On Thursday I had a very pleasant lunch with a good friend of mine, Martin Walt. Martin and I worked together in the 1950s as research scientists at Los Alamos. Martin ended up moving to the San Francisco Bay area when he accepted a position with Lockheed, and he reported to me then that he enjoyed his newly adopted state.

In fact, part of the reason I moved to California was because of Martin’s glowing reports. Another reason was because my wife Betty was not very happy living in the New Mexico desert. It was good to see Martin again, and to hear about his life and travels.

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On Wednesday we went on a field trip to Sea World. I rode some rides, and saw some of the marine animal shows. We attended the Shamu show, and one of the killer whales splashed the heck out of us.

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I recently received a note from Ron Gilgenbach, who is the chair of the University of Michigan Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences Department. Ron sent me a copy of two figures that appeared in a book titled Neutron Thermalization and Reactor Spectra back in 1968.

It’d been some time since I had last seen these figures, and I enjoyed seeing them again. I have included them below.

– Bob

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Last Wednesday, Betty and I participated in a luncheon at the University of San Diego to mark a $7 million donation we made to help fund the construction of a new nursing research and simulation training center on campus. We have been involved with the Hahn School of Nursing and Health Science for a number of years now, and have supported their nursing research programs and student scholarships.

It is expected that the new Betty and Bob Beyster Institute for Nursing Research, Advanced Practice and Simulation will be completed and operational by 2017. The Hahn School is doing good work in advancing nursing and health science, and I am pleased that we can help the school do even more in this important field that touches so many lives.

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When I visited the University of Michigan last month, I enjoyed a variety of presentations made by the engineering students and faculty. One of the presentations I found of particular interest was the work being done in the area of sensor-driven computing and what they call “smart dust.”

Prabal Dutta is a key researcher in this area, and he is collaborating with other researchers on this work, including David Blaauw, Dennis Sylvester, and David Wentzloff. It is my understanding that smart dust is networks of very small (cubic-mm) integrated, autonomous, energy-harvesting nodes that can sense the environment and deliver their data over a wireless mesh network.

If successful, this line of research could have a tremendous impact on the future of computer networking. I have included a couple of slides that detail the work that Prabal Dutta and his colleagues are doing.

– Bob

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I am pleased to let you know that the FED has released a trailer for their new film on employee ownership called We the Owners. The film, which is scheduled to be released in Summer 2012, looks at the stories of employees and founders from three companies, each of which is structured with distinct forms of broad-based employee ownership. The three companies are New Belgium Brewing Company, Namasté Solar, and DPR Construction.

Although I have not yet seen the complete film, I am looking forward to it. I believe it will go a long way in helping us achieve our goal of advancing the ideals of employee ownership to a larger audience. You can view the trailer below:

For more information or to pre-order, please visit the We the Owners website.

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I was happy to see that the newly named Bob and Betty Beyster Building at the University of Michigan is getting some use by the engineering students. I learned that about 50 students in the Machine Learning class (EECS 545) participated in a project poster session in Tishman Hall, which is the large open area on the first floor.

Some of the proects and student presenters included A Real-time Hand Gesture Recognition System (Arun Ganesan), Prediction of Patient’s Length of Stay Using Health-care Claims Data (Jiwei Cao, Juchuan Ma, Wan Huang), and Improving Image Feature Correspondence for Hovering Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (Paul Ozog, Patrick O’Keefe). I have included a photo of the proceedings below:

– Bob

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Many of you know that the University of Michigan recently decided to give the Computer Science and Engineering building on campus a new name: the Bob and Betty Beyster Building. Two weeks ago, Betty and I flew out to Michigan to participate in the official dedication of the building, and to enjoy a variety of other activities, both on campus and in the surrounding area.

Our trip began with an airplane ride from Palomar Airport in Carlsbad to Willow Run, a small airport outside of Detroit that was once the home of a manufacturing plant in World War II for the B-24 bombers built by the Ford Motor Company. The dedication ceremony at the University of Michigan was scheduled for Wednesday, April 11th, and before the event we toured the Engineering School, where we met with students, researchers, and faculty and were given briefings on their various research projects, some of which Betty and I have supported through our previous donations to the school. I was especially pleased to see their continued progress in the areas of nanotechnology, molecular physics, and laser spectroscopy. We visited the Ford Nuclear Reactor building and were able to see the now empty reactor pool and many of the remaining facilities. The reactor has been decommissioned for a long time, so the school is converting it to a laser lab, and we’ll be paying for part of that. We had dinners with different professors every night, sometimes in university buildings such as the Michigan Union and sometimes at restaurants in Ann Arbor.

The school made a big event of the dedication ceremony. The event was hosted by the Dean of Engineering, David Munson, and there were many speakers representing U-M, including Mary Sue Coleman, the President of the University, Marios Papaefthymiou, Professor and Chair of Computer Science and Engineering, and Shamik Ganguly, graduate student research assistant in CSE. The highlight of the day for me was when we first entered the lobby of the building and were greeted with a long line of students shaking blue and gold pom-poms and cheering our arrival. There were a lot of congratulations and everyone was shaking hands and so forth. I also won’t forget when they brought out part of the University of Michigan marching band to play the school fight song, Hail to the Victors, for us. That was really something. I was pleased that a number of my SAIC friends were able to join us at the ceremony as well.

I gave a short speech and my daughter Mary Ann also said a few words for the occasion. All in all, it was quite a day.

We visited my boyhood home in Grosse Ile, and this time we had the good fortune to be able to tour the inside of the house. It felt good to be inside my old house again after so many years and it brought back many good memories of my family and growing up. We also visited the Henry Ford Museum in Greenfield Village, and we dropped in on my old SAE fraternity house at the University of Michigan.

Summing up my visit, I feel good about the contributions that Betty and I have made to Michigan over the years. I owe a lot to the University — it’s the only place I went to college.

I have included some photos from the event that I hope you will enjoy.

– Bob

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I will be flying out to Ann Arbor on Easter Sunday with my wife Betty, my daughter Mary Ann, and several others. We have an ambitious schedule laid out for us, including the dedication of the Bob and Betty Beyster Building on the University of Michigan campus, a tour of the Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, and a visit to my boyhood home in Grosse Ile.

I am hoping that this time we will have the opportunity to take a look inside the house and see how it has changed in the more than 60 years since I lived there. I will post a detailed trip report when I return, hopefully with some photos.

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I was interested to read in the Washington Post that the al-Qaeda Internet forums are back online after they were blacked out for more than a week. Apparently the websites were the target of a cyberattack, although it is not clear who might have initiated this attack.

It’s amazing to me that al-Qaeda and its operatives are sophisticated enough to have a fully developed website to communicate their message of darkness to their fellow conspirators. I suspect that the U.S. has fully infiltrated their network, though I don’t have first-hand knowledge if this is the case or not.

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On Wednesday we went on a field trip to Newport Beach, where we had lunch on a beautiful lagoon on Balboa Island. We had to take a ferry to get there, which was an enjoyable adventure.

– Bob

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I recently read an article in the Washington Post that I thought you might be interested in. The article, published on March 27, 2012, discusses the current debate over U.S. military rules of engagement for launching cyberattacks on our enemies.

While some have argued that commanders on the battlefield should have this authority, the commander of the U.S. Cyber Command — General Keith Alexander — has come down on the side of requiring presidential authority to launch cyberattacks. I personally believe that the authority should be scaled depending on the origin and nature of the threat. Battlefield commanders should have the authority to defend their troops from cyberattack without having to go too far up the chain of command, especially in time-critical situations.

– Bob

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