The Institute - December 2019 - 5

Celebrating

Entrepreneurs
FEMRITE

EACH YEAR,
THOUSANDS
OF AMBITIOUS
ENGINEERS
START NEW
BUSINESSES
BY KATHY PRETZ

Editor in chief, The Institute

Alex Williamson

HOWARD

DEVADIGA

n this issue, we feature IEEE Member Christian Femrite, who along with Brian
Youngil Cho and two of their schoolmates at the University of Notre Dame,
in Indiana, cofounded speaker company Resonado in 2017 [page TI-6]. The
startup is commercializing the flat core speaker technology that Cho and
his father developed. The speakers are thinner and lighter than traditional
ones, and can be shaped to fit just about anywhere. * Member Irene Hu is a hardware electronics engineer at startup Biobot Analytics in Somerville, Mass. Biobot
was spun out of MIT in 2017 [page TI-7]. The company is working to fight opioid
addiction by testing urine in sewer system wastewater.

On page TI-12 read about roboticist
Ayanna Howard, a senior member who
has been working on developing interactive androids to guide children with autism
on ways to socially and emotionally engage
with others. She helped to found Zyrobotics,
a Georgia Tech VentureLab startup that is
working on AI and robotics technologies
for children with special needs.
Failure rates for startups are high. On
page TI-10, venture advisor and IEEE
Fellow Chenyang Xu offers entrepreneurial engineers advice on actions they can
take to ensure their businesses take off.
Senior Member Nitish Devadiga
wants to make sure today's software
PHOTO-ILLUSTRATIONS BY

engineering grads are prepared to work
at startups. On page TI-8, read about his
study, which found that the current standard software engineering curriculum
doesn't put enough emphasis on the
skills that startups and next-gen technology companies expect in new grads.
Many have taken note: The article is The
Institute's most read online.
On page TI-15, learn about the two small
companies behind NASA's lunar ranging
experiment LURE, which made a precise
measurement of the distance from the
Earth to the moon in 1969. The experiment involved shooting a high-powered
laser pulse at the moon from the Lick

Observatory on Mount Hamilton, outside of San Jose, Calif. It was because of
LURE, now an IEEE Milestone, that scientists know the Earth-moon distance
with centimeter accuracy. Lunar laser
ranging is still being conducted today.
IEEE President Moura is also an entrepreneur. He helped found Spiralgen to
commercialize Spiral, a new generation
of design tools. His column on page TI-2
is his final one for The Institute. We thank
him for his many contributions in improving IEEE.
And congratulations to Fellow Kathy
Land on being voted the 2020 IEEE president-elect [TI-4].
>>>
THE INSTITUTE

DEC 2019

TI-5

The Institute - December 2019

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Institute - December 2019