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Volunteers Needed ---for Professional Service to the Society
For as long as I can remember, it has been the custom of the President or President-Elect of the IEEE Control Systems Society to solicit the services of new volunteers for managing our various professional activities. In the early days, this solicitation came from the President, and it is perhaps a tribute to the management prowess of Jim Melsa (twenty-second CSS President) that he delegated the task in 1988 to the (then) President-Elect, Jane Cullum. This change was immediately institutionalized, and the annual call for volunteers has come from the Presdient-Elect since that time. Hence I sit here, lap-top on lap, wondering whether there is anything new I can say about the need for volunteers to step forward to perform service to the profession. Perhaps I should share some information about volunteer activity in our community which is not as widely appreciated as it should be. Most people do not realize the extent to which the IEEE is a volunteer-driven organization. All learned societies and professional organizations---whether their focus is on professional service (e.g. medicine), engineering, the sciences, or the arts and humanities---engage in a common set of activities. They hold meetings of core groups concerned with governance; they run conferences; and they publish professional and scholarly journals. What differentiates the IEEE from peer organizations is the profound extent to which all matters of operation and governance are in the hands of the IEEE members themselves. This is true at all levels. Three times a year, the IEEE holds meetings of its various Institute-wide committees and boards. At last count (the November 2004 meeting series), there were more than thirty such committees and boards, many having overlapping and intertwined missions and charters. They are all charged with recommending policies and actions directly or through each other to the Board of Directors, which may adopt, modify, or reject recommendations in arriving at final decisions. I occasionally think the IEEE is pathologically democratic in providing channels for input from almost every conceivable constituency, although I'm afraid a good deal of such input gets lost. I shall perhaps have more to say about this in the President's columns I shall write for the Control Systems Magazine next year. Within the IEEE, the Control Systems Society carries volunteer involvement to even higher levels. Not only do we have a well-defined system of member governance, with an elected Board of Governors which in turn elects an Executive Committee, we manage the operations of our own publications and conferences at a level of detail which is unknown in any of the other 38 IEEE technical societies. Examples are many and varied. For instance, people who have submitted papers to or reviewed papers for our Transactions on Automatic Control are no doubt aware of the web-based submission and peer-review system. (See http://control.bu.edu/ieee/esub.html.) This system was designed and written by our Editor-in-Chief, Christos Cassandras together with some of his graduate students. We also have a web-based conference submission, peer-review, and publication system, called PaperPlaza. (See http://www.paperplaza.net.) In my opinion this system is a technical tour de force, and again it has been written and maintained by CSS volunteers---Huibert Kwakernaak and Pradeep Misra. In almost all other societies within the IEEE such systems are provided on a fee-for-service basis by commercial vendors, and from personal experience I can report that these systems are not generally up to the standards of what has been designed and implemented by CSS volunteers.
Where are the entry-level opportunities for volunteer service within the Control Systems Society? I assume if you are still reading at this point, you may be interested in becoming more deeply involved in volunteer service. Hence I shall try to answer the question of where to begin. No service is more important than providing peer reviews for our
conferences and journals. All Society members will find that reviewing
papers is an excellent way to maintain currency in the field.
Moreover, by providing feedback to authors, a reviewer is actually an
active participant in improving the quality of our technical
literature. An excellent way to start work as a peer reviewer is to
serve as a reviewer of papers submitted to one of the Society's three
major annual conferences: the American Control Conference (ACC), the
Conference on Control Applications (CCA), or the Conference on Decision
and Control (CDC). If this is of interest, please contact the Chair
of the Conference Editorial Board (CEB): Professor Thomas Parisini Include your contact information, three to six keywords indicating your areas of expertise relevant to the review process and a brief description of your technical training and professional background. Reviewers are also needed for the Society's three major publications, the Transactions on Automatic Control, which emphasizes the underlying mathematics and conceptual foundations of control systems, the Transactions on Control Systems Technology, which emphasizes the technology of control systems, and the Control Systems Magazine, which emphasizes aspects of control systems that are of general interest. A manuscript submitted to any of these publications is sent to three or more reviewers who have special knowledge in the subject area of the article. The reviewers have approximately four weeks to evaluate the manuscript and make a recommendation. In making the recommendation, the reviewer evaluates the technical content of the manuscript as well as the adequacy of the presentation, including the abstract, introduction, organization, figures, and references. Perhaps the most important inputs the reviewer provides are written comments that might help the authors improve the manuscript. These are forwarded anonymously to the authors by the editor or associate editor handling the paper.
If you wish to volunteer as a reviewer for one of the three CSS
publications, please contact the appropriate Editor-in-Chief using the
contact information available in the publication or on the CSS web
site. Again, include your contact information, a short description of
your
areas of expertise relevant to the review process, and a brief
description of your professional background. Past experience as
a reviewer is a big plus, and if you just starting out in the peer
review system, you might want to look into conference reviewing first.
For further information you may contact our Vice President for
Publication Activities: Dr. Tariq Samad, VP Publications You can also join one of our many technical committees. These committees facilitate information exchange and promote areas of special interest within the larger field of control engineering. Specific examples of activities in the technical committees include
Prof. Yutaka Yamamoto, VP Technical ActivitiesYou should provide the TC Chair or Professor Yamamoto with your contact information, names of the technical committees that interest you, and a brief description of your professional background and current activities.
There are also opportunities in helping to run one of the 20 conferences, symposia, and workshops (listed on the CSS web site) which the Control Systems Society either sponsors or co-sponsors each year. Conferences are an increasingly important medium for rapid communication of cutting-edge technical information. Not only do conference organizers provide a great service to their profession, they also expose themselves to the latest in new technical developments in the field. Volunteer service can include managing local arrangements, publications, registration, or finance. You might also serve on a program committee and help design the technical program of the conference. Other ways to contribute technically include organizing conference sessions and workshops and serving as a session chair. For more information on conferences, please contact the General Chair of a specific conference event as listed on the conference pages of the Society website, or contact the Vice President for Conference Activities: Theodore Djaferis, VP Conferences Finally, I should mention Member Activities as an area where volunteer service is needed. First and foremost, if you are not yet a member, please join the Control Systems Society. If you would like to help enlarge our community or to find ways that the CSS can better serve its members, please contact the Vice President for Membership Activities: Richard H. Middleton, VP Member Activities He will have specific suggestions---including activities to recruit new members---including students and under-represented members of the population. He will also have ideas about addressing the needs of constituent groups, including students, retirees, women, and international members. Beyond the activities whcih lie within the portfolios of the above mentioned vice presidents of the Society, there are a number of other volunteer positions such as membership in ad hoc and standing committees, external committee and liaison positions, conference committees, and editorial boards. Most of these positions are listed on the CSS web site, and if any is of interest, please contact me by clicking the link below. It is a great honor for me to have been chosen by my peers to serve as President-Elect. It is a wonderful way for me to continue the service that has been a big part of my professional life over the past several decades. The IEEE Control Systems Society is now slightly more than fifty years old. The past half-century has been a remarkable period of accomplishment for our field, and the Control Systems Society has played a significant role in the advances that have occurred. I invite you to join me in performing the crucially important volunteer services that will support even greater successes in the next half-century.
John Baillieul THANKS: This call for volunteers is based on a very similar call by my predecessor (Mark Spong) last year. His call in turn was part of a long tradition established and sustained by earlier Presidents. |
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