Alberta Dawson
Larsen
NPSS Secretary
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Alberta Dawson |
The IEEE NPSS AdCom met on October 21, 2000 at the Lyon Hilton, Lyon, France for its very first meeting in a venue outside North America. As the Annual Meeting has been held historically in conjunction with the NSS/MIC, and since this was the very first NSS/MIC held in Europe, AdCom adhered to its usual schedule and discovered not only an outstanding NSS/MIC conference (kudos to Patrick leDû and his staff), but also a conference with a mind-boggling increase in attendance - about 1200 participants – after several years of static or declining attendance. Ponder this! A transnational IEEE is real.
Ed Lampo, Society treasurer, announced that all conferences held in the US are now to use IEEE’s consolidated banking services. Conference treasurers, chairs, and TC chairs, please discuss this with Ed for guidance (e.lampo@ieee.org). Ed noted that publication delays are impacting conference returns. He also noted that the stock market drops over the last few months have impacted our financial picture, as have increased publication costs.
Igor Alexeff, our outgoing president, presented his final report to AdCom. He noted that Mike Vannier will stand for an unprecedented third term as editor-in-chief of the Transactions on Medical Imaging (TMI), following a letter of agreement signed by presidents of all four societies involved with TMI. He announced that Osamu Ishihara is assuming the post of Fellow Committee chair, replacing John Walter who has served long and well in that position, and Dick Kouzes as our Web master. Dick will work with Ken Connor on improving our web site and keeping it up-to-date. Peter Clout will head a new Communications Committee that will consolidate our web and other outward-facing efforts. Thank you, Igor, for your leadership and service over the past two years.
Tom Kozlowski reported that the 1999 Real Time conference has closed, returning a surplus to NPSS coffers. The 2001 conference plans are well under way. The conference will be held in Valencia, Spain in June. Antonio Ferrer is the chair. Tom’s term as CANPS chair has also come to an end. Christian Boulin of EMBL, Heidelberg, will take over. Many thanks, too, to Tom, who has been a consistent, visible, and reliable leader of CANPS.
Rich Callis, the elected AdCom member for fusion reported, in Dick Foley’s absence, that the standing committee had met at the ANS meeting, and that plans for the 2001 conference were moving toward finalization. There had been setbacks caused by interpretation of DOE Order 110.3 that has since been modified. The conference will be held in Atlantic City, NJ with Phil Heitzenroeder of PPPL as chair. The 2003 conference will be in northern California with Dick Foley as chair. Site selection is in process.
Lou Costrell and Ron Keyser reported on the continuing effort to update and renew NPSS standards. This is a major task, and NPSS is responsible for many more standards than most other societies. Lou, Ron, Bill Bugg and the others who do this work are really unsung heroes of NPSS.
Joel Karp, chair of NMIS, noted that Ron Jaszczak had been elected vice chair. He also noted that NMIS supports a third term for Mike Vannier as TMI editor-in-chief. During this next year MIC will increase its involvement in the NSS/MIC joint conference, especially in site selection and selection of the general chair for the combined conferences. This is certainly appropriate since MIC is assuming the role of the proverbial dog’s tail.
Matt Allen reported that the governance of PAC continues to be an issue. PAC first met in 1965, organized exclusively by IEEE NPSS, with a conference rotation from eastern to central to western USA. It wasn’t until 1993 that the APS proposed joint sponsorship of PAC and not until 1995 that the first jointly sponsored PAC was held. The conference has to follow IEEE financial guidelines. Some question arose about this when DOE Order 110.3 was issued and it looked as if there might be problems. A review of the MOU is proposed for a future date. Several people, including Bruce Brown of Fermilab are working to improve IEEE/APS relations. An ad hoc advisory committee will be appointed to review PAC01. Bruce Brown is working with APS to involve IEEE NPSS in the 2001 Snowmass meeting, a gathering of accelerator physicists who help set the future of the US accelerator physics program.
In Virginia Ayres’ absence, Igor Alexeff reported that ICOPS 2000 had an attendance of about 295. This was reduced from prior years and may be attributable to poor attention to marketing and to the close temporal proximity of a number of other meetings. Future ICOPS conferences: 2001 in Las Vegas together with Pulsed Power; 2002 in Banff, Alberta, Canada; 2003 in Seoul, Korea.
Edl Schamiloglu gave the Pulsed Power Science and Technology report in Peter Turchi’s absence. Pulsed Power will now have a biennial special edition of TPS. Their third special edition appears as the October 2000 issue. This had a very large number of contributions and a very high rejection rate. Hence the paper quality is very high. Planning for the 2001 joint meeting with ICOPS is well along. There will be an exhibit and an IEEE Press presence. The Technical Committee hopes to move to elected committee status and will present Constitution and Bylaws in time for a vote at the March AdCom meeting. There has been controversy over the name of the Irwin Marks award. This is being studied for a future decision on whether to rename the award.
