The AdCom met on 26 July 2003 at the DoubleTree Hotel, Fisherman’s Wharf, Monterey, California, following the very successful 2003 NSREC conference. We welcome Ron Schrimpf of Vanderbilt University as the new Radiation Effects Steering Group chair, and thank Dale Platteter for his service in this capacity. We also welcomed Tony Lavietes of LLNL, an active participant, sometime treasurer and general chair of NSS/MIC, and Ralph Wyndrum, IEEE-USA vice president Technology Policy Activities.

Our Treasurer, Ed Lampo, once again exhorted us to close conference accounts quickly. Loans should be repaid, available bills should be paid, but outstanding bills, especially those from, for example, IEEE Publications, can be paid directly by IEEE. Get the bank accounts reconciled and closed, and submit your reports within 6 months of the conference. Time is still needed for an audit! Remember that fines for late closures really do kick in and escalate pretty quickly.

Ed did note that we are making real progress in getting conferences closed in a more timely way, so keep up the good work. Don’t let those outstanding bills stand in your way. IEEE really can handle them. Talk with Ed if you are concerned (e.lampo@ieee.org).

We lost $496.2K in 2002. A large IEEE infrastructure charge and lower conference and periodicals income than expected are the cause of much of the problem. While we are transitioning to a system of payment for services rendered, we are still picking up slack from less fiscally responsible societies. This is being adjusted year by year so that we should reach a point where we really are paying for what we ourselves get/use, and are no longer subsidizing some of our butterflies. IEEE itself is working hard toward a consistently balanced budget. Our 2003 budget projections will include some income from jointly sponsored publications. For 2004, we hope to break even. There will be some changes in subscription rates, especially for paper copies of journals. Note that these increases still do not cover production and distribution costs. We are working toward a system where costs are covered.

Our president, Ed Hoffman, noted that there was a large drop in both conference attendance and income, much due to SARS and the Iraqi war, and sales of publications to nonmembers have also dropped faster than projected. Hal Flescher, our finance chair and Division IV director, noted that HQ has readjusted spending for the second half of 2003 to compensate for these decreases. He also noted that the new program in relation to interest income has changed. If the market income is greater than 5%, we will see that portion above 5% on our reserve. He also noted that IEEE administrative and infrastructure charges from 1997-1999 were abnormally low because these charges were absorbed by the high stock market income.

Ed Hoffman, in his President’s report, noted that he had attended the PAC meeting at Bruce Brown’s invitation. He presented several awards, and had several positive experiences, but also learned that NPSS is still being vilified by the PAC organizing committee, and treated unequally in terms of member recruiting space and so on. Remember, NPSS members, this is the conference that NPSS ran for 30 years, when APS wanted nothing to do with it. APS has been a partner for the last 8 years only, and wants the whole ball of wax on APS terms. Is something wrong here?

Ed also attended the Editors’ Meeting in Washington, DC with Paul Dressendorfer and Steve Gitomer. The top brass of IEEE Pubs met with Ed, Paul, and Steve, and are serious in wanting to resolve our publications problems, which include late and erratic delivery dates and quality control. Publication delivery has improved, but the June TNS was a month late again.

Ed noted that ICOPS, RT and PAC all suffered to greater or lesser degree from the SARS outbreak.

The Publications and Society reviews were held by telephone, which was not wholly satisfactory. The principal criticism of our publications is that we have no editorial depth. We need editors in training for all positions. We also need conference editors who are willing to accept more than a "one-shot" assignment. The impact factor for our journals has increased steadily. TNS publication is still not sufficiently reliably on time to reapply for Index Medicus listing, which should greatly increase the TNS impact factor. On the society front, we are again faulted on no formal process for strategic planning. In general, the AdCom has found our retreats and the outcome from them to work very well for planning the society’s future.

Ed announced that Mike Unterweger has been appointed co-liaison with Jay Forster to the Standards Board.

