people who can afford to fly first class around the world would be able to afford a space flight. The estimated costs will be between $20,000 to $50,000. The Swiss investment banking firm UBS projects space tourism to generate almost $4 billion in yearly revenue by 2030. 
The current estimated cost for a 4 minute space ride is around $300,000.
 
Benefits: Space travel is starting an industry that doesn’t exist right now, so there are economic benefits, jobs, technological advancements, motivation for kids to study and being a part of it. It is inspirational. They could spur new developments that may enhance airline travel and considerably shorten flight times. There’s going to be research conducted and scientific discoveries, so there is a lot of hidden potential as a by-product of space travel.
 
Carbon footprint : Next two decades are very material for climate change. We lack technologies for low-carbon flying, shipping and concrete. Large parts of the Amazon rainforest now emit more carbon dioxide than they take in, according to a study in the journal Nature. We address this now, or we enter feedback loops that may make much of Earth too hot for humans. For every space flight, the carbon it generates is equivalent to carbon produced running a car (non-electric) for a couple of centuries. Though Bezos argues that within two centuries earth would lack the necessary resources to fulfil all needs and space will be the answer, it might be worth spending effort using natural resources such as sun and wind to fulfil the needs.
 
Regulations: According to popular magazine Politico, many space policy experts and members of oversight committees in Congress are concerned that the government isn’t prepared for it — especially the office at the Federal Aviation Administration that is responsible for regulating the new industry, but is widely viewed as overworked and understaffed. Whether ensuring public safety, managing growing space traffic, safety of passengers or mitigating environmental hazards, there is no framework for regulating private space travel. One of the challenges facing the FAA is also the lack of knowledge of these new vehicles. Regulations can only be formed when they have enough data on these vehicles.
 
Call to Action:
It’s turning out to be a healthy space race, one not compromising safety so that a commercially viable commercial tourism product can be delivered. Successful spaceflights by the two companies will also help set operational and safety protocols for both the commercial operators and the regulators.
But the challenge will be ironing out the numerous details, large and small. Time will tell if commercial space travel can be accomplished by not tampering with the atmosphere or through other economical and environment friendly means. For now, we can sit back and enjoy the billionaires carving out a new era in private space travel.
 
Opportunities for technologists as well as entrepreneurs are just opening up.  If you are still doubtful and skeptical, think twice how your commute is easier today - is it not because of the GPS technologies that had origins in the Space exploration and Satellite programs from  50 years ago? What about all those location based apps that have become so used to ..think Uber, Lyft, Airbnb etc etc ..none of those would have been possible as one technological innovation stands on the shoulders of the other. That said, Space is indeed the next frontier and the sky is not even the limit !
 
 
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Article contributed by ASEI Silicon Valley  members Santosh Ankola and Piyush Malik 
 
 
Do you have any feedback or would like to get engaged in inspiring the next generation of engineers and scientists? Join us
 
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References:
The Simpsons Predicted Richard Branson's Space Trip
Lost in Space
 
Branson, Bezos and the pointless billionaires space race
 
Launch of a new era or flights of fancy
 
 
 

Part1: Do you have the Passion for Engineering or are you just doing a job? By Dilip G. Saraf 

Summary: Many professionals wait their entire life trying to uncover their passion to find out what career they should choose to engage that passion. Engineer turned Career Coach  Dilip Saraf’s experience with successful clients shows that they have it backwards: Passion is the outcome of a meaningful engagement and effort, and not the cause. Once you embrace this notion, you’ll change how you look at your career and how you manage it! In this first part, he explores the distinction between having a passion versus just doing a job.
 
“Success causes passion more than passion causes success.”—Scott Adams 
 
Having now worked with more than 7,000 clients in hundreds of careers and in 23+ countries I have come to the conclusion that most professionals miss out on pursuing a purposeful career because they maunder through jobs and their lives wondering what their true passion really is, and, often, not finding it, yield themselves to a life of mediocrity, false expectations, and regret as they eke out their regular paychecks, often in discomfiture. 
 
This is particularly true for those in engineering, and especially those in high-tech jobs such as software, hardware, and systems design, later in their careers. This is mainly because the pace of technology evolution is fierce in these areas, and it is difficult to keep up with advances and compete in the job market with the younger crowd. My experience with those in engineering as they advance in their tenure, without keeping up with their professional growth in these technology specialties, surrender to becoming project or program manager, which can start their downward career spiral. Don’t get me wrong here, some intentionally pursue this path as they keep their technical edge to expand their career repertoire and become successful, applying their technical edge to become awesome project and program managers. 
 
On the flip side of this scenario, after seeing many successes with clients who first came to me not knowing what their true calling really was, imploring me to help them uncover their inner passion for them to pursue a great career using that passion, I have come to realize that most disillusioned engineers use their continued lack of engagement in their jobs to their inability to engage with passion, and not to their ability to compete as they fall behind in their skills, which often is the underlying cause.
 
 They rationalize their lack of engagement to their apparent lack of passion, which if they uncover, would change their life. I can almost hear them muttering to themselves, “If only someone could point out to me my true passion, I’d be leading a different life.”
 
 Nothing could be further from the truth! 
 
The successes of many of clients that belong to the other camp, who went on to achieve C-level roles in major companies, engaging in their dream jobs, now tell a different story that is almost universal: Waiting to uncover your passion for something to pursue, hoping that it would change your life is a delusional pursuit. 
 
On the contrary, if they view passion as the effect and not as the cause of success in one’s career, it flips on its head that whole idea of having to wait for someone to help them uncover their passion to engage with purpose. I have now come to realize that passion results from pursuing something that stems from your inner gifts (your genius—aptitude in everyday vernacular) and then harnessing one of those gifts in a systematic way to make an impact on the world, which helps you achieve a certain level of actualization. It is this actualization that drives your passion, and not the other way around. 
 
To explain this contrarian view I have developed a model that embodies several factors and their interplay in how one achieves a unique position in their endeavors; an interplay of these forces results in developing their unique brand that can be viewed as their actualized reality. If this view of how to pursue a career, deeply engaging in your work without knowing what your real passion is from the get-go, and then whetting your passion as you get more and more engaged in your work is metaphorically akin to eating an appetizer before a meal. 
 
 
This model is shown in accompanying Figure and will be explained  in detail in the Part-2 of this article.
About the author:
Dilip  Saraf is a highly sought after career coach who keynoted at ASEI's 33rd Annual Convention last year and seeing the value ASEI provides, joined as  a professional member of  our SiliconValley chapter. An IIT and Stanford alum, he has leveraged his experience going through five different careers to establish a career coaching practice, which enjoys global clientele. www.Dilipsaraf.com

Happy Independence day to all in the US as we celebrate the 245th Independence day on July 4th with fireworks in the sky and barbeque with friends and family or road trips during the long weekend
 
The July  2021 edition of ASEI Newsletter was sent last week to all those who are on our mailing list till June end. Here is the web version. Happy reading and catching up on all that happened in the last month and what lies ahead with your society! ASEI is a volunteer run professional organization and we welcome your involvement. We request feedback and especially welcome any articles, blogs or ideas you would like to contribute. Please be in touch with anyone from the content/editorial team. 
 
 In case you are  not receiving our emails, please check your spam/junk or promotions folder and change the settings in your mailbox to deliver ASEI emails in your in-box. If you still did not find our newsletter please send an email to info@aseiusa.org for us to investigate.

In the Engineering Tales Episode #5 , we  had BV Jagadeesh inspire us with his journey from a small village to a Silicon Valley startups to venture capital to  his philanthropy activities. BV was awarded Engineering Entrepreneur of theyearaward byASEI in 2016 for his entrepreneurial acivities and leading "Billion Dollar Babies" initiative byTiE to encourage Indian startups to become hyper growth "unicorns"
 
Jagadeesh grew up in a small village with one bus that went to a major city (Bangalore). 
He went to school in Bangalore and managed to live by himself while going to school and college. Ability to manage his own affairs at a young age really gave a leg up when he moved to US in later years.
 
After an engineering degree from Bangalore, Jagadeesh got his MS from Bombay. One of the major critical events for him happened when instead of going back home between semesters, he decided to work for a small electronic  company. The practical training and guidance  he got while working for a company in India opened his eyes to the possibility to future entrepreneurship. He made connections at IEEE that opened avenues later in life.
 
After working in multiple startups, where he learnt tremendously from other people, Jagadeesh co-founded a company called Exodus. Exodus went public and was handling 40% of ALL US internet traffic at one point. It was recognized as  a US National asset  by White House ( as per President Bill Clinton)
 
After Exodus, Jagadeesh started another startup, NetScaler, which was sold to Citrix.
 
As he had worked for and  invested in multiple startups, Jagadeesh has a keen sense on what to look for in entrepreneurs. His theory can be summed up in three letters, CPS. Consistency, Persistence and Self-Driven. If an entrepreneur has these 3 qualities, they will succeed.
 
