Secretary’s Report

The AdCom met in Tucson, Arizona on March 12th, following a meeting of the Communications Committee held on the afternoon of March 11th that was attended by a significant number of committee and AdCom members. New members Ilan Ben-Zvi, Chair - Particle Accelerator Science and Technology; Uwe Bratzler, Chair - Transnational Committee; Gerry Cooperstein, Chair - Pulsed Power TC; Chris Deeney, (PSAC); Ron Jaszczak, (NMIS); Dan Jobe, Chair – Plasma Science and Applications; and Jean Pierre Martin, Chair – CANPS were welcomed to the AdCom meeting by President Bill Moses.
Ed Lampo again exhorted conference chairs and treasurers to close their conferences promptly. In general, using IEEE Concentration Banking helps facilitate this process. Check it out. Several 2003 conferences are close to close out or are in audit. Most 2004 conferences are closing.
Neither TPS nor TNS came close enough to their page budget this year to earn an extra bonus. This has to be corrected especially since income from periodical sales is down significantly. Income from conferences is up just slightly. Overall, NPSS remains in good financial health.
Bill Moses gave the new members of AdCom an overview of IEEE and of NPSS. Much discussion focused on Open Access and how it will affect us. Certainly there must be a mechanism established to support the costs of maintaining and upgrading web sites, web links, indexing, formatting and myriad other expensive tasks that are needed to make Open Access possible. There is much work ahead to sort this out and it is likely to be expensive for us. There are many discussions going on in TAB and in IEEE Pubs to figure out what all this will mean. In the interim, IEEE has announced IEEE Enterprise, a scaled-down version of IEL allowing selection of a limited journal package for electronic access and a more flexible package of downloads.
Another IEEE initiative of interest is XELL, a program to make short courses available for sale. The production cost is very high at the moment so we have opted to wait and see how they do. We do offer some outstanding short courses at our conferences so we will keep an eye on XELL’s progress and will reassess our interest in involvement after they have some track record.
Conferences are IEEE’s second largest source of income. Although NPSS has done very well in terms of growth in conference attendance, that is not true across the Institute. Growth has been flat for a number of years. We continue to think of independent conferences that would benefit from IEEE’s umbrella and that would match our subject areas.
Bill announced some realignment of NPSS committee chairs. Peter Winokur has taken the reins of the Fellow Evaluation Committee from Ron Jaszczak, Charles Neumeyer has assumed responsibility for the Distinguished Lecturers program, and we continue to debate our relationship with the Students and Careers committee, the Sensors Council and the IEEE-USA R&D Policy committee. Is there anyone out there interested in the latter? Get in touch with Bill Moses!
Membership matters are under review and Jane Lehr will work on member recruitment and Charles Neumeyer will work on member services. Each will form committees to address these issues. Tony Lavietes has assumed the role of assistant treasurer with primary focus on conference budgets.
At the last TAB meeting our new Student Conference Paper Award was approved. This gives each conference the opportunity to offer two outstanding student paper awards and two honorable mentions. These are funded from individual conference budgets and it is at the discretion of the conference committee and overseeing Technical Committee whether or not to include them. For information on the award procedure, please contact me.

