Santa Clara Valley Section

The Santa Clara Valley (SCV) Section promotes the aims and objectives of IEEE as stated in the IEEE Constitution and Bylaws. The Section covers geographically all the peninsula south of Highway 92, plus the counties of Monterey, San Benito, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz. IEEE Santa Clara Valley Section inspires San Francisco Bay Area  professionals and students to stay connected and to collaborate by creating and providing leadership programs to educate and to stimulate technological innovation, and engineering excellence.

The Santa Clara Section together with the San Francisco and Oakland East Bay Sections form the  San Francisco Bay Area Council (SFBAC). Several of our chapters are joint chapters across the  three sections. The SFBAC is the largest amount of IEEE members world-wide.   If you want to know more contact us or join any of our events see Event Calendar or subscribe to the eGRID newsletter. Join IEEE and be part of our San Francisco Bat Area community of engineers!

IEEE Milestone for a Pioneering Medical Information System

On Thursday, May 14, an IEEE Milestone for a Pioneering Medical Information System (MIS) was dedicated at El Camino Hospital (ECH) in Mountain View, CA, where the system was first installed.

Beginning in 1965, the MIS was a joint effort between ECH and Lockheed Missiles and Space Co. to computerize the strictly manual process by which doctors, nurses, and medical staff handled patient records. The MIS ran on an IBM mainframe computer with only 128KB of memory, and a light pen was used to make selections on a monitor’s screen. Today’s cellphones have over a million times as much memory as that mainframe computer. The MIS first went live in 1972. Interestingly, nursing staff were initially much more enthusiastic than doctors about using this system. However, with increased efficiency and improved patient outcome, there was no looking back. Other hospitals began installing the system in 1973, and the systems now used throughout the world owe their success to the early work done by ECH and Lockheed. 

The dedication event featured speakers from ECH, Lockheed, IEEE, and several government officials. At its conclusion, the words of the MIS bronze Milestone plaque were recited to the audience. Officiating at the dedication event were Jill Gostin (2026 IEEE President-Elect) and Brian Berg (R6 History and Milestone Chair, who was History Center Advocate for the Milestone). Its proposal was written by Rich Clewett and Tom Gardner. This was Region 6’s 43rd Milestone, and the 27th for the IEEE Santa Clara Valley Section. Further details are on the MIS Milestone webpage . The plaque is being mounted in the lobby of ECH at 2500 Grant Rd, Mountain View, CA, where it can be seen during normal business hours. A duplicate plaque is now the 30 th IEEE plaque on the front wall of the Computer History Museum.

IEEE Spectrum – Better Hardware Could Turn Zeros into AI Heroes 

When it comes to AI models, size matters. As models grow in size, their capabilities increase. But so do the energy demands and the time it takes to run the models, which increases their carbon footprint. To mitigate these issues, people have turned to smaller, less capable models and using lower-precision numbers whenever possible for the model parameters. But there is another path that may retain a staggeringly large model’s high performance while reducing the time it takes to run an energy footprint. This approach involves befriending the zeros inside large AI models.