Millennium Magazine_2ndEd

A Marquis Who's Who Magazine 427 A fter a diverse career in accounting and secretarial work, and earning honors in writing and music from the Brainerd Institute, Vivian A. Ayers-Allen landed a job with the Houston Harris County Community Action Association. Initially she was hired as coordinator of volunteers, but the director noted her expertise in the arts and gave her a position creating cultural programs for the county. Later on in her career, Ms. Ayers- Allen would help administer workshops for the Open Field Project, through which children could create art guided by professionally paid artists who set up work stations in public spaces. Her hard work and dedication to this program eventually led to her appointment to the Advisory Council of the Arts. Ms. Ayers-Allen’s current duties for the Brainerd Institute include fundraising and creating awareness to preserve the site for a cultural center. The highlights of her career were publishing “The Hawk: An Allegory of Freedom,” and being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. She was also the first person to introduce Muhammad Ali to the public as a poet. Looking to the future, Ms. Ayers-Allen hopes to publish more of her works. FOUNDING DIRECTOR Brainerd Institute Chester, SC VIVIAN A. AYERS-ALLEN K artik Ariyur has 22 years of experience in the field of engineering. Since beginning his career as an engineering intern at the United Technologies Research Center and Qualcomm Inc., and later making significant contributions at the Honeywell Labs, Dr. Ariyur has worked his way up to become the professional he is today. In addition to conducting research, he continues teaching at Purdue University. Some of his achievements include participating in the discovery of slope seeking; developing adaptive pilot filtering that now resides on all cell phones; synthesizing predictive maintenance algorithms currently used on more than 70 percent of commercial airplanes; modernizing traditional magnetic and celestial navigation to compete with GPS; obtaining 17 U.S. patents, and publishingmore than 60 refereed articles. Dr. Ariyur serves on the editorial boards of IEEE Control Systems Letters and the International Journal of Adaptive Control and Signal Processing. He is a member of the AIAA, ASME and IEEE and has served on the program committees of several conferences from 2008 through 2019. He earned a BTech from IIT Madras, and an MS and PhD from the University of California San Diego, all in mechanical engineering. CONTROL SYSTEMS ENGINEER, RESEARCHER Purdue University, SAMMS LLC West Lafayette, IN KARTIK BALASUBRAMANIAN ARIYUR, PHD