IEEE Region 5

Join IEEE as we directly engage with local congressional staff to address our engineering issues through IEEE-USA Congressional Outreach Program (ICOP). This unique opportunity provides a platform for all Young Professionals to voice their concerns or key ideas. Through a series of congressional meetings with your representative staff members, you have an opportunity in policy discussions and build stronger partnerships as you move forward in your career. This opportunity is geared towards our young professionals who are currently attending or have graduated from university within the last 15 years. IEEE membership is required. If you’re willing to make a difference, or have any further questions, contact the current YP chair, (mailto:[email protected]?subject=Expression%20of%20Interest%20-%20ICOP%20) or any of our LSS/IEEE officers ASAP. San Antonio, Texas, United States

IEEE PI2 Austin, May 27, 2025, Tech Meeting In-Person 6 PM Central / 7 PM Eastern at Venue Change for this meeting: Dinner Provided Burns & McDonnell, 6200 Bridge Point Pkwy Unit 400, Austin, TX 78730 Abstract: Residential solar has undergone a quiet revolution in power electronics—shifting from centralized string inverters to module-level power electronics (MLPE) like optimizers and microinverters. Each step aimed to improve efficiency, reliability, and control. But current systems remain constrained by rigid architectures and inefficiencies at the edge. This saturation in technology has stalled the progress of home solar and storage technology, but also invites opportunities for new architecture. This talk explores the evolution of these technologies, the design trade-offs behind each generation, and how our approach could reshape home energy systems for greater resilience, modularity, and intelligence. It concludes with a discussion of a new "cellular" power inverter architecture that preserves the best of the legacy approaches while enabling home energy users and installers unprecedented flexibility and cost advantages. Details: Dinner and soft beverages will be provided for those with reservations. If you do not have a reservation you will not be able to eat. Cost, to defray the room, dinner and refreshments cost: Thank you in advance: IF REGISTERED IN ADVANCE (Before May 20th, 2025) Members and Non-Members: Select Register & Pay now, $25.00 Paypal from your credit card when registering - you do not need a Paypal account to use it. Click through to the credit card/debit page. OR Select Register Now and Pay Later and pay $25.00 cash or credit/debit with Square at the meeting. IEEE Student Members: Free (must register in advance before May 20th with your IEEE member number) Skip the payment All registrants After May 19th, 2025: Pay $30.00 at the the meeting in cash Attendees must be registered before the event for food accommodations. Unfortunately, we are charged more for the meals after the advance registration date For PDH hours, please email the PI2 Secretary, [email protected]. Speaker(s): Patrick Chapman, Burns & McDonnell, 6200 Bridge Point Pkwy, Unit 400, Austin, TX 78730, Austin, Texas, United States, 78730

Are you involved in engineering and technology? Do you wish to understand US policy decisions and how you can get yourself involved? Join IEEE as we host a speaking engagement with staff from out IEEE-USA Government Relations Office. You will hear directly from the staff on what IEEE is doing to increase partnership and engagement with US Congress to better represent our engineering needs. With the ever-changing landscape of recent tech policies, we hope our efforts can help protect and secure additional policies that aid our passion. Additionally, listen in as we recap how our Young Professionals were involved in our May 27th daytime meetings with congressional staff. Don’t miss the boat to understand the section's recent activity and how you can make a difference! Open to all who wish to learn and engage! 5215 UTSA Boulevard, San Antonio, Texas, United States, 78249

Are you involved in engineering and technology? Do you wish to understand US policy decisions and how you can get yourself involved? Join IEEE as we host a speaking engagement with staff from out IEEE-USA Government Relations Office. You will hear directly from the staff on what IEEE is doing to increase partnership and engagement with US Congress to better represent our engineering needs. Don’t miss the boat to understand how you can make a difference! Open to all who wish to learn! 1 UTSA Circle, Building: Building TBD, San Antonio, Texas, United States, 78249

Please Join Us For a Great Italian Dinner to Honor John Reinert 2025 Winner of the John Meredith Region 5 Lifetime Achievement Award at the Downtown Panino's Restaurant on Tuesday, May 27 6 pm. David Bondurant will do a talk on the latest packaging technology for High Performance & AI Processors: “If we make them smaller, we can make them faster” has been the approach to building faster computers over the last 70-years starting with the first transistors and continuing as we built increasingly more complex integrated circuits. More recently we have gone Beyond Moore’s Law to fabricate advanced supercomputers and AI computers using 3D Memory and 3D Packaging. In this talk, I review recent trends in 3D Memory and 3D Packaging which are driving these high performance system towards wafer scale systems with multiple reticle sized processors and 3D memories. We observe the next generation HBM4, high bandwidth 3D DRAM, and the emergence of the HBF, high bandwidth Flash memory, to increase memory capacity to serve larger databases. Speaker(s): David Bondurant, Agenda: Dinner Award Presentation Presentation Bldg: The Downtown Panino's, 604 North Tejon Street, Colorado Springs, Colorado, United States, 80903, Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/485191

Francisco “Pacho” Carrero Valentin will be our speaker. He is the Chair of the MOVE Puerto Rico Locale and an active volunteer with the American Red Cross- Puerto Rico Chapter with the Disaster Technology and the Disaster Assessment Teams. IEEE MOVE Global is an emergency response program dedicated to assisting natural disaster relief efforts with short-term communication and power solutions. The program provides essential services such as internet access, mobile phone charging, and lighting to help people stay connected during disasters. When not deployed for emergency relief, IEEE MOVE Global engages in community outreach and STEM education. Co-sponsored by: IEEE-USA MOVE Program Speaker(s): Francisco "Pacho" Carrero Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/463713

