UBM Tech's DESIGN West Announces 2013 Conference Program

SAN FRANCISCO, March 7, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- UBM Tech, which serves design engineers and the electronics industry with essential business and technical information, today announced the conference program for DESIGN West, the annual technical conference and expo for electronics design engineers, entrepreneurs, and technology professionals who create products with electronic content. The program includes 150 technical lectures, panels, tutorials, certification programs and hands-on training sessions taught by the industry's top experts on the most relevant software, hardware, and systems design topics and tools for creating products. DESIGN West, which takes place April 22-25, 2013 at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, CA, is where the world's top design engineers and product developers gather and learn, gain inspiration and get practical information and hands-on training they can put to immediate use.   

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"Engineers today are increasingly getting involved with all aspects of embedded design, from concept development through to manufacturing. To help engineers improve their skills and acquire new ones, we've expanded the DESIGN West conference program to include more topics, hands-on training sessions, and practicing engineers to speak," said Wendy Yamaguma, Senior Event Director, Electronics, UBM Tech.

DESIGN West featured sessions include:

•  "vandervecken: An OpenFlow-Controlled WAN Router and MPLS LSR for Research" presented by Josh Bailey, Software Engineer, Google on Tuesday April 23 at 8:00 a.m. 
  SDN has been gathering attention and shows a lot of promise. A challenge for the community has been the lack of a well-integrated, open source, hardware forwarding platform for SDN research. Enter the Google network research team who has been engaged with the Open Source Routing Forum and the RouteFlow team to produce a simple hardware forwarding, OpenFlow controlled router and MPLS LSR, suitable for researchers for research and experimentation with networks.   
• "Designing a Tele-Presence Robot - What Was I Thinking?" presented by Duane Benson, Web Marketing Manager, Screaming Circuits on Tuesday April 23 at 9:15 a.m. 
  Building a tele-presence robot is an adventure in systems architecture. Benson will outline his choices from discrete logic, microcontrollers, and programmable logic, to off-the-shelf modules like Android tablets and smartphones. Find out what makes up a "system," how can it be put together timely and economically and how to start with a less-than-ideal solution or upgrade.
• "Why I Failed at Kickstarter and My Friends Didn't" presented by Bob Baddeley, Founder, Portable Scores on Wednesday April 24 at 8:30 a.m.
  In 2012 two companies launched Kickstarter projects at the same time. One failed and one succeeded.  Hear the story of these companies to understand the process leading up to the launch, campaign and aftermath. Learn what it takes to run a successful Kickstarter campaign as well as the statistics and facts about the crowd-funding successes and failures.
• "Future of Mobile: A Lifestyle of Mobility" presented by Harald Neihardt, Founder & CEO, MLOVE Inc. on Thursday, April 25 at 8 a.m.
  Get the scoop on the trends and innovation in the third phase of mobile called the "Lifestyle of Mobility," where the Internet of things, connected cars, sensors and "quantified self" movement become ubiquitous and dominate our life style and cause disruption. 
• "Hack or be Hacked!" presented by Joseph Loomis, Senior Research Engineer, Southwest Research Institute on Thursday, April 25 at 9:15 a.m.
  Blending a mixture of hacking history, security knowledge and engineering experience with a focus on building a secure embedded system. Get information on the popular techniques used to hack embedded systems and why they are successful. It will cover several approaches to building in security that have been used with varying degrees of success, and what it means to hack your own embedded system.  Only well publicized hacks and vulnerabilities will be shared.

View the conference scheduler builder
View the full speaker list                    

Key workshops at DESIGN West:

• Cool Beanies! A Mesh Networked Cranial Cooling System
  Imagine the ultimate battery powered motorized propeller beanie cap.  In this session, attendees will see the "cap-net" in action.  The hardware components and software code will both be examined. Areas of focus include motor control, temperature sensors, accelerometers, LEDs, battery management, wireless technologies and the "cap-net" dashboard in the cloud. Additionally, all of the code and hardware design files will be made available as open source to enable attendees to build their own beanie, or use these design techniques in their own projects
• Learn the Four Basic Concepts of Arduino in 45 Minutes
  During this hands-on speed training session, the instructors at SparkFun are teaching the four basic concepts of Arduino—analog, digital, input, and output-- on the new Proto-Snap package. It comes with circuits already connected to the microcontroller in an easy to snap-apart board, eliminating the onerous task of breadboarding circuits.  We'll program how your components will interact, and then snap them apart to add them to specific projects.
• "Holy $#*! Our Design Is Complex - How Am I Going to Debug It?"  
  Embedded system complexity is accelerating at a dizzying pace. This session will help attendees turn science fiction into reality; peer deep into complex systems without antiquated techniques such as printfs; assist attendees inject faults, capture and save the system state and execute in reverse to find the source of bugs; and help attendees use one tool chain for their lifecycle, including bring-up, development and integration scale tools techniques, to networks of hundreds of boards.
• Raspberry Pi and Gertboard Intro Workshop, Taught by Gert Van Loo, hardware engineer &  Raspberry Pi developer
  This speed-training session offers hands-on instruction of the Raspberry Pi and the Gertboard, the new companion board that allows the Raspberry Pi to connect to the real-world by converting analog signals to digital and back again. Taught by Gert Van Loo, one of the hardware engineers who developed the Raspberry Pi and the creator of the eponymous expansion board, this session will offer several insider tips and tricks.

