Thursday, August 16, 2007

NI Week recap National Instruments is a technology company first and then a products company. If you ever want a feel for where the cutting edge of usable computing technology is, the keynote addresses during NI Week is a great place to start. This year's edition, held August 7 through 9 at the Austin Convention Center before a record crowd, was no exception. James Truchard, company co-founder and chief executive officer who holds a Ph.D. and is known to the NI community as "Dr. T", stated the technological foundations for the week's discussions. "Concurrency may be the new revolution, like object-oriented was," stated Truchard. NI follows advances in the personal computer industry, and the new hardware advancement is multicore processors. These processors allow concurrent sessions on one computer-if the programming environment can take advantage of it. And NI's LabView is just such an environment. As stated by co-founder, NI Business and Technology Fellow, and "father of LabView" Jeff Kodosky, LabView is inherently parallel in structure. In effect, this means that a program can be written such that parts of it can be processed concurrently on different processor cores with the results coming together for further processing. NI continues to develop advancements on the use of floating point gate array (FPGA) chips with development of simulation on this target. Mechatronics-the merger of mechanics and electronics in motion applications-was another keyword during the week, as well as advancements in working with the mechanical design software from SolidWorks. Following two years with emphasis on embedded systems, machine control took on a leading position this year. In the whole mechatronics model there is the sense of the parallel nature of machine development. The way machines are designed now relegates control design to the late stages of development. With a mechatronics model coupled with simulation from the SolidWorks mechanical design, control development earlier in the process is possible-not to mention the advantages of checking motions for interferences and control algorithms before any steel is cut. State chart development with the ability to link directly to control code is another advancement in LabView for machine control. Developers have mapped PackML state model from OMAC's Packaging Work Group such that a packaging machine OEM could map the state chart and then program the machine. The user would then have the top-level view of the machine operation in standard format. If other state models are developed, they also could be easily mapped into LabView. The executive team held a panel discussion with question and answer period with editors during the week. Moderated by John Graff, vice president of sales and marketing, the panel included Truchard, Kodosky, Tim Dehne (sr. vice president of R&D) and Mike Santori (business and technology fellow). The topic was innovation and how NI continues to innovate. The first impression is the continuity of the team. This group has led the company to substantial growth for at least 10 years, yet they remain a team that is still enthusiastic about both the technology and what their customers do with it. They have created a leadership program to inculcate the NI mission and culture in people. Most interesting is the involvement of the two cofounders. Truchard is always searching for new ideas (he's famous in the company for how many pages he looks at during a typical Google search). His style is to walk around and ask questions, such as "what do you think about this" or "should we be looking at that" or "are we doing this". Meanwhile Kodosky has articulated a vision of where LabView can go and motivates teams of developers to stretch the boundaries of the computational platform and graphic design. Another piece of NI's corporate culture is support for education at all levels from kindergarten to post-college. Ray Almgren, vice president of education marketing, devoted his keynote address to reviewing ways NI and it's employees have gotten involved and issued a challenge to us all to get involved and get kids interested in science and engineering. To that end, he introduced 10 year old Samuel Majors from Findlay, Ohio, who used LabView to program his school science project that involved switching model trains on to different tracks. Chris Anderson delivered the final keynote. Anderson is Editor in Chief of Wired magazine and author of "The Long Tail." The book looks at markets in the wake of widespread Internet sales. The long tail refers to the shape of a power curve that describes markets where a curve sloping downward from left to right shows that some few products in a market (the blockbusters and the large head) will have large volumes tailing off rapidly to where most products sell only a few each. A retail box store cannot afford to stock each of the small selling items, but an Internet company, for example Amazon.com, can afford to sell the many items of the long tail. And the interesting thing is that in aggregate sales of the long tail items can be huge. National Instruments has been interested in the theory of the long tail because it reflects the way it approaches the market. Its typical sale is small, but its aggregate of all the small sales is large. Finally, in partner news, Sensicast now offers connectivity from its line of environmental wireless sensors to LabView via OPC. Yaskawa is offering a driver for LabView and NI PCI communications to connect Yaskawa drives and motors to LabView via the Mechatrolink communication network. 3:31:22 PM    comment []

Present a Paper The WBF has issued a call for papers for its 2008 North American Conference that will be held March 24-27 in Philadelphia. The conference theme is "Shaping the Future of Manufacturing." Keynote speakers, panels, discussion forums, and individual presentations will focus on case studies, current and evolving manufacturing methods and technologies, and implementation of industry standards including ISA-88, ISA-95, ISA-99, B2MML, and Make2Pack. In addition, WBF's collaborative activities with ISA, OMAC, and MESA will provide a broad and balanced view of the world of manufacturing innovation. The deadline for submission is October 12, 2007. For more information about the event, or to find out more about submitting a paper, call (919) 314-3970 or visit the Web site. 7:43:55 AM    comment []