Message from AP Director Zhisheng Niu (Jan. 2008)

First of all, as the new director of IEEE Communication Society Asia Pacific Board (APB) during 2008-2009, I would like to take this opportunity to extend my best wishes for a happy and prosperous New Year 2008 to all our members in this region.  Also, I would like to express my gratitude to all the past APB officers (especially to my predecessor Prof. Daehyoung Hong) as well as many earnest volunteers involved in the APB related activities. Due to their great contributions, the AP region has been continuously recognized as one of the fastest growing regions in terms of both membership development and membership services.
In this respect, we are now in the next stage to further expand our highly-recognized technical activities, membership development activities, information services, and chapter coordination so as to provide better services to the existing 9,000+ members as well as to attract more new members. No doubt, this will bring us a lot of challenges. But, on the other hand, we are surrounded by many opportunities too.  For instance, ICC2008 will be held in Beijing from May 19-23, during which near 2,000 guests are expected to visit our region. Three month later, the 29th Olympic Summer Games will come to Beijing again. These will definitely provide us very good opportunities to further promote our region as well as to strengthen the collaboration inside our region.

To achieve these goals, a strong volunteer team is extremely important and prerequisite.  Fortunately, with the helps from our advisors, the following volunteers have agreed to devote their precious time and experience to lead the respective committees, while much more volunteers will be invited to join with them soon. 

++++++++++++++ APB Steering Committee for 2008-2009 ++++++++++++++
Director:               Zhisheng Niu (Tsinghua University, China)
Past Director:        Daehyoung Hong (Sogang University, Korea)
Vice Director:         Naoaki Yamanaka (Keio University, Japan)
Vice Director:        Seung-Woo Seo (Seoul National University, Korea)
Secretary & Treasure: Lin Zhang (Tsinghua University, China)
Secretary:                Tomoaki Ohtsuki (Keio University, Japan)
MDC Chair:            Raghavan Muralidharan (Nayna Networks, India)
CCC Chair:             Abbas Jamalipour (Univ. of Sydney, Australia)
TAC Chair:             Qian Zhang (HK Univ. of Sci. & Tech., HK China)
MCC Chair:            Song Chong (KAIST, Korea)
ISC Chair:              Kohei Shiomoto (NTT, Japan)
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(Note: MDC: Membership Development Committee; CCC: Chapter Coordination Committee; TAC: Technical Activity Committee; MCC: Meeting & Conference Committee; ISC: Information Service Committee)

I do hope you are satisfied with this new team and expect your strong supports and contributions. We will do our best for sure and let us work together in a more effective way to create an even brilliant future of our AP region.

Thank you very much in advance for your strong supports and collaboration.

Sincerely yours,

Prof. Dr. Zhisheng Niu
Dept of Electronic Engineering
School of Information Science and Technology
Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

Biography

Zhisheng Niu graduated from Northern Jiaotong University (currently Beijing Jiaotong University), Beijing, China, in 1985, and got his M.E. and D.E. degrees from Toyohashi University of Technology, Toyohashi, Japan, in 1989 and 1992, respectively.  After spending 2 years in Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., Kawasaki, Japan, he joined with Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1994, where he is now a professor at the Department of Electronic Engineering and deputy dean of the School of Information Science and Technology.  He is also an adjunction professor of Beijing Jiaotong University. His current research interests include teletraffic theory, mobile Internet, radio resource management of wireless networks, and integrated communication and broadcast networks.  He has published more than 100 journal and conference papers so far.
From October 1995 to February 1996, he was a visiting research fellow of the Communications Research Laboratory of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications of Japan.  From February 1997 to February 1998, he was a visiting senior researcher of Central Research Laboratory, Hitachi Ltd.  He received the PAACS Friendship Award from the Institute of Electronics, Information, and Communication Engineers (IEICE) of Japan in 1991, the Best Paper Award (1st prize) from the 6th Chinese Youth Conference on Communication Technology in 1999, and the Best Paper Award from the 13th Asia-Pacific Conference on Communications (APCC) in 2007.  He also received the Japanese Government Research Awards for Foreign Specialists from Science and Technology Agency (STA) of Japan and the Award for the Telecommunications Advancement Research Fellowship from Telecommunication Advancement Organization (TAO) of Japan in 1995.  
Dr. Niu is a fellow of the IEICE, a senior member of the IEEE, Director of Asia-Pacific Board of IEEE Communication Society, and council member of Chinese Institute of Electronics.