OSU Automation Society organize Automation Day
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
(STILLWATER, Okla., March 6, 2015) – Oklahoma State University Automation Day Society presented Automation Day from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday, March 6, 2015 in the Peggy Helmerich Browsing Room, OSU Edmon Low Library.
“The Automation Day event turned out to be a huge success for us - the team of OSU Automation Society,” said Sandeep Kumar Raju Vysyaraju, public relations officer and alumni affairs coordinator of the OSU Automation Society. “Even the guest speakers were very happy with the event and the organization done by us.”
The OSU Automation Society is a Student Section of the International Society for Automation
(ISA) and has more than 100 members, mostly graduate students in College of Engineering,
Architecture and Technology, from nearly all disciplines. The purpose of the organization
is the importance of automation in our lives, to attract students to these technical
careers and to encourage industry to recruit at OSU.
Automation is where a machine automatically senses, interprets, fixes, controls,
regulates or improves. Usually the machine is a computer or microprocessor. In our
daily lives, examples of automation include cruise control on cars, autofocus in cameras,
cell phone tower transfers, airplane autopilot and fraud detection in credit cards.
Often automations observe situations and events and provide warnings to the operator,
such as the lane violation chime when driving a car. Automation engineers develop
the machines, detectors and algorithms to make it happen.
About four and a half years ago, the OSU Automation Society received its charter from ISA. Several actions were incorporated to OSU Automation Society - Automation Day and monthly professional development sessions to celebrate the profession, a newsletter to support career understanding, a website partly dedicated to matching job openings with applicants and partly to promoting automation, and income to support the initiatives. In 2013, OSU Automation Society received ISA Section Excellence Award and officers received ISA Scholarships.
The automation contest was named Space Xplore and consisted of two games based on fuzzy logic and manual control design. Nearly 30 contestants participated in the automation competition and about 10 groups were part of the poster presentation. Automation Day featured three speakers who gave significant speeches: Mr. Paul Galeski, founder of MAVERICK Technologies, Mr. Michael Moan, CRAD program engineer at Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems Division, and Dr. Harold Wade, president of Wade Associates, Inc.
The poster competition had four distinguished judges: Dr. Harold Wade from Wade Associates, Inc., Dr. Anand Vennavelli, research scientist at Fractionation Research Inc., Mr. Marc Trammell, senior plant engineer at OG&E, and Dr. Tony Cai, assistant technical director at Fractionation Research Inc.
At the end of the event was an award ceremony providing the guests with the newsletter - Destination Setpoint - that was released by Dr. Russ Rhinehart and Dr. Harold Wade. Prize distribution - certificates and gift cards - to the winners of logo, poster, research week presentation and Automation Day contest were awarded after. The OSU Automation Society also complimented their team officers for the contribution to the society.
Contest winners:
Automation Contest - Space Xplore
1. Cache Hamilton – chemical engineering
2. Joshua Whitman – mechanical and aerospace engineering
3. Chris Bynam - chemical engineering
Poster competition
1. Brett King - chemical engineering
2. Grant M. Williams - physics
3. Harshal Maske - mechanical and aerospace engineering
Logo contest winner
Ram Kumar Isakki – biosystems and agricultural engineering