March 1997

Greetings from the New Editor

By Byeong Gi Lee, Editor

It is my great honor to serve as the new Editor of the IEEE Global Communications Newsletter (GCN). The GCN is now in its third year, and due to the efforts of the first Editor, Andrzej Jajszczyk, it now has a solid foundation. I appreciate Andrzej's dedicated services and would like to ask for his continued support for the GCN.
The GCN is an important and convenient news medium for all ComSoc members to globally exchange news and information on all communications communities worldwide. It can also help to disseminate information on ComSoc policies and decisions to members, and to get feedback from them so that their opinions may be reflected in future policies and decisions. As the new Editor of the GCN in this developing stage, I would like to further develop it so that it can better fulfill these two basic functions.
To that end, I plan to diversify the GCN articles such that regional local news get balanced with regional office news and ComSoc office reports. Specifically, the GCN will continue to publish local correspondents' reports and Chapters' reports as before, but at the same time will allocate space for Sister Societies, ComSoc regional offices, ComSoc regional committees, and the International Activity Council (IAC). In addition, I plan to allocate columns for the International Conference Policy Board (ICPB), Technical Activity Council (TAC), Publications Board, and other ComSoc officers. Furthermore, I plan to secure space for ComSoc members' feedback, though how to implement it is yet to be determined.
This plan has the effect of opening and expanding participation in the GCN to all ComSoc members and officers, not limited to correspondents. Each ComSoc member will learn from the GCN what's new in each national society, regional office, and regional committee, and what's decided by each council, board and committee of ComSoc, and also have the opportunity to provide feedback on their decisions. This type of open forum will encourage much more active participation of members in ComSoc activities and stimulate collaboration among all members, globally.
A rough sketch of a GCN space allocation plan that could possibly incorporate the above ideas is as follows: Among four total pages of the GCN, monthly, half to a full page will be allocated for the regional local news reported by the GCN correspondents; half a page for two regional offices (Brussel Office and Singapore Office); half a page for three regional committees (EAMEC, LAC, APC) and IAC; half a page for Communications Chapters, eight Sister Societies and members' feedback; one and a half pages for ICPB, TAC, Publications Board, and other ComSoc officers.
In the cases of the ICPB, TAC, and Publications Board, each board/council member may take turns writing an article every month, thus yielding a monthly contribution from each board/council. This arrangement enables the GCN to introduce the activity and/or the status of each conference, technical committee and journal/transactions/magazine effectively, as each member in those boards/councils corresponds to a chair/director of a smaller sized committee/board, a TC chair, or a journal/transactions/magazine editor.
For this development plan to be successful, the active participation and interest of all ComSoc members is essential. Especially, timely contributions from all GCN correspondents, regional offices, regional committee chairs, and members of IAC, ICPB, TAC, and Publications Board, who are supposed to provide reports and articles, are crucial. I hope all members will actively participate in continuously developing the GCN, and would welcome any comments or other ideas that would advance the GCN. I appreciate your support in advance.
Finally, I would like to introduce Associate Editor Professor Saewoong Bahk of Seoul National University. Professor Bahk will share the editorial work with me, taking responsibility for collecting and editing GCN articles. Please support him by promptly responding whenever you are requested to contribute articles.

The Global Meetings and Conferences Department

By Doug Zuckerman, Director of Meetings and Conferences

Several years ago, then-ComSoc President Maurizio Decina coined the phrase "The Global Communications Society," highlighting our Society's thrust into the next Millennium. Every facet of our Society's activities, from membership development to publications and conferences, continues to be driven by this vision of a truly "global" Communications Society. Though many conferences and workshops are already being undertaken on a global scale, discussions at the January IEEE ComSoc Management Retreat reaffirmed this commitment and encouraged even more initiatives for our global professional community. How can we work together to make this happen?
The Society already has in place the basic structure for continued progress. The focal point is the International Conference Policy Board (ICPB), chaired by the Director of Meetings and Conferences. (The volunteer-based ICPB plus headquarters-based paid staff make up the Department of Meetings and Conferences.) The ICPB consists of the following "boards":

Geographic Conference Boards - to ensure diversity in participation and venues from the Americas (North and Latin America), Europe-Africa-Middle East, and Asia Pacific regions.
Major Conference Boards - to ensure continuity, select sites, and seek volunteers for established major conferences such as GLOBECOM/ICC, INFOCOM, and MILCOM.
Directed Growth Conference Board - to identify new events in hot technical areas and nurture their growth into conferences of keen interest and importance to our community.
Session/Product Development Boards - to make sure participants' networking and educational needs are met by high-quality program elements, such as tutorials, technical sessions, miniconferences, and vendor exhibits.

