Meeting Minutes Emerging and Innovative Technologies Committee 2012 Annual Meeting Albuquerque, NM Attendance Roster: see attached The 2012 Annual Meeting of the Emerging and Innovative Technologies Committee (EITC) was held during the ASCE‐EWRI conference in Albuquerque, NM. The EITC Chair Elizabeth Coyle called the meeting to order and requested attendees to introduce themselves. Additional attendees introduced themselves throughout the meeting as they arrived. Approval of the 2011 Meeting Minutes – The 2011 Annual Meeting Minutes for last year's meeting (Palm Springs, CA) had been circulated electronically and copies were available for all EITC members. Elizabeth requested comments on the meeting minutes. Lilly made a motion to approve the minutes without comment, the motion was seconded. Motion passed unanimously. Items to remember for next year’s conference were briefly discussed and included: Ask for conference phone in January when the meeting date is requested. Reimbursement budget is about $5000 and usually reserved for officers and those with the most significant contributions and work to the committee (totaling approximately 10 people). Add a check list in the handbook for officers to follow when planning meetings. Request a room that can hold at least 70 people (more if possible). We had standing room only during the visions 2050 sessions and lost people who wanted to attend our sessions. 2013 Abstracts due in September. Request EWRI to move the scheduled start time of the next annual meeting so that EITC members have the opportunity to go to the open social hour event. Current articles – These articles, which are approximately 500 words, should be directly associated with EITC activities and publicize our committee. Walter Grayman mentioned that in the past we used to have a byline in Currents and a regular page for EITC so that committee members receive regular notices and are recognized as the source of the article. A banner image is desired and Elizabeth Coyle volunteered to draft a few options for the committee to review. Laurel Saito suggested we have someone to follow up with the article volunteers. Current articles are released quarterly and should be submitted to Sean McKenna ‐
[email protected] one month in advance. June 11th is the next publication date however most content is received by mid‐May for the June publication. Additional submissions for the next year will follow this pattern as follows: Submissions by mid‐August (8/2012) for the September (9/2012) publication Submissions by mid‐November (11/2012) for December (12/2012) publication Submissions by mid‐February (2/2013) for March (3/2013) publication Submissions by mid‐May (5/2013) for June (6/2013) publication
The following volunteers have offered to submit articles: Yong Liu – Cloud computing article (possibly September publication) Rob Wallace – Crowd sourcing and Emergency Management Lily Baldwin/Barbara Minsker– Sustainability David Hill – Pervasive sensing 2012 Conference Sessions Update – Track Chair Craig Patterson indicated there are 52 Papers, 1 Paper converted to Poster and 1 Panel Discussion planned for this conference. Sessions are as follows: Monday Sessions: Water/Wastewater Treatment Nano scale treatment Disinfection / water Cloud Computing Tuesday Sessions: Sustainability in water resources Enviro‐sensing and Cyber infrastructure Wednesday Sessions: Hydraulics – Waterways Vision 2050 ‐ will have a small room tomorrow Panel Discussion Thursday Sessions: Prototype to Innovative Technology Implementation Rainwater harvesting for developing regions CFD Applications and Information in Urban water management 1 & 2 Bob Andoh was double‐booked and could not attend the conference this year. All members were encouraged to attend the EITC tracks and to remind other people/authors. EITC Status Discussion – Walter Grayman indicated that EITC is under the Interdisciplinary Council. Councils and Committee Officers meet yearly in February at Council Weekend to discuss EWRI administrative issues. The committees meet at the Annual EWRI Congress. He proposed that EITC may be large and active enough to become a council if desired. Concern was expressed that if this occurs, the larger EITC group meetings at the Annual EWRI Congress would cease and we would lose the advantages of our committee meeting as this is the meeting where we brainstorm, create the ideas and have our most in‐depth discussions. Currently nothing has changed in the status of EITC.
