NASA STEP Symposium Speakers


Gene Allen

Director for Collaborative Development, MacNeal-Schwendler Corporation

Mr. Allen is the Director for Collaborative Development at the MacNeal-Scwendler Corporation, where he has been for the last four years. He has established and participated in managing over a dozen collaborative programs over the past 10 years, with the majority of those programs aimed at applying information technology to manufacturing. He is a nuclear engineer from MIT with eight years of experience in building and operating Naval nuclear propulsion plants.

Mr. Allen is a member of the Board of Directors of PDES, Inc.


David D. Briggs

Senior Specialist Engineer, Boeing

David Briggs is a Senior Specialist Engineer for Boeing Commercial Airplane Group's Information Systems Division in Seattle, Washington. For the past 18 years, he has been involved with the development of data exchange standards and technology for product data. David has held several leadership positions in the IGES and STEP development communities and is currently Boeing's representative to the PDES Inc. consortium. His current position is Chief Engineer for PDES Inc. Prior to his current assignment, David was the technical lead for the AEROSTEP/PowerSTEP project which implemented STEP as the exchange process between Boeing and its engine companies.

David has a B.S. in computer science from the University of Washington and is a member of Tau Beta Pi. He has received numerous awards for his work including PDES Inc.'s Brad Rigdon Award for Technical Management (1997). Additionally, the PowerSTEP project was awarded the 1997 CALS Implementor Honor Roll award for significant achievement in implementing CALS technology.


Doug Cheney

Senior Technical Specialist and STEPnet Facilitator, International TechneGroup, Incorporated

Doug Cheney is the CAD/IQ Solutions Manager for International TechneGroup Incorporated. He spent two years with a major automotive company investigating CAD interoperability problems and developing CAD applications to identify them. Last year Doug joined ITI to leverage their CAD programming expertise to develop his ideas into commercial software. His CAD model quality testing efforts have been featured in several national and international magazines.

Doug has also led STEP interoperability testing between 16 major CAD vendors for three years in a PDES, Inc. forum called STEPnet. Last year he received the Brad Rigdon Technical Management Award from PDES, Inc.

Doug earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Brigham Young University where he specialized in CAD application development for concurrent engineering.


Joe C. Davis

Division Manager for Project Design, Lockheed Martin Aeronautical Systems

Mr. Davis has thirty-one years of experience in a variety of aeronautical engineering disciplines including preliminary design, detailed design, flutter and vibration, and software applciations. In his current position as the Division Manager for Project Design at Lockheed Martin Aeronautical Systems, he has responsibility for core engineering detailed design functions with specific emphasis on CAD/CAM Systems and Design Standards. As a part of these responsibilities, Mr. Davis has been active in the company's participation in standards activities including STEP.

Mr. Davis currently serves as the Lockheed Martin Corporation Board Member for PDES, Inc. and has just been elected as the PDES, Inc. Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) chairman.


Larry Druffel

President, SCRA

Larry Druffel is the president of SCRA, a public, non-profit organization engaged in applying advanced technology to increase industrial competitiveness.

He was the director of the Software Engineering Institute from 1986-1996. Before joining the SEI he was vice president for business development at Rational Software. He served on the Board of Directors of Rational from 1986-1995.

Druffel was on the faculty at the USAF Academy. He later managed research programs in advanced software technology at DARPA. He was founding director of the Ada Joint Program office, then served as director of Computer Systems and Software (Research and Advanced Technology) in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

He is the co-author of a computer science textbook and 35 professional papers. He has a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, and MSc in computer science from the University of London, and a PhD in computer science from Vanderbilt University.

Druffel is a fellow of the IEEE, and a fellow of the ACM. He is on the Board of the Oak Ridge Associated Universities. He serves on Engineering Advisory Boards of the University of South Carolina, Clemson and Embry-Riddle.

He chaired the AF Science Advisory Board Study on Information Architecture and co- chaired the Defense Science Board study on Acquiring Defense Software Commercially. He lead the Defensive Information Warfare Panel for the AFSAB New World Vistas. He has served on numerous AFSAB, DSB, and National Academy studies dealing with the use of information technology for defense.


Dr. Gerry Graves

Director of Product Data Technology, Advanced Technology Institute

Dr. Graves is the Director of Product Data Technology in the Advanced Technology Institute. He has more than 20 years experience in engineering, research, and technical program management. His technical expertise includes computer integrated manufacturing technologies, concurrent engineering, and computer system architectures and software. He is the Development Group Leader for PDES, Inc., which is one of the most challenging technology initiatives worldwide. This program is accelerating the development and implementation of the Product Data Exchange using STEP, the international standard for the exchange of product model data.

Gerry Graves currently serves as the Deputy Chair for the US Technical Advisory Group to ISO TC184/SC4. In addition, he directs several DARPA-funded projects investigating collaborative design and virtual enterprise issues. Prior to joining ATI, Dr. Graves served on the Industrial Engineering faculty at Louisiana State University and at the University of Arkansas.


Dr. Martin Hardwick

President, STEP Tools, Incorporated

Dr. Hardwick is a professor of Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the President of STEP Tools, Inc, a company that makes software tools for the development of applications based upon the STEP standard.

