Making News, July 2012

Avaya, a global provider of business collaboration and communications solutions, announced in a press release its 2012 Distinguished Engineers. Mehmet C. Balasaygun, NJ B ’91, was recognized as a Distinguished Engineer for being “one of the foremost authorities on SIP endpoints including the technology, software base quality, capabilities in signaling, media and evaluation of technologies.”

Balasaygun has been with Avaya since 2000 as a consulting member of the technical staff. He received his undergraduate engineering degree at Rutgers University and a master’s from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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The North County Times (CA) recently profiled the planned 1,400-mile trek of Aaron Linsdau, CA X ’96, to walk and ski to the South Pole unaided. Linsdau is a software engineer living in Carlsbad, CA, and will start his trip from Antartica later this year.

His 85-day round-trip journey will also be used to raise awareness of prostate cancer. Read the article for more about his historic trek, he would be the first American to complete the trip from the Antarctic coast to the South pole without assistance.

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Coming up in the first week of August, NASA’s laboratory, named Curiosity, will land on Mars. The Los Angeles Times detailed the machine and its planned landing sequence in the floor of a crater. According to the article, it has taken “10 years and $2.5 billion, incorporating the work of 5,000 people in 37 states.”

An engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory will be monitoring Curiosity, but will have no ability to guide the craft remotely because of the distance away from Earth.

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