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AIM Infotec 2019 is almost here – Have you registered yet?

Few things are certain in this world, but one thing is. And that’s the fact that change is constant––especially in the world of technology.

AIM Infotec returns to the Embassy Suites La Vista on April 1 and 2. The annual tech conference is designed to help attendees stay ahead of the tech curve and gain insights, investigate, ideate and share.

This year’s Infotec will feature cutting-edge speakers, networking events and training workshops covering a wide range of topics such as security, tech leadership, big data, innovation and more. Not just an event for big businesses and tech professionals, the event also targets startups and small businesses with a growing tech presence.

Breakout sessions: Technology, Business, Innovation

With over 20 breakout sessions to choose from and speakers from noteworthy organizations like Keiwet, Hewlett Packard and FNTS, Infotec has something for everyone. Here’s a brief overview of a few sessions SPN is most excited about.

How to Innovate – Using White Space Analysis to Spark Disruption in an Industry
Ryan Grace – Owner / Partner, Advent, LLP
Spending resources to obtain patent protection on innovation is not necessarily the right business decision for every company. In fact, for some companies, patenting can initially be a business detriment and/or inefficient use of capital. Yet, this is not to say the patent universe is not one of (if not the) greatest learning tool on the planet for sparking white space innovation and driving disruption in an industry. To demonstrate the disruption white space analysis can have on an industry, this presentation recounts a situation where the presenter used white space analysis to develop a technology centered around a unique solution to a real-world problem, secured around 20 patents, and ultimately sold the technology to Garmin Industries.

ADA Compliance for Websites
Jamie McNeeley – Wave
Interactive
When building a new office, the new restaurant, new public space, etc. the architects and builders are legally required to be compliant with the American with Disabilities Act. In the same line of thinking, successful lawsuits have been filed against both large and small companies arguing that their websites are “places of public accommodation” and thus liable for ADA compliance. Come discover what is happening in the technical world of ADA compliance, what are some top ADA compliance issues on the web to look out for and how to solve them.

Considering Purpose, People, and Process when Managing Change
Victoria Graeve-Cunningham – Executive Director and Organizational Consultant, ThriVinci

Mitch Cunningham – Business Analyst, Werner Enterprises
Kelsey Haswell – Lean Improvement Specialist, Nebraska Methodist
Health
By applying lean and agile principles to talent management processes, leaders can limit the resources required to motivate performance and accelerate change. ThriVinci will share best practices for creating a north star, crafting and managing talent-centric processes, and establishing a flexible team accepting of change. After reviewing the foundations of lean, specifically, emphasizing value-added activities, attendees will review structured interview techniques to conduct a customer-focused needs assessment along with tools to diagram and understand process flow to enable identification of bottlenecks that need to be addressed.

Bringing Ingenuity Back to Engineering
Nicholas Tuck – Senior Software Engineer, Proxibid
Kathy Andersen – Scrum Master, Hudl
Developers, do you have innovative ideas that go unheard? Product Owners, does it feel like the solutions you deliver lack ingenuity? We have agile stories, empowered teams, and the latest in technology and yet we all know we could be doing better, we just don’t know how to unleash the fury. A surefire approach you are afraid to try is ShipIt Days. ShipIt Days are an approach and a mindset to allow your team the opportunity to capitalize on innovation and their natural desire to do good things. Inspired by Google’s 20% time, 3M’s 15% time, and Atlassian’s ShipIt Days, we have been putting a new spin on this “free time” concept for years to deliver innovative, motivated and sustainable results.

Inspiring keynote speakers

Infotec is also bringing you two can’t-miss keynote speakers who will share their experiences working in technology, science, and information. Their presentations will not only inspire and motivate, but will also enable technology leaders to better prepare themselves for the challenges of the future, help technology specialist to grow their knowledge, and challenge everyone to find new ways to solve problems.

Adaptability: Small Steps for Everyday Innovation
Josh Berry, Econic

From Boulder to Bahrain to Bogota, Josh Berry has spent the last fifteen years working with dozens of startups and Fortune 500 companies to understand how their organizations grow as their people adapt. During this interactive opening keynote, Josh will share brand new research and a few practical tips on the habits of adaptable teams and how leaders can create an environment to foster adaptability. Attendees will even learn how to take small steps during the rest of the conference to increase their adaptability.

