Welcome to the first monthly Drexel Smart House newsletter. It is the first of many things we are introducing in April. Today is also the launch of our publicly accessible wiki (see below) and also the announcement of our new student leaders. As of January 2009, our executive council consists of President and Chair of Commercialization, Cody A. Ray, Chair of Design, Patrick T. Hoffman, Chair of Informatics, Andrew Cebulski, and Chair of Research, Prineha Narang. More information on each is available on the wiki.

We've recently added a Communications Committee, co-chaired by our newest student members Alyssa Stein and W. Craig Hooper. If you would like to learn more or get involved, email communications@drexelsmarthouse.com.

Our newest faculty advisors are Tim Bosworth on our Executive Council Advisory Board; Neil Desnoyers for our Commercialization Committee; Rena Cumby, Karin Kuenstler, and Mike Glaser for our Design Committee.

We've been asked by students, faculty, staff, admin, alumni, and industry - basically everyone - to be kept more up to date on the ongoings within our organization. In response, we've setup public "workspaces" for each of our committees on the new wiki. This enables our committees to better manage their activities as people come and go for co-op, allows keeping a public record and roadmap for each of our areas, and let's people keep informed of opportunities for contribution to the organization, and what they can gain. As this wiki was launched today, please bear with us as we backlog our most recent activities and migrate our archival records to this wiki. All future activities and information should appear here as it arises. You can access this wiki at http://www.drexelsmarthouse.com/wiki.

To all of our sponsors, partners, thank you for the great start to a new year. We've renewed our outreach program with the Science Leadership Academy (SLA) of Center City, Philadelphia again this year. We have paired 5 high school students with our researchers working on developing a biomass air filtration system.

We've partnered with Duke University to co-found the Smart Living Association, which brings together like-minded University programs for collaboration and cross-organizational projects. We're the inaugural conference the weekend of April 3rd-5th at Duke University.

We presented to the Powelton Village Civic Association (PVCA) Executive Board and at the monthly Powelton Village general meeting. In return, PVCA presented a formal letter of support on our behalf to the upper administration at Drexel University. We have also been approached by several members of the community interested in deploying our technology directly into their homes and properties.

We're one of the founding mentor organization for the Philip B. Lindy Inner-City Public School Program. We'll be collaborating with Engineers Without Borders, Drexel Sierra Club, and Drexel Green to provide workshops for up to 15 middle school students from West Philadelphia (5th-6th grade) every other weekend for 2.5 months.

Drexel Smart House has become a member organization of the Community Alumni Network at Drexel University. We're looking at ways in which we can apply our technologies to improve the McMichael School in Mantua, as well as how we can help improve other initiatives with partnering organizations.

Our research committee is supporting approximately 20 Freshman Engineering Design Teams. If you are interested in mentoring or participating, email research@drexelsmarthouse.com