This is my final newsletter column as SMC President, as new officers were elected at last month’s SMC Board of Governors meeting. Therefore, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your help and support during the past two years. It has been an honor to serve as your president during the past two years.

I would also like to take this opportunity to welcome and congratulate SMC’s six new officers who were elected last month for two-year terms starting January 1, 2004. They are:

President:
William Gruver, gruver@cs.sfu.ca

Vice-President of Long Range Planning and Finance:
Julie Adams, julie.a.adams@vanderbilt.edu

Vice-President of Technical Activities:
Daniel Yeung, csdaniel@inet.polyu.edu.hk

Vice-President of Publications:
Peter Beling, pb3a@virginia.edu

Vice-President of Conferences and Meetings:
Mo Jamshidi, moj@cybermesa.com

Vice-President of Membership:
Tsu-Tian Lee, ttlee@cn.nctu.edu.tw

They will serve until December 31, 2005.

On January 1, 2004, former SMC president Pierre Borne will begin a two-year term as SMC’s Senior Past-President, and during this same time period, I will serve as SMC’s Junior Past-President. Bill Gruver, SMC’s new president after January 1st, will soon announce the Treasurer and Secretary for 2004.

Again, congratulations to all elected!!

I would also like to thank immensely all those officers and Board of Governors members whose terms will end on December 31, 2003, for all the hard work they have done for SMC over the past several years. It would have been impossible for me to have presided over SMC during the past two years without their support and help. They are:

Vice President of Long Range Planning and Finance: William Gruver
Vice President (Technical Activities): Wil Thissen
Vice President of Publications: Chip White
Vice President of Conferences and Meetings: Julie Adams
Vice President of Membership: Larry Hall
Jr. Past President: Pierre Borne
Sr. Past President: Dick Saeks
Treasurer: Mo Jamshidi
Secretary: Kaz Kawamura
Board of Governor Member: William Gruver
Board of Governor Member: Jim Keller
Board of Governor Member: Seppo Ovaska
Board of Governor Member: Stuart Rubin
Board of Governor Member: Hideyuki Takagi

I would also like to thank the SMC’03 general and program chairs (along with their organizing committee), for all their time and effort in making SMC’03 last month a successful one! (I hope you are all busy preparing papers for SMC’04, http://www.ieeesmc2004.tudelft.nl/, next October in The Hague, Holland).

In addition, I should note that all SMC members will soon receive ballots for SMC’s annual Board of Governors election. Please vote for the candidates of your choice. SMC can only represent your views and serve your interests only when you get involved and vote!!

In fact, I would like to invite any and all SMC members to become more involved with SMC. We are constantly looking for volunteers to:

a) Serve as an associate editor or reviewer for our journals
b) Serve on an SMC technical committee
c) Serve on the organizing committee of an SMC’s conferences
d) Become a candidate for the SMC Board of Governors
e) Become a candidate for an SMC officer position.
f) Contribute an article for the SMC web page or the SMC Newsletter.

If you are interested in any of the above, or in any other volunteer position or activity, please contact me ASAP! SMC is only as good as the volunteers we have, so please become involved!

Finally, I would like to summarize the current activities of the SMC officers, editors and other volunteers as reported at our Board of Governors meeting last month. This will hopefully give you a brief idea as to the current status of SMC and IEEE and what has happened over the past year.

• Membership

Larry Hall, VP of Membership, discussed that SMC’s membership has dropped slightly (probably due to the rise in IEEE dues over the past several years). Not only do we want to increase our membership, we want to also increase our member’s satisfaction with SMC. Thus we are always looking for ways to do this. If you have any suggestions, please let us know.

A recent IEEE survey of our members showed that members became SMC members in order to obtain our publications, obtain technical information, and to be informed in their field. However, some SMC members are dissatisfied with their SMC membership. While SMC members are aware of and like our newsletter (and all our other publications are important to them), there are other things we can do or should do to increase membership (e.g., offer more educational opportunities). We also need to boost our student membership by providing more opportunities for students. One example of this is our student activities program. The Student Activities Committee, chaired by Ferat Sahin, has provided travel funding for students to attend SMC'03. A large number of submissions were received for the best student paper competition at SMC'03, and student volunteers helped with local arrangements at SMC’03.

• Technical Activities

Wil Thissen, VP of Technical Activities, has recently revamped the SMC Technical Committees. He has terminated some for lack of activity: Adaptive Computing Systems, Pattern Recognition, all “old” TC’s in Human Machine Systems, Optimization and Environmental Systems and Risk Analysis. Some of these will be reinstated with new leadership at a later date. In addition, some new technical committees have been added. Finally, Wil is working with Peter Beling to put technical committee descriptions on the web.