Lessons Learned from the US Space Program – Recent Past and Near Future
Dr. Garrett Reisman, SpaceX and USC
Reisman was selected by NASA in 1998 as a mission specialist astronaut. While at NASA, Dr. Reisman completed two space missions, including one in 2008 where he spent 95 days on the International Space Station. He has flown aboard both the Space Shuttle Discovery and the Space Shuttle Atlantis.

After leaving NASA in 2011, Dr. Reisman joined SpaceX where he worked for Elon Musk and prepared SpaceX for human spaceflight as the Director of Space Operations. Currently, he is a Professor of Astronautical Engineering at USC and a Senior Advisor at SpaceX.

Registration information

When: April 2 (with add-on workshops April 1-2)
Where: Embassy Suites La Vista
Cost: $239 (FREE for full-time college students)
Register now: careerlink.com/infotec

Spring Break! AIM Accompanies Upward Bound Students on a Five College Campus Tour through Oklahoma, Texas

Last week, AIM Institute accompanied 28 Upward Bound students from Bryan and Papillion-La Vista high schools on a spring break college campus tour through Oklahoma and Texas. The trip capped eight months of planning and a school year’s worth of TRiO-Upward Bound programming. (TRiO and Upward Bound are grant-funded programs that help prepare underserved students for college. AIM provides TRiO-Upward Bound programming to multiple schools across Nebraska and Iowa.)

Students and their chaperones visited five universities: University of Oklahoma (Norman); Sam Houston State (Huntsville, Texas); Rice University (Houston, Texas); Texas A&M (Corpus Christi); and University of Texas (Austin).

Apart from the campus visits, students went on a variety of field trips, including the South by Southwest (SXSW) gaming expo, a contemporary arts museum, a rodeo, and the beach at Corpus Christi. The trip gave students the opportunity to experience different campus environments, possible career fields, cutting-edge technology, and arts and cultural opportunities they would not experience otherwise.

“It gets them out of their bubble,” said Jonathan Holland, AIM’s Senior Project Director for TRiO. “It allows them to see different universities that they might not even know exist out there, and helps them expand their horizons. We also picked cultural experiences to widen their knowledge and have them participate in things you just can’t do in Omaha, Nebraska.”

The group embarked on their journey Sunday, March 10, and returned Saturday, March 16. Here is a brief overview of the trip.

Monday: University of Oklahoma

The group visited the University of Oklahoma in Norman and toured the Radar Innovations Lab of the Advanced Radar Research Center, where students got to witness a mini-tornado and experience an anechoic chamber, a room designed to completely absorb sound and electromagnetic waves.

“We got to see a lot of cool stuff there on how they are working to advance weather prediction,” Holland said.

Tuesday: Sam Houston State University

Students interested in criminal justice and forensic science found the Sam Houston State tour particularly interesting because the university has a strong criminal justice program, Holland said.

That evening, the group attended the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo—the world’s largest rodeo.

“Cowboys do exist,” Papillion-La Vista student Haian said of the experience.

Wednesday: Rice University

A significant number of students were interested in Rice because of its generous financial aid package. Starting in the fall, the university is offering free tuition for anyone whose family makes under $130,000 per year. All Upward Bound students meet this threshold. Rice will also offer free tuition, grants, and stipends for room and board to students whose families make under $65,000 per year.

After Rice, the group went to the Museum of Contemporary Arts-Houston. Some students found the work confusing, and others enjoyed being asked to think outside of their comfort zones. Everyone participated in an art workshop where they made projects dealing with space and spatial relationships.

NASA came next. The group toured the Space Center Houston, saw the Saturn V rocket, and sat in on a Q&A session with retired astronaut William S. McArthur.

Thursday: Texas A&M Corpus Christi

According to student evals and chaperones’ real-time observations, the Corpus Christi leg of the trip may have been the most enjoyable. Students toured the Texas A&M campus located on Ward Island in Oso Bay.

“We have a lot of kids that are interested in looking more into the college and thinking about attending,” Holland said. “They have a good engineering program and a good marine biology program.”

The university also offers a unique selling proposition that not a lot of other schools have. “They said at least ten times in their tour presentation that they’ve been on Shark Week for the last five years,” Holland said.

Next, the group visited the Lone Star Unmanned Aerial Systems Center for Excellence & Innovation, an FAA-approved site for drone testing and research.

Finally, the group went to the beach. A majority of the students had never been to a large body of water before. Multiple evals cited the feeling of waves as their favorite part of the excursion.

