I am newly appointed as the chairman of the Electronics Society of IEICE, Japan for this fiscal year. It is already 32 years since I became a student member of IEICE in 1979. I could get many fruits from IEICE activities through domestic conferences, technical meetings, publications in journal papers and so on. In the past, I have had the chance to work for the Electronics Society.

I believe that the Electronics Society is becoming a global society with strong impact in the R&D community. Electronics is used in numerous ways and is a key part of the information society over the world. It is critical to actively sustain the leading role of the Electronics Society by ensuring highest scientific and technical standards. In addition, it is important to promote new opportunities for electronics by sponsoring international conferences and technical meetings with emerging, existing aspects of electronics including both industry oriented and academic aspects.

The number of the Electronics Society membership is currently around 7,000. It is important to increase membership by extending outreach and providing recognized value. It is also our task to promote electronics for young people. We will have to extend our efforts to energetically introduce electronics to young students, actively recruit university student members, and help students appreciate the value of continued involvement post-graduation. We will highlight to members and prospective members the services, opportunities, and rewards of membership. It is also very important to make bridges between research activities in academia and the commercial development in industry. We will have to offer various opportunities for increased interaction between academia and industry. I believe that incentivizing the electronics industry to participate in the various activities of our Society is crucial to the continued success of our Society. The Electronics Society has 15 technical committees and 8 technical committees (term limited).
These committees continue to extend global outreach to areas of large potential growth in electronics.

Our society home page was renewed this year. We shall create new resources via our web access as an open resource for Electronics Society members so that learning, searching etc., can be done through our society home page. We will also renew our news letters in July, containing a lot of attractive and inspiring articles.

It is also important to maintain the highest standard of quality in our publications. Our society started an on-line journal, Electronics Express (ELEX) 6 years ago. There have been a lot of efforts to shorten the time it takes from manuscript submission to final publication. Now, ELEX is successful so that other societies of IEICE are also going to start their own on-line journals. Since technical excellence is a cornerstone of the Society, we will ensure that technical quality is maintained through peer review, critical editorship, and attracting excellent papers.

I would like to work with the steering committee members of the Electronics Society to booster the values and visibility of the Electronics Society.