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Publications

To Better Serve and Grow the ComSoc Community

Sherman Shen

Xuemin (Sherman) Shen

Past President

2024

It is a great honor and privilege for me to serve as the President of IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) in 2022–2023. IEEE ComSoc is a global professional organization that has been creating cutting-edge communications and networking technologies through its high-quality publications, premier conferences, technology standards, educational activities, and membership development. However, we face many new challenges in this era of rapid changes, especially due to the current Covid-19 pandemic. As President, I strive to build upon the outstanding achievements of our past presidents, volunteer leaders, supporting staff, and members to make IEEE ComSoc stronger and to better serve our members. In the next two years, I will work with the ComSoc leadership team to:

  • Increase membership benefits and satisfaction
  • Recognize achievements and contributions of our members, and provide strong mentorship to our junior members and get them involved in technical activities to benefit their career progression and professional development
  • Promote diversity and inclusion in our leadership and volunteer positions, and tackle the under-representation of various geographical regions in our membership base
  • Enhance ComSoc’s leading role in telecommunications by promoting the excellence of our periodicals, conferences, and online content
  • Develop new programs for emerging technologies while encouraging participation from all stakeholders, especially junior researchers and engineers
  • Intensify industry participation in our diverse technical activities, standards, and practices, and in local chapters for networking
  • Enhance governance accountability and transparency
  • Gain a stronger position within IEEE by enhancing cooperation with other societies and councils
  • Develop cost effective strategies to improve ComSoc financial performance and reduce service cost to our members, while increasing service quality and variety

We will achieve the above goals via the four pillars in ComSoc: membership development (led by Vice President Ana Garcia Armada), conferences (led by Vice President Nelson Fonseca), publications (led by Vice President Chengshan Xiao), and technical and educational activities (led by Vice President Wei Zhang).

For membership development and global activities, we will improve services and benefits to our members in both industry and academia, and increase the perceived value of belonging to ComSoc. We will empower chapters by sharing ideas and best practices, and improving funding and support. One target performance measure is the membership increase and retention rates.

For conferences, we will create new activities of interest especially to industry members, introduce permanent activities oriented to students, improve the financial return and assurance of high technical standards, and develop new strategies for hybrid and remote conference platforms to effectively engage attendees and facilitate information exchanges in the post-pandemic era.

For publications, we will continue to enhance our publication portfolio in order to accommodate the extensive interest of our members in emerging technical areas. We will broaden open access and further strengthen the performance of all our journals and magazines, enhance diversity among the publication leadership team and volunteers, strengthen the integrity of the publication leadership team, and regulate service term limits. Furthermore, we will attract and recruit more early-career professionals and industry colleagues to get involved in journal and magazine Editorial Boards and the review process.

For technical and educational activities, we will revamp the ComSoc Technical Committee Newsletter to report news and activities of all our Technical Committees (TCs) and to brief on research advances in emerging technologies. We will establish an online TC recertification submission and review process, launch joint training and education programs with local institutions and student branches, engage industry members in ComSoc services and products, and launch standard seminars across all TCs in collaboration with IEEE Communications Standards Magazine.

I look forward to working closely with all of you in our endeavors to better serve and grow the community, especially to overcome the challenges in the current pandemic, and to take advantage of potential new opportunities in a post-pandemic world. Please feel free to drop me a note anytime if you have any ideas, comments, and suggestions. Thank you!

ComSoc Vice Presidents

Ana Garcia Armada

Ana Garcia Armada

Vice President, Member and Global Activities

Nelson Luis Saldanha da Fonseca, University of Campinas

Nelson Fonseca

Vice President, Conferences

Chengshan Xiao

Chengshan Xiao

Vice President, Conferences

Wei Zhang

Wei Zhang

Vice President, Technical and Educational Activities