Message from TFIPP Secretariat

Yoshitsugu Kondo, Dr. NTT Advanced Technology Corporation, Session Organizer, BS-7, IEICE Communications Society

　The 2013 IEICE Society Conference was held at the Fukuoka Institute of Technology in Fukuoka, on September 17-20, 2013, where three Societies of Engineering Sciences Society (ESS), Communications Society (CS), and Electronics Society (ES) joined. 18 Symposium Sessions and 55 General Sessions were held. The number of registered participants reached 6,134 in total.
　In the Conference, the IEICE Technical Committee on "Information Communication Management (ICM)" hosted an full English Session entitled “Network and Service Design, Control and Management” as one of 18 Symposium Sessions which focused on special topics of advanced technologies. ICM has been handling this Session since 2004, to promote the globalization of the IEICE by providing the participants staying in Japan or joining from overseas with more opportunities to present papers and discuss in English.
　55 papers were submitted to the Session this year, and the number increased by 20% in comparison with last year. They were classified into 16 sub-sessions according to the topics and the sub-sessions were held every day during the Society Conference.
　Various topics have been discussed in each sub-session every year. 19 papers were related to ad-hoc networks, P2P, multi-hop protocols, and wireless systems especially this year. These topics seemed to derive from an explosive spread of a smart phone, the Great East Japan Earthquake three years on, and so on. Topics covering application layers such as information centric networks, application & services and data centers were also discussed. Topics of optical networks, network management, and QoS were discussed eagerly also this year as well as before. Every presenter and audience enthusiastically discussed the ideas and exchanged opinions in the time assigned for questions and answers. Since the time assigned for presentation passed quickly, presenters and questioners continued their discussions here and there even in the break periods.
　Although most of papers were proposed from universities, 6 papers were proposed from industries. While most of speakers were international students studying in Japan and foreign researchers working in Japanese industries, 6 presenters were Japanese students and researchers. In this Symposium Session, ICM expects the open contribution from not only universities but also enterprises, and also talks by Japanese students and researchers as well as international students and foreign researchers. Discussions from various aspects are indispensable for the advancement of their research phases.
　ICM has the best paper award to encourage the continuous activities. In the last ICM workshop held in March, ICM awarded the best paper award to the following paper selected from the papers presented in the English Session of the 2012 IEICE Society Conference:
”Evolution of Eye Movement Classification for Interactive Streaming System,” by Yunlong Feng (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies, called “SOKENDAI”, Japan), Gene Cheung, Yusheng Ji (NII, Japan).
　 Now ICM is selecting the best paper award from the papers presented in the English session this year, and it will be awarded in the upcoming ICM workshop of the 2014 IEICE General Conference which will be held at Niigata University, Niigata, Japan on March 18-21, 2014. Your participation in the English Session hosted by ICM is welcome next year as well!

Fig.1 English Session BS-7 in 2013 IEICE Society Conference

　 IEICE Society Conference was organized by the three Societies, ESS, CS and ES as mentioned in the prior article and successfully held with so many participants at Fukuoka Institute of Technology in Fukuoka, Japan, on Sept. 17-20, 2013. The university is located at the east of Fukuoka city and has fostered quite many engineers, above all in the field of ICT since it was founded as Fukuoka Advance Radiotelegraphy School in 1954. Originally, the city has the long history where it has developed as the gate of trade industries to Asian and Western countries and further it has thrived on global industries covering steel, coal, car assembly and ICT over the past one century. In the sense, the Conference participants could have opportunities to see and know many international researchers sharing the same interests in special fields in the global and historical environment. They exchanged opinions through paper presentations and panel discussions, enjoyed their free time by visiting industrial sites or historical places
　 From the statistic viewpoint, this Conference provided 341 Panel/Tutorial/Symposium presentations and 1,554 general papers. It is summarized in Table 1. Two Symposium Sessions, AS-1 by Engineering Sciences Society and BS-7 by Communications Society provided English presentations/papers, further BS-7 provided the complete English Session during the four days Conference. The Conference achieved the rate of English contributions, 22% in Panel/Tutorial/Symposium Sessions and 4% in General Sessions, and 7.4% in average a little higher than the General Conference in March this year.

