We start with congratulating all the members of our community who have recently received prestigious awards and honors such as IEEE medals, technical field awards and IEEE Fellow recognition. Next, we present two reports on the ITSoc Distinguished Lecturer talks: the first talk was given by Parastoo Sadeghi on differential privacy at Linköping University; and the second was given by Shun Watanabe on information-theoretic cryptography at Sun Yat-sen University. We have another report on the 2023 GLOBECOM Conference Workshop on Channel Coding beyond 5G. We also feature call for 2024 award nominations, highlighting the new nomination deadline for the IEEE Fellow Class of 2025. As usual, we conclude with call for papers and conference calendar.

This issue marks the final edition under my tenure as the newsletter editor. In light of this, I wanted to make this farewell issue rich in content, incorporating the latest IEEE-level awards news, newly elevated IEEE Fellows and next-year named lecturers, typically reserved for the March issue. Over the past three years, I have enjoyed meaningful activities within our society, interacting with numerous members including the past three presidents, the BoG members, Matt Lafleur and Ashely Tufuga. One particularly memorable activity was the transition from the printed edition to a fully online format. The seamless transition, encompassing content coordination with BITS magazine and our ITSoc website, was made possible by generous support and advice from Brian Kurkoski, Christian Senger, Christina Fragouli, Wei Yu and  Robert Calderbank. I extend special thanks to Brian and Christian for their invaluable assistance in shaping the structure and format of our newsletter website. Lastly I extend my best wishes to my successor, Lalitha Vadlamani, and offer heartfelt congratulations on her new appointment.

Reminder:

Announcements, news, and events intended for both the newsletter and the website, such as award announcements, calls for nominations, and upcoming conferences, can be submitted at the IT Society website http://www.itsoc.org. Articles, reports, and columns can be e-mailed at [email protected] with a subject line that includes the phrase “IT newsletter.” Or the submission can be made directly by the authors at http://www.itsoc.org/newsletter/submit.

Next few deadlines:

• March 20, 2024 for the issue of March 2024;
• May 20, 2024 for the issue of June 2024;
• August 20, 2024 for the issue of September 2024.

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