AES PNW Section | ASA Northwest Chapter
August Field Trip
NWAA Labs – Acoustical Measuring Facility
Satsop Washington
August 13 or August 20, 2011 (TBA)

Your section officers are organizing a field trip, in conjunction with the ASA (Northwest Chapter of the Acoustical Society of America) on Saturday, August 13 or August 20 to the home of NWAA Labs in Satsop, WA. If the name of the town sounds familiar, it should, as it is home to the unfinished Satsop Nuclear Power Plant, aka the abandoned/unfinished WPPSS project. What can you do with a nuclear power plant that was never completed? Turn the massive concrete structures into a world-class acoustical test facility.

It’s about 100 miles to Satsop from Seattle, and we may charter a bus to get us to/from the facility. With $4 gas, the bus isn’t such a bad idea. The bus charter makes sense if 29 people are willing to get there via bus. We’ll spend the whole day there. Ron Sauro, owner and chief scientist of the facility, assures us that he can keep us interested thru the entire afternoon. The best dates look like August 13 or August 20.

The buildings redefine the word massive. The main reactor building (300ftx300ft) was designed to withstand a direct nuclear strike, or a magnitude 10 earthquake. The reinforced concrete walls are 5 (five!) feet thick. The containment vessel will hold the Space Needle, with room to spare.

n.b. The main building is 4 stories tall, with high ceiling clearances. The tour will entail more than a bit of stairway climbing, with a fair amount of physical effort required. There are no elevators and no wheelchair accommodations.

Want to Attend?
Send email to gregmauser at hotmail dot com

Please indicate if you’ll ride our bus AND your preferred date(s). We’ll get back to you with payment information. The bus needs to be about 80% full (29). At that level, the price is $25/person. It’s not worth chartering the bus if we’re not at the 75-80% level.

More Info?
See the PNW AES Section’s homepage: http://www.aes.org/sections/pnw/ There’s additional pictures and links there.

Andrew Boone, ASA Northwest Chapter
Dan Mortensen, AES PNW 2011-2012 Section Chair

The Northwest Chapter of the Acoustical Society of America &
Seattle Chapter of the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society
Announce a Combined Summer Meeting
Hosted at University of Washington – Applied Physics Laboratory (APL)
Presenting will be:

Gerald (Skip) Denny, Senior Project Engineer at APL
On “Survey of Commercial Active Broadband Acoustics and Techniques”
&
David Dall’Osto, Doctoral Candidate at the University of Washington
On “Source Localization of Aircraft from Doppler Shifted Tonals Over an Air-Water Interface”

Thursday, June 10, 2010 @ 7:00pm
University of Washington, APL Bldg – Main Conference Room
1013 NE 40th Street
Seattle, WA 98105
Parking is available in the W-10 lot just east of APL Building (passes provided at the door)
(Directions)

For those unable to attend in person, we will be broadcasting the meeting live, with a link to the broadcast provided at this site.

Presenters:
Skip Denny is a Senior Project Engineer at APL and is responsible for sensors on the OOI/RSN (cabled undersea observatory). He received his BA in Applied Physics from the University of California, San Diego and his MS in Oceanic Engineering at Rhode Island University, where his areas of focus were in underwater acoustics, optics and signal processing. He has 30+ years experience in the design and development of acoustic systems, including broadband passive and active systems, fish ID systems and parametric acoustic systems.

David Dall’Osto is a UW graduate student pursuing his PhD in Mechanical Engineering. He is working under Dr. Peter Dahl at the APL-UW, focusing on the utility of vector sensors in underwater acoustic environments, characterizing the effects of forward scattering off of a rough surface on source localization. He received his BS in Mechanical Engineering at Vanderbilt University and his MS in Mechanical Engineering from UW where he conducted an ambient noise study near Smith Island, Puget Sound. Upon graduation David would like to work in the sound-source localization industry.

The Northwest Chapter of the Acoustical Society of America
Announces the kickoff meeting for their re-established chapter
Dr. Ivan Tashev, Member of the Speech Technology Group, Microsoft Research
Presents “Sound Capture and Processing for Telecommunications and Speech Recognition”
Thursday, February 11, 2010 @ 7:30pm
Microsoft, Bldg 99 – Room 1919
14820 NE 36^th Street
Redmond, WA 98052
Parking is available in garage just east of Bldg 99
(Directions)

Abstract:
The talk will present technologies for speech enhancement and microphone array processing designed in Microsoft Research. They are used in devices and applications such as Windows Live Messenger and Office Communicator, in-car infotainment systems (see Ford Sync at www.syncmyride.com), voice control and communications (see Project Natal for Xbox at http://www.xbox.com/en-AU/live/projectnatal/). The talk is illustrated with several demos of the presented technologies.

Presenter:
Dr. Ivan Tashev received his Diploma Engineer in Electronics and PhD in Computer Science degrees from  the Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria.  He worked in the same university as assistant professor, created and taught two courses (“Data and Signal Processing” and “Real-time systems programming”). Currently he is member of the Speech Technology Group at Microsoft Research.  He is a senior member of IEEE, member of “Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing” Technical Committee of IEEE Signal Processing society, as well as a reviewer for most of signal processing journals and conferences. His book “Sound Capture and Processing: Practical Approaches” was recently published by Wiley. More information about him can be found at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/ivantash/. 

Please contact announcements@nw-asa.org with any questions