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Press Release:
Program Committee Meeting Story
APEC Expands — 198 Technical Papers At APEC 2001
I must take my hat off to the 31 members of the Program and Conference Committee's for giving up a weekend in the middle of the Olympic Games to assist in finalizing the APEC 2001 Program. These volunteer reviewers, representing power supply manufacturers, component manufacturers, OEM users, consultants and academics came from around the country to participate in this annual meeting. Members in attendance traveled from as far away as Denmark and Japan to lend their knowledge and expertise to this team effort at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim on Sunday Sept. 24th.
From 8:30 AM through 1:30 PM this dedicated group rolled up their sleeves and created the magic for APEC 2001. A Swiss watch never ran as smoothly as this APEC team made up of elder statesman to first time participants. This is not a closed club. We gladly open our doors for participation by anyone with technical or business related skills in "applied" power electronics to become part of the Program Committee "family."
Our Mission was to assist Conference Chair Mark Nelms with the annual challenge of organizing the conference program. Prior to this "final cut" meeting, 204 "volunteer" industry and academia experts signed up to assist Program Chair Joseph Thottuvelil review and grade between 5 and 20 digests received for possible inclusion in next year's conference. A total of 1928 reviews were eventually graded by this committee. Being challenged to be more inclusive of highly scored technical digests, the committee agreed to reduce the Plenary Session to three presentations. This would enable us to add five sessions of four papers each immediately following the Plenary Session on Monday afternoon. As such, our technical program will expand from 181 to an all time high of 198 papers.
The 16th annual Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition (APEC) will be held March 4-8, 2001 at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim, CA. The Conference is sponsored by the IEEE Power Electronics and Industry Applications Societies and the Power Sources Manufacturers Association. This triple sponsorship agreement, which began in Dallas in 1991, is now entering it's second decade of mutual cooperation.
When you arrive at the conference site next year you will notice a major renovation. Thursday Feb 8, 2001 is scheduled to be the opening day at California Adventure, Disney's new (55 acre) Anaheim Theme Park, located directly across the street from our conference hotel. A new 750 room hotel, the Grand Californian, and an exciting retail strip alongside it are part of this brand new $1.4 billion expansion. "Downtown Disney," located on the hotel grounds, will contain a 12 theater complex, ESPN Zone with sports theme'd dining and entertainment, a House of Blues, high end art gallery and a variety of exceptional cafe's and restaurant's.
With our ongoing Mission to serve the educational needs of practicing professionals in the power electronics industry, the Program Committee has organized a dynamite program to provide "practical" information on the latest components and circuits, design oriented analysis techniques and current trends in the design of power electronic products and systems.
At our meeting Program Chair, Joseph Thottuvelil, provided a summary of the peer review grading. A record number of abstracts (435) were received from 34 different Nations. Without the aide of current software, processing over 1900 abstracts would surely have been a monumental task. The two largest categories of topic digests received were in the areas of AC and DC Motor Drives followed by single and three phase PFC. After Joseph's introduction the members broke into small topic specific groups where borderline technical papers were given a second review for consideration into the final program. That being accomplished the groups selected leaders who organized the papers to flow in a sequence of presentations and assigned tentative titles for their respective Sessions. At the end of the day we ended up accepting 198 technical papers to be presented in 31 Sessions using 5 parallel tracks at APEC 2001. Fifty percent (50%) of the accepted digests were from authors representing 27 foreign Nations led by Korea, Spain, Japan, Brazil and China. Inclusion of this large number of international papers is a reaffirmation that APEC continues to maintain it's worldwide recognition as the foremost conference for presenting technical papers addressing all aspects of "applied" power electronics. Although a large number of abstracts were received from Asian Nations, we also received and accepted papers from as far away as Australia and India. Representing almost 20% of the accepted technical session papers, authors from China, Japan and Korea continues to demonstrate that Asian industry and academia are very active in practical technology advancements as we move into the 21st century with all of it's challenges.
Seminar Chairman Jeff Fishbein provided an overview of the 29 proposals received for Professional Education Seminar consideration. After reviewing the proposals, the committee agreed to offer five parallel tracks starting with two on power supply design, one on motor drive design, one on power packaging, and a fifth track to contain a modeling seminar with two Seminars on automotive electronics for a total of 15 Seminars being presented on Sunday and Monday.
RAP Session Chair Russ Spyker provided a summary of seven suggested controversial topics for this years' program. Russ will now finalize on the moderator and panelists for three of those topics as per direction of the committee.
Although not part of the agenda for this meeting, I can report that the "sold out" exhibit hall will contain the latest product offerings from power electronic components to power supplies and DC/DC converters. APEC 2001 will contain 148 booths, representing another conference record. Exhibits Chair John Basset will have a drawing for all attendees in the exhibit hall on Tuesday where the first prize will be a notebook computer. The second prize to be awarded will be a DVD player and the final prize will be a Palm Pilot. Participating attendees must be present when the drawing is held.
As final details are confirmed I will provide an APEC 2001 update in future reports.
To summarize. APEC 2001 will offer 31 Technical Sessions, 15 outstanding Professional Education Seminars, 3 Rap Sessions, up to 12 free Vendor Application Seminars, a sold out Exhibit Hall, the Micro Mouse competition, and finally, an opportunity to mingle with distinguished industry and academia experts.
Please mark your calendars to attend the APEC Conference where you'll surely get more "bang for the buck" than at any other "applied" power electronics conference.
PS: Bring your spouse and credit cards. We will also provide a spousal hospitality program in conjunction with the Conference.
For additional conference or exhibition information, please click on our web site at www.apec-conf.org.
See you in Anaheim.
Larry Gilbert,
Local Arrangements and Publicity Chair,
APEC 2001
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