Jagadeesh currently is Managing Director at KAAJ Ventures which is an Angel Investor in multiple companies. He has been a philanthropist as well  and working on solving water issues in India through an organization called OVBI 
 
For full session please see here
*** Contributed by Amrish Chopra from Silicon Valley chapter of   ASEI ***

Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” If you have served as an executive mentor at Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship,  then you’ll appreciate the truth of those words. More importantly, you’ll know what a privilege it is to be a small part of the impact that GSBI social entrepreneurs are having the world over! Did you know that Miller Center has accelerated more than 1,000 social enterprises since 2003? These collectively have improved, transformed, or saved the lives of over 400 million people in 100 countries.
I have had this privilege for nearly 4 years now, having mentored social enterprises of all kinds — for/non-profit in education, economic empowerment, last-mile health, and energy independence, in India, Mexico, Africa, the US! Each of these enterprises and their founders brought incredible smarts but also passion and uncommon commitment to their work. It is hard to find a sharper group as dedicated to a higher cause, driven by passion, and dazzlingly creative in solving problems! Mentoring these enterprises, seeing them implement plans and make a difference to lives and regions we too easily forget, has been rewarding beyond what I could have imagined.
People often ask me what it’s like to be a social enterprise mentor. I tell them that the mechanics of mentoring are not hard but it requires some thought and planning. No, we don’t just show up to offer “free advice”. Over the years as a product executive in Silicon Valley, I have advised and coached multiple software start-ups but being an executive mentor for a social enterprise requires a slightly different mindset, both because it involves mentoring the entrepreneur — not simply advising the business — AND because the whole endeavor is driven by a social mission. In addition to Miller Center’s vast resources, I like to tell the entrepreneur (and remind myself) of a few aspects that I pay attention to in my mentoring work knowing that my goal is to become a trusted advisor. I offer them here with the hope that they can be of some use to other mentors:


Bring your dispassionate business sense… with a large dollop of passion: As a mentor, ask your mentee — the social entrepreneur — critical business questions: Does the business model make sense? Do the unit economics work? Are hidden costs taken into consideration? What will scaling entail for your supply chain? Will your channels and partners be reliable at scale? These are important aspects where a social entrepreneur may encounter blind spots or may never have subjected their plans to this kind of business rigor. At the same time, remember the enterprise and its founder(s) are fueled by a passion for impact. And as a mentor, you need to help them employ a dispassionate approach to evaluating the impact side as well. What is the nature of the impact and will/can it work? (How) can the impact scale? Can it be replicated? For for-profit enterprises, how to balance profit margins (stakeholders have come to expect) with impact? Better yet, how to wrap a business model that supports the impact model so there doesn’t have to be a choice between impact versus profits? Social entrepreneurs’ passion will get them far, but to have sustained impact it’s important for them to evaluate, refine, and augment their potential for impact. As a mentor, you must help them evaluate and optimize both aspects!


Utilize Socrates’ secret sauce: One of the key skills for success as a mentor is listening. The founder/entrepreneur knows best their target market, the enterprise’s strengths, and the challenges they face. As a mentor, you have a lot to learn from them before offering guidance. Yet an equally important aspect of a mentor’s job is asking critical questions about the enterprise and understanding underlying assumptions. In fact, the Socratic method describes the ideal process — a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas and underlying presuppositions. Asking why, how, based on what, often helps the entrepreneur uncover their own assumptions and weak points. They can then offer (sometimes find) evidence to support their thesis or temper their assumptions. This listening while questioning and asking for evidence while respecting passion and instinct requires a fine balance and is where the secret sauce of mentoring lies. So ask a lot of questions, ask for evidence, and supporting data, yet also listen carefully to the answers and respect the entrepreneur’s instinct and passion.


Leverage Miller Center’s frameworks, resources, expertise: At Miller Center, mentors are strongly supported in the form of training, resources, and frameworks for mentoring; and well established best practices (communication, regular updates, on-time delivery, etc.) are built into the programs. Help your mentee make ample use of the resources, especially the framework-driven, modular approaches that Miller Center offers for its various programs. These frameworks bring discipline to the process and keep the social entrepreneur working towards deadline-driven outcomes. At the end of the day, you want to make sure there is a structured, tangible output and defensible plan arising from all the analysis and discussion. This may be in the form of a solid investor pitch, a plan to scale the business (Scaleout Masterclass, Replication Program), and/or a plan to bring the business back on track after a setback such as Covid-19 (GSBI Alumni Bounceback Program). Miller Center hosts a trove of training and other resources — including generously sharing expertise across programs. For example, on a venture where I was a mentor, Miller Center connected us with an expert on supply chain issues. Similarly, I have offered advice to other ventures on B2C e-commerce challenges and mobile app development considerations.


Do check in with Reality… often: Note the social enterprise and its founders are fueled by passion. They want real impact, they want it big, and they want it now! But intentions alone, however good, are rarely enough. Measurement of output — business and impact — is a way to make sure that all the energies, resources, funding are poised to make a difference for the cause the enterprise wants to serve. Make sure you address impact metrics as well: What impact metrics make sense? How will they be calibrated and collected? What do they mean, actually measure? Remember they should be measures of outputs (counting the delivery of a product or service) and outcomes (the impact of delivering the product or service). Play devil’s advocate. Investors will want to be convinced that KPIs on impact are well thought through and that their investment will make a difference.


Pay attention to the PEOPLE: Last but most certainly NOT least is making a genuine connection with your social entrepreneur (and even their teams, as possible and appropriate)! This can make all the difference. I usually begin any mentoring relationship by asking the founder(s) about themselves, their lives before and after, what brought them to this work, and what has shaped them. Remember you are helping them develop themselves and their capabilities. Often they are moving water uphill and knowing that the mentor “gets them” and is there to help them find a better way can be invaluable. The road can be lonely and the going tough especially at times where much is outside their control e.g., COVID times. Not only does the enterprise suffer but the founder(s) watch a lot of their hard work going down the tubes. They may even be more distressed than they realize. As part of Miller Center’s new Bounceback Program, one of the things we are watchful for is founder burnout or even PTSD! Don’t underestimate these aspects.


Ultimately mentoring is about helping founders and social enterprises help themselves by developing their capabilities, sharpening their focus, and avoiding possible pitfalls. Hope some of the guidelines I present above are helpful to your efforts as a mentor. I would love to hear about your experiences and other nuggets you discovered. Happy mentoring!
*************************************************************************************
Reena Kapoor is a seasoned software product leader with hands-on experience building online and mobile applications for B2C, SaaS, and enterprise businesses for close to 20 years. She spoke at the ASEI Women’s Day Special Event earlier this year (Blog and Recording available here ) This article has been adapted from "Socrate's Secret Sauce and other Mentoring Advice" published by her at the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University.

She brings deep functional expertise in product management, innovation, Agile development practices, and go-to-market planning and execution. Reena advises and works with technology clients to find product-market fit by helping them define, build, and launch products and roadmaps with both proven and experimental business models. Reena’s early career includes brand management and new products at Procter & Gamble and Kraft Foods, which she credits with teaching her principles of general management and marketing. Additionally, Reena is an active executive mentor, at Santa Clara University’s Miller Center – the largest and most successful university-based social enterprise accelerator in the world. She also serves as a director on the board of several non-profits. Reena has a B.Tech in engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi and a Master’s degree from Northwestern University.

The June  2021 edition of ASEI Newsletter was sent to all those who are on our mailing list till April end. Here is the web version. Happy reading and catching up on all that happened in the last month and what lies ahead with your society!
 

ASEI is a volunteer run professional organization and we welcome your involvement. We request feedback and especially welcome any articles, blogs or ideas you would like to contribute. Please be in touch with anyone from the content/editorial team.

 

Nidhi is a sophomore from the Silicon Valley who joined ASEI as a student member after being awarded the ASEI Silicon valley Emerging Technology Award at the 2020 Synopsys Championship. Our Silicon valley chapter has been sponsoring and encouraging promising students in this manner since inception in 2015. Through ASEI, she has been able to see what technological opportunities there are for Indian girls such as herself.
She is very passionate about helping others and does so by using her skills with programming and hardware to create products that help those in need. Some of her projects include the Money Reader for the Visually Impaired and a device called Start2Run aimed at helping athletes, specifically runners, manage their workouts without overstressing themselves.
 
She has won first place in Synopsys Science fair twice, and was the recipient of the ASEI Silicon Valley Emerging Technology  Award twice as well in 2020 and 2021. Additionally, she won the second prize in ASEI Silicon Valley Budding Engineers Talent Showcase (BETS) in August last year and received top prize at the Youth Technology Exposition (YTE 2020)  organized as part of ASEI’s 33rd  National Convention in December 2020. Additionally, She has recently  won the NCWIT Award for Aspirations in Computing as a Bay Area Winner.
In addition to creating projects, she is an avid math competitor, who has won awards in nationally recognized contests, and has recently qualified for the 2021 USA Junior Math Olympiad. In her free time, she likes to read, play the piano, and work on robotics.
 
We are very proud of Nidhi’s accomplishments and volunteer spirit and  on behalf of entire ASEI, wish her the very best as she advances her STEM journey in high school and beyond.


 
Picture: Nidhi With the students at the Shree Ramana Maharishi Academy for the Blind, teaching them about technology and getting their input for the Money Reader.
 

 

Image: iStockphoto
Exploration is an innate desire of human beings. For centuries, humans have looked to space and the stars for answers. The fascination is more than philosophical—it’s coupled with the need to solve problems here on Earth. In the past 100 years, humans have landed on the Moon, built an International Space Station, and successfully landed multiple Rovers on Mars.
Today, there are seemingly countless benefits and applications of space technology. Satellites, for instance, are becoming critical for everything from internet connectivity and precision agriculture, to border security and archaeological study.
Where the original space race was a nationalistic competition between Cold War rivals, the new space race is collaborative and commercialized.
Today, international cooperation allows for the deployment of satellites, as well as space-based science. Before SpaceX, NASA and the other space agencies that operate the International Space Station had been reliant on Russian Soyuz rockets for hundreds of missions.
With the success of its famed reusable rockets, SpaceX is on track to reduce launch costs by as much as US$6 million per flight—which is likely to support the proliferation of satellites in the coming years.
Right now, there are nearly 6,000 satellites circling our tiny planet. About 60% of those are defunct satellites—space junk—and roughly 40% are operational. Over the coming decade, it’s estimated by Euroconsult that 990 satellites will be launched every year. This means that by 2028, there could be 15,000 satellites in orbit. With improved technology and commercial partnerships, all signs point to a crowded orbit.
 