Hal Flescher, as Division IV Director, reviewed the structure of IEEE – TAB, RAB, EAB, Standards, and IEEE-USA, and the paid HQ staff. Each has its mission, but standards and TAB are the principal entities that earn money for IEEE. IEEE Publications, which publishes society intellectual property as journals and conference records, is also a large revenue source; the income from these has gone to societies since some time in the 1980s, although it had originally gone into the IEEE General Fund, which was exhausted in 1999 when it was used to meet IEEE’s unbalanced budget in a year when expected stock market revenues did not materialize. In the same time frame, dues were not increased and costs for membership items were heavily subsidized. IEEE still needs restructuring, especially in regard to financial matters and to "entitlements" expected by entities with no income stream. The Budget Committee of the Board of Directors is addressing some of these matters.

Hal also noted that IEEE conferences tend to be good value for the charges, compared with many competitive conferences. We tend to price conferences on breakeven, not on the value or potential revenue stream. He also noted that there are a number of journals that are poorly cited – have low impact numbers – and there is activity in the Publications department to eliminate some of these.

Technical Committee Reports
The CANPS Committee chairman, Christian Boulin of EMBL-Heidelberg, noted that the Real Time conference is the committee’s major undertaking. The 2003 RT conference was held in May in Montreal, where the CANPS Committee, with some new members, met. Christian is eager to make this committee more proactive and is developing a plan to approach other small conferences with overlapping interests to bolster the community.

Christian and Jean-Pierre Martin of University of Montreal, chair of RT2003 noted that this conference had been planned "by the book" and that it received the highest number of abstracts in many years. Based on the number of abstracts and prior meeting attendance statistics, an attendance of about 200 was projected. The conference then was struck by both the SARS outbreak, with Toronto being a problem city that, even though 400+ miles from Montreal, discouraged overseas and US attendance, and the 17% drop in the value of the US dollar vs. the Canadian dollar, where many charges, such as those from IEEE Conference Service were in US dollars, had a big impact on the projected costs. The organizers are to be commended highly in using strategies to contain costs, and they have, most efficiently, already issued a CD of the Conference Record. I think this may be a record. Paper proceedings are in process.

They also used a detailed questionnaire at the end of the conference to assess attendees’ views. Overall, the conference got high marks for venue, for quality and for a new session on medical real-time computing. Poor marks (really beyond control and plaguing all our conferences) were for poster no-shows, which is also expensive since the price for renting poster boards is substantial, and for the low vendor turnout. Patrick LeDû, chair of the Beaune conference in 1997, noted that 60% of the papers were from the HEP community. Diversification is definitely needed and papers from the medical, plasma fusion and astrophysics communities should be actively sought.

Richard Callis of GA reported for the Fusion Technical Committee. Rich will chair the 2003 Symposium on Fusion Engineering in San Diego this October. There have been 220 abstracts received, which is twice expectation. There are 98 non-US submittals and Rich noted possible problems with the new US requirement for machine-readable passports, or for visas, even from countries for which no visas had been required for many years. To get a visa, one must visit the US Embassy in person, which also creates a time problem. The issuance of visas has also been very slow – so slow that an award winner at one of our conferences, who had applied for a visa several months before the travel date, received a visa so late that conference attendance was impossible. TELL YOUR COLLEAGUES about this!!! And check the US Department of State web site http://unitedstatesvisas.gov/visanews/index.html for further information. Also, be careful about requests for letters of invitation. Don’t send these until the conference registration fee has been received and the credit card number validated or the funds actually deposited by electronic transfer. There has been considerable fraud in this arena with requests coming from individuals with no affiliation to our conferences or areas of technical interest.

Ron Keyser of ORTEC, chair of the Nuclear Instruments and Detectors (read Standards) technical committee is working to reactivate this group which has played an important role in NPS history. Look for his note elsewhere in this Newsletter.

Ron Jaszczak of Duke University Medical Center, chair of the Nuclear and Medical Imaging Sciences technical committee, noted that the revised NMIS constitution and bylaws had been published in the June NPSS Newsletter. These should become official shortly. The International Symposium on Medical Imaging has requested NSS/MIC to send a notice of this conference to its attendees. This was, pending agreement to a reciprocal arrangement for NSS/MIC, agreed by AdCom.

