IEEE Awards Booklet - 2019 - 2

sPeAKers

Mike North is involved in many aspects of
technology from inventing new materials
and technologies in a cleanroom, to creating
cutting-edge prototypes on Discovery Channel's Prototype This! His engaging personality makes him an energetic and charismatic
science and technology advocate inspiring
grade-schoolers to CEOs. A master of the
"nano" world, his scientific interests include
biomimetics, micro/nanofabrication, nanoscale microscopy, and micro/nanomechanical characterization. Codeveloping the concept
of Prototype This! and developing concepts for new inventions, he
would then lead teams of crack inventors, builders, and engineers
to create never-before-seen spectacles of engineering. ReAllocate
is the project he is most passionate about. As founder, he is uniting
the engineering and design communities to provide design and engineering support to those at the base of the economic pyramid. He
commonly speaks on the status and future of science and technology
and is a stand-out motivational speaker.

Telle Whitney developed a critical understanding of the challenges women face in
technology sectors during her accomplished
career in the semiconductor industry and
used her experiences to become a pioneer
for the promotion of women technologists.
As president and chief executive oﬃcer of
the Anita Borg Institute for Women (now
known as AnitaB.org) from 2002 until 2017,
Whitney shaped and executed the Institute's mission of increasing the number of women technologists in the global workforce.
Through Whitney's vision, hard work, and intense commitment,
AnitaB has identified issues, pushed both women and men to address the challenges, and inspired hundreds of thousands of women at all stages in their careers to persist and succeed. She guided
AnitaB from a new and struggling nonprofit to one with a global
reach and brand that has become an established force supporting
women in technology.

Sandra Baer has worked with city leaders
and smart city companies, worldwide, for over
20 years, helping them discover the power of
partnerships across the city ecosystem to build
trust and create prosperous communities. She
is the president of Personal Cities, a smart city
company focused on city branding and identity, social inclusion, and the acceleration of
digital technology investments. She is a global
ambassador for the Edison Electric Institute, where she works to
showcase the unique collaboration opportunities for utilities and
smart cities. As a senior advisor to Citibeats, she supports its mission
to create an economy of impact by understanding the real concerns
of a community in real time. An artificial-intelligence-based platform, Citibeats quickly gathers authentic, comprehensive feedback,
visualizing what residents of a city are saying about specific topics to
help city leaders create people-centered strategies that foster sustainable development, grow a healthier economy, and build trust with
every member of the community to create a more livable city.

Fawzi Behmann is a visionary, thought
leader, author, entrepreneur, and evangelist
in advancing the adoption of technology in
serving humanity. President of Telnet Management Consulting, Inc., with over 35 years
in the industry, he's held various executive
and leadership positions with companies in
the areas of communications and networks
spanning service providers, equipment vendors, and semiconductors in the U.S. and Canada. He founded
TelNet Management Consulting in 2009 to oﬀer education and
professional services in the areas of technology trends, Internet of
Things/artificial intelligence/5G technology positioning, and smart
networking solutions development in key markets such as healthcare, mobility, energy, public safety, and smart cities. He organized
the 2018 IEEE GreenTech International Conference and has been a
keynote and distinguished speaker and presenter at several domestic
and international conferences. An IEEE Senior Member, he is currently a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Computer Society.

Avideh Zakhor is currently the Qualcomm Chair and professor in electrical
engineering and computer science at the
University of California, Berkeley. Her areas
of interest include theories and applications
of signal, image, and video processing and
3D computer vision. She has won many
best paper awards and was the 2018 recipient of SPIE's Electronic Imaging Scientist
of the Year Award, and the Presidential Young Investigators Award
and the Oﬃce of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in
1992. She received a B.S. degree from Caltech and S.M. and Ph.D.
degrees from MIT, all in electrical engineering. She was a General Motors Scholar from 1982 to 1983 and was a Hertz fellow
from 1984 to 1988. In 2001, she was elected IEEE Fellow. She
cofounded OPC technology in 1996 (later acquired by Mentor
Graphics) and UrbanScan Inc. in 2005 (acquired by Google in
2007). She founded Indoor Reality in 2015 to develop technologies for fast, automated energy audits of commercial buildings.

Irene Hu serves as the hardware electronics engineer of Biobot Analytics, where she
leads the development of hardware electronics, communications infrastructure, and
sensing technology. Biobot transforms city
sewage into public health observatories and
is currently measuring opioid concentrations in sewage to estimate consumption in
cities. Government, public health oﬃcials,
and first responders leverage this near-real-time data to tailor their
opioid response strategies. She has served on the executive board
of Graduate Women at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and she is active in the MIT Science Policy Initiative.
Hu received the MIT Presidential Fellowship. She holds a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University,
Princeton, NJ, USA.

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IEEE Awards Booklet - 2019

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