What are Space Debris:
Space debris includes any nonfunctional human-made object in space, including rocket parts that have been abandoned in orbit after having completed their mission, defunct satellites, fragments from unintentional and intentional orbital collisions and items released during operations. These sources have multiplied to create a large amount of space debris orbiting Earth. According to NASA, there are over 30,000 objects larger than a softball in orbit, traveling at speeds up to 18,000 miles per hour.
This debris is spread across all three of the main regions of space around Earth: low-Earth orbit (LEO), medium-Earth orbit (MEO) and geosynchronous equatorial orbit (GEO). As its name suggests, LEO is the closest to us, extending up to 2,000 km from the Earth’s surface.
It is the most crowded region of the three and, in addition to hosting the International Space Station, it is the region where SpaceX, OneWeb and other well-funded companies are currently sending tens of thousands of new satellites as part of their constellations. Perhaps not surprisingly, LEO is the region with the most debris. As a result, it tends to be the focus of much of the discussion around the issue.
Issues caused by space debris
The existence of space debris is concerning for many reasons, with physical collisions being the most obvious. The possible risk caused by space debris is magnified by the incredible speed at which debris typically travels. According to NASA, there are over 30,000 objects larger than a softball in orbit, traveling at speeds up to 18,000 miles per hour. At that speed, any one of these objects is capable of completely destroying a spacecraft.
Space junk poses other challenges as well. Astronomers lament that light pollution from objects in orbit hampers observation of the night sky. The reliance of observatories — often involving equipment costing hundreds of millions of dollars — on long exposures makes debris particularly problematic.
Solution
In view of the constant increase in space-traffic, we need to develop and provide technologies to make debris prevention measures fail-safe. In parallel, regulators need to monitor the status of space systems as well as global adherence to debris mitigation under their jurisdiction more closely.
NASA and other commercial players in the space are working on various technological improvements that will help in solving the issues related to  space debris. NASA created a material that can heal itself in less than a second from hurtling space debris. 
One group that is often overlooked, but that has the potential to strongly affect the future path toward the sustainable use of space, is comprised of end users of space-based services. This encompasses anyone from telecommunications customers to users of imaging data to transportation companies relying on satellites to track their ships and planes. If end users demand sustainability like other sectors, it would likely force launch providers and satellite operators to act. 
Finally, there is a new stakeholder that is trying to solve the challenge of space debris. Startups such as Astroscale and D-Orbit are making progress toward commercializing the removal, or at least mitigation, of space debris. Another example is LeoLabs, a ground-based space mapping provider, whose phased-array radars are capable of tracking debris as small as 2 cm.
 

Image: PM Images

References:
https://spacenews.com/u-s-satellite-destroyed-in-space-collision/
https://www.space.com/3415-china-anti-satellite-test-worrisome-debris-cloud-circles-earth.html
https://www.space.com/india-anti-satellite-test-significance.html
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/visualizing-easrth-satellites-sapce-spacex/
 
http://www.esa.int/Safety_Security/Space_Debris/The_current_state_of_space_debris
 
*****This Article was Contributed by Santosh Ankola, Member ASEI Silicon Valley *******

 
The May 2021 edition of ASEI Newsletter was sent to all those who are on our mailing list till April end. Here is the web version. Happy reading and catching up on all that happened in the last month and what lies ahead with your society!
 
ASEI is a volunteer run professional organization and we welcome your involvement. We request feedback and especially welcome any articles, blogs or ideas you would like to contribute. Please be in touch with anyone from the content/editorial team. 
 
In case you are  not receiving our emails, please check your spam/junk or promotions folder and change the settings in your mailbox to deliver ASEI emails in your in-box. If you still did not find our newsletter please send an email to info@aseiusa.org for us to investigate. 
 
 

On April 24th, the American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin (ASEI) convened an AI Summit with a number of researchers, authors, speakers and experts covering Artificial Intelligence  from multiple perspectives: Augmented Intelligence with Data, AI/ML Solutions for social benefit and Artificial Intelligence Applications for the enterprise & AI Ethics 
 
Opening the summit, Divya Ashok, who serves as VP of Innovation and Strategy at Salesforce, introduced the AI Summit Chair Piyush Malik who has been working in the Data & AI domain for over 25 years, currently as the Senior Vice President at SpringML, a Google partner startup in Silicon Valley. Piyush gave a bird’s eye view of the AI landscape, the real life and enterprise application opportunities as well as set the stage for the plenary segment where the theme was AI for Society. He recognized  the  contributions of AI pioneer technologists and Turing awardees over the past 7 decades including Prof  Raj Reddy, the first Asian and the only Indian origin person to have won the Nobel prize of computing (i.e. Turing Award for AI) in 1994 long before the current euphoria over AI was commonplace.

  Vilas Dhar,  President and Trustee of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation (PJMF), gave a message of support from PJMF to ASEI as we work towards our shared vision for AI - powered yet human-centric ethical endeavor for the benefit of society as we  explore the future of meaningful work through youth empowerment. PJMF is a 21st century philanthropy advancing artificial intelligence (AI) and data solutions to create a thriving, equitable, and sustainable future for all. Vilas, a biomedical engineer by initial training is an entrepreneur, technologist, and human rights advocate with a lifelong commitment to creating more robust, human-centered social institutions. His message of support for AI for social benefit  and data philanthropy fostered through interactions with ASEI leadership was complemented by the next speaker Dr Sundar Sundareshwaran, AI Fellow at the World Economic Forum (WEF) where PJMF is a supporter.


 
At WEF, Dr Sundar is co-creating a governance framework with a multi-stakeholder community for the use of Chatbots in healthcare amongst other initiatives which he talked about in detail having an impact in the COVID era.  Sundar  represents Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corporation in his role at WEF’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. He  is a seasoned technologist with research, development, P&L and executive leadership experience. With a Master’s degree in Natural Language Understanding and a PhD in Computer Vision, Sundar has made numerous research contributions in robotics, neural networks, human computer interaction, virtual/augmented reality and autonomous vehicles. His plenary talk at the AI summit gave a broader view of the Policy impact AI is having at the World stage and he welcomed the opportunity for ASEI members to join hands in making the world a better place through fair use of AI rather than fearing from it. On behalf of ASEI, Piyush portrayed the excitement of being able to work with evangelists, policymakers, data and AI professionals and social changemakers at the WEF and PJMF.

 
In the next section of the summit three  authors spoke about their respective work and the impact each of them are having in the field of AI.  Anyone who has tried to learn GCP or machine learning with Google technologies would have seen Dr Valiappa (Lak) Lakshmanan  in action via his Coursera lessons and courses. Lak as he is popularly known, serves as the Director for Data Analytics and AI Solutions at  Google Cloud. Previously as a Director at the Climate Corporation, he led a team of data scientists building probabilistic estimates of past, current and future weather. Currently with his team he  builds software solutions for business problems using Google Cloud's data analytics and machine learning products but he is very passionate about AI for Social good on which he spoke at length. Real world proof points and examples in the field of flood control, agriculture, healthcare etc were shared with the summit audience which resulted in a lot of interactive chats and Q&A.

 

ASEI Michigan chapter president Muthu Sivanantham introduced and facilitated discussion with the next two speakers.  Dr Raj Ramesh, a TEDx speaker who happens to have a doctorate in AI was the next author to speak. He has broad experience with digital transformation and helps  organizations bring together complementary strengths of machines and humans to effect grand change.  His talk featuring interesting doodles and interactive audience participation surveys was patterned on his recent book, “AI & You” and he advised how to co-exist with machines by sharing  how to think, thrive, and transform in an AI driven future.
“AI will present a lot of opportunities in the future.  Sure, some jobs will be replaced, but each of us can leverage our knowledge, passion, and experience to position ourselves at the forefront of this cognitive revolution” - Dr Raj Ramesh at the ASEI AI Summit

 
The next speaker Ashish Bansal with his cool demeanour brought to light an example of how rubber meets the road in AI though Models in Natural Language Processing. NLP is a topic of increasing attention given the recent popularity of Open AI’s GPT3 model and discussions of “AI creating AI”. Ashish has previously worked in AI/ML  & Recommendation systems  for Twitter and Capital One and currently is a Director at  Twitch. His recent book Natural Language Processing with Tensorflow was discussed in brief as well.
 
Final section of the AI Summit was the “Women in Data & AI” segment facilitated  by Vatsala Upadhya and featured a lively and colorful “Ethics in AI” discussion between  Dr Sindhu Joseph, CEO of Cognicor with 6 Patents in AI, and Bala Sahejpal, SVP at DataRobot with Piyanka Jain, President and CEO of Aryng moderating.

 
Issues of bias, reproducibility , transparency and equity and inclusion in  data and AI from people of color perspective was discussed as well as importance of governance and building checks and balances in the development and testing of AI systems was deliberated 
Bala is an accomplished leader with over 25 years of experience and a proven ability in leading cross functional global teams for building Data and Analytics solutions delivering enterprise success while securing multimillion-dollar savings for diverse business functions. She shared what made her interested in AI infused  automation and drove her towards joining DataRobot after stints at Cisco/Appdynamics, Juniper and Netapp.
Piyanka has two Master’s degrees, with her thesis involving applied mathematics and statistics. Before founding Aryng, she was the Head of Business Analytics at PayPal-North America.She happens to be a bestselling author of “Behind every Good Decision”  and a regular contributor to Forbes, HBR, InsideHR, TDWI, Experian, Modern Workplace, Predictive Analytics World, etc. Her efforts over the years have driven $1b+ in business impact for her clients. Injecting her 20+ years of Data & Analytics experience during the panel discussion, she said “As AI becomes more prevalent, AI literacy for leaders and AI governance are two ‘must-haves’ to truly capitalize on the power of AI to drive significant business value while staying clear of AI fiasco like Tay”
Recounting the challenges that are faced in the adoption of ethical AI, Dr. Sindhu Joseph, founder, and CEO of CogniCor, which provides a digital assistant platform for financial services, said - "AI is not just scaling solutions, but amplifying the historic biases embedded in our society. Given that the most popular branch of AI namely ML/DL learns its models from historic observations, our inherent biases make their way into the data sets, making a small, select, and often homogeneous group of developers, organizations as guardians of fairness.”
 