Last but not least, the Vice President of International Affairs is a key member of the ICPB.
Getting back to the Retreat, several good suggestions were made by Lin-Shan Lee, the VP of International Affairs, and others to bolster our progress toward site and participant diversity. Impediments to this have been lack of site selection criteria and unawareness that conferences were seeking future sites. We can expect improvement in these two areas through development of such criteria by the conference boards (if not already available) and proactive involvement of the Geographic Conference Boards in advertising future conference site opportunities and overseeing results.
Another idea was to include more international colleagues on our conference organizing/program committees, as session chairs, paper reviewers, and of course as presenters. Much of this is a matter of specific conferences reaching out to our colleagues. Again, the Geographic Conference Boards can play an important role in letting both conferences and individuals know of opportunities to participate. And for this and the site diversity initiatives, we can call upon Sister Societies and local Chapters to help as well.
The Meetings and Conferences infrastructure is already in place to facilitate the above two initiatives. However, new infrastructure will be needed to widely implement the next one: remote participation at conferences. We have already seen multicasting experiments at INFOCOMs and at the GLOBECOM 1996 Global Internet Miniconference in London, using MBone and the Japanese "Software Vision" product. Steps have already begun toward seeing how we may extend this to things like post-conference virtual panel discussions. Success may lead to "ComSoc Virtual Meetings" that will even more firmly establish a sense of global community for the Global Communications Society.
If you would like to get more involved in our global conference activities, a good starting point would be to contact one of your Geographic Conference Board directors:
North and Latin America: Bruno Vianna (brunosv@cpqd.br)
Europe-Africa-Middle East: Horst Bessai (bessai@nue.et-inf.uni-siegen.de)
Asia-Pacific: Tomonori Aoyama (tomonori@exa.onlab.ntt.jp)
I look forward to your support and participation in these and other activities of our Society's Global Meetings and Conferences Department!

The IEEE ComSoc Singapore Office

By Fanny Su Beh Noi

As of January 1, 1997, the IEEE Asia Pacific Customer Service Centre (which also functions as the IEEE Communications Society Office located in Singapore) will be renamed the IEEE Asia Pacific Operations Centre.
The renaming will be in line with the scope of work this office now encompasses, which has expanded beyond its orignal setup as a customer service centre, and will be consistent with the name of the other non-U.S. office, the European Operations Centre located in Brussels.
As the IEEE Communications Society Office, our focus for 1997 will be increased interaction and coordination with our volunteers, and participation in Communications Society events in the Asia Pacific Region.
We are currently coordinating a Distinguished Lecture Tour by Prof. David Goodman to all five Communications Society chapters in Australia. An abstract of the two-hour talk by Prof. Goodman follows.

Personal Communications in 2010
David J. Goodman, Rutgers University WINLAB
dgoodman@winlab.rutgers.edu
Although telephone networks incorporate sophisticated information technology, the telephones that we use at home and at work have changed very little in the last 60 years. Computers are the opposite. While the telephones on our desks are primitive information devices, our PCs are extremely advanced. The situation will change drastically over the next 13 years. After a century of stately evolution, telephones and telephone networks will experience a massive paradigm shift.
In 1997, the seeds of change are germinating in the domain of PCS, which eventually will unite telephone and computer communications. While everyone agrees that the first two letters of PCS stand for personal communications, the S has six meanings which together reflect the high volume of PCS activity in technical, government, and business domains. The six dimensions of PCS are: services, systems, sets, spectrum, standards, and subscribers. Each dimension is highly complex, and they all influence each other.
This talk discusses the status of PCS in 1997 and describes work in progress to create the technology that will deliver to people the advanced information services of the next century.

