IEEE Rising Stars Conference and Costumer Electronics Show (CES) – Recap

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From January 4 to January 8 the Houston Section Secretary, Moriah Hargrove Anders, traveled to Las Vegas, NV to participate in the IEEE Rising Stars 2019 conference and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2019. Rising Stars is an annually-held professional development conference for students and young professionals while CES is a global technological showcase that provides a platform for thousands of companies to highlight their best new products. Generally speaking, Rising Stars is intentionally held the weekend before CES to enable IEEE members to benefit from presenters sourced from CES attendees, as well as attend CES. CES is hosted at a variety of casino-hotels and conferencing spaces across Las Vegas (eg in excess of 7 different locations), while Rising Stars was held in conference rooms of the Tropicana Resort.

Rising Stars had a variety of presentations including technical keynotes, project management of technical teams, financial habits workshop, branding workshops, resume workshops, Arduino workshops, networking workshops, and so on. The team that organized Rising Stars definitely did a great job this year balancing content between student interests and YP interests.

“My favorite class by far was the presentation on ‘managing technical teams.’ I have attended project management lectures before but never have been privy to an actual presentation that covered the challenges of leading engineers— a group who typically don’t want to play icebreakers and would prefer cutting to the chase. I derived a lot of value from this presentation and can almost justify the whole conference cost from this one hour lesson.” – quote from Moriah. She has also summarized her Rising Stars conference takeaways below, which includes a mixture of derived guidance from the presentations as well as guidance taken verbatim from various speakers.

Rising Stars conference organizers decided to forge recording presentations this year. Recording of CES are available here: http://live.ces.tech/category/videos/all-ces-video-content. CES is such a massive conference and ordeal that the only way to summarize the experience is to share links. Please enjoy the links below and consider attending Rising Stars and/or CES next year!

 

Rising Stars Takeaways:

  • What got you here won’t get you there.
    • Generally used in a presentation as a reminder to continue to learn and push yourself to the next step personally/professionally.
  • High performing teams care about each other and the success of the team overall.
  • Sign of success in getting your team to buy into the mission/vision of the team occurs when everyone on the team takes responsibility for the wins/failures of the team.
  • Signs of a dysfunctional team: lack of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability, inattention to results — sometimes you have to restart the reforming, restorming, and renorming processes before your team can reach performing.
  • A good mentor asks questions and guides their mentee to their own answers.
  • Sometimes general visions and dreams are better to set than specific, life-long goals.
  • Informing employees of their impact on company (e.g., impact on final product or what the final product is used for or sold to) can help increase emotional buy-in to the cause. Emotional buy-in is what enables your team to buy into the mission/vision of the team.
  • Ideal age to run a startup is 25-45.
  • Be confident in yourself.
  • Don’t let your desire to be perfect get in your ways of getting things done. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
  • Being a hard and sincere worker makes an impact.
  • If a project or task is late, offer to help since you’ll fix a problem while elevating yourself.
  • Be on time.
  • Be emphatic. Be positive and have a good attitude.
  • Find a career you like so working hard doesn’t feel like it.
  • Take risks, fail fast, and repeat.
  • Don’t do it all at once. Take time off, too.

 

CES Related Links:

IBM opened CES by featuring its CEO, Ginni Rometty. She shared her view on how technology built on a foundation of responsibility and trust will significantly improve how businesses operate and how people work/live: http://live.ces.tech/detail/videos/ces-2019-keynotes/video/5987207113001/cta-state-of-the-industry-address-and-ibm-keynote?autoStart=true.

CES Highlights: http://live.ces.tech/detail/videos/highlights/video/5988426419001/what%E2%80%99s-hot-at-ces-2019?autoStart=true

 

8K OLED Displays: https://www.t3.com/news/ces; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWO3l7Xs-LQ

CES Startup Highlights: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeanbaptiste/2019/01/05/22-startups-to-watch-at-ces-2019/#603d81555e5b

What Moriah will be buying ASAP from CES: https://www.loopearplugs.com/

TechRadar’s Best of CES List: https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-ces-tech-techradars-2019-ces-awards

CNN’s event recap (which also features a cool bread vending machine): https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/05/tech/ces-2019-preview/index.html

 

Article written by IEEE Houston Section Secretary: Moriah Hargrove Anders

 

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