Friday: University of Texas

On the last full day of the trip, the group traveled to Austin to tour the University of Texas and attend the SXSW gaming expo, where students interacted with gaming culture by listening to game developers and testing out new video games.

“It was exciting meeting and seeing game developers because I got to learn a little about how games are developed,” Papillion-La Vista student Chelsea said.

Bryan student Kimberly agreed. “I’ve never been to a gaming expo. Seeing all those video game nerds was cool.”

Worth the Stress

Despite a bus breakdown outside Salina, Kansas, on the way back, the trip proved successful and informative, even life-changing.                                                   

“My senior year became amazing because of Upward Bound,” said Papillion-La Vista student Ayomide.

Likewise, the trip had a major positive impact on AIM staff chaperones.

“Sometimes it’s hard to stay focused on our goals when we are buried up to our necks in the grind,” said Manager of Development and Technical Operations Nate Work, who helped guide the trip. “But what we do makes a huge difference to those kids.”

Holland concurred: “My favorite part was looking at some of the evaluations on the last day and seeing how grateful, thankful, and excited the kids were. Getting those was super awesome. It made all the stress and sleepless nights worth it. We’ve already started thinking about ideas for next year.”

Some Highlights from the Trip

Part of the Saturn V rocket on display at NASA.

Students tour the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Houston.

Student work made during an art workshop at the Museum of Contemporary Arts.

More student artwork.

Touring the anechoic chamber at the University of Oklahoma’s Radar Innovations Lab.

Heading home.

Spring Break! AIM Accompanies Upward Bound Students on a Five College Campus Tour through Oklahoma, Texas

Recently, AIM Institute accompanied 28 Upward Bound students from Bryan and Papillion-La Vista high schools on a spring break college campus tour through Oklahoma and Texas. The trip capped eight months of planning and a school year’s worth of TRiO-Upward Bound programming. (TRiO and Upward Bound are grant-funded programs that help prepare underserved students for college. AIM provides TRiO-Upward Bound programming to multiple schools across Nebraska and Iowa.)

Students and their chaperones visited five universities: University of Oklahoma (Norman); Sam Houston State (Huntsville, Texas); Rice University (Houston, Texas); Texas A&M (Corpus Christi); and University of Texas (Austin).

Apart from the campus visits, students went on a variety of field trips, including the South by Southwest (SXSW) gaming expo, a contemporary arts museum, a rodeo, and the beach at Corpus Christi. The trip gave students the opportunity to experience different campus environments, possible career fields, cutting-edge technology, and arts and cultural opportunities they would not experience otherwise.

“It gets them out of their bubble,” said Jonathan Holland, AIM’s Senior Project Director for TRiO. “It allows them to see different universities that they might not even know exist out there, and helps them expand their horizons. We also picked cultural experiences to widen their knowledge and have them participate in things you just can’t do in Omaha, Nebraska.”

The group embarked on their journey Sunday, March 10, and returned Saturday, March 16. Here is a brief overview of the trip.

Monday: University of Oklahoma

The group visited the University of Oklahoma in Norman and toured the Radar Innovations Lab of the Advanced Radar Research Center, where students got to witness a mini-tornado and experience an anechoic chamber, a room designed to completely absorb sound and electromagnetic waves.

“We got to see a lot of cool stuff there on how they are working to advance weather prediction,” Holland said.

Tuesday: Sam Houston State University

Students interested in criminal justice and forensic science found the Sam Houston State tour particularly interesting because the university has a strong criminal justice program, Holland said.

That evening, the group attended the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo—the world’s largest rodeo.

“Cowboys do exist,” Papillion-La Vista student Haian said of the experience.

Wednesday: Rice University

A significant number of students were interested in Rice because of its generous financial aid package. Starting in the fall, the university is offering free tuition for anyone whose family makes under $130,000 per year. All Upward Bound students meet this threshold. Rice will also offer free tuition, grants, and stipends for room and board to students whose families make under $65,000 per year.

After Rice, the group went to the Museum of Contemporary Arts-Houston. Some students found the work confusing, and others enjoyed being asked to think outside of their comfort zones. Everyone participated in an art workshop where they made projects dealing with space and spatial relationships.

NASA came next. The group toured the Space Center Houston, saw the Saturn V rocket, and sat in on a Q&A session with retired astronaut William S. McArthur.