If you require further information regarding rhe Distinguished Lecture Tour of Prof. Goodman, please contact us at ieeeapo@technet.sg.
We will also be setting up a table/booth at INFOCOM '97 (April 9-11) to be held in Kobe, Japan, to service member and publication enquiries. Please do drop by to see us if you are attending.

The Technical Committees and the Technical Affairs Council

By Nim K. Cheung, Vice President of Technical Affairs

The IEEE Communications Society is a diverse group of professionals with a common interest in advancing science, engineering, technology, and applications in the expanding field of communications. The definition and implementation of the technical directions of the Society is carried out by different technical committees. Membership of the technical committees is open to all. The number of members on each committee varies from 20 to 600. The technical committees are important elements of the Society, and all members are invited - and encouraged - to participate in one or more of these committees.
The technical committees are networks of professionals with similar interests in different areas of communications. They usually meet twice each year at major conferences, but a lot of business is conducted via e-mail and Web pages nowadays. The committees provide subject matter experts to support major conferences and organize workshops in specialty areas. They contribute editors and advisors to the publications, assist in the selection of fellows and distinguished lecturers, and help to sponsor educational activities for members and the industry at large.
There are presently 21 technical committees. The chairs of these committees together constitutes a body called the Technical Affairs Council (TAC) which is chaired by the Vice President of Technical Affairs. The council meets twice a year at ICC and GLOBECOM, and is responsible for setting the overall policies and directions of the technical committees. Since the field of communications is constantly evolving, new committees on emerging "hot" technologies will continue to be created, and older committees may be combined or discontinued. The following is the current list of the TAC members and their associated technical committees:
Technical Affairs Council
Chair: Nim Cheung
nkc@bellcore.com
Secretary
Edmundo A. de Souza e Silva
edmundo@nce.ufrj.br
Staff Liaison for VP-Technical Affairs
Diane DeMarzo
d.demarzo@ieee.org
Technical Committees/Chair
Cable-Based Delivery and Access Systems/Jack Terry
jack_terry@nt.com
Communications Software/Masaichi Kajiwara
kajiwara@stf.mac.omron.co.jp"
Communications Switching/Bijan Jabbari
bjabbari@gmu.edu
Communications Systems Integration and Modeling/Guy Omidyar
gomidyar@tsmi.iitri.com
Communications Theory/Peter J. McLane
mclanep@qucdnee.ee.queensu.ca
Computer Communications/Tatsuya Suda
suda@ics.uci.edu
Enterprise Networking/Roberto Saracco
Roberto.Saracco@cselt.stet.it
Gigabit Networking/James Sterbenz
jpgs@ieee.org
Information Infrastructure/Veli Sahin
sahinv@rss.dl.nec.com
Interconnections in High Speed Digital Systems/Michael W. Hanley
mhaney@bass.gmu.edu
Internet/Henning Schulzrinne and Lixia Zhang
schulzrinne@cs.columbia.edu and lixia@cs.ucla.edu
Multimedia Communications/Jeffrey Derby
jhderby@vnet.ibm.com
Network Operations and Management/Shri K. Goyal
goyal@gte.com
Personal Communications/Justin C-I Chuang
justin@research.att.com
Quality Assurance Management/Ray Bonelli
rjb@nwwpa.lucent.com
Radio Communications/Martin Meyers
mm@whamg.att.com
Satellite and Space Communications/Satchandi Verma
Satchandi_Verma-P27555@email.mot.com
Signal Processing and Communications Electronics/Trevor Clarkson
tgc@kcl.ac.uk
Signal Processing and Storage/Jaekyun Moon
moon@umn.edu
Tactical Communications/Kenneth C. Young, Jr.
kcy@bellcore.com
Transmission, Access, and Optical Systems/Steve Gorshe
steveg@tdd.hbo.nec.com

The following are the major goals of the Technical Affairs Council in 1997:

Continue to develop strong technical committee roles in shaping the technical programs of major conferences.
Plug in and play a proactive role in emerging "hot" technologies.
Formulate and implement plans for each technical committee to become an "information gateway."
Work with ComSoc's Meetings and Conferences Department to develop new forms of electronic conferences to serve global members.
Continue to attract student members and leaders in emerging technologies at ComSoc activities.