 This session underscored the need for diversity in organizations and in startups developing AI algorithms and attention and investment in branches of AI that have the potential to bring about fairness.
The interactive Q&A sessions and chat texts continued to buzz throughout the nearly 4 hour conference with an engaged audience. The most interesting audience questions and some early bird participants won 10 books courtesy the three  authors and publishers. Proposing the vote of thanks, Raju Sreewastava, CEO of Big Data Trunk announced the list of winners.
 
The AI Summit showed the attendees the depth of AI/ML experience and thought leadership amongst Indian diaspora & ASEI members and gave a glimpse of the richness of  its collaborations with national and international professional bodies. 
As is evident from recent events and newsletters, ASEI has had a fantastic 2021 so far with a large number of activities and new programmes such as MentorConnect, UniversityConnect and YouthPrograms to serve its members’ interests and build the next generation of engineers and technologists.
 

COVID Emergency Response
 
CNN reports, “India reported 352,991 new cases of coronavirus, bringing the total to more than 17.3 million cases. This is the sixth day running that India, with a 1.3 billion population, has added over a 300,000 new cases a day —the highest number of cases in a single day anywhere in the world. The country's death toll also continues to break records, with 2,812 deaths reported on Monday, marking the tenth day in a row of rising figures."
 
ASEI is deeply anguished at the globally worsening situation with pandemic  over the past year but more so as  India is now in the eye of the storm with surging cases and shortages of critical medical supplies, oxygen and healthcare facilities. As a group of compassionate technologists we are encouraging all of our members to get involved and help. Here  is a list of selected resources that could help someone: This shall be kept updated as the situation evolves
 
Stay safe and healthy. We are in this together!
 
Informational resources 
 Crowdsourced information on Covid Relief  but mostly good to locate resources in all parts of India .
Delhi has created a microsite for Covid related resources 
 
ART OF LIVING volunteers initiative for _COVID related relief in different cities. 
Click on the link below for covid related help and choose the category (Select the head as per your requirement, Then Join the relevant whatsapp group, Exit the group once your problem is resolved.)
 Mumbai 
 Delhi 
 Kolkata 
 Pune 
 
Organizations collecting donations to help with covid response
 
The hospitals in India are overwhelmed by the steep increase in cases, lack of oxygen and ventilators, and shortage of vaccines is making a deadly situation even worse. Please consider supporting these organizations and mutual aid groups  
- Khalsa Aid https://www.khalsaaid.org/
- Give India https://lnkd.in/ggwPsy3
- Ongoing Mutual Aid and Fundraisers for COVID-19 
- Michigan India Community Services recommends Donate  to SEVA International for Oxygen Concentrators 
- Donate to Aim for  Seva 
-Overseas Volunteer for Better India extends its mission by adding Covid relief projects -OVBI 
- IIT Alumni have come together for helping through Milaap 
-Other portals consolidated for Covide related donations to India  here
 

 
 

 
Have you ever noticed that you were talking, browsing about some specific thing to buy on the mobile phone and all of a sudden you start seeing ads in your search engine, websites you visit, smart tv, mobile apps and so on. That's happening due to the loose privacy settings and ad technologies building and sharing your profile through cookies, IDFA or similar identifier. This has led to explosive growth of internet age companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon etc. With concerns from consumer advocacy groups and lawmakers around the world, there have been changes proposed in this space and this article will demystify those for you and what you need to know specially if you are an Apple aficionado.
 
Internet and specifically mobile usage has exploded in the last few years. 4.66 billion or 60% of the world’s population has access to the internet. 5.22 billion or 66.6% of the world’s population has a phone. 
 
Social and Gaming Apps have been one of the biggest contributors of users using the mobile. Users provide their personal data such as age, gender, date of birth to most of the apps that they download and use. Apps also collect the usage metrics, location metrics and other useful metrics in order to make the App and their product better. 
 
However, not all data that is collected is used for improving the product. Apps use a unique identifier called IDFA in Apple iOS and Google Advertising ID in Android devices across the apps. As users open and navigate through various apps, a user profile against this unique ID is built. This user profile is what gets shared through a data broker or Data Management Platform. This helps the Ad platforms to show targeted Ads to a user. In simple terms, your personal data is pieced together, shared, aggregated, and used in real-time auctions, fueling a $227 billion-a-year industry.
 
Good news is Apple, with it’s new release of iOS 14.5 any day now, will take a major step to protect users’ privacy within the app ecosystem
 
As a complex and growing set of entities access, track, and monetize personal consumer data, Apple is introducing two new features aimed at providing users with increased transparency, visibility, and choice so that they can make informed choices and exert greater control over their privacy. 
 
App Tracking Transparency will require apps to get the user’s permission before tracking their data across apps or websites owned by other companies. App Tracking Transparency will require apps to get the user’s permission before tracking their data across apps or websites owned by other companies. Any App who shares user data or uses data for advertising will be required to show a popup and get user consent before they can do so. With about 70% users predicted to opt out of data sharing, this will result in loss of at least 50% Ad revenue for Apps that heavily rely on Ads for monetization.
 
This is just the beginning of data privacy as Chrome, Android and other OS and platforms will enforce stricter rules that help users take control of their data.
 


References
 
Mobile Marketing Stats
 
28 Mobile App Statistics to know 
 
Release of IOS 14.5
 
Apples’ Transparency 
 
GDPR 
 
**********************************************************************************************************
 
Article contributed by Santosh Ankola, ASEI SiliconValley

Learn, Network and win Prizes!
 
ASEI will convene an AI Summit with a number of researchers, authors, speakers and experts covering AI from multiple perspectives: Augmented Intelligence with Data, AI/ML Solutions and Artificial Intelligence Applications for the enterprise  & AI Ethics 
Be amongst the first 20 to join the live audience on 24th April  for a chance to win 5 early bird giveaways. Also, submit your questions in advance via twitter @ASEIUSA and engage with us with hashtag #ASEI #AISUMMIT. There are prizes for most interesting questions raised and also most engaged participants will win one of 10 giveaway books .
 Prizes Sponsored By : O’reilly Media  & Packt
 
Register here to get a Zoom link
 
Here is the speaker lineup:
PLENARY: 10am -10:45 AM (all times PT)
Overview
Dr Raj Reddy (First Asian Turing Award Winner ) AI Pioneer & Professor @Carnegie Mellon University & Stanford
Dabbala Rajagopal "Raj" Reddy is an Indian-American computer scientist and a winner of the Turing Award. He is one of the early pioneers of Artificial Intelligence and has served on the faculty of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon for over 50 years.
Dr Venkataraman (Sundar) Sundareswaran AI Fellow @ World Economic Forum
Topic: Artificial Intelligence & WEF: Developing tools for an ethical world
Sundar is an Artificial Intelligence Fellow at the World Economic Forum, where he is co-creating a governance framework with a multi-stakeholder community for the use of Chatbots in healthcare.  He represents Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corporation in this role at the Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Sundar is a seasoned technologist with research, development, P&L and executive leadership experience. With a Master’s degree in Natural Language Understanding and a PhD in Computer Vision, Sundar made numerous research contributions in robotics, neural networks, human computer interaction, virtual/augmented reality and autonomous vehicles, prior to taking leadership roles in advanced technology production facilities.  He is passionate about responsible deployment of novel technologies in societally important areas such as healthcare.
Topic: AI/ML Applications for the Enterprise
Piyush Malik Senior Vice President @ SpringML
Piyush is a startup executive, entrepreneur, board advisor and business transformation practitioner in emerging technologies. Currently as Senior VP at SpringML, a Google partner startup, Piyush is in charge of customer success solutions helping enterprise clients accelerate in their journey of AI-First and Cloud-First digital transformation. The technologies include AI/ML, IoT & Data Science. Formerly, he co-founded and led diversified, large, and high-caliber global teams of thousands at IBM and before that at PricewaterhouseCoopers to grow and scale his Fortune 500 client companies’ businesses spanning numerous industries and 4 continents. An alum of IIT Delhi, with a masters in Management of Technology and undergraduate in Telecom and Electronics Engineering, he has lived in the Silicon Valley for 25 years and has been serving on the boards of a number of professional and non-profit organizations including American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin.
 Vilas Dhar President @  Patrick J McGovern Foundation 
Global AI & Data Philanthrophy 
Vilas Dhar is President and Trustee of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, a 21st century philanthropy advancing artificial intelligence (AI) and data solutions to create a thriving, equitable, and sustainable future for all. Vilas is an entrepreneur, technologist, and human rights advocate with a lifelong commitment to creating more robust, human-centered social institutions. A leading voice on equity in a tech-enabled world, Vilas champions a new social compact for the digital age that prioritizes individuals and communities in the development of new products, inspires economic and social opportunity, and empowers the most vulnerable. Vilas serves as a Trustee of the Christensen Fund, Co-Chair of the Global AI Action Alliance at the World Economic Forum, a Senior Fellow of the Berggruen Institute, Advisor to MIT SOLVE, and as a Director of the New England International Donors. Vilas holds a J.D. from NYU School of Law, a Master’s in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and dual Bachelor's degrees in Biomedical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of Illinois.
10:45 am -11:15 am (all times PT)
Session 1 Topic: AI for Social Good
Dr Valiappa Lakshmanan 4X Author, Sr Director & Head AI Solutions @Google
Lak is the Director for Data Analytics and AI Solutions on Google Cloud. His team builds software solutions for business problems using Google Cloud's data analytics and machine learning products. Previously as a Director at the Climate Corporation, he led a team of data scientists (statisticians, engineers, meteorologists) who build probabilistic estimates of past, current and future weather. Before that, he was a Senior Research Scientist at CIMMS/U. Oklahoma/National Severe Storms Laboratory. His Google Scholar page captures the ways in which that work is used by other scientists.
Books: His O'Reilly books on Machine Learning Design Patterns, BigQuery: The Definitive Guide and Data Science on Google Cloud Platform are available from Amazon. His earlier book on Automating the Analysis of Spatial Grids can be read online and ordered from Springer's website.
11:15 am -11:45 am (all times PT)
Session 2 Topic: AI & You – How to think, transform, and thrive in an AI future
Dr Raj Ramesh TEDx Speaker & Author
Dr. Raj Ramesh, who has a doctorate in AI, has broad experience with digital transformation. He helps organizations bring together complementary strengths of machines and humans to effect grand change.  In his recent book, “AI & You: How to Think, Thrive, and Transform in an Artificial Intelligence Future,” he explores how individuals and companies can best prepare for the new changes AI will bring. Raj is passionate about simplifying the complexity of AI/ML so many more can understand the topic and adapt their professional career.  One way he does this is through easy to comprehend whiteboard videos. He has produced over 150 of them that are freely available on YouTube . He’s an engineer, designer, programmer, business owner, mentor,  data scientist, evangelist, storyteller, dreamer, teacher, speaker, writer, doodler, video creator, father, husband, dog owner, and probably a few more.





