IEEE Consultants Network of Long Island (LICN)

During the last few years, the newspapers have been filled with stories of corruption: the Manganos, Sam Bankman-Fried, Senator Bob Menendez are just three examples. What can we learn from these examples? What are the expectations about ethical standards in the business world?

The expectations are proactivity, integrity and transparency. By proactivity, we mean that businesses and other organizations are expected to create an ethical culture both internally and with their business partners, including consultants of all types. How can this be accomplished, in a word where goods and services are more often provided through a network of independent vendors?

By integrity, we mean honesty and trustworthiness in dealings with others. What are the potential conflicts of interest that can compromise integrity, especially where business is conducted through ever-shifting sets of consultants and vendors? How can these conflicts be recognized and dealt with?

By transparency, we mean accuracy and accountability in all commercial dealings.
Learn how you cannot only comply with these ethical standards, but improve your business performance at the same time, that good ethics is good business.

Speaker Bio:
Lisa Renee Pomerantz graduated from Harvard University and Boston University Law School. After graduation, Lisa clerked for a federal judge. Following a stint as a litigation attorney, she worked for fifteen years as a senior-level in-house counsel for NEC.

Since 2003, Lisa has practiced business and employment law on Long Island. In 2024, she moved to Denver but maintains her New York practice remotely. She mediates and arbitrates commercial, consumer and employment disputes for the American Arbitration Association. She also mediates cases privately and in various New York State federal and state courts. Lisa has served on the EDNY ADR Advisory Council and in a variety of leadership roles with the Association for Conflict Resolution, the New York State Dispute Resolution Association and the Suffolk County Bar Association.

Lisa is a popular keynote speaker at legal and business meetings and conferences, and publishes an email newsletter entitled “Making the Connection.” She has contributed numerous articles to the Suffolk Lawyer and ACResolution Magazine. She also has provided on-line and live training for business and legal audiences, and has taught at Touro Law School, New York Law School, the University of Tartu in Estonia and Vilnius University in Lithuania.

Lisa has received numerous awards for her professional activities. In 2007, Lisa received the Suffolk County Bar Association Directors’ Award in recognition of her service as ADR Committee Co-Chair. She was named Member of the Year by Moxxie Network for 2015. Lisa also received an award in 2015 from the Association for Conflict Resolution for exemplary leadership. In 2010, the Long Island Business News named Lisa as a recipient of its Top Fifty Around 50 Award, in 2011 and 2017 she received its Leadership in Law Award, and in 2019 she was named among the Top 50 Women on Long Island.

Agenda:
We will start our meeting at 7:00 pm. For the next 10 minutes or so, we will introduce ourselves, handle any LICN business and do a little networking. We will then start our presentation. After the presentation, feel free to stick around and chat with others to network or to further discuss our lecture topic.

Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are a unique, versatile class of Integrated Circuits (ICs) that can be configured to implement customized digital logic circuits.

In this in-depth talk, we will explore this powerful reconfigurable hardware, starting with an overview and its history, further diving into the internal structure of an FPGA. We will examine how the core components - configurable logic blocks and various memory elements - operate and how these building blocks are configured to create specific digital functions.

This presentation will also cover the FPGA design methodology using hardware description languages (HDLs) with examples, and the various stages of synthesis, mapping, and routing.

We will also look at the practical applications in demanding fields such as medical imaging and diagnostics, and cutting-edge AI/Machine Learning acceleration, showcasing their capability for custom hardware development.

Speaker Bio:
Smitha Kaje is an Embedded Systems Engineer at Spellman High Voltage Electronics Corporation, Hauppauge, NY, specializing in digital design and coding of FPGAs, GUIs, microcontrollers, and DSPs for high-voltage Medical Devices such as CT Scanners & X-ray Generators.
She has two master degrees in electrical and computer engineering from Stony Brook University and BITS Pilani-Dubai and has over 12 years of professional experience.

She is a dedicated contributor to academic research, with three peer-reviewed conference papers published on FPGA-based accelerators. She actively reviews technical papers in journals/conferences and also enjoys judging technical competitions.

Smitha volunteers as the chair of the IEEE Signal Processing Society of Long Island 2025 and is a part of the organizing committee for IEEE Women in Engineering Forum USA East 2025.

Agenda:
We will start our meeting at 7:00 pm. For the next 10 minutes or so, we will introduce ourselves, handle any LICN business and do a little networking. We will then start our presentation. After the presentation, feel free to stick around and chat with others to network or to further discuss our lecture topic.

NOTES
There is no cost to attend this meeting, however, if you are a NYS Professional Engineer and would like to receive Professional Development Hours (PDHs) of continuing education credit, then payment of a $15 fee is required. You will also have to properly fill out an Evaluation Form to prove that you attended this lecture.