Conference Summary

VTIC2000 was opened by Dr. Thuy T. Le, Conference Chairman plus utmost warm welcome remarks by Dr. Kuei-wu Tsai, Associate Dean of College Engineering, San Jose State University and Mr. James T. Lap, VACETS President. Following the welcome remarks, Dr. Trung V. Nguyen, Program Chair, proudly informed the audience the conference program schedule. Last but not least, the keynote speaker, Mr. Shawn (Xuan) Bui, General Manager of Enterprise Operating System Operation of Hewlett-Packard Company eloquently delivered a very informative speech on the topic of "Future Enterprise Computing" that set the tone for the technical presentations.

This year’s conference theme was "Technology and Industry: Beginning of New Era." The topics included Engineering, Science and Technology, Telecommunications, Networking and Computation, plus tutorials, panel discussions, and workshop. The conference gathered many students and talented professionals from wide variety of industries in which many are holding senior positions, professors from Universities through out the country, successful entrepreneurs as well as high ranking government officials. Moreover, there were sponsoring school and companies through out the coasts showing support for the conference including San Jose State University, Cisco, Netsperanto (former Omely), Compaq, Fujitsu America, TopVu, MicroLambda, StartDay1 and iminorities.

The technical presentations were held in SJSU Engineering auditorium started on Friday morning and went through the afternoon, which then ended at 5:30PM. In addition to the presentations, there were tutorial sessions on Friday afternoon on Electronic Commerce and Digital Communications held at the same Engineering building, room E287.

As the evening came, there was a celebration banquet conference dinner with steaks and lovely traditional Vietnamese music that chased away the seriousness of the day’s technical presentations which held at the Faculty Dining hall. Dr. Thuy T. Le started the banquet dinner with a quick welcome remark followed by Mr. James Lap with a report on VACETS activities and Dr. Tri CaoHuu, VACETS President–Elect, gave everyone his thought on the challenging role of VACETS 2000-2001. Followed with the banquet guest speaker, Dr. Chi D. Pham, from International Monetary Fund shared his view of " Vietnam: A Roadmap Toward a Market Economy" which raised many interested questions from the audience who did not want to let him return to his dinner table. It seemed that the audience was more hunger to learn from Dr. Pham than fill their stomachs with steaks. Luckily, the Conference Chairman nicely intervened and got Dr. Pham back to his dinner.

On the following Saturday morning, the conference continued with a special presentation by Dr. Tung Bui from University of Hawaii on "E-Commerce in East Asia: Opportunities and Challenges" held at the Engineering auditorium. Also, during that morning, in the Engineering Room E285 and E287, there were lively panel discussions on "The Vietnamese Community and 21 Century" joined with "Effective Networking Among Professionals and Students" plus "Technology in 21^st Century" and "Student Group Discussion." At the meantime, hiring managers from Cisco and Intel were holding a rather intrigue workshop on "What Expected From Hiring Managers." To add to all the excitements, Mr. Louis Nguyen from Osprey Ventures gave a very informative speak on "Venture Capitalist."

By one PM Saturday, the conference was ended with everyone returned to the Engineering auditorium where several people got to share their warm thoughts of the successful conference and urged VACETS members to go forward with future projects. It is safe to say that everyone who attended the conference made new friends, strengthen friendship and learned something new. I sure did.

Thanh Pham

Exhibition Chair

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