Additionally, DESIGN West offers free education and training to engineers.  For additional information visit: http://ubmdesign.com/sanjose/expo/free-training.php

DESIGN West sponsors to date include platinum sponsor Microchip and Gold Sponsors AMD, Intel, Rohde & Schwarz, and Texas Instruments and Mouser Electronics, as the Silver Sponsor.

DESIGN West partner activities include:

• Reducing power and maximizing efficiency in embedded designs are among a few of the topics that Platinum Sponsor Microchip will present training sessions on in booths 1116 and 1138. 
• Gold sponsor Rohde & Schwarz will host a "Technology Tour" at the event.  Booth 816 will be transformed into a 1,000 square foot state-of-the-art training center.  It will offer a unique learning experience on the latest test and measurement technologies and debugging techniques.
• The Intelligent Systems Zone in the DESIGN West exhibit hall is anchored by Gold Sponsor Intel in booth 916 and will showcase how Intelligent Systems are transforming the design process. Attendees will learn how to incorporate all the new technology features and build next-generation designs.  Intel will also hold training sessions in their booth on the show floor.
• Gold sponsor AMD booth number 1308:  See the latest embedded solutions which give designers ample flexibility to design scalable, x86-based, low-cost and feature-rich products, and drive energy conservation into their systems without compromising application performance or compatibility, graphics performance or features.
• Gold Sponsor TI, booth 1607 – Meet the winners of the TI MCU BoosterPack Design Challenge at Design West and see their original designs.  View Video
• IBM will be delivering training sessions such as "Agile for Safety Critical Systems' featuring speaker Bruce Douglass in their booth space 1623.

View the full DESIGN West Exhibitor List. 

DESIGN West media registration is now open at https://designwest.reg.ubmelectronics.com/2013/registrations/Media?cid=PR2

For more information on DESIGN West sponsorships, contact Will Wise at will.wise@ubm.com or 415.947.6252.

Join the conversation about DESIGN West on Twitter (https://twitter.com/#!/ubmdesign) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/ubmdesign) for all the latest updates.

About DESIGN (www.ubmdesign.com)

Held in key strategic technology development locations worldwide, UBM Tech's DESIGN events are the global electronics industry's leading gatherings.  With cutting edge product demonstrations, visionary speeches and hundreds of essential technical training classes and accreditation opportunities, DESIGN is the ideal venue for the electronics engineering community to learn, collaborate and recognize excellence. UBM Tech's DESIGN events cater to the extremely technical, higher-learning needs of the world's top engineers while providing an unprecedented forum for the examination of the industry's pressing business challenges.  In addition, DESIGN West celebrates decades of unique local electronics industry culture, innovation and Silicon Valley's significant contributions to the global technology industry.

About UBM Tech

UBM Tech is a global media business that provides information, events, training, data services, and marketing solutions for the technology industry.  Its media brands and information services inform and inspire decision makers across the entire technology market— engineers and design professionals, software and game developers, solutions providers and integrators, networking and communications executives, and business technology professionals.  UBM Tech's industry-leading media brands include EE Times, Interop, Black Hat, InformationWeek, Game Developer Conference, CRN, and DesignCon. The company's information products include research, education, training, and data services that accelerate decision making for technology buyers.  UBM Tech also offers a full range of marketing services based on its content and technology market expertise, including custom events, content marketing solutions, community development and demand generation programs. UBM Tech is a part of UBM (UBM.L), a global provider of media and information services with a market capitalization of more than $2.5 billion.

For more information, go to www.ubm.com; follow us at @UBM_plc to get the latest UBM news.

For more information on UBM Tech's DESIGN West 2013 please contact:
Linda Uslaner, Marketing Director
T: 516.562.5843, E: linda.uslaner@ubm.com

SOURCE UBM Tech