A question has arisen again about the NSS/MIC exhibit days. In general, MIC starts on Thursday, and the exhibits close on Thursday. This year MIC opens on Wednesday so there will be two days of exposure for the MIC community. More MIC-relevant exhibitors are needed. Effort is being expended by several people to identify appropriate companies and to woo them.

Bruce Brown of Fermilab, chair of the Particle Accelerator Science and Technology technical committee, reported that PAC03 had 1135 registered attendees, just short of the midline projection of 1150. Of the 1467 abstracts received, it is expected that 1147 papers will be published in the conference record. He reported that the exhibit space in the Portland, OR downtown Hilton was in a converted garage and was not adequate. Many exhibitors complained. Ceilings were too low and so forth.

The PAC01 audit is in progress. Money has been set aside for the electronic archiving project. The folks in Knoxville made a media event of the contract signing for PAC05, to be chaired by Norbert Holtkamp of SNS, and the PAC07 hotel contract has been signed.

Bruce is working hard, and needs all the help he can get, to increase the number of IEEE NPSS participants at PAC, and to encourage those to join as senior members or, if possible, to move their status from member to senior member. Remember, senior members are eligible to become IEEE fellows!

Tom Hussey from the Air Force Research Lab, Kirtland AFB, chair of the Plasma Science and Applications technical committee reported that ICOPS 2003, held on Jeju Island, Korea, suffered from the SARS epidemic. Although conference abstract submittal was very high, with 678 abstracts, actual attendance was only about 450, half of whom were students. The normal student attendance is about 10%, so income was substantially reduced. By scaling back social events, it was possible to break even, but without fully covering administrative costs. Two special issues of the Transactions on Plasma Science will be forthcoming – one containing plenary and invited papers, and the other containing selected contributed papers.

ICOPS 2004 will be in Baltimore, Maryland and 2005 will be in Monterey, California, once more at the Fisherman’s Wharf DoubleTree and in sequence with Pulsed Power.

Bob Reinovsky of Los Alamos, chair of the Pulsed Power technical committee, reported that the 2003 meeting had 584 registrants with 69% from the US. The 477 abstracts represent a 100% increase since Pulsed Power became an NPSS conference in the early 1990s! Good going. The drop in foreign participation was related to the long delays by US embassies in issuing passports. While there are usually about 50 Russian delegates, there were only 22 this time, even though letters of invitation had been sent in February and personal attempts were made to speed the visa process. We need IEEE’s help in dealing with the State Department and FBI to get visa clearances processed speedily.

For the 2005 conference, Edl Schamiloglu will be program chair, so he’ll serve apprenticeship before taking on chairmanship of the combined ICOPS/Pulsed Power conference in 2007 in Albuquerque, where this joint conference will be sequential with PAC07. Steve Gitomer, editor of Transactions on Plasma Science, has been asked to join the Pulsed Power technical committee as a nonvoting member to provide publications advice.

The committee is also looking toward affiliation with several non-IEEE conferences and also toward making Pulsed Power an elected technical committee. Committee terms and rotations, and an effort to attract younger members are part of the strategy toward the latter.

Ron Schrimpf of Vanderbilt University, the new chair of the Radiation Effects Steering Group, introduced Alan Johnston, chair of the 2003 NSREC that finished its last sessions on Friday. There was a 7% increase in attendance over 2002, although the foreign attendance declined. There was also a drop in sponsorships, but the increased attendance offset that. The short course attendance represented 73% of the conference attendees, possibly spurred by the excellent Quick-time CD of last year’s course distributed to attendees.

Ron reported that the 2004 conference will be held from 19-24 July in Atlanta with Dan Fleetwood as chair. The 2005 conference will be at the Sheraton Hilton Towers, Seattle, WA. There is a proposal for 2006 for the Sawgrass Marriott near Jacksonville, FL that is under review, and Lloyd Massengill, the general chair, is looking at sites for 2007 and should have a proposal in hand next spring. The Steering Group has voted to go to a three-year schedule for venue selection since it is getting harder to find good venues for their growing conference on a two-year cycle.

