Shinji Hara VP Member Activities Department of Information Physics and Computing, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo Contact

The Member Activities Board (MAB) consists of the Vice President of Member Activities, the Chairs of the Standing Committees and the Chairs of the Ad Hoc committees. The Standing Committees are the long term committees; the Ad Hoc Committees are temporary in nature and are devised for a special event which may not be permanent. The overall purpose of MAB is to promote membership within the IEEE Control Systems Society and to provide IEEE resources to the membership through various committee activities.

The constituents served by the MAB include all members of the society. A member of the Society is defined as any member of the IEEE who elects to pay the Society fee. This is the typical definition of a member, however, it is also possible to be an Affiliate member. An Affiliate member includes the following two categories of people or organizations:

1. those individuals or groups whose technological activities do not justify full membership in the IEEE, but who may be helped by participation in Society activities, or
2. by the participation of an Affiliate member, the regular members of the Society may gain some benefit from this interaction.
   

Besides its publications, its conferences, and its technical activities, the IEEE Control Systems Society also spends considerable efforts in providing services to its members. Some of these services concern the membership at large. Others are targeted at specific constituent groups that are thought - rightly or wrongly - to require special attention, such as the women members, the student members, the international members, and others.

These efforts and initiatives range from organizing reduced conference registration fees for students to nominating and evaluating candidates for IEEE Fellow, from coordinating the activities of local society chapters to promoting the role of women in control, from disseminating CD-ROM proceedings of our major conferences in developing countries to collecting documentation about historical developments and personalities in our field.

These initiatives do not come by accident. They are most often the result of a lot of brainstorming that goes on in a number of special purpose committees, whose chairpersons collectively make up the Membership Activities Board (more poetically called the MAB), headed by the Vice-President for Membership Activities. On this webpage, you will find a listing of these committees, together with the name and address of each chairperson.

It will be a major objective of the Membership Activities Board in the next few years to effectively open up the Control Systems Society and its activities to our international members, including our colleagues who work in countries where distance or financial difficulties constitute a significant deterrent. The success of such enterprise will depend to a large extent on the inputs and ideas generated by the people who are most concerned.

It goes without saying that there would be no Membership Activities without active members, no brainstorming without brains, and no initiatives without proposals. Thus, we welcome volunteers (male, female, young or old), ideas, criticism and proposals (including constructive ones). Do not hesitate to contact either myself, or the chairperson of any of the committees of the Membership Activities Board.

Vice-President for Membership Activities