Fw: IEEE NoVa Communications Society meeting, Tuesday Feb. 25, 2003

[Paul Rinaldo]

Gang,
FYI
Paul

Dear IEEE Communications Society members and friends,

The first meeting of the IEEE's Northern Virginia Communications Society
is on Tuesday, Feb. 25th.  We are privileged to have Dr. Louis Pecora of
the Naval Research Laboratories give us a technical talk about recent
advances in chaos theory and its applications.  I've known Lou since the
early days of Apple's Macintosh computer, when we were using Macs for
scientific computing.  He's an engaging and entertaining speaker, never
dull, always funny.  You will want to come out and hear him, so put this
on your calendar.  He tweaked his resume just for us - he wanted us to
know that he was a foreman at Hazleton Weaving Company, just in case you
were a Hazleton alumnus as well.  If you're interested in learning a
little bit about chaos theory, have some pizza with your friends and
renew old acquaintances.  The meeting will be held at the TRW building
in Reston, VA.  Details are included below.

Our section has had a changing of the guard this year.  Matt Giltner,
who's ably served as your chair for the last two years, is still active
and will continue in IEEE leadership in the Washington area.  He's also
volunteered to be our treasurer.  It's my privilege to take over as
chairman from Matt.  Dennis Moen is our vice chair, and Steve Briese is
our secretary.  In the next few months I want to tell you more about
each of them.  Suffice it to say that we have good and capable officers,
for which we are grateful.  Our local branch of the Communications
Society is going to continue what we do best, which is to have a strong
program of interesting technical speakers for our meetings.



Speaker: Dr. Louis Pecora
         Naval Research Laboratories
Title:   Some Things You Can Do With Chaos
Date:   	 Tuesday, Feb. 25, 2003
Time:   	 6:00 p.m.  - dinner (free - please RSVP to fred.seelig@ieee.org
or fseelig@mitre.org)
         6:45 p.m. - speaker presentation
Place:   TRW 12011 Sunset Hills Rd., Reston, VA.
         (Corner of  Sunset Hills Rd and Reston Parkway, very close to
the Reston Parkway exit of Rt. 267, the Dulles Toll Road)


TITLE:  Some things you can do with Chaos

Abstract:     I will introduce the concepts of chaotic behavior in
physical systems, emphasizing the need to change our thinking when
dealing with such behavior.  I will follow this up with some things
people have been doing to try to harness chaotic phenomenon and leverage
the nonlinear nature of such systems along with the unusual aspects of
its properties such as unpredictability, continuous, broad spectrum,
fractal structure and complete lack of stable periodic structure --
chaotic systems never repeat themselves.

Speaker Bio:   Dr. Pecora is currently a research physicist at the Naval
Research Laboratory where he heads the programs for Nonlinear Dynamics
in Structures and Nonlinear Dynamics of Coupled Systems in the Materials
Physics branch. He received his B.S. degree in physics from Wilkes
College in 1969. After two years of graduate work at Purdue University
and a year as a foreman in the Hazleton Weaving Company he enrolled in
the Syracuse University Solid State Science program from which he
received a Ph.D. in 1977

In 1977 he was awarded an NRC postdoctoral fellowship at the Naval
Research Laboratory where he worked on applications of positron
annihilation techniques in determining electronic states in copper
alloys.  In the mid-1980's Dr. Pecora moved into the field of nonlinear
dynamics. Early work led to the discovery and characterization of
chaotic transients in spin-wave behavior in yttrium iron garnets. More
recent work has focused on the applications of chaotic behavior,
especially the effects of driving systems with chaotic signals. This has
resulted in the discovery of synchronization of chaotic systems, control
and tracking, and dynamics of many coupled, nonlinear systems. Dr.
Pecora has published over 100 scientific papers and has five patents for
the applications of chaos.


See you there,

Fred Seelig
Chair
IEEE Communications Society, Northern Virginia Section
-- 
The MITRE Corporation
7515 Colshire Dr.
McLean, VA  22102-7508

Center for Advanced Aviation System Development (CAASD)
Communications and Information Systems Dept
F083  Communications, Navigation and Surveillance
Mail Stop N660                    (703) 883-3223  phone
fseelig@mitre.org                 (703) 883-1367  fax
fred.seelig@ieee.org                     http://www.mitrecaasd.org