Spectra Newsletter

It was an ideal match: the In2:InThinking Network paired with the college’s Ernie Schaeffer Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship and Department of Manufacturing Systems Engineering and Management (MSEM) for a one-day conference on innovation.

The Art of Innovation conference was conceived last year, when Ileana Costea, chair of the MSEM department, attended the 2012 In2:InThinking annual forum. In2:In Thinking is a nonprofit organization that brings together people who share an interest in using better thinking to create a better future.

“They were talking about various aspects of problem solving but really thinking out of the box, which I liked,” she says. She suggested to the group’s president, Bill Bellows of Aerojet Rocketdyne, that CSUN host a small one-day conference on innovation and entrepreneurship in conjunction with the 2013 In2:In Thinking Forum, and that both events be held on campus. [Read more…]

Word is getting out about the California Renewable Energy and Storage Technology (CREST) Conference, even though it’s only two years old. At the 2013 conference, held May 4, both attendance and the number of sessions offered were up over last year.

“We’re happy with how it’s progressing, and there is excitement on campus,” says Abhijit Mukherjee, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, who organized the event. “Expectations are high, and it’s hard to keep pace. We’re trying to involve more faculty so it becomes bigger and even more successful.”

This past year, 80 people attended, up from 64 the year before, and Digital Energy came forward as a sponsor. Highlights included a talk by Rajit Gadh, director of UCLA’s Center for Smart Grid Research Center; a luncheon keynote address by David Nahai, former Los Angeles Department of Water and Power CEO and general manager; and the afternoon session, presented by industry professionals and organized by the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, which recently set up a satellite office on campus.[Read more…]

It’s been 28 years since the first International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference (or CSUN Conference, as it is informally known). Since then the annual gathering has become the largest and best-known conference of its kind; it has also begun spawning spinoffs abroad. In 2012, for example, C.T. Lin, professor of mechanical engineering, and CECS dean S.K. Ramesh traveled to Linz, Austria, for the International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs (ICCHP), which was inspired by the CSUN Conference and has been running every two years for approximately a decade. [Read more…]

It’s a pervasive dilemma of modern urban society: how to determine the number of empty spaces available in parking lots for popular destinations, like malls, movie theaters and, well, CSUN.

Current solutions include sensors or cameras that track how many spaces are occupied, coupled with digital signs at parking lot entrances that indicate the number of free spaces. So far, these installations offer varying degrees of accuracy, and with so many sensors to install and hook up, large-scale systems are expensive. [Read more…]