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54 DESIGN007 MAGAZINE I JANUARY 2018 Jasbir Bath, technical conference director for IPC APEX EXPO, has been coordinating IPC's techni- cal program for several years now, but his interest and excite- ment for the event continues to expand. It's clear that Jasbir and his team take great pains to create a fresh, exciting menu of sessions, development courses and more, full of potential learning expe - riences, year after year. It looks like 2018 will be no exception. Patty Goldman: Hi Jasbir, please begin by tell- ing me what your position at IPC entails. Jasbir Bath: I'm the conference director for the IPC APEX EXPO conference. I've been doing it for the last four or five years. My respon- sibility is to help organize the conference, solicit papers, and then put together a tech- nical program committee to solicit papers and review the abstracts coming in, and then select papers for the conference. We're at the stage now where we're putting papers into sessions. We're writing session descriptions and we're receiving papers and presentations for each of the sessions to review for the conference. That's the job that I'm responsible for. We may have some drops, we may have some addi- tions, but we're in the middle of the review process for papers and presentations now. Goldman: How many tracks should there be? Bath: There should be 32 sessions. We're doing about five tracks in parallel from Tuesday after- noon, Wednesday all day, and then Thursday morning. We're trying to make sure that the tracks have assembly, PCB fabrica- tion, and reliability tracks, as well as some others. We're trying to keep the fabrication and the reli- ability in one track, the assem- bly in one track, etc., so that two fabrication sessions aren't going at the same time. It's always tricky. We try not to clash with the standards committee meetings. That gets interesting, because some of the people who chair the paper sessions may also be involved in standards meetings. We want to make sure, for example, if there's a PCB assembly track that it doesn't overlap with a PCB assembly standards committee meeting.There has been feedback on that, so we're putting in a renewed effort to make sure we don't have any overlaps. At the same time, if there's a potential clash on Thursday morn- ing with the professional development (PD) courses that are going on, we're also trying to make sure we don't have a PD course on one subject coinciding with a technical session in the same area. Goldman: Do the professional development courses run on the weekend and during the week too? Bath: They run on Sunday all day, Monday all day, and then Thursday morning. It's not a big overlap. There maybe last-minute changes that we can't account for, but generally we're in good shape. Goldman: It's hard to make everyone happy. Bath: Exactly. The chair of a standards com- mittee session may also be chairing a technical Jasbir Bath Keeping it New, Current and Relevant: IPC Conference Director Jasbir Bath IPC APEX EXPO 2018 PRE-SHOW SPECIAL COVERAGE