Current literature reports that developing one successful drug compound takes ten to fifteen years and approximately one billion dollars.  Fewer than five percent of all candidate drug compounds make it to market.  Improving the drug success rate, even marginally, translates into saving between $200M to $300M per compound and saving hundreds of lives.  To help improve the current success rate, we present an evidential-based approach to drug development decision making.  The approach treats decision-related data as evidence for or against pursuing competing development alternatives as opposed to treating all data as probabilistic in nature.  A benefit of the evidential approach is that decision makers are not forced to make unwarranted assumptions and approximations when complete statistical data are lacking.  As a consequence, an evidential approach is able to give better insight into the impact of assumptions, approximations, and uncertainty on multi-million dollar drug development decisions.  The insight provided by an evidential approach can help decision makers avoid making undesirable and costly choices.  We will present a summary of results from using an evidential approach, in a blind retrospective study, that identified false positive drug compounds that were approved by the FDA and when released to market resulted in over hundred human deaths.

Advances in chip and system design will help define the next generation of wireless sensors.  I’ll discuss examples of our work that have enabled new collaborative science.  We will then cover chip design techniques for body-worn/implantable systems and wireless sensors.  Finally, I’ll present examples of future mainstream constantly connected devices for improving healthcare.  These areas present tough unsolved problems at the interface between the IC and the outside world that cannot be solved by transistor technology scaling alone.  Several future applications will demand thin-film realization and biocompatibility of complex systems.  Novel power sources, microscale resonator technologies, and new system integration techniques will be enabling technologies for these emerging systems.

The availability of the desktop and office located 3D printer has revolutionized the prototyping and pilot line worlds.  We will present the capabilities and tradeoff of the the different materials that can be used in 3D printers, and uses in prototypes, mechanical samples, 3D miniatures, and one-up designs through small pilot run products.  For the prototypes, different printers offer different size a capabilities in the printed output that are possible.  These include the creation of mechanical and industrial design for cell phone molds, replacement parts, mice, camera shells, sporting/health care products etc.  A quick overview of the software available and its use for the creation of 3D designs, as well as the use of 3D scanners to input base designs will be presented.

This talk explains the goals and challenges encountered when setting up a solar and clean energy utility program.

Pirooz Parvarandeh, Maxim Integrated CTO, tells us about his career path and gives us tips and tricks to help build your leadership skills.  Whether you are an Executive, Manager or even an Individual Contributor, leadership is important no matter what your role is within a company.  Leadership can help you make impact on the company which will lead to your success.  This is a rare opportunity to get leadership stories and advice from a successful executive that can make you more successful in your career.
Come out and have Pirooz entertain you with his leadership success stories and learn how to use them to improve your career.
Prior to the presentation food will be served as well as time for networking with your fellow engineers (don’t forget to connect with them on LinkedIn).  The presentation will last approximately 45 minutes, and will be followed by a chance to ask your leadership questions to Pirooz.  Please come prepared with questions to ask!

Designing solid-state devices is essentially restricted by choosing available chemical elements found on the Periodic Table and forming various stable solids made of these chemical elements.  A key to developing novel solid-state devices is, therefore, to find a route to combine a variety of such solids often physically and/or chemically incompatible with each other to benefit from resulting combined material platforms.  In this talk, specific examples of “Mesoscopic Materials” will be presented with the view toward solid-state devices for energy harvesting from waste heat and sunlight.  The talk is divided into the following two sections.
1. Semiconductor nanocomposites for energy harvesting from waste heat: thermoelectric.
2. Metal oxide thin films for high-power solar energy collection and transmission: Sun to fiber.

Get a glimpse of centuries-old brewing traditions, a taste of San Francisco history, and a flight of selected Anchor beers.  The normal walking tour of the brewery lasts about 40-45 minutes.  During the total tour and tasting of about 1-1/2 – 2 hours, the tour guide will give us a brief history of the brewery and walk you through three floors of our building.  Our tour will be a bit more in-depth and behind the scenes.
Anchor Brewing has been located in San Francisco since 1896 and claims to be America’s first craft brewery, with roots dating back to the California gold rush.  Today their beers are handmade from an all-malt mash in a traditional copper brewhouse.  Their process combines the time-honored art of classical brewing with carefully applied, state-of-the-art modern methods.
Tour is limited to the first 45 signups!