Feb Program Chairs - Mitch Erickson & Steve Varley
- Feb. 2 "The Fierce Urgency of Now" - Margaret McMenamin, President of Union County College, will describe the college's work to help students and their families achieve economic and social mobility through higher education. Since her arrival in July of 2010, President McMenamin has refocused the institution on student success with a particular emphasis on equity. UCC is a federally designated Minority Serving / Hispanic Serving Institution where 70% of the 20,000 students are Black or Hispanic. [video conference]
- Feb. 9 "A Contrarian View of Julius Caesar's Assassination" - Summit Old Guard's Foster Osborne will pose questions such as: Was the assassination a good or bad thing? Did he deserve it? Was he a great leader or a despicable tyrant? And what makes his assassination the most famous in history? (Spoiler alert: It helps to have William Shakespeare write about it). [video conference]
- Feb. 16 "Student/Partner Alliance (S/PA)" - Executive Director Maggie Momber will describe how Summit-based S/PA increases low-income student success through scholarships and mentoring. Over 25 years S/PA has supported more than 2,200 scholarships for high school students from the Newark and Jersey City areas. This combination is key to S/PA's 100% high school graduation and college admissions rate over the past five years. [video conference]
- Feb. 23 "COVID-19 Vaccines" - Dr. Ashish Parikh, Chief Quality Officer at Summit CityMD (formerly Summit Medical Group), will talk about COVID-19 vaccines, their safety and efficacy and will answer all our questions. [video conference]
January Program Chair - Al Aho
- Jan. 5 "What Should a Well-Informed Person Know About Computers?" – Brian Kernighan is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and one of the original Unix Pioneers at Bell Labs. Brian will describe his experiences teaching "Computers in Our World," a first year course designed to inform non-technical students how modern hardware, software and communications systems operate." [video conference]
- Jan. 12 "SARS-CoV-2 – The Mouse that Roared" – Robert Martin, former CTO of Bell Labs and VP at Bellcore, will discuss the historically quite tame SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 that is causing historic economic, political, and behavioral disruptions. Bob will cover COVID-19 – the cause, prevention, and treatment – and the consequential behaviors. Who would have thought a year ago we would become facile with terms like super-spreader and herd immunity? [video conference]
- Jan. 19 "Adventures in Biking Europe with a Father of the Internet" – Robert Lucky is a former executive director of research at Bell Labs and VP of research at Telcordia. In recent years, Bob took a dozen bike trips through Europe with his close friend, Len Kleinrock, one of the fathers of the Internet. These were roll-your-own, meticulously planned trips. What could possibly go wrong? His talk is about what they learned as well as the joys of these great adventures. [video conference]
- Jan. 26 "Future Cameras" – Shree Nayar is T.C. Chang Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, head of the Columbia Vision Laboratory, and a member of the National Academy of Inventors. Shree will describe computational imaging and show examples of novel cameras that are changing the way visual information is being used by both humans and machines. He will also describe Bigshot, his educational experiential camera that has been used to teach science and photography to kids in underserved communities around the globe. [video conference]
