A Message from Vincenzo Piuri, 2015 Technical Activities Vice President (February)

Vincenzo Piuri, 2015 IEEE Vice-President Technical Activities
Vincenzo Piuri, 2015 IEEE Vice-President Technical Activities

Dear colleagues:

This year, IEEE Technical Activities will take a strategic approach to satisfying the current and evolving needs of our technical communities. We will focus on the needs of our chapters, which link us locally to communities worldwide. We’ll work to recognize agile, adaptable services and products and better understand the compelling demand for nurturing emerging technical needs as early as possible.

We’ll better engage and empower underserved segments of our communities, mainly young professionals, professional engineers, entrepreneurs, and engineers in the industry, through better networking opportunities and creating easier access to the resources they need.

We’ll develop even higher-quality conferences and experiment with new and innovative technical meetings. We’ll work to address the diverse needs and aspirations of conference communities, focusing on industry, young professionals, and professional engineers.

Our technical communities – all leaders in their specified technical fields— will continue to ensure high-quality journals and magazines. We’ll study ways to better identify new technologies and build new communities around them to nurture and support them early on.

We’ll continue to nurture and support humanitarian projects in cooperation with IEEE initiatives. We will provide technical resources and encourage our volunteers, especially younger ones, to participate. By so doing, we’ll create opportunities and strengthen bonds among technical experts, enthusiastic technical volunteers, and local populations.

None of this can be achieved unless we pursue stronger and more synergic cooperation across IEEE and address the evolving needs of our communities. We must learn to better integrate services, join efforts and competences, and explore new opportunities and services with groups throughout the organization. As we look towards the future, we must listen to each other and work together and continue to evolve. The challenge is huge, but together we can make it happen.

Sincerely yours,

Vincenzo Piuri
2015 IEEE Technical Activities Vice President

Comments

  • Dear Vincenzo,

    Thank you so much for this message and this is a great news we hear from the Institution side. As an engineer who has moved from the industry into academia, I can comment as below:

    1. Engineering is a field where a good balance of theory, practice and team work help achieving our overall goals successfully. My observation in participating at conferences such as IECON and ISIE regularly is that these conferences are dominated mostly by academic work. However, if we look at conferences such as APEC they have good balance of theory and practice combined in reviews and organizing conference tracks. Given this situation, it may be a good idea to see that new conferences have a good balance on theory and practice, by encouraging industry engineers to participate.

    2. Mathematically obsessed journal and conference publications is my second concern. If you talk to many academics and reviewers, many may agree that many IEEE publications are judged/reviewed based on high level mathematics, cited in the manuscript, but put into limited use in the real application they have developed. In other words, excessive mathematics should not be an important (or the only serious) criteria for acceptance of publications.

    3. Innovation and commercialization- I think it is very good idea to have innovations and patents well recognized by IEEE publications, particularly in journals and magazines. Is it possible for us to have a short sub-section where new patents, or commercialization of existing patents by IEEE members be recognized by short articles in IEEE magazines as a regular feature.

    4. Need to have a proper procedure for appointing office bearers in technical committees- It may be a good idea to have a proper procedure to follow in appointing office bearers to new technical committees formed, where preliminary groups are encouraged to maintain some diplomacy to have a wider group of IEEE membership consulted before appointing the office bearers of new TCs.

    These are my personal views, based on my near 40 years of career experience in electronic engineering area.

    Best wishes to your great ideas …

    Nihal Kularatna, (SM)

  • Dear Vincenzo
    I think the flood of information is good, feeds the engineering community, but not as important as making the world understand what and how engineers/ engineering makes the difference. Currently there is a large need to make engineers feel that the are part of a community that reveres their work – not just the heroes. In order to do this we are championing “Engineers@Work” this year and encouraging them to participate in a show and tell collaboratively to enthuse the young and old in our community in four key areas of interest to our membership;

    Digital Media – Information in many different forms, video audio data, reaches us digitally over IP networks. We will have an expose on how this data is gathered, compiled for different audiences and then transferred to our “devices” without the consumer knowing and feeling the enormous amount of work that goes into this aspect.

    Transport – all aspects of an engineers life (with a focus on the disparity between what is learnt at uni and what is actually required at a site) constructing elements of information and control systems that go into a successful tunnel project. We will hear from engineers in the field on real live projects that have been completed successfully.

    Physical Security- these days with technology increasingly used as a tool to prevent and control the occurrence of crime, communications, signal process are depended on for not only live command and control but forensic analysis (using plenty of behind the scene analysis). We will see why “technology” is not the barrier and how technology delivers “flexibility” which improves effectiveness.

    Underwater wave energy based power generation: The topic is one of the hottest in town with a major project getting the nod with an investment in many millions after almost 10years of field research. Hear from real engineers working and delivering these state of the art “eco” projects.

    Hope we see more of what and how everyday engineers work and encourage them to pass on their experiences to the community.

    Regards
    Ollencio D’Souza
    Chair
    IEEE Joint Chapter
    Communications Signal Processing and Ocean Engineering. NSW

  • Dear Vicenzo,

    Thank you for your message.

    I’m 31 years old and I have started three small software companies so far. I have learned a little bit about how to incubate new businesses. I just take care of them personally, assemble a good team, identify customers’ unmet needs, find ways to serve them better than the competition and keep the business in the black until it is stable enough to keep going on its own. Then I bring in people with more experience to take things to whole a new level (which is the tricky part).

    As Section Chair I would like to take the same approach to form new chapters: Assist them in their first year: encourage society members to form the chapter, identify the unmet needs of our members, serve them better than the substitutes. Help them to get started, to elect an interim Chair and a Vicechair, to have their first few events, to submit their complete reports on time and to have a successful succession.

    I hope we have a chance to talk a little bit more about this next week and figure out if this would be a good approach. Also, I would like to ask for your advice on which IEEE resources and services would be most useful during the first year of any new chapter.

    Thanks,

    Gerardo Barbosa
    IEEE Monterrey Section Chair 2014-2015

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