Posted on Apr 22, 2005

Matt Milless, director of student activities, authored an article, “Want to be a tech-savvy campus activities professional?” in the March issue of Campus Activities Programming. He advises that campus activities staffers turn to students to advance their technological literacy. But he warns that they should be prepared for a long conversation. “Students take this subject very seriously,” he said. And he asks students to be patient. “Remember, some of us started with eight-track tape players.”

Posted on Apr 22, 2005

Lorraine Cox,  assistant professor of visual arts, presented a paper, “Survivalist Aesthetic or Interventionist Strategy: Collage in the Work of Chris Ofili, Pepón Osorio and Siona Benjamin,” at the Collage as Cultural Practice conference, sponsored by the University of Iowa's Obermann Center for Advanced Studies in Iowa City. The paper, part of a developing chapter of a book project, analyzes collage in relation to critical race theory as a strategy for disrupting essentialist assumptions about race and ethnicity while also serving as a survivalist aesthetic of cultural expression. The three artists incorporate collage as a strategy for confronting their post-colonial realities and the ability of the work to prompt the viewer to do the same.

Posted on Apr 22, 2005

David Hemmendinger, professor of computer science, and Cherrice Traver, professor of electrical engineering, are co-authors (with Bob Reese and Mitch Thornton of the University of Mississippi) of a paper, “Early evaluation for performance enhancement in phased logic,” in the April issue of IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design. The paper stems from Traver's research on the design of asynchronous digital logic circuits (circuits that do not depend on a clock signal to regulate their operation). Also, Hemmendinger recently taught a brief course on the Java programming language at ESIGELEC, an engineering college in Rouen, France, where he has taught the course twice before. ESIGELEC, with which the College has had exchanges for some years, has a program that brings in foreign teachers to offer courses in English as part of their students' international experience.

Posted on Apr 22, 2005

A group of 21 students boarded a bus at 7:15 Wednesday morning bound for the National Conference on Undergraduate Research at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va.

The group is accompanied by Prof. Ashraf Ghaly.

Profs. Ann Anderson and Tom Werner, members of the NCUR Board of Governors, traveled to Washington and Lee earlier in the week.

The group is to return on Saturday, April 23.

Union is a charter member of NCUR, participating every year since 1987. Union hosted the event in 1990 and 1995.

Posted on Apr 22, 2005

The College will be well represented by three alumni – Mark Walsh '76, Steve Ritterbush '68 and John Ciovacco '87 — at the Summit at Tech Valley on Tuesday, April 26, at the Desmond Hotel and Conference Center in Albany.

Walsh, a trustee of the College, will serve as emcee of the event. He is managing partner of Ruxton Ventures LLC, an equity and investment firm with holdings in technology and service companies including Blackboard, Half.com, Day Corp. and IndustryBrains. He served as chairman of VerticalNet. He was also senior vice president of American Online. He founded and managed American Enterprise, the business-to-business division of AOL. Walsh earned his bachelor's from Union, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Ritterbush, a trustee and partner at Fairfax Partners in Vienna, Va., a private equity investment firm, will lead a session titled “Effective Investor Presentations: What the VCs Want to Know.” He is also a judge in “Show Me the Money: $100,000 Business Plan Competition.” He has founded more than 25 companies including ISR Solutions, the world's largest privately held security systems integration company, and AppNet Systems, Inc., a company that provided a variety of web-based services ranging from inventory management to web page design. He earned a master's of science degree in oceanography from the Department of Geophysics at the University of Hawaii, and a master's degree in law and diplomacy and a Ph.D. in international economics from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University. Ritterbush was also a Rockefeller Foundation fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. 

Ciovacco, co-founder (with Ted Eveleth '87) and chairman of Cyclics, is a panelist for a session titled “Advancing Tech Valley: What Will it Take?” moderated by Walsh. Ciovacco and Eveleth recognized the opportunity when GE decided that Cylics resin technology would not fit into its product strategy, and assembled the company's technical and management teams. Cyclics has grown from a 5-person company to one with nearly 100 employees on two continents and a $40 million production plant. It was named The Business Review's Most Promising New Enterprise in 2003, and the Schenectady Chamber of Commerce's Outstanding New Enterprise in 2002.

For further details on the Summit, visit http://www.techvalley.org.