The new student organization ECE Pulse held its second annual conference, directed toward students in electrical and computer engineering, Friday and Saturday.

The conference, which also has the same name as the RSO, was first held last spring. This year about 350 people showed up to the keynote speech, and about 450, more than double the turnout of last year’s event, registered for the conference, said Shivani Singh, director of the conference and junior in computer engineering.

“ECE Pulse is a conference that’s not just about holding tech talks and having a lot of students coming together to hear people talk,” Singh said. “It’s about them realizing that what they learn can be applied to a lot of fields.”

The conference included talks on topics such as biotechnology, computing and aerospace engineering that attracted students from departments other than ECE.

“We want them to come together and learn about all the different things they can do in a very casual environment,” Singh said. “This is where they get a chance to see what’s out there and envision their futures in the corporate world.”

The keynote speaker of the event, Lt. Gen. Eugene L. Tattini, discussed how ECE alumni from the University worked on Curiosity, the rover NASA sent to Mars in August 2012.

“He spoke about how a lot of the ECE graduates designed the antennae for Curiosity that helped it land safely on Mars, so he spoke about mechanical engineering, aerospace engineering, ECE and showed how everything comes together,” Singh said. “It showed what we want to show to this conference: that all the engineers come together to make wonderful inventions.”

Another part of the conference was a set of competitions. About 70 teams competed in eight categories, all of which presented a problem that needed to be completed within a set time limit. 

Prizes ranged from GTX480 graphic cards for winners in the harder categories to gift cards for winners in less difficult competitions.

Li Ma and Liana Nicklaus won the Digital II competition and, along with other winners, attended a dinner with corporate representatives Friday night.

“We built a control system for a rover that was supposed to leave Earth, go into space, go into Venus’s atmosphere and land on Venus,” Nicklaus said.

Graphics cards, lunch, breakfast and snacks were paid for primarily by a group of corporate sponsors including Nvidia, Accenture, Mathworks, Schlumberger and Qualcomm.

“Professor (Andreas) Cangellaris, head of our department, is really proud that we held this event without taking a single penny out of his pocket,” Singh said.

The ECE department helped the group plan the event as well. Cangellaris gave the inaugural speech, and Erhan Kudeki, the faculty mentor, oversaw the day’s talks.

“They gave us ideas about what we can do in the future,” Singh said. “We just recently became an RSO, so now we are thinking about holding more events than just this conference.”

Austin can be reached at [email protected].