Notes and pictures from the 2024 ECEDHA Western Regional Meeting at UNLV

Over the last two days, I attended the 2024 Western Regional Meeting of ECEDHA, the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department Heads Association. It was held this year at UNLV, which is only 3 miles (5 km) away from Pololu, in the engineering department’s new Advanced Engineering Building that was just opened earlier this year.

UNLV’s new Advanced Engineering Building, November 2024.

I was there representing Pololu as one of five local industry sponsors. The larger companies there were treating it mostly as a recruiting event, and while we have several UNLV alums working at Pololu along with half a dozen student interns from UNLV, I looked at the event more as an opportunity to meet some of our customers. I also got to see some of UNLV’s new facilities for engineering students and researchers.

Setting up Pololu’s booth at the 2024 ECEDHA Western Regional Meeting. We need to get some of those printed tablecloths!

Booth’s-eye view at the 2024 ECEDHA Western Regional Meeting evening reception in the lobby of UNLV’s Advanced Engineering Building.

I had attended the full ECEDHA annual conference back in 2019, when it was held in Tucson, Arizona. That was a very large event with major corporate participation from all the large semiconductor manufacturers, and I was there with Texas Instruments supporting the TI-RSLK that they were promoting heavily at the time.

Texas Instruments booth at ECEDHA 2019 Annual Conference and Expo in Tucson, Arizona.

The TI-RSLK was the centerpiece of their booth, and they had several of the robots running around the booth and in adjacent workshop rooms.

The pandemic led to TI discontinuing the microcontrollers that the TI-RSLK was based on, which also led to them discontinuing the TI-RSLK and removing most mentions of it from their website, but this video promotion is still up on their YouTube channel:

Anyway, I had attended the larger conference before, but only from the perspective of the large corporate sponsor, where I was mostly staffing the booth at the expo hall and not participating in the sessions held with the department heads. At this smaller Western Regional Meeting yesterday, I was able to sit in on the professors’ discussions and got to see a very different perspective.

UNLV’s Dean Venkat opened the morning with some background about UNLV’s growth and struggles with recruiting and keeping students in electrical engineering and computer engineering. They have substantially improved their success rate as measured by new students who graduate within six years, and they had raised that from 18% to 42% over the last decade.

Opening remarks by Dean Rama Venkat.

A common concern among the ECE department heads was the decline in enrollment in electrical engineering and computer engineering compared to adjacent departments such as computer science and mechanical engineering.

Declining electrical and computer engineering student enrollment (compared to computer science and mechanical engineering) was a shared concern.

One of the observations was that robotics and engineering promotion at high school and lower levels tended to expose students to either the programming side or the “building” side that would push students more toward mechanical engineering than electrical engineering.

We also got tours of the UNLV engineering facilities, including parts of the new building. Here are a few pictures from the open wet lab on the third floor. The quick pictures do not do it justice, and there were also many areas I didn’t get pictures of, like big environmental chambers where they can control things like temperature and humidity.

LCD privacy windows looking into the open wet lab on the third floor of UNLVs AEB.

Back on the first floor, we also saw the big maker space they are setting up. They will have several fancy 3D printers, CNC lathes and milling machines, and high-end test equipment that should be available to all students (as opposed to the upstairs labs that are more restricted).

Maker Space getting set up in UNLV’s new Advanced Engineering Building, November 2024.

It was great to see all this happening in Las Vegas. Thank you to Dr. Mei Yang for organizing the event and inviting me! Here is one last group picture as we were on a tour, with the Las Vegas Strip and Sphere visible out the window.

UNLV engineering facilities tour, with the Las Vegas Strip and Sphere visible in the background.