Task Committee Initiatives: Cloud Computing TC – Yong Liu offered the update for this TC. The TC started meeting last September/October, has had 3 to 4 teleconferences and has an organized list of contacts and sub‐ groups within the TC. The Cloud Symposium in Cincinnati next year is being organized and invitees are being explored including non‐traditional attendees and contributors. Zheng Yi stated that many groups are using cloud computing and need help using the technology. Zheng Yi and Rob Wallace, as well as others, indicated a desire to identify other organizations that we could collaborate with in the cloud computing symposium. EWRI would have to invite these other groups to be involved with the TC. This may include academia and government representatives as well as people from other organizations such as AWRA, AWWRA, WERF, WEF, State Engineering Organizations, associates from other ASCE Congresses and industry representatives such as IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. Microsoft has an Earth Energy Environment initiative and desire to push their technology into this market. Google is also working in this market. There is some concern to remain focused. Rajib Sinha indicated the TC may need to define the questions about cloud computing they would like to answer and present them for attendees. The TC has been using wiki and has information about their responsibilities on the wiki page. The TC also has an official web site where most information is posted. In addition, 4 to 5 social network groups have been established with hundreds of people per group. They are getting good publicity and need more targeted/focused publications. Yong Liu has offered to work on the Currents publication. Walter Grayman distributed a handout about cloud computing the TC is using to get further interest (http://content.asce.org/conferences/ewri2013/SymposiumonCloudComputing.html). Lily Baldwin indicated we may want to reserve one full day for the cloud symposium. Walter Grayman suggested we should wait to see how many registrants we receive before this is decided. Vision 2050 – Visions 2050 was published a month ago and those copies available at the conference were sold out. In October, ASCE will publish a new site where individual chapters can be downloaded for free. When this site is established the link to get the chapters downloaded should be distributed. Because the publication has been completed there was discussion of this TC possibly sunsetting at this time. However, given the interest based on attendance at the Visions 2050 session the TC may stay active a while longer to produce articles for publication. A great deal of thanks was expressed by the group for the work that Walter Grayman, Pete Loucks, Laurel Saito and the other authors did to produce such an excellent product. Enviro Cyber Sensing – Bill Mok stepped down as Chair of this TC and David Hill volunteered to replace him. One session was held this year and there was some overlap with the sensing and cloud computing TCs. As such they will work together and will meet in the Apache room in the conference center at 6:00 pm. Laurel Saito indicated the TCs could have combined talks and could have some talks via a webinar and/or have talks remotely. Some disappointment was expressed in number of abstracts which were
reduced due to the travel funding cuts of government employees who had previously given commitments. Travel budgets will be further cut by an anticipated 30% next year. Input from government agencies is still desired however, as they are often developing the sensing technology. David Hill indicated a strong desire to have NASA attend. Rob Wallace suggested working closely with agencies in the area the conference is to be held (Cincinnati, OH 2013). There is a great interest at Wright‐Patterson AFB which is one location with many possible inputs. Further, the University of Kentucky is also close and could participate. Other agencies include the American Council of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH), the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety (NIOSH), and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Cincinnati. Additional tasks undertaken by the TC include contributing to special issues in JWRM, the Geospatial Consortium (web sensor standards), and the Virtual H2O conference held last year. Rain Harvesting in Developing Countries – Emmanuel Nzewi reported that there will be one session this year with 3 papers. He indicated that he would like to more broadly define this TC and then work on getting additional members to join the TC in the future. Sustainability Collaboration – This committee has been approved and is cosponsored by the Sustainability Committee and EITC. Sustainability came up with the idea to name this committee “Performance Based Sustainable Design for Water Infrastructure” which met Sunday afternoon. The Chair is Barbara Minsker and Lily Baldwin is secretary as well as the Co‐chair for five proposed topics the TC wishes to address which are currently: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
Introduction/Statement of the problem we are trying to solve State of the practice in sustainable infrastructure design Definition of and criteria for performance based design Current strategies Future needs
The TC plans on having a detailed outline by next year's congress and a final position paper by the end of summer 2013. The TC is planning 5 sessions next at next year's congress and possibly a symposium in 2014. The sessions will provide an update on the position paper (1 session), provide case studies (2 sessions), and have panel discussions (2 session) on current practice and future needs. For the symposium in 2014 more volunteers will be needed. Send Lily Baldwin an email (
