New Year, New Members

The start of each calendar year sees turnover in the AdCom membership; the leaving members are gratefully thanked for their work and legacy, the new ones are warmly welcomed while looking forward to benefitting from their experience and contributions. 2023 saw the end of term for (and welcome to) Andrew Goertzen (Younhgo Seo, NMISC chair), Heather O’Brien (Emily Schrock, PPST chair), Arati Dasgupta (Joe Schumer, PSAC), David Donovan(Mark Tillack, FTC), Martin Nieto-Perez (George Sips, FTC chair), Mitra Safavi-Naeini (Emilie Roncali, DEI liaison), Cinzia da Via (Audrey Corbeil-Therien, WIE liaison), Margaret Daube-Witherspoon (Jiniy Qi, TMI liaison). In addition, Steve Gitomer and Steve Gold are stepping  down as IEEE TPS EiC and Chapters Chair respectively, at the end of 2024; Edl Schamiloglu and Angela Di Fulvio, together with Martin Nieto-Perez, will assume their respective positions. Thank you for the long years of service!

We also created two new positions: TAB climate change liaison (Cinzia da Via) and IEEE Standards Activity (SA) liaison (Nicolaos Karakatsanis) to align with activities that are currently of great relevance to IEEE and IEEE Technical activity board (TAB).

Updates from the TAB Meeting Series

As I attend the IEEE TAB meeting series, I continue to be impressed by its breadth and vibrancy, which extend well beyond technology development. A full description would require many pages: I will thus give only a very brief and necessarily selective summary. Anyone interested to learn more, or volunteer at any level, is encouraged to reach out to any AdCom member and/or visit relevant IEEE websites.

In IEEE’s effort to be a proactive technology leader, a key general approach used in the Future Directions TAB meetings, is the identification of:

• Areas where technical development is anticipated to have a significant societal impact
• Gaps that needs to be filled to reach, disseminate and regulate anticipated broadly available ‘end products’
• Expertise within and outside IEEE necessary to catalyze such developments. Part of the operational approach is establishment of Roadmaps across Initiatives and Societies

Society presentations of draft Roadmaps

The Communication Society talked about needs in telecommunication: present and future developments not only in the context of available technology, of the establishment of a continuum  between Wi-Fi, mobile and satellite communication and development of smart materials, but also in the context of geographically varying capital and operational costs, and of the impact of international regulatory bodies on data transmission protocols and cyber security.

Another example came from the  Power & Energy Society (PES) where energy needs were discussed in the context of development of energy supply/storage paradigms that would be resilient to the increasing frequency and intensity of natural disasters: here IEEE also plays a critical role in the development of performance standards.

Roadmaps from other societies focussed on developments of wireless technology, ubiquitous connectivity, digital twins and many others. Some topics of broader discussion included IEEE Digital Privacy Initiative, which spans technology, ethics and government regulatory bodies; Public Safety -facilitating technology and regulations in nationals and international contexts.

Objective and Scientifically Sound Guidance

The usefulness of such Roadmaps is several-fold:

• It encourages critical evaluation of technical development in light of potential impact
• It forces a critical analysis of the steps required to achieve the identified goals
• It compels consideration of the practical and regulatory requirements allowing broad dissemination of the final product.

If well thought out, a ‘living’ and judiciously evolving Roadmap becomes a source of objective and scientifically sound information that can be used by appropriate governing bodies. In our own home, RISC and NMISC are now attempting to develop a such a Roadmap.

Facilitating Engagement with Young People

A common theme in many of the presentations was emphasis on facilitating engagement and participation of young people: it was stressed that students want mentorships and access to internships that will confer on them a competitive edge in the job market; some societies are responding by offering, for example, combined technical and entrepreneurship training. Several other suggestions were made; a particularly interesting one was to create IEEE-sponsored competitions in areas of relevance to industry with the winner automatically being offered a job. Maybe something like this might stem from collaborations between a society and student chapters while also serving to strengthen ties between academia and industry?  Food for thought.

TAB Committee Updates

Somewhat related to this topic is the news that IEEE has finalized a TAB committee on Technical Community Outreach, Engagement, and Society Membership (TCOES) which is meant to improve communication and engagement between all parts of IEEE including Chapters, and Technical Activities, including Societies and Councils, with a partial aim to improve collective best practices across its bodies to better serve its members.

Climate change and DEI remain top priorities for IEEE TAB. Several Webinars were hosted by TAB in 2023, focussed on topics such as Sustainable Technology educational series, Wildfire Webinar and Engineering-Driven Solutions for Inland & Coastal Flooding Series. Anyone interested in learning more and become involved in these efforts, please contact our Climate Change Liaison, Cinzia da Via.

The TAB DEI committee, led by Dalma Novak, described  increase DEI activities across IEEE TAB and presented some success stories from other societies; for example, the IEEE Signal Processing Society founded the Mentoring Experiences for Underrepresented Young Researchers Program, which pairs young researchers from underrepresented groups with an established researcher in signal processing from a different institute and typically another country. For any ideas you may like to share/pursue or interest in participation please contact Jane Lehr and /or Emilie Roncali.

AdCom Meeting Updates

Looking closer to home now: our November AdCom meeting was quite eventful as we evaluated the outcome of the first implementation of our Best Practices as well as discussed items related to the upcoming Society review.

• We standardized the Technical Chairs reports format to AdCom; the new format allows for a faster identification of good practices within a technical area that can become more widely adopted as well as prompt identification of problems requiring dedicated help from AdCom. Such information will help AdCom to better serve NPSS.
• We also now have a set of slides on NPSS and IEEE that chairs of any NPSS meeting can use in their welcome speech to disseminate awareness of the broader societal activities and generate more engagement and discussion with our audiences at large.
• We also discussed the need to strengthen our Standards activity (SA) in recognition of not just the technical importance of standards, but also of the impact standards can have on ensuring appropriate performance and safety of the ‘end products.’

I am very much looking forward to the March AdCom meeting: one day is spent in a retreat, where we dedicate time to discussing new projects and ideas — and, as it appears clear from this short write-up, there is no shortage of activities where we can contribute, even by an infinitesimal amount, to bettering living conditions in the world

More to report next time, including the outcome of our Society Review.

Vesna Sossi, IEEE NPSS President, can be reached by E-mail at [email protected].