My name is Araki, who is honored to be appointed as the President of Electronics Society from June of this year. During the last year serving as the President-Elect, through participation in the activities of the Board of Directors and the Executive Committee, I could reaffirm the importance and the significance of the society’s activities as an organization for human resource development and industry-university cooperation. In the nowadays regressive circumstance which is also faced by other related societies, it is important to continue seeking for the future outlook as well as the policy towards sustainable activities of the society.

In the next five years, the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers will celebrate its 100th anniversary. In this centennial period, the Institute has been playing a pioneering and core role towards the development of electronics, information and communication technologies of Japan, Asian countries and the world. Most recently this April, the Institute has completed its transfer to general incorporated association, which was an attempt to return to the starting point of an academic society.

On the other hand, it is also important to concern the issue of collaborating and competing with IEEE, which is no exaggeration to say, on the way achieving world domination. Regarding organizing an international conference, it has been becoming more important that if the conference proceedings can be published in IEEE Xplore. For that reason, I am hoping that the new document retrieval system called IEICE Knowledge Discovery, which has been being leaded by Communications Society of IEICE, could become a counterpart of IEEE Xplore. This new document retrieval system is exploring its own way to include technical report magazines of the industry, and to introduce multiple language support in awareness of its prospective expansion to Asian countries.

Although the long-term membership decline has seemed to be stopped as the current number of members of Electronics Society has become about 7000, it is still important to continue policies to promote conference participation and paper submission, especially from members of the industry. Currently, there are 15 regular technical committees in the society frequently organizing various technical meetings around the country, by which provides places for fruitful discussions. I believe that this activity of the technical committees is a distinctive feature and an essential activity of this society which should be maintained positively. Furthermore, I also appreciate the activity of organizing overseas technical meetings mainly in Asian areas by some technical committees, which provides effective opportunities for cooperation with Asian researchers.

There are also other eight ad hoc technical committees supporting exploratory research fields. Taking an example in recent topics, there has been drastically increasing expectation for wireless power transmission as a new application of electromagnetic wave or electromagnetic field. Counting from the period of its predecessor – the SPS technical committee, the ad hoc technical committee on wireless power transmission has spent eight years steadily continuing its own academic activities. Owing to this preparation period, the committee can nowadays quickly respond to the wireless power transmission boom, provide technical forum for researchers from many other fields e.g. machine control system, and realize integration as well as creation of new academic disciplines. It would be our important future task to uncover and promote these exploratory research fields.

Finally, I would like to inform about the status of the society journal. Despite ELEX (Electronic Express) first issued 7 years ago has been steadily gaining recognition, we aim to make this electronic journal more attractive by further shortening the peer review period. Following the success of ELEX, Engineering Sciences Society and Communications Society also publish their electronic journals (NOLTA, ComEX). Although the English edition of the society journal has sufficiently attained recognition as it can attract more than half of submission from abroad, it is still important to explore policies to improve its impact factor (IF). On the other hand, it could not be denied that the Japanese edition of the society journal is becoming sluggish, which is one of the challenges faced by the society. It is necessary to introduce new measures, for example, publishing interesting review papers to reactivate the Japanese edition of the society journal. The enrichment of the journal must be the first mission of the society. Let the journal be published with ambitious researches and ambitious papers.