Thursday: Texas A&M Corpus Christi

According to student evals and chaperones’ real-time observations, the Corpus Christi leg of the trip may have been the most enjoyable. Students toured the Texas A&M campus located on Ward Island in Oso Bay.

“We have a lot of kids that are interested in looking more into the college and thinking about attending,” Holland said. “They have a good engineering program and a good marine biology program.”

The university also offers a unique selling proposition that not a lot of other schools have. “They said at least ten times in their tour presentation that they’ve been on Shark Week for the last five years,” Holland said.

Next, the group visited the Lone Star Unmanned Aerial Systems Center for Excellence & Innovation, an FAA-approved site for drone testing and research.

Finally, the group went to the beach. A majority of the students had never been to a large body of water before. Multiple evals cited the feeling of waves as their favorite part of the excursion.

Friday: University of Texas

On the last full day of the trip, the group traveled to Austin to tour the University of Texas and attend the SXSW gaming expo, where students interacted with gaming culture by listening to game developers and testing out new video games.

“It was exciting meeting and seeing game developers because I got to learn a little about how games are developed,” Papillion-La Vista student Chelsea said.

Bryan student Kimberly agreed. “I’ve never been to a gaming expo. Seeing all those video game nerds was cool.”

Worth the Stress

Despite a bus breakdown outside Salina, Kansas, on the way back, the trip proved successful and informative, even life-changing.                                                   

“My senior year became amazing because of Upward Bound,” said Papillion-La Vista student Ayomide.

Likewise, the trip had a major positive impact on AIM staff chaperones.

“Sometimes it’s hard to stay focused on our goals when we are buried up to our necks in the grind,” said Manager of Development and Technical Operations Nate Work, who helped guide the trip. “But what we do makes a huge difference to those kids.”

Holland concurred: “My favorite part was looking at some of the evaluations on the last day and seeing how grateful, thankful, and excited the kids were. Getting those was super awesome. It made all the stress and sleepless nights worth it. We’ve already started thinking about ideas for next year.”

Some Highlights from the Trip

Part of the Saturn V rocket on display at NASA.

Students tour the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Houston.

Student work made during an art workshop at the Museum of Contemporary Arts.

More student artwork.

Touring the anechoic chamber at the University of Oklahoma’s Radar Innovations Lab.

Heading home.

AIM Institute Brings Ozobots to Abraham Lincoln

On Thursday, March 14, the AIM Brain Exchange participated in a tech-themed lunch & learn for students at Abraham Lincoln High School in Council Bluffs. AIM’s Brain Exchange team brought pizza, soda, colored markers, easel paper and Ozobots—tiny, bubble-shaped robots made to teach kids about programming in a fun way.  

“I call it coding visually,” said Lana Yager, an instructor in Technology Experiences for the AIM Brain Exchange.

Students drew trails on paper using a thick black marker. A sensor inside the Ozobot would read the trail and instruct the robot to follow.

To make things more interesting, students could add sequences of color-coded patterns along the way. Those patterns represented instructions that tell the Ozobot how to move.

For instance, “Red-Green-Blue” would direct the robot to go at a snail’s pace. If a student were to draw that sequence on the trail somewhere, the sensor inside the Ozobot would read the sequence and force the robot to slow down until it rolled across another sequence instructing it to do something else.

A sequence of “Blue-Green-Red,” on the other hand, would tell the robot to go super fast.

Thus, the principles of coding were illustrated IRL.

Sparking Interest in Tech with Pizza and Robots

Yager was heartened by the positive reaction at yesterday’s tech lunch.

“You never how kids are going to react, especially high school kids,” she said. One student who previously hadn’t seemed very engaged with school showed up. “I didn’t think he was going to like it at all, but he really liked it. He said several times, ‘This is fun, thank you.’ And he brought a girlfriend with him, and she really liked it too. So that’s cool.”

AIM’s Brain Exchange program participates in tech lunch & learns twice a month at Abraham Lincoln. The events are a hit with students.

“Last time, we did virtual reality,” Yager said. “That was fun.”

So fun, in fact, that during yesterday’s Ozobot-themed lunch, one of the students asked if they would get to do VR again next time.

Perhaps, Yager said. VR is a growing field with applications ranging from gaming to medicine. And the more exposure to technology students receive, the better.