11:45 am -12:15 pm (all times PT)
Session 3 Topic: Rubber Meets the road: Natural Language Processing -- Big Models aren't enough
Ashish Bansal Author and Director @Twitch





Author of Advanced Natural Language Processing with TensorFlow 2 (https://tinyurl.com/4p3bsxwj) Ashish builds content recommendation engines at Twitch and was previously at Twitter. He was a Senior Director of Data Science at Capital One. Prior to Capital One, he co-founded GALE Partners and headed the Machine Learning group. He has over 19 years of experience in the technology industry, along with an MBA from Kellogg School of Management and B Tech from IIT BHU. His life's ambition is to be a Kung Fu master.
 12:15 pm -1:00 pm (all times PT)
Session 4 : Women in Data Panel : AI Ethics and Innovation in the enterprise
Dr.Sindhu Joseph CEO and Founder @ CogniCor Technologies, Inc.
Dr.Sindhu Joseph is the Founder and CEO of CogniCor, the leading AI Digital Assistant platform that delivers revolutionary operational efficiency and productivity for leading financial firms of the world. She holds a Ph.D. in AI, is the inventor of 6 patents, author, and speaker on topics around Enterprise AI, AI in Financial Services and diversity in AI. She is also a mentor to Nex3 AI Startup accelerator and is an advisory council member of Build Common Wealth Inc. She is based in Palo Alto, California, and drives CogniCor’s vision to provide thinking, talking face to every business. CogniCor, created out of her Ph.D., combines traditional inductive AI with advanced deductive AI and reasoning to offer a unique digital assistant platform built for business teams in the Financial services industry.
Bala Sahejpal Senior Vice President @DataRobot
Accomplished leader with the proven ability in leading cross functional global teams for building Data and Analytics solutions delivering enterprise success while securing multimillion-dollar savings for diverse business functions - Sales, Marketing, Product Management, Finance, Customer Service, and Engineering. Excellent understanding of business solutions, technologies and challenges associated with implementation of Data Science models, Big Data, Business Intelligence, Analytics and Master Data solutions in medium to large-scale organizations.
Piyanka Jain President & Founder @Aryng
In more than 15 years as an analytics leader, Aryng Founder Piyanka Jain is a leading expert in Data Literacy, building Data Culture, Machine Learning, Data Science and Analytics. She is an Amazon #1 bestselling author in Data Mining, paid keynoter in conferences, and a regular contributor to Forbes, HBR, InsideHR, TDWI, Experian, Modern Workplace, Predictive Analytics World, etc. She has developed the BADIR framework which enables 10X+ faster insights, 20X+ impact, and has driven $1b+ in business impact for her clients. She has two Master’s degrees, with her thesis involving applied mathematics and statistics. Before founding Aryng, she was the Head of Business Analytics at PayPal-North America.
1:00 pm - 1:15 pm (all times PT)
Prizes and Closing announcements 
 

 Pathways that work - By Dr Preetha Ram
 

 
Career success is as much about content knowledge as about soft skills.  A  2014 survey from CareerBuilder found that 77% of employers surveyed believed soft skills were of equal importance as hard skills/technical competencies.  During my time as Dean for Science at Emory University, I was fortunate to encounter many young people starting out on their STEM careers. As  I kept up with their careers, I have, over time, developed strong notions on what contributes to success in STEM careers.   My hypothesis is that it takes both personality characteristics/attributes and knowledge/competencies to really succeed in one’s chosen career.  One without the other is like,  yin without the yang, the chole without the bhatura, the iddli without the chutney.
 
What are these personality attributes? And what are these competencies?  
 
At the ASEI EdTech event on April 10, Anita Kishore, Alok Jain, Srini Vemula and I explored these questions around the framework of helping children and youth get from the “Classroom to the C-Suite”.  
 
Curiosity, creativity, resilience, grit, and empathy are some well recognized traits that contribute to success.  These attributes allow one to keep learning, keep growing and respond to crises calmly and thoughtfully.  Parents can inculcate these attributes by helping their children reflect on their activities and encourage and discuss their children’s reading.  As important as asking thought provoking questions is listening to the responses, offering insights and modelling the behaviors parents would like their children to emulate.
 
For young professionals engaged in career progression, we agreed with Anita’s three tips:
1) Stay curious - engage in continuous learning by reading, talking to others in your area (and outside), sign up for industry-leading newsletters, etc
2) Experiment - Apply your experimental mindset to all parts of your life.  It's ok to make mistakes.  You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.   
3) Ask for feedback from peers, mentors, critics, and supporters - and remain true to your own values.  Feedback is a gift - you can accept it or disregard it, but it can be used to improve yourself.  
 
We all understand the importance of gaining skills and competencies, and undoubtedly the most important of them all, would be quantitative skills.  Everyone needs math in their lives. Ideally we want our kids to be comfortable playing with math like they do with playdough, moving things, making shapes, enjoying, building, and taking it apart again.  Math opens the doors to understanding concepts, which can later lead up to mastery in data science and AI.  Igebra.ai, founded by Srini Vemula, has successfully built curricula around this goal: mastery of math and to keep elementary school children joyously , joyously engaged with math, and learning coding and basic ai concepts. 
 
While quantitative proficiencies are key to unlocking technical competencies in this technology driven world, an entrepreneurial mindset can open up new paradigms of thinking and new opportunities.  Learning how to be entrepreneurial can be tremendously advantageous as the Future of Work will demand innovation, creativity, and out-of-the box thinking from its employees. Creativity and entrepreneurial thinking is sure to be rewarded not only in startups but also by established corporations.  Moonshot jr,  the brainchild of Alok Jain, has a curriculum that trains children of all ages to think entrepreneurially!  If the notion of elementary school age children creating and selling their products on Amazon, makes you marvel, you need to take a look at Moonshot Jr.
 
As in anything, it is a question of balance.  As a parent, we balance a child’s experiences and explorations, so that there is guidance but also empowerment, and room to discover and grow.  We also balance the acquisition of soft skills and as well as of technical competencies.  Finally, as professionals, young and old, we balance the various demands of growing our careers, being a good team player, being a patient and collaborative colleague, growing our professional networks with staying current in the field, always learning, always innovating, growing our knowledge base.  Help is available at each stage of the journey: executive coaching offered by Anita Kishore, quantitative training at Srini Vemula’s igebra.ai, and entrepreneurship training by Alok Jain’s MoonshotJr.
 
In a nutshell, quantitative skills and entrepreneurial thinking, enhanced by the soft skills noted above, are uniformly helpful and should be in the toolbox for everyone, the artist or the analyst, the poet or physicist, the social worker or the scientist!
 
***********************************************************************
This article was contributed by ASEI SiliconValley Boardmember Dr Preetha Ram who serves as  General Partner at Pier 70 Ventures and was  formerly Dean for Science at Emory University as well as a successful EdTech entrepreneur having founded and exited OpenStudy prior to jumping into the venture capital world. For anyone signing up to avail products or services from MoonShot Jr or Igebra.ai for their family (kids, grandkids, nephews or nieces etc.) or coaching from Dr Anita, there are ASEI Member / sponsorship discounts available. Click here for more info.
 