Technical Committee News:
All preparations for 2005 conferences are proceeding well. This year the RT2005 conference will be held in Stockholm, Sweden. A record number of abstracts has been received and it is expected that attendance will be good, barring the kinds of international incidents, including the Asian SARS outbreak that limited attendance in 2003.
The Symposium on Fusion Engineering will meet in Knoxville, TN in the fall, with Nermin Uckan as the General Chair and Dave Rasmussen as the program chair. Future SOFE conferences will collocate with ICOPS or the joint ICOPS Pulsed Power Conference. Should the ITER project move forward as hoped, one would expect to see growth in SOFE attendance over the next few years. For an ITER update, see Phil Heitzenroeder’s article below.
Plans for both the Medical Imaging Conference and the Nuclear Science Symposium are well in hand. Read Tom Lewellen’s article to learn about all the contingency planning. The 2006 meeting will be in San Diego, 2007 in Hawaii and 2008 in Germany. The chairs of the NMIS and RITC are working on their respective Bylaws to bring them into alignment. This will assist in streamlining the organization and management of this highly successful joint conference series. Joel Karp and Paul Kinahan are dealing with the review and editorial issues related to papers submitted for publication to TNS from the MIC.
This is also a year in which the Particle Accelerator Science and Technology Committee together with the APS Division of Particles and Beams hosts the PAC, which will be held in Knoxville, TN and will be over by the time you receive this. See the article under Awards, and look for a report on the conference’s successes in the September issue. The new PAST chair, Ilan Ben-Zvi, gave kudos to Bruce Brown for all his work in getting resolutions to many PAC issues including the use of JACoW for posting PAC papers, getting the digitization of PAC proceedings completed, increasing IEEE NPSS involvement in the PAC Organizing committee, working toward getting more senior members and Fellows among the accelerator science and technology members of IEEE, getting visible articles into the Newsletter, and so on. Bruce continues to contribute generously. This year the Proceedings will be distributed on CD-ROM with paper copies available from IEEE. There will be several special events in honor of the World Year of Physics celebrating the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. PAC07, Stan Schriber, chair, will be held in Albuquerque contiguous to the PPST.
The Plasma Sciences and Applications Technical Committee has revised its Constitution and Bylaws. Look at them in the section on Technical Committee reports. The 2004 conference has closed. The 2005 conference, to be held in Monterey this June 20 to 23, has received ~480 abstracts, somewhat lower than last year. There will be a minicourse on Z-pinches. The 2006 conference will be held in Traverse City, MI with Jess Asmussen as general chair.
The ICOPS will be preceded by both the June AdCom meeting and then the Pulsed Power conference in the same venue, starting on 13 June through 17 June. In 2006 there will be a Megagauss Conference cosponsored by NPSS in Santa Fe, NM. These conferences meet as the Pulsed Power Plasma Science Conference in Albuquerque in 2007.
The next NSREC conference will be held in Seattle in July. See the cover story if you managed to miss it! Conferences are in the planning stage through 2008 and the chairperson for 2009 will be selected in Seattle. The conference is now using IEEE’s Manuscript Central to manage papers reviewed for TNS. This year’s issue of TNS containing submitted 2004 NSREC papers scheduled for December made it out on time. This is critical for NSREC since the committee uses the journal as part of its review process for selection of the next year’s papers.
Craig Woody, chair of the Radiation Instrumentation TC, noted that Homeland Security is a growing field and that there will be a short course on this subject at the NSS in October. This is a new subject to add to the NSS arsenal.
Uwe Bratzler reports that the activities of the Transnational committee include chapter development, supporting non-North American conference locations, encouraging IEEE NPSS awards to non-US citizens, encouraging NPSS membership and dealing with problems of international membership such as clarifying what various institutions are, and recognizing their status appropriately. Communications across many time zones is nontrivial but must be dealt with to include all regions. The CIP (Conference Information and Promotion Committee) works in parallel with the Transnational committee. It was started to provide support for the Lyon meeting with a group of somewhat younger, enthusiastic people and has grown now to about 50 members worldwide. They have a luncheon at the NSS/MIC conference annually, and they are rather more informal than the Transnational Committee.

