July 17, 1997
President of VACETS (1996-1997)
Good morning.! I’m honored and pleased to have presided over a very prosperous year for the Vietnamese Association for Computing, Engineering Technology, and Science (VACETS), and feel remarkably proud to deliver these welcome remarks. I would like to extend my heart-felt welcome to everyone here today and would like to thank San Jose State University (SJSU) for their kind hospitality in providing a venue for the conference. VACETS has become a truly- professional association in a short three-year period. This is evident in the level of participation from all of you, in both numbers and in the quality of the conference papers we have received. Unfortunately, many of our VACETS members could not attend this conference, but I believe that they are looking forward to hearing from us on the success of this event.
Before sharing with you some of the VACETS accomplishments that we achieved during the last year, I would like to take a few minutes to express appreciation to people who made the significant contributions to VTIC ’97. Let me begin by offering words of thanks from all of us to the VTIC ’97 Organizing Committee. Especially, our thanks go to Dr. Tri Caohuu, Dr. Thong Tran, Dr. Thuy Trong Le, Mr. Phong Ky Vo, Dr. Phu Huu Le, Mr. Binh Chu, and many others. These people have displayed excellence in managing the VTIC ’97 through some very difficult times during the last six months. Each of you deserves a share of the credits for the VACETS record you have established, especially since, as I have said, you had to work under difficult circumstances. Our thanks are also due to financial sponsors, VACETS members and friends, who have contributed papers to the conference; without their contributions, this conference would not have become a reality. Finally, we would like to thank all of you who came here to attend this conference with us.
Many people here may not know well about VACETS. VACETS, a non-profit, international, professional and technical organization, was founded in 1994. The mission of VACETS is to provide a forum for Vietnamese engineers and scientists to exchange technical ideas and knowledge, and to foster professional relationship via technical magazines, journals and conferences. After three years of existence, VACETS now has more than 900 members in over 20 countries. VACETS members are able to elect the executive board through the Internet. They can even stay in touch with other members via seven email forums that solicit technical interchanges on the issues of computer and technology, social issues, literature, job opportunities, educational opportunities, and collaborative projects of significant interests. As a founder of VACETS, I never imagined that VACETS, in a short period, would become the large worldwide technical association that it is today.
VACETS makes maximum use of the Internet; since October 1996, we have had our own VACETS Internet server and we moved all VACETS mailing lists on a single host. We would like to thank Mr. Tin Le and his company "NetImage, Inc.", who put a great effort into this Internet support. With the new Internet server, our systems administration has redesigned our VACETS Website, which has attracted thousands of visitors. The VACETS Website has had over 1000 hits per day, far than more we expected.
Last year, our Technical Affairs Committee members did a great job on the Technical Columns task. We enjoyed reading various interesting articles regularly posted on VACETS forums, some of these are: "Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) - An Analogy", "The UNIX Runtime Environment" ,"National Information Infrastructures in Pacific Asia: a Vision ...", "Largest Known Prime discovered", "Internet over Cable Statistics as a Formal System", "Cubic Planet Earth", "The Abuse of Statistics", "Where is the 10th Planet", etc. You can read on-line these articles on our VACETS home page.
Our second VACETS Technical Journal has just been published. This issue contains contributions of VACETS members and friends in various disciplines of engineering and science. It covers research work in aerospace, applied mathematics, antenna design, computers and communications to biomedical engineering, digital signal processing, robotics, environment and wireless technology.
In addition to having technical activities, our members have participated in various social activities. We have published the 1997 Spring Magazine with over 200 pages that feature fine poems and short stories contributed by VACETS members and friends. We have the interesting community column "La’ Thu+ VACETS", which is regularly printed on many Vietnamese newspapers around the world. The goal of this column is to share our technical knowledge with the Vietnamese community. We would like to thank Mr. Trieu Duc Doan, who is the principal author making a great success of this community project effort.
Today VACETS has local chapters in Australia, Canada, Europe and the United States. In late August 1996, the VACETS Washington DC Local Chapter had its second annual Three-day Tennis Tournament and Fall Picnic, which were attracted over 100 VACETS members and friends participated. Also, in May 1997, the Washington DC Local Chapter successfully organized its annual election to select the Chairman and Vice-Chairman for the term 1997-1998.
As you all know, VACETS is not an elitist group. We are down to earth and go beyond our academic titles to help our community and fellow engineers. In a fundamental way, VACETS strives to provide a learning platform, a platform from which we share our ideas and accomplishments, no matter how small these accomplishments are. In this sense and in contrary to a popular belief, a member does not have to have a Ph.D. in a given field to present his/her excellent academic and/or career accomplishments.
A great example for this is the VACETS Dictionary project. Its product consisting of English-Vietnamese technical and scientific terms will be produced in an electronic CD-ROM form, and may be available sometimes this year. This project is led by Dr. Hai Pham and is currently attracting over 100 experts worldwide, ranging from a student to a senior scientist.
I am proud to say that we, Vietnamese engineers and scientists, including VACETS members, have contributed significantly to the current evolution of technologies. Some of these contributions will obviously be demonstrated in this VTIC '97 conference. The diversity of VACETS members' endeavors can be witnessed from the presentations here today: they cover the frontier technology topics such as robotics and control science, computer and communication, environmental technology, and of course, biomedical and medicine.
Team work was crucial to building the growth of VACETS. We always need your help, ideas and suggestions, and we will continue to seek your input. We have to work together as we have done in the past to sustain the kind of creativity and commitment we come to expect and to achieve the VACETS goals. I am confident that if we continue to work together, we will secure VACETS’ status as a world class technical association in a short few years to come.
Let us continue to improve the tradition of excellence we have already established, helping each other, training, supporting and educating, to expand VACETS and ultimately to give our Vietnamese minority a stronger voice, a dignified place in the countries we live, where, in three years, we will step into the twenty-first century.
This year, like VTIC ’96, through VTIC ’97, we will again benefit from the shared knowledge and combined experiences that are the platforms of our discussion that I spoke of earlier. The platform that let us benefit from seeing each other face-to-face and having the opportunity to discuss in person technical issues of mutual, compelling interests. Last year, our VTIC ’96 Proceedings were sent to hundreds of universities and colleges around the world. We received many appreciation letters from these institutes sent from various places in France and North America. We would like to keep this tradition.
It has been a great honor to serve all of you. I recognize that I have to pass this tradition of excellence of our organization to the next group of leadership. This Saturday, July 20, 1997, will be my last day to serve as the President of VACETS. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all VACETS advisors and Administrative Committee members who worked tirelessly with me to run VACETS during the last year. I would like to extend my congratulation to the newly elected Executive Committee (ExecCom). I strongly believe this new team will lead VACETS into a new phase of exciting development and will take VACETS a next level of excellence.
Finally, again, we look forward to having you, as members, to continue to support and work with us to make VACETS a success. Thank you and have a great conference.
Back to Main VTIC '97 Webpage
Text @ Copyright 1997, VACETS