 My discussion will be brief and it's really a sales pitch and it's to tell you a little bit about the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and then Scott Berger will tell you a little bit about process safety and some of the things that we've done. Our primary reason for being here is to cooperate with the Indian Chemical Council in looking at ways of improving and training process safety in India. Let me tell you a little bit about AICHE. We're a professional society and professional societies always have high level mission statements. Lofty goals that we try to accomplish and these are the goals of AICHE. We want to be a global leader for the profession particularly in technology. And so I'll tell you a little bit about the programs we have and meetings and journals but we really want to look at ourselves in a global basis which is why we're here in India at this time. Also as a professional society we try to help chemical engineers move through their career starting as a student, getting a job, working through their career and even in retirement. And actually that's a very useful thing to be in a professional society is when you retire you find professional societies can be a good activity for you and it keeps you engaged keeps your mind working and that's why a lot of our volunteers are retired people. And finally we actually do get involved in trying to promote the best principles of science and engineering for society in our government and so we do try to write white papers and make position statements about issues that are important to education and industry to our government officials. We're almost 100 years old and to give you a sense of why we were started back in about 1906, 1907 the chemical industry was starting to grow and there was this new discipline developing where chemists were learning some mechanical skills and they were starting to build chemical facilities. At that time the big chemical industry was cement, gunpowder, refining, although the refining industry was making more lamp oil than anything else but there was a new discipline that was developing and so there were just a handful of universities that had coined the phrase chemical engineering and they had started the discipline of chemical engineering and a group of people got together and said, you know, we need to promote this. We want to see the profession of chemical engineer taught at every university and we want to have an educational program that's structured and disciplined and so they formed the American Institute of Chemical Engineers. And what we are is that we are individual members and most of our membership work in industry, about 80% of our members work in industry. A little under 20% of our members work in academia as professors and students and some of our members also work in government. We have about 40,000 members, about 10% of our membership is from outside the United States and we'd like to change that. We'd like to see a lot more members from outside the United States. We have a lot of student members. Overall in the United States there are about 20,000 students going through the four-year program of chemical engineering and about 5,000 of them are active as members of AICAG. The other thing that we do is we try to help standardize the curricula of chemical engineering through a accreditation board and so we're involved in making sure that everyone's education has at least some level of standards. And mostly what we do is we have meetings that many people come to and I hope someday you'll come to one of our meetings. We get up to about 6,000 people. Our last meeting in San Francisco we actually had over 1,000 students at the meeting and about 5,500 professionals giving papers on various topics. And so there's a little bit more detail. Obviously we publish journals and hopefully if you go into your library you'll see the AICAG Journal and I know because we receive many applications and many submissions and publish many papers from India in that journal. Basically the way we operate ourselves is we have technical divisions in different areas like process development, fuels and petrochemicals, environmental and these groups come together and they help program the meetings at our national meetings. The other thing is basically a professional society is a great networking opportunity and as you develop your career and move on you'll find it's useful for you to spend time with people in your profession. If nothing else to help you do your job or if you're looking for your next job it's often good just to have these informal networks. And we do that through local sections which are groups of professionals people who have gotten a job and working in industry let's say and then also we have almost 140 over 140 student chapters so the universities have programs where students are also members. And as I mentioned we do some government relations which means some advocacy, a little bit of lobbying. We teach courses in chemical engineering and we're going to tell you a little bit about the process safety that we do and then I'm going to diverge a little bit and I'm going to talk a little bit of some of our industry activities where we actually bring industry together for special topics and industry companies work together to develop new technology. Let me see, let me just try to hit the high points. Scott Berger is actually the director of all of these institutes and let me just hit the high points. The Center for Chemical Process Safety is a collection of over 80 companies that come together that bring the best practices to process safety together and I'm going to stop and let Scott tell you more about that. Design Institute for Physical Properties is again companies come together and they decide they need to understand the physical properties of some small molecules and they collectively do research and have standardized physical properties that are published that basically saves them work of doing that in their own companies because they do it together in a consortium that