Symposium Program & Speakers Announced

Jon DiPietro presentingOur symposium program chair Joe Provenzano is pleased to announce the speakers for this year’s ISA WWAC symposium.  Our technical program has over 25 speakers and spans two packed days of technical presentations, poster sessions, and papers.  The program also includes a keynote speaker; two invited speakers; guest speakers from the  WEF Automation and Info Tech Committee and the Florida Section of the AWWA; and a special welcome from ISA President Bob Lindeman.

This year’s WWAC Symposium keynote speaker will be Celine Hyer, a long-time AWWA member, who will present a keynote address entitled “Facing Utility Challenges: Managing Risk and Addressing Aging Infrastructure Needs.”  Celine is a principal consultant with Red Oak Division of Malcolm Pirnie/ARCADIS in Tampa, Florida, where she leads the asset management practice for the South. Currently, she leads asset management projects throughout the United States for medium and large utilities including New York City Department of Environmental Protection, Dallas Water Utility, Lee County Utilities and Toho Water Authority.

In addition to the keynote presentation, the symposium will feature a wide variety of technical presentations on a wide variety of automation, cybersecurity, instrumentation, plant optimization and system-integration topics. Two major themes this year are creating high-performance human machine interfaces (HMIs) to improve operational effectiveness, and developing supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems and automation cybersecurity best practices. The symposium also continues with its traditional strength of sharing new ideas and lessons learned from recent plant upgrades and new-builds.

On the first day of the technical program, inivited speaker Bryan Singer from Kenexis Consulting Corporation will present a talk entitled “An Overview of ISA99 for the Water or Wastewater SCADA Specialist.” The talk will focus on the ISA99 family of automation security standards and how to effectively apply them to your facilities.  Bryan is the founding chairman and now co-chairman of the ISA99, Industrial Automation and Control Systems Security Standards Committee, a standards body focusing on the security issues of the control systems environments.  He has recently co-authored the book “Cybersecurity for Industrial Control Systems: SCADA, DCS, PLC, HMI, and SIS” and is a regular speaker on cybersecurity, industrial networks and effectively deploying SCADA technology.

On the second day of the full-day program, invited speaker Bill Hollifield from PAS will be present a talk entitled “The High Performance HMI – Better Graphics for Operations Effectiveness“. Human Machine Interfaces (HMI) improvement has become a hot topic. The knowledge and control capabilities now exist for creating High Performance HMIs. These provide for much improved situation awareness, improved surveillance and control, easier training, and verifiable cost saving.  Bill is a member of the ISA-18 Alarm Management committee, the ISA-101 HMI committee, the API-1167 Alarm Management committee, and is a co-author of the Electric Power Research Institute’s Alarm Management Guidelines. Bill is also co-author of The High Performance HMI Handbook.

Invited guest speaker and WEF Automation and Info Tech Chair, Tom DeLaura, will also give a presentation about automation technology trends in the wastewater sector. DeLaura, vice president of Eramosa Engineering International Inc., is a long-time member of both ISA and WEF and has a career in the wastewater sector that spans over 38 years. He has written and presented on numerous topics of interest to the water and wastewater industry; he has received several awards from the industry for his dedication and service.  In addition to providing a guest speaker, WEF is also a technical co-sponsor of the symposium.

A guest speaker from the Florida Section of the AWWA is will also be presenting a talk on automation trends in the drinking water sector in the Florida area. We are pleased to welcome the Florida AWWA is a technical co-sponsor of this year’s symposium.

The Florida AWWA and the ISA have been working together to have the hours that attendees spend at the symposium certified as Florida DEP-approved CEUs (continuing education credits) for Florida state licensed water operators and wastewater operators.  Florida state licensed water and wastewater operators will be able to get 2.0 CEUs for attending the symposium that they can use for the annual continuing education requirements associated with their licenses; Florida state licensed engineers will also be able to get 20 PDHs (professional development hours) by participating in the symposium.  For attendees from outside the Florida area, the ISA will also be providing a certificate for 20 PDHs to participants.   Additional CEUs and PDHs can be earned by attending the full-day optional short-course on Automation & SCADA security on August 7, 2012.

In all there are over 25 speakers who will be presenting talks on a wide variety of topics that relate to the water and wastewater sectors.  We invite you to register for the symposium today.

More information

More information the WWAC2012 technical program can found in the symposium program schedule.

About GrahamNasby

Graham Nasby, P.Eng., PMP, CAP is a project manager and automation engineer who lives in Guelph, Ontario Canada where he is the Water SCADA & Security Specialist for the City of Guelph Waterworks. Graham was the chair of the 2012 and 2013 ISA water/wastewater symposiums, and is currently the editor of the ISA Water/Wastewater newsletter. He can be contacted at www.grahamnasby.com