He is a member of the architecture working group of ISO TC184/SC4 (STEP) and a member of the boards of PDES, Inc. and the US Product Data Association. His research interests include engineering database systems, information modeling, distributed systems and object oriented programming.


Laurence J. McKee

Senior Systems Analyst, International Business Machines (IBM)

Mr. McKee is an employee of the IBM Corporation. He is currently assigned full time as a technical representative to the PDES, Inc. industry consortium and participates as the leader of the Deployment group. In his current assignment, he is responsible for producing a strategy for PDES, Inc. member companies to move from their current data exchange environment to a STEP based data exchange or sharing environment. This strategy leverages pilot implementation efforts in which PDES, Inc. members share implementation knowledge and experience in the application of STEP technologies.

He also continues to play a major role in the development and testing of STEP Application Protocol 203 (Configuration Controlled Design of 3D Mechanical Parts and Assemblies) and its enhancements.

Prior to working at IBM, Mr. McKee was a member of the CAD/CAM group for General Dynamics Eastern Data Systems Center which developed data exchange solutions for the Electric Boat Shipyard. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY.


Asa Trainer

Product Line Manager for Interface Products, Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC)

Asa Trainer is the Product Line Manager for Interface Products at Parametric Technology Corporation. He is responsible for translation software products such as Pro/INTERFACE for STEP and Pro/INTERFACE for CATIA. Prior to working at PTC, Asa worked for Boeing Helicopters where he performed advanced aircraft aerodynamic analysis and mission simulation, and most recently was lead engineer for design and analysis integration in the New Product Development organization. Before moving to Boeing, Asa worked for Wichita State University and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as a CAD/CAM instructor and Cessna Aircraft Company as a design engineer.

Asa holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, an M.S. in Aeronautical Engineering from Wichita State University, and has done doctoral work at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in object-based computer-aided design of rotorcraft. Asa is a member of several engineering organizations including the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Sigma Gamma Tau. Asa also serves on the Technical Advisory Committee of PDES, Inc. and is a Past-President of the Mid-Atlantic Pro/USER Group.


Stephen C. Waterbury

CAE Specialist, NASA/GSFC

Mr. Waterbury is a Specialist in Computer-Aided Engineering at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC). His main professional focus is on CAD/CAE information management and integration, in which he is developing systems and applications in support of electromechanical design and analysis, the integration of applications and data by the use of the Internet and engineering metadata standards, and the creation of a parts library, design repository, and knowledge capture system for the integration and enhancement of NASA's corporate engineering knowledge.

Waterbury is the system architect for NASA's Electrical, Electronic, and Electromechanical (EEE) Parts Information Management System (EPIMS-Web), an information system supporting all NASA flight projects, for which his development group received a NASA Group Achievement Award. He was also the designer of the NASA Parts Analysis Web System (PAWS), for which his group received a GSFC Group Achievement Award, and the NASA Alert Reporting System (NARS), which has now been integrated into EPIMS-Web. He is the administrator of the WWW Virtual Library for Engineering, for which he shares administrative responsibilities with a cadre of dedicated volunteers who administer the various engineering domain servers.

Waterbury's current project is the NASA STEP Testbed, an on-line, Web-accessible system for the prototyping and deployment of engineering data exchange, integration, and management application software based upon the STEP (ISO 10303) standard. The NASA STEP Testbed is sponsored by the NASA Office of the Chief Engineer.

Waterbury is active in identifying and supporting engineering information standards applicable to the systems he develops for NASA. He has been involved in supporting the development of STEP (ISO 10303) and served as the Chair of the U.S. IGES/PDES Organizations's Standard Parts Committee for one year.

Waterbury is the Chair of the NASA Product Data Exchange Working Group and is NASA's technical representative to PDES, Inc., a consortium of CAD vendors and manufacturing, automotive, and aerospace companies implementing STEP. He also currently serves as the U.S. Technical Advisor to IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission -- ISO's sister organization for standards in the electronic domain) TC3/SC3D (Data sets for libraries of electronic component data) and is a member of the U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) for IEC TC93 (Design Automation), which is responsible for bringing such standards as EDIF, VHDL, and STEP electrical/electronic Application Protocols into a common framework for Electronic Design Automation (EDA).

Waterbury received a B.S. in Physics with Honors from the University of Maryland in 1982. He has been with NASA since 1986.


Uwe Weissflog

Manager, Strategic Planning, Structural Dynamics Research Corporation (SDRC)

Mr. Weissflog is responsible for long term (strategic) direction for SDRC's Mechanical Design Automation business, strategic planning processes, and STEP. He joined SDRC 4 years ago, but has a long history in the industry, having worked in the Information Technology world for the past 27 years.

Mr. Weissflog's focus during the last 19 years was on CAD/CAM/CAE and PDM, in which he has held various positions in SW development, research, market support and marketing. He has been actively involved in IGES and STEP since 1981. His work assignments have allowed him to work in the US, in France and in Germany, a privilege he has thoroughly enjoyed.


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Steve Waterbury
Chair
NASA Product Data Exchange Working Group