Thanos Stouraitis
Dear Members of IEEE Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society,
Please accept my greetings and best wishes for the New Year. 2012 marks 40 years since the naming of IEEE Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society as such and 61 years since the founding of its predecessor, the IRE Professional Group on Circuit Theory. CASS has gone through more than half a century of evolution that was recently marked by two important developments at its governance level: the introduction of a new position in the CASS Executive Committee, namely that of the Vice President for Regional Activities and Membership, and the extension of the presidency duration to two years. The first change emphasizes the strong will of CASS leadership to focus on finding ways to better serve CAS Society members at the local and global level, while the second creates a time cushion that allows the leadership of our Society for better planning and organizing of initiatives and actions developed during a presidency, as well as enhanced presence of the society at the IEEE level of activities.
The dedication, inspired vision, and exellent organizational skills of my predecessors, most notably the most recent ones, Gianluca Setti and Mani Soma, will be hard to match. I am grateful to both of them for what they have done for our Society and for sparing no effort in helping me prepare for this two-year adventure. During their presidencies and following the steps of our previous leaders, they created the opportunities for operating today in an environment that is conducive to the birth and implementation of initiatives that aim at serving our members in new and exciting ways. In this environment, our highly skilled volunteers, who serve on the current Board of Governors and Executive Committee of CASS, are dedicated to the needs of the members of the Society. I welcome our five newly elected members of the BoG: Joos Vandewalle, Amara Amara, Yoshifumi Nishio, Eduardo da Silva and Raija Lehto; the last three serving for the first time. The Society’s executive office, headed by our Executive Director Heidi Zazza, provides the entire necessary infrastructure as well as a smooth interface with IEEE operations. Together, volunteers and staff, we will try to enhance the operations of our Society and better serve its members. I thank them all for their continued efforts and dedication.
Although many IEEE Societies still struggle with this issue, previous efforts of the BoG have halted the reduction of the membership of CASS and stabilized it at about ten thousand. I encourage our members to take advantage of important recent Society offerings, like the free electronic access to proceedings of CASS-sponsored conferences, the CASS discount for the ISCAS registration fee, the option to purchase electronic access to all CAS publications, the CASS Student Scholarships, the member e-newsletter, etc. It will be the task of the current leadership to retain our members and attract more, by improving our communication with them and providing enhanced opportunities for technical excellence, continuing education, and networking. Our new website will be used as an advanced instrument for preserving our history, facilitating communication, and supporting our day-to-day operations, ranging from publications to conferences, and all those activities that keep our members interested and satisfied partners in CASS. We will explore new ways (including electronic social networks) to communicate more directly and efficiently with our members.
We must constantly review and examine all the products and services we offer to our membership. An electronic survey of our members was organized last year and our community responded with evaluations, remarks, and suggestions for our activities and operations. These responses are currently considered as a basis for actions. Additionally, an effort has begun, at the Board of Governors level, to identify the vision of CASS in a way that best recognizes the multi-disciplinary interests of our members. It will be our task to see that both these efforts are culminated by initiatives that best serve our members’ needs.
Within the next two years, CASS will undergo a Society review by IEEE, with CASS publications reviewed first. Preparing for this review will be a great opportunity to examine our whole organization and identify our strenghts, weaknesses, and opportunities.
We continuously try to improve the quality of our publications and conferences through the hard work of our volunteers who develop and organize them. Our recent ventures, like the JETCAS journal as well as the CASFEST conference, aspire to be established as important vehicles for providing coverage of emerging technical fields, which have always been close to the heart of our Society. We should use the diversity of our Society and we should lead through the continued embracing of emerging topics. The Society should search for strategies to address the impact on both its publications and the need for lifelong learning of technology-driven changes, like the open journal access movement, the popularity of e-learning, the acceptance of podcasts, webinars, etc. It should seek more efficient and economical ways of delivering CASS publications to our members.
In a constantly changing landscape, CASS must focus on staying competitive and avoiding obsolescence by creating new partnerships and cooperation with other entities, inside and outside IEEE. We will build upon our existing relationships with other societies and councils and will develop new ones to improve our products and enhance our presence.
For many years, we have been talking about increased industry involvement in CASS activities, as the kind of inoculation that helps elevate our activities to a higher level and shelter us from the tribulations of turbulent times. We will explore whether an Industry Advisory Board could help us in this direction.
In addition to serving our Graduate of the Last Decade (GOLD) members, several ideas float around our BoG members on how to better serve our students, in terms of building their careers, through the publication of internship and co-op opportunities, mentoring services, as well as discussion forums that enable students to interact with other students across the planet. We will explore these ideas as well as ideas for helping already-graduated CASS members.
I encourage you to get involved in the operations of this friendly and welcoming Society, through its technical committees, its local chapter activities, summer schools, our Outreach Initiative actions, the Distinguished Lecture program, organization of workshops, special sessions, tutorials, our Women in CAS (WiCAS) and the GoLD activities.
I encourage you to let me know of any ideas and suggestions you may have for the improvement of the Society.
Thank you.
Thanos
Past Messages
Past President’s Message – 2011
President’s Message – 2011
Quarterly Message – 2010
President’s Message – 2008
President’s Message – 2007: Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Annual Report
I would like to thank the Board of Governors for…