Let’s Join the 2014 IEICE General Conference and Try Your Paper Presentation in the Complete English Session BS-1

Reminder: Proposal Due Date for the Contest “I-Scover Challenge 2013” Comes Soon!

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Message from TFIPP Secretariat

Yuji INOUE, Dr. President, IEICE Chairman, TOYOTA InfoTechnology Center Co.,Ltd.

　A Happy New Year to All of You!
　According to the social manner greeting with the beginning of a new year, I would like to look back over my determination as President of IEICE to reform the organization toward the next generation and our activities what we have evolved so far. I will do my best to keep up the activities so that it might not remain in my first dream of the year.
　We have pushed forward in full power with the new scheme “To begin on the reformation of IEICE toward the coming centenary commencing in 2017, and to propose the medium and long year plan, and the basic scheme for the organizational reform” on which I have committed myself in the presidential inaugural message (2013 IEICE General Assembly, IEICE Journal, vol.95, no.7, see it at http://www.ieice.org/eng/about/pre_message13.pdf#zoom=75).
　Then, a half year has quickly passed. Without loss of time, we have presented two new strategic visions of IEICE in addition to the current schemes to be observed. The first vision is the evolution toward “the multi-cultural activities” as the world paradigm next to the globalization, and the second vision is the establishment of “the new collaboration with the changing society and industries”. For realization of the innovation, we will extend active discussions over the realization of the innovation involving not only IEICE members but also other experts and institutions.
　 The important part of my duties as President must be “the foundation of surplus” to activate the discussion on the innovation and enable those new activities, in other words, the restructuring of current activities. Since IEICE stands on the fervent contributions of IEICE members through volunteer activities in each field, we have neither waste nor inertia in current activities. However, it means that we cannot commence any new activities without change of schemes. We have to face the difficulties with this strong intention. The examples are referred as follows. Your great understanding and cooperation to the fundamental idea will be appreciated.

Multi-cultural Paradigm

　The fundamental idea of multi-cultural formation is to promote the internationalization of IEICE according to a paradigm different from that of IEEE. The global paradigm in IEEE is based on the idea of uniting different societies through a social value. On the other hand, the multi-cultural paradigm is based on the idea of making effort for the prosperity and progress of people’s life over the world, on the international relations sharing multiple social values where all of the people recognize the features of different regions, races and cultures each other.
　According to the idea, we have changed the title of the current “IEICE Overseas Section” to the “IEICE International Section” so that it will be on the same level as the current domestic Section in Japan. Needless to say, the change of title is the beginning of reformation. At the moment, about 10% of IEICE members belong to one of the International Sections, we will encourage them to join not only paper publication activities but also join the contribution to the development of each regional society and economy.
　Simultaneously, the mutual cooperative activities between the International Sections with the organization in Japan will be important for the realization of the multicultural paradigm. Since the reformation of IEICE Headquarters also will be required with the internationalization of executives and committee members, we are looking forward to constructive proposals from the International Sections or international members.

Development of I-Scover

　 The IEICE Knowledge Discovery (I-Scover) has come out and started running in the beginning of April 2013. It is expected to provide widely the general society with the information infrastructure where publications of IEICE will be widely and easily utilized by general people over the world. Furthermore, we will develop the system as an intellectual network connected on an open link basis to the databases of publications over the world shared through IEICE, the relevant academic institutions and industries, further IEICE International Sections, and thus we will establish it as the infrastructure for information delivery and exchange in the new IEICE. It is expected that each of the International Sections will make use of the I-Scover capabilities in harmony with the features and culture of the region. In parallel with the I-Scover based infrastructure development, the reinforcement of the system and its business continuity plan survivable even in a huge disaster should be taken into account with the highest priority.

New Organization

　 We have stated the thoroughgoing slimming of the current IEICE Committees and strengthening the executive functions of the Headquarters. More than 30 current Committees in the Headquarters will be consolidated and reduced into the half and a new organization will be set up to develop the innovation in it. The new organization will be formed to execute the decision by Committees and the scheme of the organization has already settled in the Headquarters. For example, a Director in charge of the system was assigned last year on a trial basis and he started to strengthen the system.

Financial Task Force

　The Financial Task Force was set up by IEICE Directors for Finance, Prof. Masahiro Morikura and Prof. Kiyomichi Araki, and other members. It has positively worked to reserve the fund to execute new policies.

Toward the Bright Future

　The most of more than 30,000 current IEICE members are “silent members” now. Publications of IEICE were the valuable source of information in the society with less information 20 years ago. How about the present society? It is full of information everywhere and over Internet, and the content has been diversified from new ICT to “The Innovation of Society and Business Activities”. The delay of IEICE’s action to the trend of social diversification has caused the drastic reduction of members in industries. We are facing the fact that the 2/3 of student members tends to withdraw just after they are employed by industries. IEICE can no longer respond the social needs only with the information delivery based on the technical achievement now. A card to overcome the difficulties is “Toward IEICE which can talk about the story” proposed by Director/General Affairs, Prof. Hiroyuki Morikawa in the Preface of IEICE Journal , vol.95, no.8. We will put it forward to realize the new scheme through discussion as a new action.
　The discussion of innovation has just started, also in the meetings of IEICE Societies and Group, and we may face difficulties in the future. I hope we will greet the year 2017 with an infrastructure endurable to the coming 100 years, also through a trial of open academic salon for free discussion.