Table 1 The number of presentations/papers and the rate of those given in English

　 As informed in the former issues of IEICE Global Plaza, the IEICE Knowledge Discovery, briefly “I-Scover” is a database service where you can easily search out an expected paper out of quite many publications of IEICE, further any other databases linked to IEICE’s database through the fundamental scheme of metadata based structure and linked data. You can access I-Scover without charge. Once you entered into the world of I-Scover, you can freely walk around more preferable papers and reach the final destination with keywords, relevant author-names, attributes, fields. Anyhow, please try to visit http://i-scover.ieice.org/?lang=en at first. We have just opened this service in the beginning of this fiscal year, your constructive idea or experience are welcome to improve the functions or enhance the quality of available services for general researchers and scholars over the world.
　 The “I-Scover Challenge 2013” is the first trial of public contest for this purpose. The application procedure and important dates are: Requirements: to propose the idea of new capabilities, application program, data analysis/visualization with documentation or products. Qualification of applicant: delivered to the applicants on demand Specifications of application: -do- Metadata files: given in Linked Data form or XML form. Due date of the entry and proposal: January 8, 2014.
Notice of examination results: Middle of February, 2014.
Award ceremony to excellent proposals: in the 2014 IEICE General Conference at Niigata University in March, 2014.
Contact: Prof. Kenzo Takahashi, I-Scover Project, at kt@ieice.org.

　 As notified in the former issues of IEICE Global Plaza, “the 2014 IEICE Information and Communication Technology Forum”, briefly ICTF2014 will be held at Poznan University of Technology in the beautiful city of Poznan, Poland, on May 28-30, 2014. This forum will encourage the collaboration of researchers in academia and industry over the world, especially in Europe and Asia. The researchers, professors, PhD students and experts from industry will gather there to exchange ideas and discuss major trends and challenges in the updated ICT.

• Full paper due: December 29, 2012
• Notification of acceptance: February 10, 2013
• Final camera-ready manuscript due: March 3, 2013
• Conference: May 28-30, 2014

Fig.2 Beautiful oldest historical city of Poznan in Poland,
where ICTF2014 will be held in May, 2014

Topics of Interests

　The Forum will be comprised of three days sessions, divided into blocks based on the subject. Keynote talks will be provided to address the challenges to the next-generation communication networking technologies and applications.
　The topics of interests in your paper submission are:

<Engineering/Fundamentals>
-Theory and application of mathematical systems sciences
-Signal processing interdisciplinary
-Non-linear phenomena
-Cryptography and information security
-Coding theories
-VLSI systems, applications and computer aided network design
-Acoustics engineering

<Communications>
-Next generation access networks
-Next generation networking
-Power line communication
-Wireless communication and networking
-Optical networks and systems
-Internet of things
-Green communication
-Smart grids

<Electronics>
-Image and signal processing
-Digital coding and filtering
-Microwave devices, components, systems and applicaitons
-Analog and mixed-signal circuits
-Low power designs
-Embedded systems
-Consumer and multimedia system
-Biomedical/bio-engineering circuits and systems

Collaborations with IEICE I-Scover Project

　All accepted contributions will appear as full papers in the conference proceedings and will be published on the IEICE’s I-Scover based Digital Library. For this purpose, IEICE Europe Section has been developing the application program to the Conference papers to be indexed for general readers widely over the world, through the I-Scover capabilities. This new scheme of ICTF will promote the enhancement of impact factor of papers presented in the Conference. All paper registrations and submissions also will be handled through the proper conference system developed by IEICE Europe Section which will be compatible with the I-Scover.

Updated Program and Liaison

　Please refer to the updated information of the Conference at: http://www.ictf2014.org/. If any, would you please contact
Mariusz Glabowski at mariusz.glabowski@put.poznan.pl.