Agentic AI represents a groundbreaking shift in artificial intelligence, enabling systems to act autonomously, make decisions, and achieve goals with minimal human intervention. This talk explores the concept of Agentic AI, its various types, adoption trends, and the transformative impact it is poised to have on industries and societies. From reshaping workflows to influencing ethical frameworks, we’ll examine how this emerging technology drives innovation and redefines humanity’s relationship with intelligent systems. Note: - You will require a Zoom account (free to obtain) to join the meeting. This requirement is to avoid Zoom bombing. Please sign in using the email address tied to your Zoom account, not necessarily the one you used to register for the event. - By registering for this event, you agree that IEEE and the organizers are not liable to you for any loss, damage, injury, or any incidental, indirect, special, consequential, or economic loss or damage (including loss of opportunity, exemplary or punitive damages). The event will be recorded and will be made available for public viewing. Co-sponsored by: Vishnu S. Pendyala, SJSU Speaker(s): Dr. Narayan Srinivasa, IEEE Fellow , Dr. Vishnu S. Pendyala Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/479545

This session will delve into the dynamic and rapidly advancing field of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), an innovative approach that merges traditional information retrieval techniques with generative AI models to produce content that is more accurate, relevant, and grounded in factual data. It will begin with an overview of the fundamental paradigms of RAG, emphasizing its distinction from purely generative or purely retrieval-based systems. The session will then explore the key technologies that power RAG, including vector databases, dense retrievers such as ChromaDB and FAISS, and advanced transformer-based language models like BERT and GPT. Attendees will gain insights into RAG pipeline architectures, integration complexities, and deployment strategies in real-world environments. The session will conclude with a discussion of emerging trends and research directions, such as domain-adapted RAG, low-latency retrieval, and scalable knowledge grounding, offering a comprehensive understanding of both the conceptual foundations and practical applications of RAG in today's AI landscape. Speaker(s): Dr. Rajanikanth Aluvalu Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/486210

You want to move into a leadership role — but the path from expert to leader isn’t what it used to be. In this session, we’ll explore what it really means to evolve beyond subject-matter expertise and step into transformative leadership during an era defined by AI acceleration and what futurist Jamais Cascio coined as the BANI era: Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, and Incomprehensible. What You’ll Take Away: - A deeper understanding of why today’s volatility demands more than just competence — it demands clarity, adaptability, and relational intelligence - A mindset shift from reactive problem-solver to systems-aware leader - New language and frameworks for building trust, influence, and decision-making power in uncertain environments - Tools to define your unique value as a future-ready leader — not just a domain expert Bonus Takeaway: Learn how AI isn’t replacing leaders — it’s revealing the gaps in human leadership. You’ll leave with a mental model to augment your intuition and strategic decision-making in real time. Speaker(s): Caroline Stokes Agenda: IEEE-USA's free webinars/events are designed to help you find your next job, maintain your career, negotiate an appropriate salary, understand ethical considerations in the workplace and learn about other career-building strategies and public policy developments that affect your profession. For information regarding upcoming webinars or to visit our vast webinar archive, please visit: (https://ieeeusa.org/careers/webinars/) (https://newsletter.smartbrief.com/rest/sign-up/2479DAB0-4089-43E7-925D-86AE0C1E6244?campaign=e0d52cef) Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/485051

In this talk, we'll explore various machine learning model optimization techniques, with a focus on fine-tuning and distillation. As models grow larger and more complex, optimizing them for efficiency is crucial, especially when deploying in resource constrained environments. We'll dive deep into fine-tuning and distillation, explaining their processes, benefits, and trade-offs. Additionally, we'll introduce LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation) and QLoRA (Quantized LoRA), two cutting edge techniques that allow for efficient fine-tuning of large models, particularly large language models (LLMs), with minimal computational overhead. The session will also briefly cover other optimization methods, such as pruning, quantization, and reinforcement learning (RL), providing a comprehensive overview of how to select the right technique for different use cases. By the end of this talk, you'll have a deeper understanding of these optimization strategies and when to apply them to enhance model performance, scalability, and efficiency. Speaker(s): Raja Krishna Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/480233

IEEE SSCS/CAS Central Texas chapter is sponsoring a workshop on Advanced Computing: System, Circuits, and Technology held at Silicon Laboratories at 200 W. Cesar Chavez st in downtown Austin. The intent of this workshop is to give an overview of the current state of the art of Advanced Computing, from process technology, to microprocessors, to next generation chiplets and systems on a chip (SOC). Please join us for three SSCS Distinguished Lecturers who will be presenting the topics shown below. - Topic 1: Adaptive Processor Designs, Speaker: Keith Bowman (Qualcomm Technologies) - Topic 2: The Road to Gate-All-Around CMOS, Speaker: Alvin Loke (Intel) - Topic 3: Circuits for Resiliency, Reliability and Security, Speaker: Carlos Tokunaga (Intel) Free parking will be provided in the Silicon Labs garage at 200 W. Cesar Chavez st. Speaker(s): Dr. Bowman, Dr. Loke, Dr. Tokunaga Room: Lobby (Free parking in the Silicon Labs garage), Silicon Laboratories, 200 W. Cesar Chavez St, Austin, Texas, United States, 78701, Virtual: https://events.vtools.ieee.org/m/483559