 

The Space Launch System has been the subject of heated debates, but what’s the alternative for going to the Moon, Mars, and beyond? (PIX credit: NASA)
 
Several days after the editorial board of Bloomberg recommended that the Biden Administration cancel the Space Launch System (SLS), Loren Thompson published a rebuttal in Forbes. But I respectfully, if strongly, disagree with Thompson. The future of the SLS is of immense importance to NASA and the country, and thus to the taxpayers, and hence we need to attempt as soon as possible to set the record straight.
Thompson says, “The editorial board at Bloomberg News launched a nonsensical attack on NASA’s human spaceflight program last week. It was full of dubious assertions about alternatives to the Space Launch System.” And yet it is his attack that seems motivated for self-centered reasons, and is full of questionable assertions.
Yes, as the Bloomberg editorial said, SLS needs to be scrapped. But not only that, we need to change the paradigm of how we do space travel. Building a bigger and bigger rocket every time to fit a bigger mission, the crux of Thompson’s argument, is asinine and unnecessary. With the advent of many reusable rockets by SpaceX, Blue Origin, and hopefully soon Rocket Lab, we are in a different territory. Let us, as a country, take advantage of it or someone else will do it first.
The problem, simply put, is that larger payloads and farther destinations require more propellant, which in turn requires bigger rockets to boost them. So, our plans also get limited in what we have available that day in terms of rockets.
What if we do not have to be limited this way? This is possible by docking multiple upper stages in low Earth orbit (LEO), one carrying the payload and all others carrying that much extra fuel by the same reusable booster(s). No refueling required for now, as the Forbes article posited as alarm—perhaps that can come later. In nerd-speak, what this does is to increase the propellant fraction until it is equal to what is needed to do the job. This gives us an ability to have theoretically infinite solutions for space travel, basically tailored to fit the need. Want to go to Moon? Two flights of Falcon Heavy. Want to go to Mars instead? Four flights of Falcon Heavy. A little extra boost needed? Rocket Lab’s new Neutron can fill the gap. A bigger gap? New Glenn of Blue Origin can help out.
It builds a railroad to space with thousands of solutions at our finger tips. Let us build this railroad instead of the one-off solutions like SLS. This is not rocket science!
This was not possible earlier. But now the reusable rockets have proven considerably less expensive to fly, and the upper stages have less weight. It is almost a sure bet that many other countries, especially China, will follow this method and leave us in dust if we do not adopt this. China is already developing reusable rockets. If we stay with the current status quo, we will lose this race to China, who will have thousands of possible paths to NASA’s one or two using SLS. Do we really want to be in that pickle?
This solution exists today! Docking in LEO has been done since 1966, and is being done today frequently, and often automatically, at the International Space Station. The answer is simple: save the $2 billion per year spent on SLS and put some of that into developing in-space refueling technology, lunar surface infrastructure, and water-ice extraction technologies; some can even be reallocated for climate change. It is a huge saving, and we need to take a step now with the new administration.
To supplant the above arguments with numbers, SLS cost is pegged at about $2 billion per launch and its payload capability for LEO with Block 1 is 95 tons and Block 2 cargo 130 tons. Falcon Heavy, pegged at $125 million per launch with its semi-reusable option (the two side boosters recovered and core expended) has around 54 tons capacity to LEO. Four flights of it can deposit more than 200 tons in LEO, which is twice as much as one SLS Block 1. Thus, the approximate numbers now are $2 billion vs $500 million for twice the payload—a factor of eight advantage. Why would we not do this? Mind you, this does not require refueling, just docking. And as icing on this cake, we can also use some upper stage tanks as habitats. Is this rocket science? No. Just common sense, perhaps with some innovative, out-of-the-box, bold thinking that NASA used to be known for.
Schedule. That we should “commit ourselves to achieving a goal before this decade is out of landing man on the Moon” was announced in 1961, and was fulfilled despite those clunky computers and the first-time feats for almost all of the successes. NASA taking longer for the Space Shuttle was already the beginning of different NASA from the one in ’60s, which has just proven it is in a huge bureaucratic decline now thanks mainly to the unfair political pressure being exerted by some Senators and the likes of companies that Mr. Thompson represents. There has to be a limit to stretching this string unreasonably harder. It needs to break now. Yes, SpaceX was five years behind schedule for Falcon Heavy. But SLS is already at year ten after the development was announced and has not flown yet. No, those excuses just don’t wash any more.
 
Cost. Let us just look at the actual savings to taxpayers here in the example Mr. Thompson mentions in his essay, where he compares Starship’s projected $2 million launch cost versus the $331.8 million NASA just paid for a Falcon Heavy launch. Starship’s quoted cost by SpaceX indeed is absurdly low and may not pan out. But even taking that number into account, NASA is being taken to cleaners for $329.8 million more than should have ($331.8 million – $2 million), for the sake of argument. But in case of SLS, where each launch costs approximately $2 billion each, it is a higher number by about $1.67 billion, which the taxpayers will bear the brunt of. Which is a higher burden? It is not just the ratio that matters. For taxpayers, it is the actual dollar amount.
Technology. The most impactful technology, possibly by far, that was developed by SpaceX is the sequence of the boostback maneuver, engine restarts, and landing on a droneship or returning to the launch site. This is what will save considerable sums that make unthinkable doable. It changes the paradigm that helps not just this country but humanity. To make light of this by comparing it to the “world’s largest welding tool,” as Forbes does in its assessment of new technology on SLS, is to intentionally keep blinders on.
Justification. The method outlined above, which is possible only with reusable booster rockets and not with SLS, not only creates the path to the Moon and Mars but also many other destinations in solar system. Again, the common denominator is to not use SLS or any expendable rocket solutions, which are huge money pits. If we do not think China will embrace this development, while the US again falls victim to political and big business arm-twisting, then we have another set of blinders on. It may not be just that this time around. It may also be a security threat in terms of China moving much farther ahead of us in the space arena, particularly cislunar space, if we do not take action soon.
Thompson expounds that “several companies on the SLS team including core stage contractor contribute to my think tank.” Here on the other hand, no companies—SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, or any other team—have contributed to this opinion piece.
 

 
 
This article is adapted from an OpEd by the author recently published on TheSpaceReview.com Dr. Ajay Kothari is an ASEI Life Member and former President of the ASEI Washington DC chapter. He received his MS and PhD in Aerospace Engineering  from the University of Maryland and has been  the   founder/president of Astrox Corporation for more than 3 decades.
PS: The video recording appearing alongside here is from a prior event - a conversation between Dr Kothari and Piyush Malik on the topic of "Moon and Space:The New Gold Rush" as part of Launching ASEI 's Getting Real with Engineering Webinar Series
 

The April 2021 Newsletter was sent to all those who are on our mailing list till March 31st,2021. Here is the web version. In case you are  not receiving our emails, please check your spam/ junk or promotions folder and change the settings in your mailbox to deliver ASEI emails in your in-box. If you still did not find our newsletter please send an email to info@aseiusa.org for us to investigate. 

 
 

Career success is as much about content knowledge as about soft skills.  In fact A 2014 survey from Career Builder found that 77% of employers it surveyed believed soft skills were of equal importance as hard skills. How to transform STEM students into CEOs?  ASEI experts believe it is through a combination of paying attention to both soft skills and content skills.
ASEI Youth programmes are central to our strategy as regular readers may already know. We will host an Education Technology and STEM focussed discussion with a few experts on April 10, 2021 . Join us as we delve into tools that you can use to equip yourself and your kids (or grandkids) to become more successful in STEM careers.
 
Moderated by ASEI Board Member, Dr. Preetha Ram, who has herself successfully navigated the path from a STEM education (IIT, PhD Chemistry, Yale) to Dean of Science Emory, CEO and now General Partner of a venture firm, you will hear actionable insights from experts and entrepreneurs:
 
Early Steps: Succeeding in STEM paths in from school days
Speaker: Dr. Anita Kishore
 
Early Days: Building creativity and competencies for the future
Speaker: Srini Vemula, CEO of igebra
 
Early Launch: Taking science projects to start-ups
Speaker: Alok Jain, CEO of MoonshotJr
 
Early Steps:
 
What attributes and skills create success in this group that is most often called “nerdy”?  An interest in science and engineering does not necessarily equate to the “nerd”.  What habits can be created early so the young engineer learns to navigate his professional relationships with confidence and ease?
 
Anita Kishore will give us guidance and actionable steps to take as early as high school to ensure success in all stages.
 
Early Days:
The world of tomorrow will be about technology, data, and machine intelligence.  How do we prepare our children to succeed in this data driven world?  What are the new building blocks for this reality?  How do we transform young minds into digital data natives?
 
Srini Vemula has built a unique learning site where your children can learn quantitative skills, data skills, and AI concepts.
 
Early Launch:
An entrepreneurial mindset can be tremendously helpful no matter what the age or stage.  It is valued not only in start-ups but in companies and in academia.  How do you build this mindset at an early age?  
 
Alok Jain has created a wonderful and fun filled curriculum that is sure to set young entrepreneurs on the right track.
 
 
 
 
 
 

ASEI has existed since 1983 for networking opportunities for its member engineers and scientists however in the past few years, the focus has been more on youth development. While encouraging students at undergraduate as well as postgraduate levels with scholarships amounting to tens of thousands of dollars in the past decade, Youth programs were highlighted as one of the  four pillars of ASEI’s 2021 strategy
 

 

 
Recently, a number of members across ASEI chapters got involved with grassroot level interactions with school students participating in science fairs in Michigan as well as in Silicon Valley. These are the opportunities where our members get to speak with promising students to identify talent while judging science fairs. While silicon valley chapter has partnered with Santa Clara Science and Engineering Fair Association (SCSEFA)  for over 6 years now,awarding 3 winners from each of the high school year for the past 6 years,  it was the first time for Michigan chapter to participate with an external agency Science and Engineering Fair of Metro Detroit(SEFMD)  and they selected 5 winning projects.
 

 
We congratulate each of the winning students making it so far. It is incredible to see how much rigour and effort they put into their science projects and presentations.  They will be given opportunities to compete in other science and engineering competitions at the regional and national level such as the YTE 2020 that ASEI hosted last December.

Read more about these YTE Feeder events in reports published recently  by Muthu Sivanantham and Laxmi Patil 


A big "Thank You" to all our volunteer judges  for  their  role  in building the next generation of science and engineering lovers!
**Article Contributed by Piyush Malik, ASEI President **

It is 3/14/2021 and PI day is upon us. My company had an extensive Pi day event where people demonstrated all sorts of innovative products and ideas. After the event, I started thinking about π, π day and the relevance of π in our life. I found that π (3.14……) is extremely relevant for all sorts of innovation and specifically in space technology.
 
Did you know these amazing things about PI?