[email protected]) if you are interested in joining the task committee. Awards: Margaret Peterson Award – This committee is cosponsored by the Education Council and EITC. The TC session will be held Tuesday at 2:00 pm and will have one of Margaret Peterson’s students in attendance for the awards session. There was discussion about what is required and it has been decided that nominations will not be rolled over from one year to the next. As such the TC is looking for more nominees with more diversified backgrounds (2 in a row from academia have been awarded). The
TC would like to have suggestions for women who are in the non‐academic realm with the understanding that the award has a strong focus on mentorship as well as service to ASCE/EWRI. The nominated woman must be ASCE member and would receive help to become connected to EWRI if necessary. This must be a third party nomination but the nominated person must be aware of the nomination because they have to submit a statement. The TC is sending out requests for nominations but also expecting our committee members to suggest possible awardees. To do so, go to the awards website (http://www.asce.org/ewri/Awards/EWRI‐Awards/) for information on submitting the nominations. Pete Loucks suggested Liz Perez may be one possible nominee for this award. Planning & Management Council Service to the Profession Award – Mohammad Karamouz was mentioned as EITC’s choice for nomination of this award. Lindell Ormsbee will re‐nominate him. Elizabeth Coyle will send a letter of endorsement for this nomination from EITC. Julian Hinds Award – Walter Grayman was mentioned by the entire group as EITC’s choice for nomination of this award. Elizabeth Coyle will send a letter of endorsement for this nomination from EITC but needs an EITC member to nominate him. Sessions for 2013 Congress: Rob Wallace proposed a session on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and suggested that concepts used outside our field could be applied to environmental and water resources (e.g. stream bank analysis or species counting) in a session. Possible invitees would be agencies such as the USPRS, USGS, USACE and FAA. FAA has a deadline for providing guidelines for allowing UAVs in US airspace a technology using remote sensing. USACE has a program for UAVs. As such Rob Wallace volunteered to take care of potential authors/abstracts by June 4th for a session. David Hill proposed a session on Micro‐remote Sensing that addresses research needs and possible future applications. It was agreed that CFD is not an emerging technology at this point but that it could be merged with Cloud computing, possibly integrating the data to work on graphics processing units (GPUs). Further, there may be the possibility to present information on the workforce and GPU programming. Additional EITC Session topics mentioned included: Crowd sourcing, Emergency Management, Sensing to enable the city of the future, Social network mining, Ubiquitous Computing/Sensing, Water for People – Rob Wallace volunteered to present one paper. David Hill will handle the session. A workshop on Hydro‐fracking covering the “soup to nuts groundwater impacts”.
Craig Patterson discussed some sessions already scheduled such as emerging and innovative disinfection processes used in mine waste treatment as well as Nano‐technology in water and wastewater treatment. Adiya Tyagi is responsible for the Sustainability Committee tracks and has new sessions for fish sensing and wireless technology to monitor the movement of rock. David Hill mentioned that previously data was sent to dataloggers, but the trend is moving to real time data. Other projects: Women/ Water Nexus – Laurel Saito would like to have the EITC hold a session and address issues regarding how to get women more involved in water resources in third world countries. This would include virtual mentoring network for younger women and could also go under the Education Council. Discussion regarding EITC undertaking social issues was conducted and it was agreed by the group that this is an area we wish to entertain. Laurel mentioned she would also approach the Education Council regarding this topic. Webinars – Various uses for webinars were discussed such as teaching and holding meetings, however, ASCE charges $1000 for a webinar which is a deterrent to participants. Social Networks – Social networking applications for the environment were discussed. There is a common concern among the group on how to get the interest of younger people; social networking may be one way to do this. Future Communications – Elizabeth Coyle will send out a survey to determine the best time for our annual conference call anticipated to be held in August 2012. Membership and Officers
David Hill volunteered for the Secretary position beginning October 15th 2012. He was nominated and seconded with all in favor. Sajjad Ahmad volunteered for current Track Chair and Craig Patterson is Assistant Track Chair. All were in favor. Karl Lambert will become Vice‐Chair October 15th 2012. Rajib Sinha will become Chair October 15th 2012. Elizabeth Coyle will become Past‐Chair October 15th 2012.
Attendance List David Hill Sushil Raj Kanel Karl Lambert Rajib Sinha Elizabeth Coyle Laurel Saito Pete Loucks Norm Jones Rob Wallace Jeanne VanBriesen Lily Baldwin Shielar Liu Yong Liu Jae Ryu Walter Grayman Craig Patterson Sajjad Ahmad Mohammad Karamouz Andy Kropf Navideh Noori Sanaz Imen Nur Muhammad Lindell Ormsbee Emmanuel U. Nzewi
Aditya Tyagi Sudhir Kshirsagar