AAAEA IL participated in the Chicagoland Engineering Week ending Feb 22nd with AAAEA famous annual Essay/Poster Contest.
2019 WASHINGTON AWARDEE | MARGARET HAMILTON
Margaret H. Hamilton is CEO of Hamilton Technologies. She graduated in 1958 from Earlham in mathematics and philosophy. Preparing for graduate school, she joined MIT, developing software for predicting weather on the LGP-30; and for SAGE’s air defense system on the AN/FSQ-7. Upon hearing MIT needed people to “send man to the moon”,
she joined NASA/MIT’s project to build Apollo on-board flight software, starting with unmanned missions. For the manned missions, she led the team that developed the on-board flight software for the command and lunar modules. She was the Director of the Software Engineering Division at MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory. Hamilton developed software to detect and recover from errors in realtime; including the priority displays interface routines based on her man-in-the-loop-concepts that gave the software the ability to communicate asynchronously in realtime with the astronauts – the software and astronauts running in parallel – within a distributed system-of-systems environment. With this as a backdrop, the priority displays warned the astronauts in an emergency by interrupting
the astronauts’ normal mission displays and replacing them with priority alarm displays – as was the case during the Apollo 11 landing.
Hamilton is the person who came up with the idea of naming the discipline, “software engineering”, as a way of giving it legitimacy. She led an empirical study of Apollo and later efforts, resulting in her systems theory of control. From its axioms, the universal systems language was derived together with its automation and preventative paradigm. Hamilton received the NASA Exceptional Space Act Award (2003) and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama (2016).
AAAEA judges selected 3 wining students to award during the prestigious Washington Award dinner on Feb 22nd. The Essay/Poster Contest was sponsored by AAAEA-IL and was open to all students in the 3rd through 8th grades in the Chicagoland area schools. Students submitted an essay and a poster about an engineer that they admire or have made an impact on their life. The essays explained who the engineer was and why the student admired this engineer. The poster depicted some aspect of the engineer and the engineer’s accomplishment. The purpose of the contest is meant to stimulate students to consider careers in engineering by fostering interest in engineering through research, essay writing, creating a poster and interacting with engineers.
Below were the judges and the winners for the 2019 contest.
E-Week Coordinator:
Jamal Grainawi, PE, SE; WSP, AAAEA-IL Trustee
Essay/Poster Judge:
Jamal Grainawi, PE, SE; WSP, AAAEA-IL Trustee
Hussam Alkhatib, PE ; WSP, AAAEA-IL Vice President
Winners:
| 5th & 6th Grade | |||
| Dean Hammad | 6th Grade | Palos South Elementary School | Topic: Douglas Engelbart |
| Naya Kudssi | 5th Grade | Westview Hills Middle School | Topic: Larry Page |
| 7th & 8th Grade | |||
| Naomi Hammad | 8th Grade | Palos South Middle School | Topic: Steve Sasson |
In addition to the judges and the students the dinner was attended by the association president Mr. Amro Kudssi. The new chair of the Women Engineers Mrs. Rund Daod and her husband Mr. Ahmad Saadeh. Here are pictures from the event.
