Villanova University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

On November 4, 1999, the thirteenth annual ECE Day was presented in the Villanova Room of Connelly Center.  This year's theme of electronic communications covered topics ranging from the invention of the walkie-talkie to the future possibility of teleportation.   Senior ECE students participated by presenting their senior project concepts in a poster session; in addition two ECE seniors presented a talk on past predictions of life in the late 20th century.

Mr. J. Brian Sharkey, of Villanova's class of 1969, presented the first talk of the day entitled Total Information Awareness - how search navigators may lead to teleportation.   Mr. Sharkey, vice president of Hicks and Association, SAIC, was the past Deputy Director for the Information Systems Office (ISO) at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  Mr. Sharkey discussed data gathering and information discovery, giving examples of thematic search navigators and metrics for performance.  He also discussed collective reasoning, and  explained how human to human collaboration is required to reason about complex and ambiguous data. Mr. Sharkey explained how the reasoning process is aided by realism within the environment that people share, and therefore virtual reality immersive environments can aid the collaboration process.  Mr. Sharkey stated his belief that in the future virtual reality and telepresence will provide accurate and complete inputs to all the senses to the extent that the person will experience virtual teleportation.

Ravikanth Pappu, a 1993 Villanova EE graduate, followed Mr. Sharkey's talk with an equally thought provoking talk entitled “When Things Start To Think”. Ravi  is currently a doctoral candidate in the MIT Media Laboratory.  His talk explained how computers are evolving by moving out of the box.  Today's computers are on our desktop, but also in our microwave ovens, dishwashers, automobiles, and TV.  Future computers will migrate even further into our everyday lives.  Some future computers may be found in items that we wear, and the objects that we most commonly use.  Ravi described how a shoe computer might be kept charged through the mere process of our walking about, and how it might use our bodies as a communications medium exchanging data with other computers though the physical act of a human to human handshake.   Ravi also described how medicine cabinets and smart pill boxes, might be capable of keeping track of medicine usage.  Almost anything in our surroundings might contain some form of intelligence in the future.

David  Piscitello,  President of South Carolina's Core Competence, Inc., and 1974 Villanova graduate presented a talk entitled High Speed Internet Access - Present and Future.  Mr. Piscitello is a founder of The Internet Security Conference,  Inc., and a member of the board of advisors for Covad Communications and CoSine communications.  In his talk, Mr. Piscitello explained how the long promised "residential broadband" era has finally arrived. He explained that local exchange carriers, cable companies, and entrepreneurial competitors now offer a variety of high speed services across the United States.  Mr. Piscitello discussed the shape of high speed access, key concepts and features of wireline and wireless broadband local access, and how ILECs and CLECs are attempting to operate within the 1996 Telecom Act.

 Al Gross of Orbital Sciences Inc., was originally scheduled to present a talk entitled History of Wireless Communications - From Secret To Cellular, however, an automobile accident prevented him from making a trip to Villanova from Arizona.  Fortunately Mr. Gross is doing fine now.  Through the efforts of Dr. Frank Mercede, Mr. Warren Cooper of the Historical Electronics Museum near Baltimore was able to fill in.  Mr. Cooper is a Life Fellow of the IEEE and began his career in electronics during World War II.  In his talk, Mr. Cooper presented the history of the major electronics events in the 20th century.

Following Mr. Cooper's talk, the senior ECE students conducted a poster session.  Under the direction of Dr. Ed Kresch and Dr. Frank Mercede, the students presented posters describing their senior design projects. Non-student ECE day attendees were provided with ballots and asked to review each project by viewing the posters and discussing the projects with the students.  For the first time, awards were presented to student group rated the highest by the attendees.  First prize went to the team of Fred Cowdery and Ram Mofsowitz, for the project entitled Keyless Access System.  Second place went to  Brian Baglieri, John Kuta, Benjamin Ramig, and Randy Tink for their project entitled Radio Repeater Controller.  A project entitled Restaurant Palm Pilot took third place for team members Jessica Bradley, Jeff Dingle, Sean O'Donnell, and Steve Urrea.

After a fine dinner and an excellent chance to further discuss the student projects, ECE seniors Patsy Dougherty and Joseph Perez presented their talk entitled A Past View of the Future- A lighthearted look at predictions of life in 1999.  Employing colorful graphics from magazines such as Electronics Experimenter and Popular Science, the students presented visions of flying cars, high density cities, and robot butlers that our parents and grandparents expected would be common place in 1999. August Design, Inc. of Ardmore, PA provided the poster session awards and gifts for the speakers.  Bentley Systems Inc.,  BTG International, and Lockheed Martin provided a number of corporate promotional items that were enjoyed by the attendees.

The speakers and audience seemed to enjoy the information packed five hour session which has become an important tradition for Villanova's technology community.
 
 
 

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Last Revised: October 9, 1998