Greetings from the New President

IEICE-CS is IEICE's largest society and currently has more than 8,000 members. I am very honored to be the IEICE-CS President. First of all, I would like to thank all the members who support IEICE-CS through various activities such as publications and conferences. IEICE-CS has 28 vibrant technical committees and provides up-to-date, high-quality R&D information through numerous publications and online archives. We can say that these activities have contributed significantly to the development of information and communication technology (ICT) in the world today. Building on the success of IEICE-CS to date, I promise to do my best to further improve the activities and increase its values.

Ending the coronavirus pandemic is a top priority of the international community today. Since last year, the pandemic has adversely affected almost all activities of IEICE-CS. Even in this difficult situation, we have to do our best to continue our activities. We need to continue actions to adopt the latest technologies to find new ways for IEICE-CS members to talk and interact with each other. Through those actions, IEICE-CS must continue to contribute to the development of ICT steadily.

IEICE-CS has achieved a number of reforms, leading other societies within IEICE. A typical example is about a Technical Committee Conference. IEICE-CS started reforming the Technical Committee Conference and The Technical Report from 2016 and completed it in 2018. In 2016, we introduced a new rule to properly set the registration fee for a Technical Committee Conference. In 2018, in order to reduce printing costs, we stopped publishing the real booklet of Technical Report of a Technical Committee Conference, and started to just distribute the PDF only. Similar reforms were completed before the coronavirus pandemic at all IEICE societies. If the reform had been delayed, it must have been more difficult for IEICE to hold many Technical Committee Conferences online.

Unfortunately, IEICE membership and finances are declining. The total number of papers submitted to IEICE’s seven English journals also continues to decline. These numbers are important indicators of the value of IEICE. Nowadays, a lot of information about ICT can be easily accessed through the Internet. The role of the IEICE needs to be revised. The IEICE needs to create and provide new value to its members. I believe that the essential value of the IEICE is existing in the three major roles.

(1) To provide members with authoritative and reliable information and knowledge in the field of ICT.
(2) To provide members with a place to discuss state-of-the-art technology.
(3) To provide members with opportunities to share their information with the world, to communicate openly with various people.

I will work to improve the activities of IEICE-CS with the goal of increasing its value.

Last December, IEICE-CS launched a new conference, the International Conference on Emerging Technologies for Communications (ICETC). The major purpose of ICETC is to stimulate the technical discussions across technical boundaries among IEICE-CS members. Technical committees in IEICE-CS collaborated to organize the conference covering all their research areas. Unfortunately, all sessions in the last year's conference was only online because of the corona pandemic. Still, the number of participants reached 589. Participants were able to discuss with people from different technical backgrounds. Currently, the Organizing Committee is preparing for this year's ICETC 2021. Please consider submitting paper and participating to the conference. We would like to grow ICETC as a conference where experts from various fields of ICT can easily and excitingly interact with each other.

Globalization promotes the activities by enabling interaction with foreign researchers and students. However, the percentage of non-Japanese people involved in the operation of IEICE-CS is still small. We will encourage diverse people to participate in the operation. Also, a clear obstacle to building a diverse network through IEICE-CS is the small number of female members in IEICE-CS. One of the causes of this problem is the small number of female researchers and engineers in electrical and electronic technology in our society. It is difficult to solve this problem in short term. However, for a long-term improvement, we will promote the attractiveness of ICT research and development to high school and junior high school students who are beginning to think about their career paths. We need to create more opportunities for young people to learn ICT and create new ideas.

I would like to conclude this greeting message by asking all of you for your kind support and contributions to IEICE-CS activities and its improvements.