June IEEE Travel And IEEE’s 5-Year Strategic Plan

In June 2024, as IEEE President and CEO, I visited Bremen, Germany (to give out an award) and Birmingham, England (for an IEEE milestone, but I included these in my last blog). This is a report on additional travel in June 2024, including meetings during the IEEE meeting series in Toronto.

After spending a couple of days at my home in San Jose, CA, I then went to the Regions 1 and 2 joint meeting in Stamford, Connecticut. All ten IEEE regions have a few meetings every year, but generally they have one large meeting where many of the leaders in these sections as well as other IEEE leaders participate. With this meeting I will have attended 9 out of 10 of these Region meetings. I missed the Region 10 meeting (Asia) as I attended the Region 8 meeting (Europe and Africa).

Like the other region meetings there was discussion on local and well as global IEEE topics and presentations from the many organizational units in the IEEE. Regions 1 and 2 held joint meetings as they are going to merge as a single region (Region 2) by 2028 and these joint meetings help them get ready to work as one region.

After the joint Region 1 and 2 meeting I flew to Denver to attend the International Conference on Communications (ICC) for a day in order to give out the IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award for outstanding contributions to communications technology to Stephen B. Weinstein, Leonard J. Cimini, Jr., and Geoffrey Ye Li for for their work on technology that enables the high data rate capabilities in modern cellular and Wi-Fi systems. The image below shows me in front of an IEEE Communications Society exhibit at the conference.

After my quick trip to Denver, I flew back to the San Francisco Bay area where I was able to spend some time at the first IEEE Computer Society Summit on Reliability, Availability and Serviceability (RAS) in Data Centers (CS RAS Summit) in coordination with the Test Technology Technical Community (TTTC). This summit took place June 11-12 in Santa Clara, CA. Jyotika Athavale, President of the IEEE Computer Society, was one of the co-organizers. With the increasing importance of data center computing to support AI training and inference, improving reliability of data centers will help to make computing more efficient and sustainable.

I also gave a remote talk to the IEEE Computer Society Chapters Summit later that week. On Sunday, June 16 I flew to Washington DC in order to visit with Steve Welby, Deputy Director, National Security, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and past Executive Director of the IEEE at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. I spoke with him about how things were going in the IEEE and also about important developments in technology that IEEE could contribute to. The image below shows me and Steve with the White House in the background.

While I Washington, DC I also briefly attended the IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society (MTT-S) Adcom meeting and the International Microwave Symposium (IMS) Welcome Reception. I also got to have a bird’s eye view of the setup of the very large exhibit area for the conference where there were going to be over 1,000 exhibits (I was at the IMS on Monday and the exhibits didn’t officially open until Tuesday). IMS is one of the IEEE’s conferences with a significant industrial presence. Engagement with Industry is one of my priorities for the IEEE in 2024.

From Washington, DC I flew to Toronto, Canada on Tuesday, where the June IEEE meeting series was going to happen. I attended the IEEE Industry Engagement Committee (an IEEE Board of Director’s Standing Committee) meeting on Tuesday where we came up with plans to increase our engagement with industry and provide value, particularly for younger technologists in industry. The next day, Wednesday, I attended the IEEE Future Directions Committee, which is a standing committee in IEEE Technical Activities that focuses on creating activities around emerging and significant technical developments that fall in IEEE’s broad areas of interest.

On Thursday there was a very productive IEEE organization unit alignment lunch which focused on IEEE funding of public imperatives. IEEE public imperatives are activities that IEEE should engage in as a non-profit organization, regardless of whether they generate a surplus or not.

IEEE leaders have aligned on a set of principles that can help us to better achieve our mission of “advancing technology for the benefit of humanity,” including better understanding and possible expansion of public imperative spending. These principles will play a significant role in our 2025 budget and the process for creating the 2026 IEEE budget.

On Friday, after attending IEEE Technical Activities and IEEE-USA meetings (on and off between other engagements) I moderated the first of the 2024 IEEE President-Elect Candidates Forums which was live for those attending the IEEE meeting series, was live-streamed on IEEE.tv and was recorded for IEEE members to view before they started to vote on these and other candidate leaders starting on August 15, 2024.

After the candidate’s forum we had a Karaoke event (IEEE’s got talent) where Executive Director, Sophia Muirhead and I started the session off singing Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline”. The Karaoke session was a big success and I was amazed at some of the singing talent in the IEEE! We had singles and groups of IEEE volunteers and staff join in the fun and there was even dancing as well as singing. We ended up running the session for an hour later than scheduled (till 10 PM) and there were still folks signing up for chances to sing when we closed up. The final song was, “Girls just want to have fun”, by Cyndi Lauper.

After Educational Activities, Technical Activities and Member and Geographic Activities meetings on Saturday the IEEE board, including directors elect, and senior staff were invited to a reception by the local Toronto IEEE section. We also invited the local section leaders to our board dinner on Sunday night after the first day of our two-day board meeting.

In the IEEE board of directors meeting, we had several very productive activities. In addition to supporting a new budgeting process that should benefit IEEE overall and enable us to do more good work together, Sophia Muirhead and I spoke about progress we have been making to meeting our objectives in 2024 and beyond (in particular because we are creating our 5-year plan for the IEEE this year, for 2025-2030).

We had presentations by some of our task forces and ad hoc committees on important activities to further our goals including the IEEE Catalyst member and geographic activities (MGA) committee on Engaging Students and Young Professionals in Industry, the Future of Technical and Engineering Education task force, an ad hoc committee on Technology for a Sustainable Climate (continuing activities started in 2023 by Past President Saifur Rahman) and a finance committee on Enabling Strategic Investments and Public Imperatives.

On the second day or our IEEE Board of Directors meeting we spent the morning in a discussion of our strategic plan for the next 5 years with EY Parthenon and Mckinley that began during our January BoD retreat in Jamaica. The photo below shows me posting some comments on suggestions for our strategic plan.

We have been spending a significant time during our BoD meetings for such strategic discussions to help us gain perspectives from all of the stakeholders in the IEEE and determine what we should have as aspirational goals for the next five years and what we should do over that time to achieve these goals.

June 2024 saw me in Europe and then Connecticut at the Region ½ meeting, then in Denver, in Santa Clara, CA and visiting the Eisenhower building next to the White House. I gave out several IEEE awards and worked with the IEEE board on creating a strategic plan for the next five year.