Conference in Detroit

The front half of this past week I spent in Detroit at a conference, the General Meeting for the IEEE Power and Engineering Society. The meeting is held ever year with the purpose of presenting the results from the research work being done by universities and actual implementation of these ideas by energy utility companies. In addition, there are a long list of meetings held by the various committees, sub-committies, working groups and task forces addressing current the areas of concern in the power and energy world. At any given moment there are dozens of meetings taking place and just figuring out which meetings and presentations to attend takes a significant amount of work; there's a paperback-sized conference guide that is (poorly) designed to help attendees navigate all the options.

The content of the conference meetings and presentations was great; it was very helpful to hear work being presented by the authors themselves as well as presentations from people who don't traditionally publish and thus aren't normally directly visible to academics like me. I'll write more about this later but for now you can safely assume it was nerdy in nature.

So until I get that put together, here's a little show-and-tell from the few days I spent there. I would have put this up earlier but the internet access at the hotel was not up to the onslaught of 500 graduate electrical engineering students.

Most of the conference meetings were held in this building, the GM Renaissance Center. Based on my wanderings in the building, it appears to multi-purpose. My guess is that all of the building you can see in this picture is office space, maybe mostly used by GM? The lower levels house a Marriot hotel, retail space, conference rooms and a show-floor for the latest products from GM.

Here's a view of the lower levels. The sky bridge shown here connected the hotel I was staying in with the Marriot hotel in the Renaissance Center where the conference was being held. I barely went outside during the conference, walking back and forth between the two buildings. I know that Detroit is going through some tough times but the view from my daily commute between the two buildings revealed none of that.

The interior of the lower levels was very open with suspended walkways between the five different towers of the building.

Down on the showroom floor I got my first look at the Chevy Volt, the car every electrical engineer wants to own. I took this photo because I noticed that the grill normally used to allow outside air to enter the engine compartment and cool the engine no longer did so; it was entirely decorative and non-functional. The Volt does have a gasoline engine that is used to charge batteries but it is rather small and as you can tell from the picture, it isn't located in the traditional front-and-center location in the engine compartment.

Every morning all the cars in the showroom on the ground floor get a cleaning.

I'm revealing my ignorance of geography but who moved Canada across the strait from Detroit? There is it, just a drive through a tunnel and you're in another country. Windsor, Canada also hosts a very visible Harrah's casino.

More frivolously, the hotel I stayed in seemed to be missing several floors. My room was on the 14th floor and the elevators in the hotel were the fastest I've ever ridden. My guess is it took less than ten seconds to travel from the ground floor to the floor labelled "14", however high up that actually is.

And my pet peeve for the trip: the air conditioner in my room. The hotel had central air rather than an individual unit in each room. This cut down on the noise which is certainly nice but in this case there seemed to be a critical design flaw. The vent at the top dumped could air into the room and the vent at the bottom pulled the air out; in-between was the thermostat. First of all, having the outlet and inlet for the room so close together doesn't encourage circulation of the air throughout the entire room. Secondly, putting the thermostat between the two does accurately measure the temperature of the air as it moves from outlet to inlet but not as much the temperature of the room. Due to these two design choices it was very hard for the AC to do a good job of actually cooling the room. It did a great job of cooling the space between those two vents, though.