Conference speech: Receiving the LACCEI 2024 Medal of Academic Merit Hamadou Saliah-Hassane, San Jose, Costa Rica, July 18th 2024
Con toda humildad, agradezco a LACCEI por haberme concedido el privilegio de hablar ante esta respetuosa y venerable asamblea. Hago extensivo mi saludo y admiración a todos los nominados y anteriores galardonados con este premio. Gracias a Costa Rica por darnos la oportunidad de organizar esta prestigiosa conferencia de LACCEI por segunda vez en los últimos años.
In all humility, I thank LACCEI for giving me the privilege of speaking before this respectful and venerable assembly. I extend my respectful greetings and admiration to all the nominees and past winners of this award. Thank you to Costa Rica for giving us the opportunity to organize this prestigious LACCEI conference for the second time in recent years.
To begin with, I think it’s important to place my academic career in the context of my family.
At elementary school, being the son of a schoolteacher and an educated mother at the time of my birth in the 50s, at home, my sister and I, educated by our mother, had the privilege of learning to read and write before school age. It should be pointed out, however, that my father, the school principal, lived in the schoolyard of the elementary school in Mirriah, a town in Niger.
I can say that the spirit of public service and voluntary work was rooted in our family unit. I had the privilege of being well prepared to face the “white man’s school” and to pursue my primary and secondary education in several regions of my native Niger. And this, according to the successive postings of my father, who had become a civil servant.
Later, my proactivity and quest for autonomy enabled me to pursue my university studies in reputable establishments in Senegal from 1974 to 1976 for a first diploma as a senior technician in telecommunications electronics, then in Canada at the École Polytechnique de Montréal from 1978 to 1983 for two electrical engineering diplomas specializing in electrical engineering, transmission and distribution of electrical energy and automation, including a bachelor’s and master’s degree. I also completed my doctoral studies at McGill University in 1999. The subject of my thesis was computer-aided intelligent engineering design using artificial neural networks. My work was colored by my experience as a teaching assistant at Polytechnique, McGill and the University of Niamey in Niger. My studies, from master’s to doctorate level, were interspersed with positions as head of the electrical engineering department at a regional engineering and technician school.
To the students in this room and those elsewhere, I would say that studies, publications and diplomas are by no means enough to give back to humanity what they have received. That’s why, during your academic life, you’ll need to participate actively and sometimes intensively in extracurricular activities including community services. Firstly, to better learn and master subjects by putting them into practice in a real-life setting, and above all to socialize and be able to give back later to the society that would have enabled you to succeed.
On this point, as far as I’m concerned, my IEEE membership since the start of my university studies in the late 1970s has enabled me to meet certain challenges, which justify my presence among you today. It’s about voluntarily contributing to the collective wealth without counting the cost or expecting immediate reward.
One of the keys to achieving this is mentoring. Seeking out and being a mentor to others is a guarantee of personal and collective fulfillment.
Personally, I was fortunate to have the late Professor Dinkar Mukhedkar as my inveterate mentor. Prof. Mukhedkar was my master thesis supervisor at École Polytechnique de Montréal. It was thanks to him that I learned the true role of a teacher who respects and helps students to succeed, beyond the delivery of academic subjects. One of Professor Mukhedkar’s most memorable phrases was: “I won’t do another master’s thesis or doctoral dissertation for you. For everything else, you can count on me”. Yes, his greatest asset was the impressive network of contacts he had built up over the years. Before the advent of the Internet and today’s social networks, the telephone and fax were the best means of communication that he uses to connect us with his colleagues around the World. But we had to know how to communicate well to receive a fax of the relevant documents a few hours or days later, enabling us to make rapid progress with our work.
The late Professor Mukhedkar and Professor David Lowther of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill University, both IEEE Fellow members and visionaries with multidisciplinary expertise, gave me the opportunity during my master’s and doctoral studies to participate in undergraduate and graduate teaching at their respective institutions. At Polytechnique, I helped teach courses in Power systems and Capstone Design, and at McGill, courses in intelligent computer-aided design using expert systems and knowledge-based systems.
I would also like to mention the support and appreciation of my expertise by Professor Gilbert Frade and Professor Alan Rodney and their colleagues of the École Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris who helped us to set up the academic program from scratch at École des Mines de l’Industrie et de la Géologie (EMIG), an African regional engineering school, based in Niger, for which I had been recruited in 1989 as the Head of Electrical Engineering Department. This school belonging to the former Communauté des Etats de l’Afrique de l’Ouest (CEAO) selects students from seven countries: Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mali, Mauritania, Niger and Senegal.
In the time allotted to me, I couldn’t possibly mention several other mentors and collaborators I’ve come across by chance. But let me pique your curiosity by briefly mentioning the impact on LACCEI and the OAS of my international collaboration with the late Dr Rob Reilly and Professor Maria Larrondo Petrie for LACCEI.
With Dr Rob, thanks to seed funding from the IEEE Foundation for a project entitled “Mainstreaming Engineers in Africa and the Middle East”, we were able to make a modest contribution to encouraging young people in Africa to choose a career in engineering, and to helping teacher-researchers in Africa to progress in their careers and gain professional recognition.
With Prof. Maria, during the IEEE Education Society standards development process, we worked together to involve students, teacher-researchers and suppliers of educational materials. The approach we adopted is that of participatory action research, which contributes to the training of engineering educators worldwide.
With the two of them, Rob and Maria, one of our favorite multiple specific projects is “IEEE Engineering for the Americas (EftA)”, a dynamic that had planned to heavily involve the OAS. Quote:
“IEEE EftA will operationalize (and adapt) OAS EftA concepts by employing IEEE’s human and financial resources. IEEE EftA will bring together its experts to lead this initiative forward and implement a functional structure with meaningful and effective capacity building and capability development processes…”
I ask you to consider this quote as our willingness to continue the project with LACCEI and international organizations dedicated to the inclusive education and training of engineers, technicians and scientists worldwide.
Having mentioned my academic career, the support and encouragement of my own parents and friends, the need for mentoring and social commitment, I can’t finish without thanking my wife Josée, who spares no effort to accompany me in my many projects as a volunteer for a better world. As our parents taught us, Josée and our children have also learned to give back.
Contrary to popular belief, the sinews of war are not money. Resilience in the face of omnipresent adversity, passion, determination and a taste for effort are the keys to success.
As far as I’m concerned, my passion is teaching engineering in a different way, collaboratively and with the help of Online laboratories, as proposed by the very first IEEE Education Society standard IEEE 1876 -2019 On Networked Smart Learning Objects for Online Laboratories. This standard, whose development I had the privilege of chairing, was approved in 2019, just before the COVID 19 era. Several LACCEI members contributed to it. In this sense, the strong arm of the valorization of our efforts for LACCEI is Dr. Luis Felipe Zapata Rivera here. He is currently the Chair of the IEEE Education Society Standards Committee and the Vice-Chair for the development and maintenance of the Online Laboratories Standardization effort.
I can’t end this speech without underlining the support of my native country, Republic of Niger, and of Canada in awarding me scholarships for excellence in university studies. I would also like to mention the support of the Canadian Emerging Leaders for Americas program, through which I’ve been able to welcome Brazilian students and teacher researchers to my laboratory at TELUQ University in Montreal.
I thank the organizers of this conference for inviting me and for awarding me the 2024 LACCEI Academic Merit Medal. I share this distinction with all my students, teachers, collaborators and family, without whom nothing would have been possible.
Thank you for listening.