　IEICE keeps a top exchange program with The Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea (IEEK) where the tops of each institution visit the other institution on the occasion of annual General Conference/Assembly in turn since 1983. This year, Dr. Shigeyuki Akiba, IEICE Vice President and Chairman of International Affairs Committee and Prof. Kiyomichi Araki, IEICE Director/Finance joined the 2013 IEEK General Assembly which was held at Korea University in Seoul, on November 23, 2013. The number of participants reached around 800 persons. IEEK hold the General Assembly twice a year, three days in Summer season, and one day in Fall season. The Assembly provided seven Aural Sessions and one Poster Session. IEEK has six Societies and 12 Regional Sections more than IEICE and they were very keen to join the conference.
　Dr. Akiba gave a Keynote Speech entitled “Trend of Telecom -Electronics” viewing the drastically changing environment and new types of multi-networks and multi-users, and also referred to Green ICT and network security. Prof. Araki, the former Chairman of IEICE Electronics Soc., gave a Keynote Speech entitled “Cloud Cooperated HetNet for 5G Cellular Networks” and introduced 4G cellular networks to cover the explosive mobile traffic, Multi-band heterogeneous networks (HetNet), the optimization of cell range, cloud cooperated multiband HetNet with seamless hand-over functions, further, referred to the expected collaborations between IEEK and IEICE. The 2014 IEICE General Conference in Niigata will receive IEEK President as the main guest as well. ( summarized by Prof. Kenzo Takahashi)

　The 2014 IEICE General Conference will be held at Niigata University in Niigata, Japan, in coming March. IEICE Communications Society will consecutively provide a complete English Session during the four-days of the Conference as well as in the former General Conferences. This event has been organized to accelerate the globalizing academic activities of IEICE by encouraging younger researchers, engineers and foreign scholars studying in Japan with participants from many countries. It has been planned and managed by the IEICE Technical Committee on Network Systems (NS) under IEICE Communications Society so far since it was set up as a program of the General Conference in 2005, and it has covered around 60 papers in English every year. The discussion between speakers and participants in the venue has been very active and the event has gained a high reputation by the participants. Further, the best papers will be awarded by the Society. Would you try to submit your paper to the English Session? The program of the Session is summarized as follows:
Date : on March 18-21, 2014
Venue: Niigata University, Niigata, Japan
Title of Session: BS-1 “Future Network Technologies for Advanced Information and Communications Society”
Topics of Interest: Network, Service and Wireless issues
Paper length: 2 pages (1 page is also acceptable)
Proceedings: To be delivered through the meta-data based search engine “I-Scover (IEICE Knowledge Discovery)”.
Paper Submission Deadline: 17:00, January 8, Friday, 2014
URL: http://www.toyoag.co.jp/ieice/E_G_top/e_g_top.html
(The English version of the whole program includes Sessions in Japanese. Please distinguish the English Session with “BS-1”.)

　The IEICE Knowledge Discovery, briefly “I-Scover” has been reported in prior issues of IEICE Global Plaza. It was opened through the press release in the beginning of April 2013 and successively it has been developed to enhance the versatile functions and improve the quality of search or publication services so that everyone can freely use it, develop innovative technologies or enhance the impact factor of papers each other.
　It has a metadata based structure of search engine and enables easy retrieval of preferable papers relational to the attributes or concept of required papers with the function of linked data. Further, it is possible to freely access the I-Scover without charge. The first step of access to the I-Scover is to open the home page at http://i-scover.ieice.org/?lang=en and experience the retrieval of papers which you want, starting with the relevant information like keywords, author names, attributes of the required papers, special fields and so on.
　The “I-Scover Challenge 2013” is a public contest where the participants will compete the new idea of capabilities, relevant software or products, data analysis and visualization processes based on the I-Scover, toward the future new possibilities of functions/services to activate academic activities in the field of electronics, information and communication science and technologies. The qualifications for applicant and application process were reported in the former issue of IEICE Global Plaza. The due date of the entry and proposal is January 8, Friday, 2014. Please hurry up your application.
　For any question, please contact the liaison at global@ieice.org. Your constructive opinions for better use of I-Scover are welcome.

ICOIN2014 - IEICE Communications Soc., in Phuket, Thailand, on Feb. 10-12, 2014, http://www.icoin.org/main/

COOL Chips XVII - IEICE Electronics Soc., in Yokohama, Japan, on Apr. 14-16, 2014, http://www.coolchips.org/wp/

EMC’14/Tokyo - IEICE Communications Soc., in Tokyo, Japan, on May 13-16, 2014, http://www.ieice.org/~emc14/

ICTF2014 - IEICE Europe Section, at Poznan University of Technology in Poznan, Poland, on May 28-30, 2014, http://www.ictf2014.org/index.php?layout=0

WTC2014 - IEICE Communications Soc., in Berlin, Germany, on Jun. 1-3, 2014, http://conference.vde.com/wtc2014/Pages/Start.aspx

OECC/ACOFT2014 - IEICE Communications Soc., in Melbourne, Australia, on Jul. 6-10, 2014, http://www.oecc-acoft-2014.org/

ISITA2014 - IEICE Engineering Sciences Soc., in Melbourne, Australia, on Oct. 26-29, 2014, http://www.isita.ieice.org/2014/

ISAP2014 - IEICE Communications Soc., in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, on Dec. 2-5, 2014, http://isap2014.org/