The Brain Exchange, a program of the AIM Institute, is committed to providing tech education to youth who might not otherwise have access to such vital experiences, to dispelling the myth that technology is “too hard,” and to igniting curiosity and interest in tech.

Thursday’s lunch & learn was funded through the Upward Bound program, which provides fundamental support to students in their preparation for college entrance.

Women in Tech: Kaitlyn Hova

Growing up, Kaitlyn Hova thought programming sounded extremely dull, thanks to her father, who worked as a software engineer for various credit card companies.

“He worked in an office, and it was just the most boring life I could ever imagine,” Hova says. “I was never going to be a software engineer, ever. I just had no idea that you could do so much with it.”

Now, the Omaha native is senior UX developer at Women Who Code, a global 501(c)3 nonprofit dedicated to inspiring women to excel in technology careers. She and her husband also operate their own business, Hova Labs, whose work runs the gamut from web design to 3D printing. (Recently, Developer Week, a developer & engineering technology conference, gave Hova Labs a “Best in 3D Printing” award for their Hovalin, a playable, 3D-printed violin that can be made with about $70 worth of raw material.)

Kaitlyn Hova is also a neuroscientist and a Berklee-trained violinist who has performed with Rod Stewart, Josh Groban, Trans-Siberian Orchestra, Mannheim Steamroller, and multiple rock and indie bands.

In other words she’s pretty much a superhero.

An Unlikely Path toward Tech

Originally, Hova pursued a career in music. She started performing at thirteen with various big-name artists that came to Omaha, then quickly discovered she could make better money playing weddings. But she faced a major age-related hurdle.

“I found out no one was actually going to hire a violinist who’s thirteen years old to play their special day unless you have a website. A website makes you legitimate. So I started coding around then.”

The gigs started rolling in.  

She didn’t realize you could do programming for a living. Coding had always been a means to an end: a website for her music, a customized Myspace page, a database for a college project.

Eventually, after a stint at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, she came to the University of Nebraska at Omaha to study neuroscience.

Building a New Social Network

Hova was born with a neurological condition called synesthesia. Synesthesia involves the crossing of senses. A person with synesthesia might see sounds, taste colors, or hear smells. Like most people with the condition, she didn’t realize she was any different. She thought everyone saw colors when they heard music.

When she found out synesthesia was relatively rare, she wanted to know everything about it. After graduating with her degree in neuroscience, she decided she wanted to research synesthesia more extensively. Unfortunately, many graduate programs in neuroscience did not offer the option to study the condition. It’s hard to find funding for synesthesia research, because many people do not even know they have it. And there was no aggregate database of synesthetes, which made it hard to recruit study participants.

So she built The Synesthesia Network, an educational social network for people with synesthesia, universities that want to study synesthesia, and curious minds who want to learn more about synesthesia. Since then, she has given TED Talks on synesthesia, and developed a synesthesia violin that pairs notes with different colored lights to approximate the type of synesthesia that she experiences.

Developing the Synesthesia Network required learning an unfamiliar coding language.

“I already had all the front-end experience,” Hova says. “I could build it, design it, no problem. But I didn’t know how to work with databases.”

So she took a coding bootcamp to learn Ruby on Rails and build the back-end database behind the Synesthesia Network. This experience helped her realize she preferred to build software and dynamic web apps rather than static websites. She switched careers,  moved to San Francisco, and now spends her days coding, dreaming up new ideas, inventing fun projects, being a new mom, and advocating for women in technology.

Advice for Women Considering Tech Careers

Hova knows what it feels like to feel excluded from tech. From a young age, she thought of software engineering as a boring dad enterprise, not as a powerful tool to unlock her creativity.

“Girls, myself included, are usually pretty creative,” she says. “You want to solve creative problems. So don’t think of software as ones and zeroes. Think of it as: each coding language and platform you use is like a different tool in your toolbelt to build whatever you want. You can still have that creativity. But coding gives you the tools to build the thing that you want to build. Like, literally anything.”

It might be difficult at first. “But you’ll learn patterns along the way, and it gets easier.”

“It’s kind of like puzzle-solving all day. You’ll get a problem, and you’ll go, okay, how do I solve that? And that’s all you do. It’s fun!”

What We Do

AIM Institute is building an inclusive tech talent community. From offering tech educational experiences to youth through our Brain Exchange, to helping career changers and tech professionals upgrade their skills via the Interface School, we believe there is a path for everyone in technology.