1.Pi day was started in 1998, by a physicist at San Francisco Exploratorium, as a celebration of Pi. Yes, real pies were involved.
2. National Pi Day (March 14) was declared by the US Congress in 2009. In November 2019, UNESCO decided Pi Day as the International Day of Mathematics
3. PI is considered the swiss army knife of our universe. It is used to answer questions about anything that is spherical or circular and the number has infinite digits
4. Ratio of Circle’s Circumference to its diameter is ALWAYS equal to PI. This applies to the largest planets to smallest atoms!!!
 


5. Pi is ancient. Pi was named only in the 18th century and the symbol Pi was not used until swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler used it in the 1730s.
6. Even the Bible has a pair of passages about Pi 10 cubits from brim to brim  while “30 cubits did compass it round about” - dimensions that place the value of what we now call pi at 3.
7. As NASA explores space (which is full of spherical and circular things), it uses PI extensively 18 Ways NASA Uses Pi and How Pi Makes NASA/JPL Go 'Round
8. PI is a cultural icon. Apu, from Simpsons, claimed to know 40000 digits of PI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_T34r4AysIw. In Star Trek series Spock foils an evil computer by instructing it to compute pi to the last digit Spock Destroys Evil Computer
9. PI has been calculated up to 31 trillion digits - 31,415,926,535,897 to be exact. The record for memorizing digits of pi, stands at 70,030. Want to see how many digits of Pi you can memorize? Try for yourself Pi Quiz
10. Pi Day, March 14th is Albert Einstein’s Birthday. Other notable Birthdays on Pi day include composer Johann Strauss. Famous Physicist Stephen Hawking died on March 14, 2018. 
11. On Pi day if you feel like eating Pie or Pizza see discounts at Pi Day discount (Pizza for $3.14 and more)
 
For more celebrations of and information try the links below
 
pi day
What is Pi 
NASA Pi Day Challenge
18 Ways NASA uses Pi
how many digits of Pi does NASA need and use

*** Article Contributed by Amrish Chopra,  Life Member, ASEI Silicon Valley *****

Did you miss ASEI Newsletter for this month?
The March 2021 Newsletter was sent to all those who were on our mailing list till end of Feb 2021. Here is the web version.

A lot of members have been providing feedback and we thank you to all those who recently reached out  letting us know that our communications are either perhaps landing in your junk folder or being misdirected. Our  monthly  Newsletter for March 2021 (and future ones too) will be available and archived  on our website 
 
In case you are  not receiving our emails, please check your spam/ junk or promotions folder and change the settings in your mailbox to deliver ASEI emails in your in-box. If you still did not find our newsletter please send an email to info@aseiusa.org for us to investigate.
 

To celebrate International Women's month, we are happy to offer FREE month of mentorship to all women out there - members or not. So spread the word in your network.
Connect with Divya Ashok or Ram Ramnanujam on Linkedin if you would like to know more or click here to avail of this FREE opportunty
http://www.aseiusa.org/Home/Programs
 
 
 

“Women will have achieved true equality when men share with them, the responsibility of bringing up the next generation.” - Ruth Bader Ginsburg
 
The first International Women's Day was celebrated on March 8th,1911. Over a century later, according to the World  Economic Forum (WEF), we will achieve gender parity in another 100 years. Let us take this moment to actively and consciously pursue the empowerment and elevation of women, by each other and our allies. 
 
This year's theme for International Women’s Day is - Women in Leadership: Achieving an equal future in a COVID-19 world. Women have been instrumental in shaping businesses and the workforce while keeping their families safe and healthy during this once-in-a-lifetime pandemic.
I would like to take a moment to celebrate the economic, political, and social achievements of women in the recovery and rebuilding of our world, and also to generate awareness around the struggles of women worldwide.
 
It has been a year since most of us went into lockdown and experienced several emotions including disbelief, paranoia, stress, grief, and worry for our families’ well-being. There were many who did not have the luxury of Netflix nor the comfort of instant delivery (think war zones, natural calamities, mental health). 2020 certainly made every mother’s journey hard, juggling work and life and some far more than others. Overall, existing gender inequalities regressed women’s progress in the world (Report).
 
In the midst of all this chaos, women rose up to the challenge at the workplace, at home, and in some cases for their country. A few highlights were Jacinda Arden and Angela Merkel who proved what a woman at the helm can help a country achieve in this calamity. Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett was instrumental in leading her team to create the Moderna vaccine. Swati Mohan landed the Perseverance rover in Mars, marking a historic win for humanity. There are several women in your own home, workplace and organizations you belong to that you can recognize, celebrate and elevate.
 
Here are nine simple actions I want to leave you with to elevate women around you in March.
1.     Celebrate 3 women around you and reinforce their impact on your life.
2.     Recognize your female and queer women in the workplace for their contributions to your teams.
3.     Purchase from women-owned businesses in March.
4.     Provide your time or donate to organizations for the betterment of women.
5.     Mentor/Coach at least 1 woman in 2021
6.     If you have a technologist at home, have them take advantage of ASEI’s offer on FREE mentoring for women in March!
7.     Host virtual events for your community and your organization. Several events below can use allies to increase awareness.
8.     Remember, house chores are not gender-specific. They are life skills for everyone!
9.     Last but not least, say THANK YOU to the wonderful women around you, starting with your mom.
 It takes a village to complete a project successfully. It is going to take all of us, taking meaningful action, to elevate and accelerate our progress towards gender equality.
List of events:
·        Mentor Connect by ASEI (FREE for women if you sign up by 3/31)
·        Women’s Panel on Social Entrepreneurship by ASEI (March 27th, 2021)
·        https://www.eventbrite.com/d/online/international-womens-day/
·        https://www.eventbrite.com/e/united-nations-observance-of-international-womens-day-2021-registration-141746857667 Thank you, Divya Ashok, for this beautifully articulated write-up.

 
 
The only thing constant in our lives is change and with the turn of the year, a new ASEI Board took shape and we have pledged to make a difference. We did not let the pandemic driven crisis go to waste and launched our social media and digital efforts . Building on the momentum from our recent 33rd National Convention held virtually,  with fresh ideas and new vigour, our 2021 Annual General Meeting with Chief Guest UC San Diego Chancellor Dr Pradeep Kosla kicked off ASEI’s 2021 activities and initiatives  into high gear. 
 
The four Pillars of our strategy are:
 
1.MentorConnect (1:1 Mentoring with Engineering Executives)
2.UniversityConnect (Connecting with Indian origin Faculty and Students across Universities & Affiliation with Engineering and Sciences Bodies)
3.KnowledgeSharing (Engineering Tales spotlight series on exceptional ASEI members & Getting Real with Engineering Webinars)
 
4.Youth & STEM (Continue programs like Scholarships, Science Fairs and Youth Technology Exposition)
 

On Feb 27th, we had a launch event for Mentor Connect where ASEI Treasurer Ram Ramanujam kicked off with introductions and Sri Gavini moderated a panel discussion with 3 seasoned engineering executives Raj Gupta,  Subu Subramanian and Ankur Ganguli shared  lessons from their respective creer journeys. MentorConnect is a unique member benefit available for Free to all ASEI student and professional members. Registration is open now till March 21,2021
 
 
*** Post  by : Piyush  Malik , ASEI President  *** Picture Credit: Divya Ashok, LifeMember ASEI Silicon Valley ***
 
 
 

The celebration of National Engineers Week was started in 1951 by the NSPE (National Society of Professional Engineers) in conjunction with George Washington's birthday because he is considered as the nation's first engineer, notably for his survey work. It is observed by more than 70 engineering, education, and cultural societies, and more than 50 corporations and government agencies. The purpose of National Engineers Week is to call attention to the contributions to society that engineers make. It is also a time for engineers to emphasize the importance of learning math, science, and technical skills. 
 
Engineers Week is a time to celebrate their important work and engage the next generation of innovators. Even with social distancing, you can make a difference.
 
Interesting Fact: The Ferris Wheel is One of the Greatest Engineering Wonders:- The very first Ferris Wheel was created by Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania engineer, George W. Ferris, in 1893. The 140-foot steel towers and 45-foot axle were the largest pieces of constructed steel at the time.

Dr Sam Pitroda is an internationally respected telecom inventor, entrepreneur, development thinker, and policy maker. Credited with having laid the foundation for India’s telecommunications and technology revolution of the 1980s, Mr. Pitroda has been a leading campaigner to help bridge the global digital divide. During his tenure as Advisor to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, Mr. Pitroda led six Technology Missions related to telecommunications, water, literacy, immunization, dairy production, and oil seeds. He was also the founder and first Chairman of India’s Telecom Commission. In these plural roles, Mr. Pitroda helped revolutionize India's development philosophies and policies with a focus on access to technology as the key to social change.
 
ASEI and Sam Pitroda  have a long time association. In addition to being the ASEI  lifetime achievement award winner in 2016 , he has spoken at 2006 and 2016 National Conventions as well as the 2020 convention  featured a special message from him for the YTE participants and attendees. However, Piyush has an even longer association with him dating back to 1989 when Mr Pitroda was the Chairman of CDOT and Telecom Commission in India! 
 

 
In his conversation, Dr Pitroda shared the essence of his 55 year journey as an engineer, inventor and entrepreneur in US and covered broad technology & policy  trends that he feels are likely to shape the world going forward. 


He pointed out how science and technology has improved all aspects of our life. Science and technology have improved our health, communication, education, transport, and infrastructure. Even with these amazing changes that science has given us, there is still more to do. So where do we go from here?
 
