| Continuing
my theme with President’s Reports, I’m going to discuss
a single topic, which is the structure of IEEE. In case you’ve
already decided that this is a boring topic and are about to stop
reading, I’ll jump to the conclusion, which is that I think
it is important for you to vote in the upcoming IEEE-wide elections.
There is an outstanding candidate (Hal Flescher) who is running
for a very important office (TAB Vice-President), and your vote
can help. In addition, I think that many of us are only aware of
our one little part of IEEE, and it would be useful to see a bit
of its breadth and how it is organized.
So now to the IEEE organization chart: Every IEEE member has two
attributes that they could be “organized” (or perhaps
“sorted”) by—their technical interests and the
geographical area where they live. IEEE therefore has two main subunits
known as the Technical Activities Board (TAB) and the Regional Activities
Board (RAB). TAB’s main activities are, well, technical. TAB
is responsible for 388 conferences and 99 journals, which comprise
almost all of IEEE’s activities in these areas. TAB is made
up of 39 Societies (the NPSS is one of them), each with a different
area of technical interest, as well as 5 Councils, which are groups
of Societies that work together in technical areas that are of common
interest. Each Society usually has multiple Technical Committees
(TCs), and each TC usually organizes a conference. Within the NPSS
we have eight Technical Committees, and the table below names them
and the conference that they organize.
RAB activities tend to be more local and technically diverse. RAB
divides the world up into ten geographical Regions, which are then
subdivided into Sections. Rather than concentrating on conferences
and journals, RAB tends to promote cross-disciplinary engineering
activities and “networking” between engineers. For example,
a Section meeting may feature a speaker giving a general interest
talk followed by a chance for the audience to interact with each
other and the speaker. RAB also organizes some large trade shows,
such as WESCON.
Naturally, an individual member may be interested in both Regional
and Technical activities, and is certainly encouraged to do both.
To this end, many Societies have Chapters, which are groups of people
with a common technical interest that also live in the same area.
There are also other Boards within IEEE, such as Educational Activities
and Standards, but TAB and RAB are the two main pillars of the IEEE
organization.
So what does this have to do with voting in the IEEE elections?
There is an outstanding candidate named Harold (Hal) Flescher, who
is running for the Vice-President of TAB. This position is the head
of TAB—like large corporations, the Vice-President of Technical
Activities and the Vice-President of Regional Activities come directly
under the President of IEEE on the organization chart. Hal has been
extremely active for two decades both in TAB and in the NPSS (he
is a member of the Radiation Effects community), and is very highly
thought of at the upper organizational levels of both the Society
and TAB. My feeling is that if the voting members of TAB (who are
mainly the Presidents of the 44 Societies and Councils) were to
elect the TAB Vice-President, Hal would win in a landslide. However,
the TAB VP is elected by all the IEEE members, and quite frankly,
only a small fraction of IEEE members know what TAB is or what the
TAB VP does. Thus, I think that it is important for you to vote,
and I give my strong personal endorsement to Hal Flescher.
As usual, if you have any thoughts on these or any other issues,
please feel free to contact me.
Bill Moses, IEEE NPSS President, can be reached at Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, One Cyclotron Road, MS55-121, Berkeley,
CA 94720-8099; Tel: +1 510 486 4432; Fax: +1 510 486 4768; E-mail:wwmoses@lbl.gov.
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