Other Committees and Liaisons
The Conference Policy Committee continues to gather and publish on the web, information about upcoming conferences. If you know of a conference that is not listed and should be, contact Ray Larsen to make sure the list is updated (larsen@slac.stanford.edu).
The Awards committee is responsible for awarding the seven Society awards as well as keeping track of the individual TC awards. Very few nominations for 2005 awards have been received as this newsletter goes to press (although the deadline has not yet passed). Read Igor’s article below and send in nominations for 2006. It is not too early. We all have deserving colleagues eligible for these Society awards. And we have new awards, just approved by TAB. These are conference Best Student Paper awards. Each conference sponsored by NPSS may include these awards in its budget (at the conference management’s discretion). Two awards of $500 and a certificate each, and two honorable mention certificates are allowed at each conference.
The Membership and Chapters committee reported that U.S. membership in IEEE is down to about 60% while the international membership has climbed to 40%. This is a 6% change for each. Chapters are somewhat strange. They are formed from societies but then come under the aegis of RAB, the regional activities board. Perhaps that is one of the reasons we give them such a low level of support! Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
The Fellows Evaluation Committee report appears below. NPSS has always done a good job in evaluating Fellow candidates, which means that they are honest and realistic in their rankings and the Society is successful. There is a new Fellows category for Applications Engineers and Practitioners to try to encourage more Fellows from industry.
The report of the Nominations committee includes the report on the survey which follows this report. Five AdCom members will be elected in the fall to bring the complement of elected AdCom members back to 16. They will be from Pulsed Power, Radiation Effects, Plasma Science and Applications, Computer Applications in Nuclear and Plasma Sciences and Radiation Instrumentation. If you have ideas for good candidates let either your TC chair or Peter Winokur know.
Paul Dressendorfer announced some Publications Committee changes. For TNS, Joel Karp will take the lead as MIC editor with 5 associates. Zane Bell will be the NSS lead with 16 associates, Jean-Pierre Dufay will be Real Time editor and John Pressler will be lead NSREC editor with two associates. They will start to use MS Central for the 2005 NSREC papers. IEEE is starting to digitize its early journals. TNS started in 1953 and TPS in 1973. Do you have old copies collecting dust somewhere? Why not see if IEEE could use them? They also need the IRE journals for those early years. The TPS special edition “Images in Plasma Sciences” should have a budget included within the Publications budget. TMI, for which we are one of four sponsors, did well in 2004 and came in within the 5% of its page budget so was eligible for a bonus.
See the Communications Committee Report for details about the new brochure and flyers. Remember to request them from Peter Clout (clout@vista-control.com) for your conferences, well in advance of the date needed. The display booth also continues to be available on request.
The liaison to the Social Implications of Technology committee noted that in the 1970s and 1980s we worried about the social values and impacts of technology changes, the development of third world appropriate technologies and so on. The SSIT journal is good and has some compelling articles. The ethics activities of IEEE, despite the strong code of ethics that each member acknowledges at membership renewal each year, is timid and trivial. The independent Online Center for Engineering Ethics in Engineering and Science works hard to provide on-line help to people in need. Most cases involve faculty publishing grad student ideas and work without proper credit, and the problems of line engineers finding unsafe equipment and bringing it to management attention without resolution by management. Your editor wonders why so many corporations would rather pay big legal fees than pay for safety-motivated design changes.
Standards need updating and reaffirmation. NIM and CAMAC are up for reaffirmation and there should be a new vote soon.
Is anyone out here interested in becoming our liaison to the IEEE-USA R&D Policy Committee? Let Bill Moses know at wwmoses@lbl.gov.

Unfinished Business
Membership issues continue to be studied. It is becoming more and more obvious that each TC has to have a liaison to the membership committee and that they have to begin the management of recruiting at their own conferences. There will be a membership retreat in Piscataway that Jane Lehr will attend. This issue is ongoing.
We have applied to have the Transactions on Nuclear Science included in Index Medicus. If we are rejected, then we will apply again.

AdCom Actions

• It was moved, seconded and passed that AdCom would pay the extra charges for the TPS special issue, “Images of Plasma Science.”
  
• It was moved, seconded and passed that IEEE NPSS technically cosponsor the 2006 Power Modulator Conference.
  
• It was moved, seconded and passed that AdCom accept the changes to the PSAC Bylaws. Please see the article on these changes and the new C&B under Technical Committee Reports.
  
• It was moved that IEEE NPSS cosponsor the Imaging Technologies for Biomedical Sciences 2005. The motion was unanimously opposed.
  
• It was moved, seconded and passed that the Cyclotron Conference papers be scanned and posted on the JACoW web site. This has been approved by the copyright office and no expenses will be incurred by NPSS.
  
• It was moved, seconded and passed that the redistribution of AdCom seats in accordance with the recent survey, be accepted. See the following article.

Tony Lavietes has agreed to take on the position of liaison to the Sensors Council. The role of the Students and Careers committee continues to be discussed. Perhaps our focus, through Chas Neumeyer’s committee, should be on GOLD, i.e., Graduates of the Last Decade. This will be assessed.
Jane Lehr will head a committee comprising Gerry Cooperstein, Chris Deeney, Steve Gold, Ron Jaszczak, Alan Johnston, Ed Lampo, Peter Clout, Mike Unterweger and Peter Winokur to review the IEEE NPSS constitution and bylaws.
The next meeting of the IEEE NPSS AdCom will be held on Sunday, June 12, 2005 at the Portola Plaza Hotel, Monterey, CA before ICOPS and Pulsed Power.