Imperial College students win a major IEEE award

A group of students from the Electrical and Electronic Engineering Department at Imperial College have won a prestigious award, which was announced at the annual IEEE Honors Ceremony held in Montreal on June 26. They won the top prize of $10,000 in the IEEE Presidents’ Change the World Competition and were accorded the title of IEEE Student Humanitarian Supreme. The E.Quinox team pioneered a project in Rwanda to bring electricity to rural villages so that solar power-based supplies can be used for charging mobile phones and other low power applications. The project continues this summer with the active encouragement of the E & E department at Imperial and the Rwandan Government.

Public Key Cryptography IEEE Milestone Plaque Celebration

On Tuesday October 5th Milestone Plaques will be unveiled in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, to celebrate the invention of public key cryptography around 40 years ago by a team at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). The event is being organised by the UKRI Section Life Members Affinity Group (LMAG).

The programme for the day begins with an unveiling ceremony at the GCHQ site, followed by lunch at the Pump Room, Pittville Park, Cheltenham. A second plaque will be unveiled in the Pump Room after lunch, before the afternoon session comprising a symposium of talks on the history of cryptography.

Any members interested in attending should contact Prof Peter Hill (p.c.j.hill@cranfield.ac.uk) as soon as possible, because of space limitations.

EMC Chapter

The next meeting will be at the EMCUK Conference and Exhibition in Newbury, Berks (www.emcuk.co.uk) on the 12-13 October. A series of practical demonstrations showing a variety of EMC phenomena, effects, and design issues will be presented.

TELFOR 2010 November 23-25 2010 Conference

Details of this conference on telecoms topics, to be held at the SAVA Centre, Belgrade can be found at www.telfor.rs.

GOLD Affinity Group activities

Volunteers are needed to support the UKRI Section GOLD Affinity Group. If you are a GOLD (a graduate of the last decade) member and would like to help, please contact Vivien Chu on (xiaoli.chu@kcl.ac.uk).

Region 8 Director-elect Elections

Members will be receiving shortly the details of the voting procedures for the election of the Region 8 (Europe, Middle East, Russia and Africa) Director-elect for 2011-12. The two candidates are Martin Bastiaans (Netherlands) and Gerhard Hancke (South Africa). The successful candidate will become the Region 8 Director in 2013-14. The candidates' websites give details of their background and policies.

Safety of Mobile phones

Prof Tony Davies, June 2010

The publication in May 2010 of the ten-year Interphone study on the safety of mobile phones will no doubt raise further public concern about this danger or otherwise of radiation from mobile phones and masts, wi-fi systems, and various other devices and systems which emit radio waves. Although the ten-year Interphone study concluded:

"Overall, no increase in risk of glioma or meningioma was observed with use of mobile phones. There were suggestions of an increased risk of glioma at the highest exposure levels, but biases and error prevent a causal interpretation."

the significance and interpretation of these conclusions has already been disputed by some who continue to argue that mobile phones pose a great risk and it is unlikely to reduce the internet-marketing of devices which claim to reduce these supposed-risks.

The public, in general, do not have a basis to judge the competing claims and IEEE members may often be asked to express opinions about such matters. The IET has a specialist team of volunteers (Biological Effects Policy Advisory Group) which has released a new 10-page Position Statement (The Possible Harmful Effects of Low-level Electrical Fields at frequencies up to 300GHz) which may be used as a source of objective opinion.

A booklet for the general public is available from Sense about Science which aims to explain the issues in simple terms and in particular, to distinguish non-ionising and ionising radiation. They have also produced a leaflet highlighting some of the absurd claims made for costly 'anti-EMF' products. There appear to be no experimental studies demonstrating damage from mobile phones which have been successfully replicated.

Sense about Science guide Making Sense about Radiation may be downloaded from:
http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project/256/

IET BEPAG statement:
www.theiet.org/factfiles/bioeffects/postat02final.cfm

Interphone study
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/ije/press_releases/freepdf/dyq079.pdf

A comprehensive list of reviews of the topic can be found at
http://www.mobilemastinfo.com/information/radiowaves_and_health/health_reports.htm
although no doubt there will be those who will claim that the list must be biased because it was compiled for the Mobile Operators Association.

Communications Chapter News

The Communications Chapter organised the 7^th International Symposium of Communication Systems, Networks and DSP on the 21-23 July at Northumbria University, Newcastle. Over 200 people attended from over 48 countries. (www.candsp.com). Professor Hamid Aghvami (CTR, King’s College London) gave the keynote address.

The Chapter also organised the first workshop on Wavelet Analysis with Matlab on May 2-3 at Northumbria University.

Please refer to the Chapter website for details of awards and prizes given by the Chapter.

Cognitive Dynamic Systems Course

A one day course is organized on Cognitive Dynamic Systems by Prof. Simon Haykin. For registration details email Dr. Mathini Sellathurai at mathini@ieee.org by August 20 2010.

Details

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