Every five years each society in the IEEE is reviewed by the Technical Activities Board (TAB) over a wide range of issues and procedures, including finances, governance, publications, membership, conference/workshops, and globalization efforts. This year the Information Theory Society is being reviewed, with the actual review taking place at the November TAB meeting in Denver. Within the next couple of months, we will be preparing the written responses that will serve as the basis for the November discussions. The officers, committee chairs, and members of the Board of Governors will be evaluating the Society's efforts this year, and each member should take this opportunity to provide input.
Elsewhere in the Newsletter is a note from Membership Chair, Ubli Mitra, soliciting just such a response. The IT Society has always placed emphasis on our technical activities, the publications and the conferences/workshops, and has attempted to be active internationally. Comments and suggestions concerning these and other roles are welcome. My e-mail address is: j.d.gibson@ieee.org.
The first Board of Governors meeting of the year was held at Princeton, where the IT Society review and many other issues were discussed. The next Board meeting is on June 9, 1996, at the Information Theory Workshop in Haifa, Israel. This workshop is a topically broad-based one, as contrasted with the topically focused workshops, and it promises to be important technically, with the added attraction of celebrating Jacob Ziv's 65th birthday.
One of the issues brought forth at the Princeton BoG meeting, during a discussion of future conferences and workshops, was planning meeting dates so that participants miss as few classes and important dates at home as possible. This is an important consideration and deserving of careful planning and creative responses whenever possible.
We are currently at a time when the basic research results of the Information Theory Society members in error control coding, modulation, networks, and source compression are bearing fruit in terms of new, powerful telecommunications services and products. As an IT Society member, this is a source of some satisfaction to me; but additionally, I wonder if these new telecommunications services and systems might offer opportunities to remain connected during travel (should we need to or want to) and further open up our activities to a wider audience of participants. Specifically, I am thinking about how we might use one or more of the many videoconferencing methods available to allow participants to teach classes or attend business meetings while at IT conferences/workshops or to provide certain technical sessions to off-site participants via the Internet (say).
Granted there are many technical and economic reasons why this might be difficult, expensive, and unwieldy, and some participants enjoy the meetings precisely because they are able to focus on the technical program without the external distractions. With these in mind, however, there ARE intriguing possibilities. For example, two weeks ago while traveling in Northern California, I taught my undergraduate class from San Francisco to College Station, Texas, using ISDN at 128 kilobits/sec and a widely available videoconferencing system. Having done this from other locations before, I knew that the class would be a big success because, what better way to teach digital communications, or say, compression, than by using the technology? Additionally, I did not miss my class! Admittedly, the arrangements were non-trivial, but because the equipment was available at both ends, the cost was low.
Other possible uses include broadcasting an important plenary or tutorial over the Internet. Of course, several other societies now broadcast technical presentations from their conferences regularly, and there are many free(!) tools available to accomplish this. Certainly, this would allow much broader member participation in the technical meetings, which has always been a priority for us.
I am sure that many other innovative ways for us to exploit the technological fruits of our labor will come to mind. If you have suggestions or comments, send me e-mail at the address given previously, or if you have a H.320 compatible videoconferencing system at 128 or 112 kbits/sec, give me a video call at (409) 845-2652 (twice). I look forward to hearing from you and seeing you--at Haifa or in my office!