In the following issues of the Global Communications Newsletter, we will report TAC's progress in the above areas, and will ask each technical committee to take turns introducing their committee and highlighting their activities. Each technical committee has a web page at the ComSoc web site under the section "Technical Committees" (http:/www.comsoc.org). In each Web page, you can find the names and addresses of the officers of each committee, the charter of the committee, and a description of their recent activities (e.g., the conferences they sponsor).
Finally, I urge all ComSoc members to sign up for one or more technical committees that interest them and play an active role in shaping the progress in these technical areas. Please come to the meetings of the technical committees next time you attend a major ComSoc conference; they are open to all. For faraway members who are unable to attend the committee meetings in person, please visit the Web pages of each committee to learn about what's going on, and participate in and contribute to the technical activities via the Internet!

The IEEE ComSoc Brussels Office

By Jacques Kevers

Everything started when the IEEE Computer Society opened its Brussels office in 1985. The objective was to enable regional people to join, subscribe, get CS Press publications much faster than previously, and make payments in local currencies. The office staff also represented the Society by operating publication and membership tables at conferences held in Region 8, and assisting local committees with the organization of such conferences and workshops.
In 1990, the Society added staff to support the European operations of the IEEE Technical Activities Department (TAD). Since its inception, the office has sold CS Press books, generating more than $2.2 million, and TAD products, generating more than $730,000.
Finally, the IEEE Board of Directors elected to take over TAD European Operations and to create an office designed to serve all IEEE members. In January 1994, the IEEE European Operations Centre was opened. It is now a joint office of the IEEE, the IEEE Computer Society, and the IEEE Communications Society.
The mission of the IEEE non-U.S. offices was defined as follows:

Promote the IEEE's presence worldwide
Provide high-quality service to IEEE and Society members
Promote member participation in local volunteer activities
Increase IEEE and Society memberships in local countries
Develop IEEE cooperation with national societies
Ensure timely delivery of cost-effective products and services around the world

In order to allow the Brussels office to efficiently provide membership services, it was decided to connect the office directly to IEEE's central databases. A frame relay computer connection was set up in December 1995, and the necessary training sessions were accomplished in January 1996.
This on-line access to members' records in Piscataway allowed for major enhancements in services provided from Brussels. The system is currently being used for answering membership status and product price/availability inquiries, making address changes, and triggering shipment of replacement copies for missing periodicals.
Both Headquarters and Brussels staff continue to develop further plans, and are currently undertaking pilot projects where the frame relay connection will be used for actually processing online membership applications and service changes, as well as books orders.
More details about these pilots and about specific ComSoc activities will be given in our next article. In the meantime, we are looking forward to receive any comments or suggestions from Region 8 Communication Society members. Contact details for the office are as follows:
IEEE Communications Society
European Operations Centre
13 Avenue de l'Aquilon
B-1200 Brussels
Manager: Jacques Kevers
Phone: +32-2-770-6634
Fax: +32-2-770-8505
E-mail: memservice-europe@ieee.org

The Seventh IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC '96)

By Chi-chao Chao, Taiwan

The Seventh IEEE International Symposium on Personal, Indoor, and Mobile Radio Communications (PIMRC '96) was held at the Taipei International Convention Center, Taipei, Taiwan, ROC, October 15-18, 1996, which was the first major IEEE Communications Society conference ever to take place in Taiwan. More than 550 participants from 29 countries all over the world attended this event.
The excellent location, fine weather, stimulating atmosphere, and solid technical program made PIMRC '96 a success. The three-volume proceedings contain more than 1200 pages, and extra copies can be obtained by contacting
Ms. Kitty Lin
Institute of Information Science, Academia Sinica
Nankang, Taipei
Taiwan 115, ROC
Fax: +886-2-782-4814
E-mail: kitty@iis.sinica.edu.tw
The cost is NT$2000 (US$76) for each copy.