we help run for them. Let me go to the top of the bottom. Same thing in terms of Design Institute for Emergency Relief Systems. We found that there was a need to standardize how people choose and design relief systems and so this is a group of companies that come together to help do that. I'll talk about two of our new societies that we've started. I don't know how popular biological engineering is in your teaching and your profession here but biology really has taken off in the United States and part of that is because our government has given a lot of funding for biological sciences and so we find that over a third of the papers that are meetings now have something to do with biology and biological engineering. So we actually started a society for biological engineering where we try to bring in not only chemical engineers but biologists and other scientists to talk about and have special meetings. By the way if you go to our website you'll be able to if you want to see more about this you'll be able to drill down and see some of the activities. As an example to give you an idea of something really unusual there we go, that we're doing we actually formed a consortium to do the total genome the genome sequence of the Chinese hamster ovary cell and it's called the Cho chip project the chip is the format in which the array of the gene is laid out and the Chinese hamster, why are we doing that? That doesn't sound like chemical engineering but we have eight companies who have contributed funds into a consortium and we're working with the university to do this genome syncope. Well because that cell is used as a factory to produce enzymes and proteins by the pharmaceutical and the biotech industry and if you know the gene structure you'll be able to make the process the biochemical process work better and for instance Genentech their first major success was a growth hormone was made in the Chinese hamster ovary cell so that's chemical engineering and it's certainly different than what chemical engineering was ten years ago but we think that's going to be the future for where many of you may go another area that we believe is important is we need to get more engaged in studies of how chemical engineering can benefit global growth and sustainable development so we formed an institute for sustainability and they're doing a number of interesting projects one of which is to actually look at the metrics for sustainable development so many companies say we're a sustainable company and this company says we're a sustainable company well how so, how much? and there aren't really good metrics out there and so what we're trying to do is put together a program where a company could say well I want to compare our olefin process to this olefin process and which one is more sustainable and obviously we're going to look at things like energy consumption and water use and things of that nature and try to standardize that I encourage you, if you would to go to aiche.org and if you look under technical societies you'll see these and you can join these for very little money I'm going to talk a little bit about that in a second and if nothing else look at the interesting meetings that they have now this slide was actually made for the group that we were talking to down at the World Trade Center and of course this slide was put together primarily for people who have their degree and they're working in industry and they're well paid and it is not meant for students I'll change the punch line for you we realize that if we want to have more interaction and more members outside the United States that we needed to use the web to do that, the internet to do that and so we've made a lot of investment in the last year and a half to improve our web system and we've decided that we actually can offer memberships at a much lower fee than we actually do in the United States I'm sorry I'm going to talk in dollars but I think you basically multiply these numbers by about 45 and I think you'll get them the rupees somewhere around there but a membership for AICHE costs $200 a year for a professional which is a fair chunk of change and we realize that to be successful outside the United States that we really need to find a way to bring that price down we think that we can do that and if you're willing to take a look at membership, for instance some of the things that we have is we now have an electronic library of over 250 books in chemical engineering that's available with your membership to AICHE and for instance Perry's Handbook is in there and there are many other books that are in there the interesting thing about the electronic version of some of these books is they're actually better than the hand version the hard copy because the tables and charts are interactive, many of them so in Perry's you can go in there and you can see certain charts you may be working on a research project and you can actually place your data into this chart and it will put your data point right on the chart, they're interactive and a number of the CCPS the Center for Chemical Process safety books are also there we publish a monthly magazine called Chemical Engineering Progress CEP that's also available online we're starting to generate a lot of traffic in blogs podcasts, podcasts where we have specialty lectures and we're starting to pull together a lot of RSS feeds we also have the ability to do webcast and web conferencing so if you wanted to actually have meetings on the web that would come with your membership an email address and probably what I didn't really talk about is there's also for students a pretty significant job part of that site where I actually list many many jobs that are available now these are mostly almost all in the United States so for professionals we're actually looking at cutting our membership rate one third to give this program but for your perspective in the U.S. our student membership is $15 and for that you would get the ability to use this information and learn more about the profession outside of India