Steve Izzo is the leader of ComSoc’s Pre-University STEM Education Working Group and will be the moderator for this webinar.  Steve retired from Nokia Bell Labs in 2019 after a long career with expertise in product management, software engineering and management consulting. He joined the ComSoc Educational Services Board in 2022 specially to work on Pre-University STEM education.

Steve will share information on the types of resources available to volunteers conducting local Pre-University STEM activities including the new Tryengineering.org/com website.  Steve will then introduce the featured speakers, Ronny Cabrera and Stefano Giordano, who were selected to share their experiences in organizing events funded in part by IEEE ComSoc.

Ronny Cabrera, MBA, PMP, Master in Project Management and Electronics and Telecommunications Engineer

Ronny Cabrera currently works as a Professor and Process Executive at the Private Technical University of Loja, Ecuador. He has successfully participated in and directed 15 social impact technology projects in the last 8 years. He is Coordinator of the Education Committee of IEEE Ecuador and Secretary of IEEE Region 9.

Ronny’s talk will focus on IEEE Ecuador STEM Camps that were created to increase interest in engineering and technology among girls and boys from communities in Ecuador. The resources used to meet the objectives of this project are STEM workshops aimed at girls and boys between 10 and 15 years old. The project was launched in 2019 and has allowed more than 800 students and teachers to participate. In 2023, the workshops were implemented adding the ICT theme to the existing ones of robotics, video games and electronics.

Stefano Giordano is full professor at the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Pisa where he is the responsible of the Telecommunication Networks Laboratories giving lectures both at the University of Pisa and the Italian Navy Academy. He is senior member of the IEEE Comsoc  and was Chair of the Communication Systems Integration and Modelling (CSIM) Technical Committee and at present vice-chair of the TACTILE INTERNET TC. He founded with Juniper Networks the first European Juniper Networks Higher Learning Center. He is author of more that 300 papers on peer reviewed international conferences and journals on the practical and theoretical aspect of modern networking including SDN, NFV and IoT. He was responsible for the participation of the University of Pisa to the Euro-NGI (Next Generation Internet in Europe) Network of Excellence.  From the research activities of his group two spin-off companies (Nextworks and Netresults) were created. He was co-founder of the CUBIT consortium where he is now President of the board.

Stefano will be discussing the Italy Section’s recent activity to introduce students and their families to Telecommunication Engineering and some of its “verticals” during the Night of Research. According to its website, the Night of Research is a “Europe-wide public event, which displays the diversity of science and its impact on citizens' daily lives in fun, inspiring ways.”

The chosen vertical for this year’s session organized by the Italy Section is 5G for Agriculture with a particular focus on applications within a greenhouse (“The Internet of Tomatoes”).  This activity corresponds to one of the research activity of the Department of Information Engineering within the National Center on Technologies in Agriculture (AGRITECH) where a 5G (O-RAN based) network “in a box” will be proposed as an enabling platform for robotics, computer vision, lighting, environmental control within the greenhouse.  The session activity will include a demonstration on the distributed synchronization of many Arduino nodes. Each board is communicating using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth and equipped with an RGB LED (and  its own red leds matrix). At the beginning - like a specific type of fireflies - all the nodes are asynchronous while blinking; one board is equipped with a button, and thanks to the communication will enable the synchronization of all the nodes (blinking with the same frequency/period and “in phase"). This will highlight the nature inspired solutions, distributed processing and communications and the relevance of synchronization in ultra broadband wireless networks such as 5G and 6G.

We hope that you can join us for this unique opportunity.  Register now for this webinar.  Once you register, you will receive a confirmation email with instructions for joining the session.