Welcome from the President
President’s Message: Spring Forward, Fall Back
Hi all,
Welcome to a new year in CIS! I wrote this message right as the US switched from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time. The title of this article is how I was taught to remember which direction to turn the clocks in this biannual ritual. But it now reminds me to reflect a little on 2022 and then to spring forward in anticipation of the new year.
Thankfully, 2022 marked the return for CIS to in-person meetings with our two major conferences, WCCI in Padua, Italy, and SSCI in Singapore. We held the CIS AdCom meeting series prior to both events. It felt so good (if a little strange at first) to conduct our affairs really across the table from one another. At WCCI, besides a belated 2021 IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award presentation, the 2022 edition of that prestigious award went to Paul John Werbos, Program Director (Retired), National Science Foundation, Arlington, Virginia, USA, “For development of backpropagation and fundamental contributions to reinforcement learning and time series analysis.” CIS sponsors this award, but the evaluation and selection committee is at the IEEE level. Congratulations, Paul! Additionally, at the IEEE stage, Chang-Shing Lee won the IEEE Educational Activities Board (EAB) Meritorious Achievement Award in Pre-University Education, “For sustained contributions in promoting Computational and Artificial Intelligence among pre-university students.” Quite an honor, Chang-Shing, to you and your entire team.
But let’s see what’s cooking for 2023. To continue the theme from the last paragraph, the 2023 IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award winner is Marios Polycarpou, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Director of the KIOS Research and Innovation Center of Excellence, University of Cyprus, Aglantzia, Cyprus, “For contributions to the theory and application of neural networks and learning systems in monitoring and control.” Way to go, Marios. Also, of course, there is a full slate of IEEE CIS awards for 2023 which you can find in this issue of CIM. Hats off to these recipients.
I invite you to spend some time on our website perusing the many benefits and opportunities of being an IEEE CIS member. Each year we look to increase the funding and engagement chances in members activities, technical activities, educational activities and more. Please check out the excellent newsletter for month-to-month announcements (archived versions are on the CIS website). In addition to these regular (and expanding) programs, IEEE allows us each year to invest in new initiatives to benefit our members and society. Many of our regular programs actually started as initiatives. This year, we have initiatives that span our entire society. They include, among others, enhancing the Resource Center; producing AI tools to help our publications efforts; obtaining better conference management software; industry and government outreach; post pandemic technical regeneration/revitalization – called “breaking boundaries”; developing qualitative metrics to measure our diversity and inclusion efforts, and more. Be on the lookout for developments in these areas.
As always, feel free to contact me at kellerj@missouri.edu with your thoughts, suggestions, questions, and innovative ideas (maybe you can “champion” a CIS initiative). Please stay safe and healthy. I hope to see many of you as we emerge from the pandemic.
Dalma Novak, the IEEE Division X Director with the 2021 and 2022 IEEE Frank Rosenblatt Award winners at WCCI 2022
Jim Keller
University of Missouri, USA