Chapter Elects Officers, Celebrates Scholarships, and Discusses 5G

During the December General Membership Meeting in December, the chapter elected its officers for the coming year, including its first female president, Angela Alexander-Mendoza. The other elected officers are Richard Roda as chapter executive vice president and Michael Tague as chapter treasurer. Karen Barry was also appointed as chapter executive secretary. Chair Martin Harbolt announced that the chapter will be sending care packages to the soldiers. Col. Roberto Castillo, USA, led a line of volunteers who packaged various items such as snacks, books and games, and practical items. Each package also contained a card, thanking the soldier for their service. The chapter briefed its financials, including five $2,000 STEM scholarships given to deserving local area high school graduates. The scholarship committee was recognized with certificates of appreciation. This committee has a tough job, as there are more deserving students than scholarships. The scholarship committee must make difficult choices when weighing which students merit scholarships. Chief Chester Brown thanked the chapter for its support of the Human Resources Command's angel tree project. These funds were used to purchase bicycles for children of HRC employees. A retrospective of past events was presented, which included presentations by SAIC's Kuan Collins on artificial intelligence; TEKsystems with a local high school robotics team on robotics; Oracle on MySQL; Perspecta's Stu Hammer on transformation from the cloud; CoreSys Federal with Seth Martinez on cybersecurity; Exeter's Rob Weighal on hybrid cloud; Cohns & Associates with motivational speaker Col. Wendy Rivers, USA; and Booksource with Jonathan Cowherd on DROOLS business logic integration platform. The chapter also held a Young AFCEAN social, a golf scramble with NTT Data Federal, Exeter, and CoreSys Consulting to raise scholarship funds. AFCEA International recognized the chapter with the following awards: Model Young AFCEAN Program, Young AFCEAN Chapter, Model Chapter, and Brenda M. Dougherty Diversity Program. Verizon's Mark Rosenstein spoke on how 5G will transform business and usher in a fourth industrial revolution. With its superior bandwidth and lower latency, 5G will enable workforce productivity, allow businesses to have superior business intelligence and awareness of their operating environment, and provide a more personalized customer experience. Additionally, 5G technologies can lead to greater precision in manufacturing, an autonomous supply chain which automates delivery and tracking of shipments, and augmented or virtual reality which will enable Telemedicine, as well as allow richer 3D computer interfaces.

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