Archives for June 2012

Today marks the official start of a new Advent GX project with Donna, TX Economic Development Corporation (EDC). Donna (cityofdonna.org) is a community of nearly 16,000 located in Southeast Hidalgo County and home to a new international port of entry. The community is eager to increase bridge crossings and expand economic activity.

We will use our Advent GX Strategy Deployment (ASD) process to engage community stakeholders and form an economic development strategy that takes advantage of the community’s assets. Among these are a rich heritage, abundant agricultural operations and location along a primary North American trade corridor. In addition, Advent GX will begin immediately to evaluate best developmental opportunities for Donna and begin pursuing those.

The AdventGX team for the Donna project includes former Hidalgo County Judge and new Advent GX Managing Partner JD Salinas III, AdventGX President Jose Quintana and Joan Quintana, AdventGX Managing Partner. In addition, subject matter experts in the fields of development, international trade, manufacturing, nature tourism and heritage tourism will serve the project.

Today we are delighted to tell the world that JD Salinas III will join Advent GX has a managing partner effective Monday, June 25th. JD joins us after stepping down from his post as Regional Administrator for the US General Services Administration (GSA). You can expect to see JD here at the Innovation Underground in Bryan, TX in the coming months. He will also be working to expand the Innovation Underground network with new incubation locations in the Lower Rio Grande Valley region of Texas and in other areas of North America.

JD has served as Regional Administrator for the GSA’s Greater Southwest Region since November 2009. Prior to his service at GSA, Salinas served as County Judge of Hidalgo County, Texas. He is a graduate of Texas A&M University where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Recreation, Parks and Tourism Sciences in 1991, and of University of Texas – Pan American where he earned a Masters of Public Administration in 2002.

We are honored that JD has chosen to join our team. He will significantly enhance our ability to reach and serve communities and businesses throughout Texas and North America. JD brings an exceptional understanding of local, state and federal issues that impact both local governments and businesses and his servant values are a perfect fit with Advent GX.

Texas music, Texas beer and locally crafted pizza were on hand to welcome international visitors to downtown Bryan and the Innovation Underground during the 2012 International Conference on Design, Computing and Cognition. The group of international travelers gathered in the IU’s patio garden to meet colleagues from across the globe representing a variety of disciplines all with a shared interest in design aspects of artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

According to Texas A&M’s website, Design Computing and Cognition is a biannual conference series that provides an international forum for the presentation and discussion of state-of-the-art and cutting-edge design research with a focus on artificial intelligence, cognitive science and computational theories in design. The conference proceedings form a continuing archive of design computing and cognition research. DCC is one of the few high-profile and highly respected international interdisciplinary conferences. Most conferences are dedicated to a topic that interests only a single discipline. DCC is different in that the audience, talks, and presenters are from a variety of disciplines, all circling around a central theme.

DDC’12 was chaired by Dr. John S. Gero, a research professor in the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, the Volgenau School of Engineering, and the Department of Computational Social Science at George Mason University. Dr. Tracy Hammond was the Texas A&M local chair of the event. She is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the director of the Sketch Recognition Lab.

Previously, the conference was held at MIT, the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands (DCC’06), the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Stuttgart in Stuttgart in Germany (DCC’10).