Dale Platteter, the Radiation Effects chair, noted that the NSREC in Reno had slightly lower attendance than the previous year. Registration was done on-line and there were more IEEE members registered than before. In 2001 a secure site for credit card use will be provided. Power Point slides projected from computers were used in almost 80% of the oral presentations. There is grave concern about getting the proceedings out in December. All materials were submitted to IEEE Pubs by their October 2 deadline. However it is unclear whether the publication schedule will be met. Conference finances are in order and the conference will close in a timely fashion.
Glenn Knoll reported that the Radiation Instrumentation Technical Committee is a young organization, with much of the “formalizing” done by Bill Moses. They share responsibility for the NSS/MIC with NMIS and will work with Joel Karp and the NMIS committee to make the conference organization more balanced, with evenly shared responsibilities. Some RI steering committee members – Gary Alley, Erik Heijne, Ed Lampo, and Bill Moses – are at the end of their elected terms although Bill has one further year as past chairman. There was discussion of concentration banking for offshore conferences. This won’t work and isn’t required by IEEE. There is also a question of obtaining and using grants from US funding agencies. Tony Lavietes noted that all is going well in planning for the 2001 NSS/MIC in San Diego, but there will be some rethinking of several areas based on the 2000 conference. Grant Smith is the NSS program chair and Ben Tsui is the MIC program chair. The week prior to NSS/MIC there will be a 3-D Medical Imaging Conference in Monterey, chaired by Ron Huesman of LBNL. This is a conference that overlaps interest areas of NPSS and one to which we have provided technical cosponsorship. While this is a conference of less than 200, it may have some impact on NSS/MIC 2001 attendance. Normally this group meets in June so that conflict is avoided. Joel Karp will chair the 2002 conference to be held in Norfolk, VA. Hotel contracts have been signed off and planning goes forward. John Valentine is chair of the 2003 site selection committee. Prospective locations are Portland, OR, Salt Lake City, UT, and Colorado Springs, CO. Ralph James of Sandia will be the general chair. The RISC will come to AdCom with a proposal for an NSS award in March. Patrick le Dû reported on the 2000 conference. There were, at the time he spoke, almost 1300 registrants, of whom about 1000 were paid. Attendance distribution was ~30% from the US and Canada, ~20% from France, ~30% from the rest of western Europe, a few from eastern Europe, and the balance from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan. There was interest expressed by scientists from several African nations but funds were needed to support attendance. This was not found. However, this is important and an area where more attention should be given. About 22% of attendees were IEEE members, but about 50% had never been to an IEEE-sponsored conference in the past. About 15% of the attendees were students, and about 70 of these received some level of support. The MIC short courses were very well attended with over 70 registrants in each. One NSS short course was canceled while the other two had 15 and 35 attendees respectively. There were 57 exhibitors with 60 exhibit booths in total. The scientific program featured many overview talks and there was an effort to find topics that overlapped NSS and MIC interests. There were, because of the unexpected turnout, some hotel difficulties with people housed as far away as Grenoble (a total of 120 people were affected). However, this problem was fallout due to the conference’s overwhelming success! It is likely that there will be another European NSS/MIC, possibly in 2004 with Alberto del Guerra of the University of Pisa leading the organizing effort. One hopes that by the next European meeting the US government restrictions on travel will have been alleviated so that the US attendance is more in keeping with usual US participation levels.
The Meetings Policy Committee has been reorganized. Ray Larsen will be the chair, with Lou Costrell continuing as co-chair. The committee will continue its work on the NPSS Conference Policy document to bring this into closer alignment with IEEE’s meetings manual. There will be an effort to break the Guidelines into clearer sections for different members of each conference organizing committee. There will also be a section added on offshore conference management, and some more detail on what to watch for with hotel contracts. Ray will spearhead this. A liaison for European conferences will be added to the committee.
Peter Clout announced the Graduate Scholarship, Merit and Shea Award winners. See their photographs and biographies elsewhere in this Newsletter. The Phelps Award for Continuing Education has never been awarded. It has been reorganized so that Technical Committees that give short courses make these awards.
There is now a new French NPSS chapter and there is interest in the formation of an Italian chapter. Region 8 has seen major growth in the last few years, and these new chapters are a reflection of that. Combined society chapters seem to be stronger than single-society chapters, especially since many societies are decreasing in membership (only about 60% of IEEE members belong to a society). NPSS membership has been fairly stable, but the demographics have changed, with 40% of NPSS members located outside the United States. There are still issues of complicated application forms, misunderstood credentials and other membership deterrents that are under investigation with the hope of alleviating or eliminating these problems. Christian Boulin also pointed out that Europeans typically don’t join societies, so education is also needed, and the value of IEEE NPSS has to be proven.