Ron Keyser introduced Ralph James, the General Chair of the 2003 NSS/MIC. The conference, to be held in Portland, OR is going to be larger than it has been in several years. There was growth in both NSS and MIC abstract numbers, with about 1200 total. There may be as many as 1400 attendees. The committee has been working hard to promote the meeting. The Room Temperature Semiconductor Detector workshop, with 120 papers, will be meeting with them as will a number of smaller satellite meetings. Success has its problems and sessions will start on Monday; there will be a number of parallel sessions, and a lot of posters. They are trying to expand the room block. There are quite a few European papers, and over half the RTSD papers are from overseas. Considerable effort will need to be expended in helping to obtain visas with the new rule change. (See above.)

Patrick LeDû reported on the continuing problems with closing the 2000 conference in Lyon. This has been a good learning experience and Alberto Del Guerro, chair of the 2004 NSS/MIC, to be held in Rome, will be a major beneficiary of the lessons learned. From a technical and international, interactive view, the Lyon conference was terrific and a new venture. It has most probably had a significant role in the conference growth seen in the last couple of years. The Rome conference will be centered at a hotel that has its own conference center so will be more like an American conference in that regard. The hotel and meeting spaces are being renovated now, so the space should be very nice. The conference will run on the European-style Monday to Friday schedule, with no weekend technical sessions. RTSD will once again collocate and several satellite workshops are also collocating, including one on breast imaging.

Tony Lavietes, who presented the above material on the Rome meeting, also introduced a new, secure, web-based registration package that is now in beta test. It will go live shortly for 2003 NSS/MIC registration and for subsequent years. The developers, for a very reasonable additional fee, will make the software available to all other NPSS conferences. After testing by the 2003 NSS/MIC, AdCom will decide how to proceed. Input is wanted from TC and conference chairs. Assuming success, this package has the potential for considerable savings to our conferences in the registration function. Issues such as a maintenance contract remain open for discussion.

Erik Heijne of CERN, chair of the Transnational Committee, reported that the committee now has 15 members representing radiation effects, radiation instrumentation, nuclear and medical imaging and plasma science. Other fields need representation. They have been active in collaborating with chapters, and tried to get awards nominations in, but were unable to comply with the May 15 deadline. They will start working now for 2004 awards. They are eager to get input from members and potential members on their view of IEEE NPSS activities.

Functional Committees and Liaisons
Ray Larsen, chair of the Meeting Policies Committee, noted that the terrific effort of our conference organizers in difficult and unpredictable times has earned our kudos. Ray and his committee are working on guidelines for international meetings as a supplement to the NPSS meeting planning document that is used in conjunction with the IEEE Meeting Organization Manual.

Ray is also our liaison to the Society for Social Implications of Technology (SSIT). His report is presented in detail elsewhere in this issue.

Igor Alexeff announced the winners of the Merit and Shea awards who are, respectively, Joe Srour of TRW and Steve Gitomer of LANL, our Transactions on Plasma Science editor. No Early Achievement or graduate student awards were given this year.

Vernon Price reported that our membership is down some 6.3% this year. Usually in June there is a surge of new student memberships and that didn’t happen this year. At PAC, Vernon only recruited 4 new members, but did better at Radiation Effects with 18 new members. There were also 21 new members recruited at ICOPS. Vern also mentioned that NPSS response to the member satisfaction survey was 34% of the requests, which is good. The responses need to be evaluated.

Osamu Ishihara reported that we ranked and submitted 11 Fellow candidate applications. It was a very good pool, so we’ll see how many new Fellows are appointed from NPSS. In the past we have had 35 to 50% of our nominees elevated. The committee also needs fresh members. A member can’t serve as a referee for a candidate, and all committee members must be Fellows. It makes things tough at times…

By the time you get this report, you should have returned your AdCom ballots. Peter Winokur deserves applause for completing his role of Nominations Committee chair expediently and months ahead of schedule.

