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QUESTIONS & ANSWERS FOR COMSOC PRESIDENT-ELECT CANDIDATES 2010

The annual IEEE Communications Society elections will soon commence.  The result of this year's elections will fill the President-Elect position (as well as four Members-at-Large) on the Board of Governors.  Questions are being addressed to the four candidates running for position of President-Elect providing them an opportunity to answer questions that will better amplify their positions.

Q3a. What can ComSoc leadership do to increase the participation and engagement of industry in its publication, conference, and educational activities?

Sergio Benedetto

The disaffection of industry to ComSoc manifests itself in two main aspects: declining membership and reduced participation to ComSoc activities as “active” members. The first aspect has been already treated in the previous Q&As, so, even though I fully understand that the two are intimately intertwined, I will deal here only with the second, dividing my consideration to the three issues of the question, namely publications, conferences, and educational activities.

Publications: Increase the number of editors from industry in the editorial boards of our journals through a campaign of open calls that clarifies the objective of strengthening the “practical”, applied content of our journals and magazines by publishing high-quality papers presenting heuristics and trade-offs to find good-enough solutions to real-life problems (citation from a recent constructive message received from an industry member). Since we have received several constructive criticisms from industry members about the content of ComSoc publications, we could invite those members to actively contribute to a change.

Conferences: In our major flagship conferences, we have started already to include workshops and business panels aiming at attract a larger participation from industry; to push these initiatives further in the proper direction, it is crucial to have more industry members participating in the organization of conferences through the technical program committees and, also, taking part as members to our GITC Committee. Apart from ICC and GLOBECOM, we need to think of more industry-focused workshops/ conferences.

Educational Activities: We should be more proactive in inviting our expert members to propose/prepare tutorials and webinars more industry oriented. Again, the key is to have industry members involved in these activities.

Vijay Bhargava

This is an important question as practicing engineers constitute seventy percent of our membership. To increase their participation and engagement in ComSoc activities we first need to make our publication, conferences and educational material relevant to their jobs. We have been only partially successful in providing valuable services to this large segment of our membership.

Majority of our publications and conferences are dominated by academia. We need to develop a different model for our publications and technical conferences to increase participation and engagement of our industry in them. To accomplish this we must:

. Provide a fast track to publishing peer-reviewed articles from corporations. Many of them have position papers for contributions to standards and these can be refined and published for much wider dissemination via the IEEE Explore.

. Reserve a certain number of slots on our journals/magazines editorial boards and conference technical program committees for our practicing engineers from industry.

. There are several appointed positions on our Board of Governors. Reserving such appointments for members from industry will make our Board more balanced and will likely increase participation from industry.

. Provide a global forum for our industrial members across the globe through online personal access to expertise, products and services. Create an industry led committee for new and emerging technologies.

. Use the outstanding Communications Society’s Chapter infrastructure to provide networking opportunities hosted by the local industries that bring academic and industrial members together. Ensure that the Chapter establishes and maintains contact with local industries.

Harvey A. Freeman

Harvey Q3
 

 

Andrzej Jajszczyk

 The proper balance between the numbers of members coming from industry and academia is one of the key fundaments of IEEE Communications Society. Both groups build our strength and their members benefit from mutual exchange of information and experiences. As the changes in the industry have resulted in some decrease of interest in participating industry employees in ComSoc’s activities, it is of a great importance to reverse this negative trend. To achieve this, in my opinion, the ComSoc leadership should pursue the following actions:
1. Increase the practical engineering content in our magazines as well as achieve the proper balance between editors and authors from academia and industry. Work to assure better quality, proper scope, as well as timeliness and fairness of the review process in all our publications.
2. Widen the role of web-supported remote conferencing. Facilitate networking with the industry leaders at meetings and conferences.
3. Work to extend online access to industry resources, technical papers, high-quality tutorials, webcasts, white papers, and research reports.
4. Make the ComSoc more attractive to industry employees by strengthening our certification program that provides credentials in the areas most valued by current or potential employers. Extend and strengthen our standardization programs, allowing members to better influence this important area.