Current World
 Current world order was created post world war 2 and was built around five major area: Democracy, Human Rights, Capitalism, Consumption and Military. These areas gave us worldwide institutions such as the United Nations, World Bank and GDP. However, this world design is now 75 years old and is built on a world view that does not exist anymore. Post-World War we have seen the dismantling of Soviet Union, rise of countries gaining independence, China being a major player in world politics, energy and huge leaps in technology. Downside of this world order is that inequality around the world increased. Finally, we have a major event of COVID-19 pandemic which highlighted the fact that everything is interconnected. So where do we go now?
Future World
As per Dr. Pitroda, world order should be based on two P's:
·        Planet - We all live on the same planet and cannot ignore planet. Focus should be on global warming, pollution, etc.
·        People - We need to respect every human being. We live in an economy of surplus not an economy of scarcity.
·        Based on the 2 P's, we need to have a more inclusive world. Some changes suggested by Dr. Pitroda were:
·        Democracy needs to be more inclusive.
·        Reform Capitalism such that it does not create inequality. Provide incentives to solve poor people problems not rich people problems.
·        Change thinking to Conserve not Consume
·        Non-violence should be the foundation we build everything on.
In his final comments, Dr. Pitroda said science and technology can lead us to this new world, just as science and technology has shaped our current world. He was very complimentary of the Engineers of Indian Origin in America and commended us all for choosing this noble profession where we have the ability to innovate and positively impact not only US but also India and ultimately the world. 
 
You can  see the full video of this EngineeringTales here
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRt_WCXWyLI
*******
Author: Amrish Chopra, Life Member ASEI Silicon Valley 
Image credits : Piyush Malik, Sam Pitroda
 

 After 8 years of hard work, on February 18th, NASA landed the Rover on Mars at the bottom of the deep valley. Named Perseverance, rover will search for signs of microbial life. Rover’s landing zone is assumed to be a riverbed that may indicate signs of life. Rover will collect rock core samples in metal tubes. Future missions will return these samples to Earth for extensive study.
 
Perseverance journey to Mars took seven months and about 300 million miles (480 million kilometers). Perseverance was launched on July 30 2020 and multiple trajectory corrections maneuvers were made to point the rover to the bottom of the deep valley. Perseverance’s Route to Mars is shown below.
 
 
 
Leading the NASA Rover Landing is Swathi Mohan, the guidance, navigation and control operations lead, and mission commentator for the Perseverance project. She has been working on Perseverance for 8 years and flying the Rover for last seven months. “Perseverance will be the first mission to fly terrain-relative navigation so while she is descending on the parachute she will be actually at the ground with a camera, seeing where she is with respect to the Martian surface, and choosing a safe spot to land”, said Swathi Mohan.  Terrain-Relative Navigation captures photos of the Mars terrain in real time and compares them with onboard maps of the landing area, autonomously directing the rover to divert around known hazards and obstacles as needed.
 
Landing test can be seen here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaVTxc8uxOw&feature=emb_logo
 
Another major accomplishment in this mission is to test the first powered flight on Mars, aka Mars helicopter. Vaneeza Rupani, an 11th grader from Northport Alabama was bestowed the honor to name the helicopter. She submitted her essay into NASA’s “Name the Rover” contest and was chosen among 28,000 essays and named the helicopter Ingenuity. Ingenuity team was led by Dr Bob Balaram. A Principal member of Technical Staff at JPL robotics. Mars has very little atmosphere, only around 1% of Earths. “Flying this kind of helicopter is equivalent to flying a similar helicopter on Earth at a hundred thousand feet” said Dr. Bob Balaram. Helicopter was built using Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and Linux operating system and has a high resolution downward-looking camera for navigation, landing, and science surveying of the terrain, and a communication system to relay data to the Perseverance rover.
 
Kudos to Indian diaspora to assist in this monumental task of finding life on Mars!!!
 
Onwards to Mars!!
 
References:
 
Mars Landing - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gm0b_ijaYMQ
Mars Mission team 
Swathi Mohan BIO 
Landing test
Mars Helicopter 
 
Insane Engineering behind the Rover https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqqaW8DCc-I&feature=youtu.be
 
 
**********************************************
By Amrish Chopra, Director VMWare
Life Member, ASEI Silicon Valley 

 
At the Annual General Meeting held Feb 6th presided by Dr. Pradeep Khosla, Chancellor at University of California San Diego, ASEI members from all chapters across the US joined via Zoom to witness the inauguration of the new National Board of Directors. ASEI President Piyush Malik announced his executive team and launch of new programs and initiatives for 2021. 
PRESS RELEASE
 UCSD Chancellor Khosla kicks off ASEI’s National Board and key initiatives at its 2021 Annual General MeetingFremont, CA Feb 7th, 2021
 The American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin (ASEI) has adapted to the pandemic well and digitally transformed itself by holding all programs virtually and making more of them freely available to all. Here’s a glimpse of its last 30 days:
At the Annual General Meeting held Feb 6th, presided by Dr. Pradeep Khosla, Chancellor at University of California San Diego, ASEI members from all chapters across the US joined via Zoom to witness the inauguration of the new National Board of Directors. ASEI President Piyush Malik announced his executive team and launch of new programs and initiatives for 2021.
A distinguished alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and Carnegie Mellon University, the Chief Guest Dr. Khosla is an internationally renowned electrical and computer engineer recognized for his seminal contributions in secure software and intelligent robot systems. He congratulated Piyush and the new ASEI board members on the important role they play in nurturing the next generation of engineers and technologists. Sharing his career story and how despite being an immigrant person of Indian origin with accent and color disadvantage, he broke the prevailing stereotypes and went on to become the CEO of one of the top US Public Universities with annual revenue of $5.4 Billion.
“People of Indian origin are excelling in engineering in the US in companies all around the USA and they have broken the glass ceiling multiple times and very successfully and got visibility. With visibility comes great responsibility towards the broader community to give back and that’s where ASEI fits in” - Dr Khosla said during his speech.
Dr. Khosla complimented ASEI for the significant role it plays in bridging the Industry academia gap as well as skill gap through its knowledge-sharing events, youth programs, student chapters, and the new initiatives such as University Connect and Mentor Connect which aim to help budding and early tenure engineers with career and professional guidance.
 ASEI National President Malik emphasized how while rejuvenating the chapters and bringing in more diversity, all of them will work together as “One ASEI“ within the framework of new programs like Engineering Tales, MentorConnect, University Connect as well as continue the successful series “Getting Real with Engineering” and STEM programs such as “Youth Technology Exposition”
 The event brought out the exuberance of ASEI National Board Members each of who spoke why they choose to volunteer with ASEI. Later, chapter presidents from Michigan (Muthu Sivananthan), Southern California (Sri Gavini), Waington DC (Venkat Gurunathan) and San Diego (Ashish Mehta) introduced their respective chapter’s board members. Wearing a dual hat as the Silicon Valley chapter President Piyush Malik went on to introduce an expanded and diverse chapter board comprising of seasoned executives, entrepreneurs, educators and technologists.
The launch event owed the attendees the depth of experience amongst ASEI board members and gave a glimpse of the richness of the upcoming programs in the months ahead. It concluded with an interactive “open mike” networking session with all members coming on camera expressing their thoughts and shared excitement for ASEI’s bright future.
 Last month, ASEI hosted Ambassador Amit Kumar, Consul General of India, Chicago on  Jan 28 2021, on the heels of India’s 72nd Republic Day, for a virtual Fireside chat. ASEI Michigan chapter president, Muthu Sivanantham, opened that event by welcoming Mr. Kumar as well as Radha Krishnan, President, DEP Inc.
Amit Kumar addressed the audience by talking about “Technology and Development” and elaborated the rapid growth that is underway in India. He emphasized how significant India-US relations are and highlighted their collaborative efforts in the areas of Energy, Science and Technology. Radha engaged in a fireside chat with Amb. Kumar and ASEI-MI director Anjali Tiwari moderated the session.
The interactive panel discussed topics ranging from sustainable development, investing in India to immigration-related issues. “Just in the last year alone, India received around 57 billion USD of investment focused on Digital space,” said Amb. Kumar. In conclusion, the Consul General has said that he is looking forward to collaborating with ASEI and connecting the organization with India based entities to help leverage each other’s strengths in fostering investments, growth and youth development.
ASEI launched has also “Engineering Tales” a series of conversations to highlight the accomplishments of its longstanding members and distinguished professionals amongst its member community. The inaugural Episode on Jan 9th featured advanced materials and nanotechnology expert Dr Thomas Abraham who besides being a successful engineering entrepreneur is also a serial community builder and has been an ASEI Board member since 2013. Visit https://youtu.be/NZ6ndRV5mDc.
About ASEI
The American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin (ASEI) is a not-for-profit organization that provides a platform for networking, career advancement, community service, mentoring and technology exchange for professionals, students and businesses in the United States and abroad. Members are guided by several objectives, including the creation of an open, inclusive, and transparent organization; providing positive role models, awarding scholarships, and remaining socially responsible. ASEI was founded in 1983 in Detroit, Michigan by a handful of visionaries. Today, the organization has active chapters in Michigan, Southern California, Silicon Valley, San Diego, and Washington, DC with more in the pipeline.
For more information, or to join this professional body, visit: www.aseiusa.org.
 Links for media coverage of the event:
New India Times
India West
 
 

American Society of Engineers of Indian Origin (ASEI) hosted its 33rd Annual National Convention focusing on Global Engineering & Technologies (GET2020). This virtual convention was held on December 5th and 6th, 2020. While the speakers and participants were on the Zoom platform, it was live-streamed worldwide through YouTube.  Attended by scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and corporate leaders across the USA, the two-day event featured keynotes and multiple interactive sessions with prominent business and technology leaders, scientists and engineering entrepreneurs. At the Finale session on the second day, ASEI recognized four engineering achievers and four service excellence and contributors to ASEI.
 
Links for extensive media coverage of the convention:
 
News India Times
 
The American Bazaar
 
The UNN
 
India West
 
South Asia Monitor