For those sponsoring new Fellows, remember to highlight unique achievements that can be quantified with publications, leadership roles, other awards, and Fellow nominees, remember to ask referees whether they can write supportive fellow recommendation letters. If not, find other references! Remember, you don’t need to be a Fellow to nominate someone to elevation to Fellow, AND you, the nominee will need references from 5-8 Fellows. The person nominating an individual cannot write a recommendation so reserve those Fellow contacts for more valuable use.
Hal Flescher provided some background on the IEEE Finance situation. Hal is a member of the IEEE ad hoc Finance Restructuring Committee. He noted that IEEE dues have been stable for a number of years. For PINS dues are about 50% of those of the G8 countries. IEEE has a lot of electronic initiatives in place or in planning. They have been living on General Fund reserves that are not under control of the entities – that is, the societies and councils. As a result of these initiatives it looked as if the General Fund would be reduced to zero and IEEE would require financial restructuring. However, the stock market returns of the past few years saved the IEEE from having to go to societies and councils for operating funds in the last two or three years. This is changing, although they won’t know until April 2001 what the 2000 budget result is and whether or how much in the red they have landed. In order to support IEEE’s financial needs we will have to increase our income streams to pay the tax we can expect them to charge societies and councils. There has to be a mechanism developed that won’t kill society incentives to do well financially. Part of the current financial problem results from changes in income distribution a decade or more ago when it was decided that societies should see the income for their intellectual property – especially their publications. Prior to that most or all of the publication income went into the general fund. Fiscal changes have to be approved by 31 IEEE Directors. TAB, which produces about 98% of the income stream, only has 10 votes, so this is not simple. Also, while there has been some examination of expenses by TAB, not all IEEE boards have been conscientious about examining their expenditures and controlling spending. IEEE needs to operate under sound business practices. One hopes that these are being developed.
The Publications Committee met prior to the AdCom meeting. The largest issue is that of publication delays. There are many contributing factors. If material is submitted late, the place in the queue is lost. The development of software to handle publications electronically has been slow. There is a large personnel gap, with about 34% of key positions unfilled. There is also a good deal of confusion about what IEEE Pubs wants in formatting. Do they or don’t they want TIF files, for example. Can they read TIF files if they get them? There are also issues concerning the plan for no author proofs for conference records. Since equations and certain other materials are reset manually there is a significant opportunity for introducing errors. We hope to have a Pubs person visit AdCom to discuss some of these issues.
Ray Larsen, liaison to the Society for Social Implications of Technology, is also liaison to the On-line Engineering Ethics Center (see last Newsletter). He reports that activity continues to increase. There are some back room rumblings that IEEE might actually be positioning itself for more formal involvement with the Center. There are many of us who would like to see IEEE put some real muscle into its Code of Ethics, which seems only to be a rag doll with no backbone at all, with no dedicated and serious effort at enforcement ever since the Ethics Committee’s activities were eviscerated by the 3Ps and the Board a few years back. Some positive action would be laudatory.
The liaison to the R&D Policy Committee, Peter Winokur, reports that this committee operates under IEEE-USA. They support research activities in the national laboratories as well as in civilian and defense sectors. Over 50% of our national economic growth can be attributed to civilian and defense technology developments. The Committee prepares position and policy papers in various R&D areas. These can take anywhere for 6 months to one year to be approved. Once released some have a life span of up to 5 years.
The Sensors Council, with which NPSS has affiliated itself and to which Bill Moses is liaison, will publish the first edition of the sensors journal in June 2001. Dick Kouzes is an associate editor of this new journal. The Council will organize conferences in future. They have exhibits scheduled at Euro Sensor and the Sensors Expo.
Hal Flescher, the liaison to RADECS, the French Radiation Effects and Components conference that started in the late 1970s, reports that this conference is fairly international now, and has close ties to NPSS through technical co-sponsorship of the conference and publication of their conference record. This conference has about 150 attendees. Might its future and that of NSREC have some common ground? Something to ponder.
There was considerable further discussion of NPSS involvement with Snowmass, the HEP Summer Studies program sponsored jointly by APS DPF and APS DPB that occurs approximately every 5 years. It has been proposed that we provide something akin to a “Technology School” with one-day programs on various aspects of accelerator technology such as accelerators, detectors, instrumentation, particle identification and vision for the future of technology related to HEP. Bruce Brown of FNAL is heading this effort, with a committee to assist him. The AdCom moved to support this effort financially.
The issue of proxies was readdressed. The guideline is that proxies with constitutionally allowed authority would be permitted. So, for example, any NPSS technical Committee that operates under a Constitution and Bylaws could define proxies for the TC chairs in their Constitution.
AdCom Actions:
The next meeting of the NPSS AdCom will be held on March 3, 2001 at the Governor Calvert Inn, Annapolis, MD.
Respectfully submitted,
Albe Larsen
Albe Dawson Larsen, the NPSS Secretary, can be reached at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, P.O. Box 4939, Stanford, CA 94309; Phone +1 650 926-2748; Fax: +1 650 926-5124; E-mail: a.dawson@ieee.org