Paul Dressendorfer, our Editor-in-Chief, and also TNS editor, expanded on Ed Hoffman’s report related to the Annual Panel of Editors’ meeting in Washington. IEEE publishes 116 periodicals, supports 350 conferences and in total publishes about 30% of the information in its technical areas. In 2002, only 42% of IEEE journals were out on time. While TNS publication has improved, the June 03 issue was mailed two weeks late. On the other hand, TPS, which hasn’t been out on time for a long, long time (does anyone remember the last on-time issue?) was out on time. Could the meeting between our editors and senior Pubs staff have had an effect? Limited guidelines have also come down regarding papers from politically sensitive countries. Papers may be published, but communication with authors is disallowed for now, so our journals are not accepting articles from these countries since review and revision has been made impossible.

Peter Clout, chair of the Communications committee, has announced the availability of our new brochure and of a particle-accelerator-specific flyer. Contact Peter for copies for your conferences (clout@vista-control.com). Leave adequate time for shipping. If you want Newsletter copies, let Ken Dawson (kend@triumf.ca) know as early as possible because they have to be printed with the major run. They are, according to Vernon Price, a good sales tool, well worth including in registration packets.

Our booth is also available and can be obtained from Peter.

Our web site has improved, but we need input from Technical Committees to provide links to relevant sites that discuss our technologies and areas of interest. It is also important that NPSS conference literature and web sites say that they are NPSS conferences! Use the logo. Spell out the words, Remember to provide Dick Kouzes with a hotlink to your web page (richard.kouzes@pnl.gov). Check out other web sites to get ideas to improve yours.

Our guest, Ralph Wyndrum, noted that IEEE has many awards, but the candidate pool is small. The IEEE web site lists all awards and the criteria on which they are awarded. Many an NPSS member is eligible for some of them. We haven’t had a lot of recognition at the Institute level, despite being an extremely active society. However, not all Societies, no matter how big, can boast of having an IEEE Emberson Award winner in their ranks!

Ralph also discussed the IEEE-USA Technical Policy Council’s activities. He is meeting with eight IEEE societies to encourage members to participate in Council activities. They are working on the criteria for long-term technical worker visas, some of which have been used fraudulently. They encourage individual member visits to Congress in support of IEEE-USA positions in a number of areas, and they also support four professional lobbyists in Washington. Areas of focus include energy policy where we are well represented by Ned Sauthoff, utility restructuring, National Electrical Reliability and so on. Position papers are being prepared on Electric/Hybrid Cars; Advanced Nuclear Power R&D and others. Their priorities are broadband deployment including DSL and fiber optic issues; SPAM; the public health information system; homeland security; genetic nondiscrimination; and nanotech R&D. They team with other technical societies when making presentations. They are also soliciting grassroots teams to visit congressmen, and support a number of Congressional Visiting Days.

Other activities include regional technology fora with three scheduled (Austin, San Diego, Boston). Globalization of technology is a concern, and they also support a Career Policy Committee.

If you have an interest in participating in these activities, contact Ralph (r.wyndrum@ieee.org) about the possibilities. A number of us have served in the past as reviewers of position statements, but there are many opportunities.

Other Items
As XPLORE becomes used more routinely, there will be a switch in the paradigm for allocating publication revenue, which is now based on the All-Society Periodicals Package. For NPSS we expect to remain revenue neutral, but there will be a big impact, both positive and negative, on a number of societies, based on a preliminary study.

Corporate purchases of the IEL package, where employees have ready access electronically to IEEE journals seem to be part of the reason that society memberships are dropping – the journal access isn’t needed. This will continue to be monitored.

It is important to remember that there are specific rules for conference sponsorships – don’t use the term lightly! And note that we may e-mail something for another conference or society, but mailing lists are not shared! This is a recurring issue as every conference chairman gets requests. Be careful and check the rules. If you don’t know and can’t find the answer, contact Ray Larsen (Larsen@SLAC.Stanford.edu)

Future Meetings

October 25, 2003
Portland, OR
Annual Meeting with NSS/MIC

March 12, 13, 2004
New Orleans, LA
Retreat and Meeting

July 24, 2004
Atlanta, Georgia
NSREC

October 23, 2004
Rome, Italy
Annual Meeting with NSS/MIC

Albe Larsen, the NPSS Secretary, can be reached at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, MS66, 2575 and Hill Road, Menlo Park, CA 94025; Phone: +1 650 926-2748; Fax: +1 650 926-5124; E-mail: amlarsen@slac.stanford.edu