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Universal Dynamics at the IEEE Industrial Applications Society General Meeting - Roma 2000

October 9, 2000

The Industrial Applications Society of IEEE held its general meeting in Rome, Italy during the week of October 9-13, 2000. This meeting was the largest and best attended of any of the IAS general meetings, with over 1,500 registrants, 82 sessions and over 500 papers presented. This was also the first general meeting held outside of North America. There were large contingents from Europe, North America and Asia as well as attendees from Australia, South America and Africa.

Universal Dynamics had two attendees, Mark Weaver and Steve Hagemoen. Mr. Weaver presented a paper titled "Installation of An Integrated Turbine-Generator Control System for a Pulp Mill" (click on PDF or HTML to read the paper) - a discussion of the Northwood governor/exciter/protection job completed in 1998. Mr. Weaver will present this paper again at the IEEE-IAS Pulp & Paper Technical Conference to be held in Portland, Oregon in June of next year.

The IAS general meeting in the past has usually been primarily attended by academic types - presenting papers describing obscure and arcane topics, e.g., "Sensorless Vector Control of Induction Motor Using a Novel Reduced-Order Extended Luenberger Observer". Most of these ideas will never see the light of a real application but they do extend our knowledge, a graduate student is published and a new Ph.D. is awarded. The real difference between this meeting and previous meetings is the effort made by the IAS Meetings Department to include actual industrial applications presented by actual industrial users, e.g,. "Increased Productivity with AC Drives for Mining Excavators and Haul Trucks". Next year the general meeting will be held in Chicago in October. Every 4 years the conference will be held outside of North America. The next international conference site is still to be determined but Hong Kong looks like the top contender for the 2004 meeting.