The SMC Technical Committees provide a key structure through which SMC members build professional networks, initiate meetings, support the yearly SMC conference by organising sessions and tracks, and support IEEE publications. The society and its members have benefited from a wide range of active Technical Committee's (TC's). A Technical Committee consists of a group of scientists/engineers who volunteer to cooperate in a specific field towards one or more of the following goals:

• organize one, or more, invited sessions/tracks for the annual SMC Conference.

• organize a technical workshop in their specific area of expertise (typically 2 - 3 days, 30 - 50 participants).

•  inititiate a special issue or section in the IEEE Transactions on SMC.

•  organize a half-day tutorial course in the annual SMC Conference.

•  publish a tutorial review paper in the IEEE Transactions on SMC

Each TC has a chair; the TC chair acts as the liaison to the area coordinator and to the SMC board.

The society technical activities structure is dynamic, i.e., it evolves over time as membership interest shifts, 'old' fields disappear, new fields emerge and new initiatives are taken by members. For example, recently four new initiatives were taken to establish new technical committee's (chairs listed in parentheses):

Systems Assurance (Jack Marin, US Military Academy)
Machine Learning (Y.Y. Tang, Hong Kong Polytechnic University).
Bio-informatics (Cathy M. Helgerson, Un. of Illinois, Chicago)
Intelligent Transport Systems (Tsu-Tian Lee, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan)

Including these four new ones, the following Technical Committee'ss are active at present:
1. 'Systems' Area (coordinator: Seppo Ovaska):

• Conflict Resolution (L. Fang)

• Discrete Event Systems ( M. Zhou)

•  Industrial Applications (M. Embrechts)

•  Robotics and Manufacturing Automation (W. Gruver)

•  Control of Uncertain Systems (A. El Kamel)

•  Systems Assurance (Jack Marin)

•  Service Systems and Organizations (Jian Chen)

• Intelligent Transport Systems (Tsu-Tian Lee)

2. Human-Machine Systems:

• A new committee is being established (contact Stephanie Guerlain, University of Virginia)

3. Cybernetics (coordinator: Daniel Yeung):

• Computational Intelligence (Michael R. Berthold)

•  Soft Computing (Hideyuki Takagi)

• Expert and Knowledge Base Systems (John Lee)

• Knowledge Acquisition in Intelligent Systems (Stuart Rubin)

• Intelligent Communications (Ljiljana Trajkovic)

• Machine Learning; (Y.Y. Tang)

• Bio-informatics (Cathy M. Helgerson)

Are you interested in the work of on or more committee's, would you like to participate? Please contact the committee chair. Are you interested in a field for which there is no committee yet, but would like to volunteer in setting up a new one? Would you like any other information? Then contact the VP Technical Activities with your questions (thissen@tbm.tudelft.nl)

Wil Thissen, VP Technical Activities

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