 "Photo: Isaac Smith~ Daily Egyptian")
What began as a small seminar with four or five guest speakers has now grown into a three-day conference aimed at giving students the chance to mingle with top industry professionals.
The Southern Illinois University Innovative Systems conference, which began Thursday and ended Saturday in the Engineering Building, featured lectures by 20 top industry officials, such as Flavio Bonomi, a leading researcher at Cisco Systems, and Dewayne Hendricks, chief executive officer of the wireless communications corporation the Dandin Group. The conference also held demonstrations of student projects, such as laser alignment systems, solar-powered planes and a spine stabilization system.
Anil Mehta, co-founder and chairman of the SIU Innovative Systems Conference, said the conference is a student-run initiative aimed at connecting students with professions in the engineering industry.
Mehta, a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering from Bombay, said the conference began in 2006 with him and two friends trying to bring in people with experience in electrical engineering to network with and learn from.
“(We were) trying to get folks from Chicago, St. Louis, who work in the real world to come and network with us and tell us what to do, what are the skills required,” Mehta said. “Since 2006, this has grown into a much bigger deal, it has started to get folks from other aspects of engineering.”
Mehta said he hopes the conference would enable students to get better jobs after graduation and forge a stronger bond with the university. Students graduate and never look back, he said, and that’s not good for the university.
Brent Ritzel, a Carbondale native, said he met Mehta about three months ago and wanted to get involved in the conference as soon as he heard about it.
“For me, this is the event of the fall in southern Illinois, quite frankly, not just for the SIU campus or Carbondale, but the whole region,” Ritzel said. “This is really momentous.”
Michael Welling, co-founder and a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering, said the conference enables students to show their work and mingle with leaders in industry.
“It shows them what they have to look forward to,” Welling said. “ It gives them something to shoot for.”
Mehta said he hopes the conference will continue to grow and attract bigger names from more companies and groups in the future, at the same time, incorporating more colleges. He said he is working to try and get the inventor of Second Life, a 3-D virtual world where users socialize through a customized avatar, at a future conference.
Madeleine Leroux can be reached at 536-3311 ext. 254.