Richard Saeks chairs a committee that is making recommendations for structural changes to SMC. His concept is to strengthen technical committees by combining them into technical divisions.

• Conferences

Julie Adams, VP of Conferences and Meetings, has arranged 24 conferences in 2003 and 2004 to be either “in cooperation with,” “sponsored,” or “co-sponsored” with SMC. This is a great improvement over several years ago. The schedule for future SMC conferences is as follows:

SMC2004 – Conference site will be The Hague, Netherlands, at the Netherlands Congress Center October 10-13, 2004 (for more information, see http://www.ieeesmc2004.tudelft.nl/ - there is still time for you to send in a paper…).

SMC2005 – Site will be the Hilton Waikoloa on the Big Island of Hawaii in October 2005.

SMC2006 – Site will be the Grand Hotel in Taipei, Taiwan on October 8-11, 2006.

SMC’07 – Possibly Montreal. A proposal is planned for presentation at the April 2004 ExCom meeting.

SMC’08 – Site will be the International Convention Centre in Singapore in October 2008.

SMC’09 – Site will be in North America. No proposal yet.

SMC’10– Greece has been proposed.

• Publications

One of the most important changes to the SMC Society over the past several years has been a significant research explosion in the area of complex smart “intelligent systems”. The SMC Transactions have been publishing fewer papers on non-perceptive and non-adaptive systems and more on intelligent systems dealing with uncertainty and vagueness. A typical paper published in 1992 might have been titled: “Distributed Dynamic Decision and Planning Systems for Robot Motion”, whereas a paper published today would more likely be titled: “An Adaptive Intelligent Control System Application Using a Fuzzy-Neural Network Algorithm Approach”.

We now see papers published on new, everyday applications involving smart, intelligent systems such as intelligent retrieval from Internet searches, cameras that remove the jitter that comes from unsteady hands, intelligent transportation systems, adaptive communications technologies, intelligent manufacturing systems, etc.

In fact, because of this research explosion, submissions to our journals are predicted, by the end of 2004, to increase by over 150% for Part A, over 200% for Part B, and over 250% for Part C, as compared to the number of submissions several years ago. The SMC transaction that has the biggest increase in the number of submissions is Part B, from 310 submissions in 1999 to an estimated 1000 submissions in the near future. In fact, Part B will publish over 2500 pages in 2004, an increase of 1500 pages over 2003, to meet this demand. Thus, due to the increased number of pages in Part B for 2004, we are still looking for high quality papers to publish (despite the huge increase in submissions we are seeing).

SMC did submit a proposal to IEEE TAB splitting Part B into two journals, but the proposal was opposed by two other societies due to perceived competition and other issues. TAB therefore approved increasing the page count for Part B from 1000 pages in 2003 to 2550 pages in 2004. However, to help pay for this, SMC members will only get electronic access to Part A, B and C, and our Newsletter, included with their SMC membership fee of $9 for 2004; they will no longer receive hard copies of Part C mailed to them. The new prices for our journals for 2004 are:

Part A: Member Print Price: $20, Student/Other/Retired Print Price: $10, Non-member list price: $370 (as recommended by marketing).

Part B: Member Print Price: $25, Student/Other/Retired Print Price: $13, Non-member list price: $400 (April 2003 recommended price was $370 based upon 1000 pages).

Part C: Member Print Price: $15, Student/Other/Retired Print Price: $8, Non-member list price: $255 (as recommended by marketing).

Part B has a turn about time of about 83 days for submitted papers, even through Larry Hall, the editor of Part B, expects about 800 papers for this year. Larry is also proposing to put page numbers on papers when they get electronically posted in XPLORE, thus enabling them to be cited.

Both Chip White, editor of Part C, and Don Brown, editor of Part A, have reported that Part A and Part C are doing well.

All three of SMC’s journals are now fully electronic on Manuscript Central, thanks to hard work by all three editors. SMC was the first IEEE society to do this for all of its journals. However, all three journals have a critical need for additional AE’s (if you know of any candidates, please let one of the editors know).

T.T. Lee, the editor of SMC’s Newsletter, with this newsletter, has just published the last issue of 2003. The SMC newsletter is well designed and seems to be attractive to our members. Even through the newsletter is relatively new; over 50% of our members have read it. However, T.T. would like to improve the SMC Newsletter further, and is looking for suggestions and articles.

Peter Beling has been working hard to revise our web pages. Much of it is now finished, and the balance should be finished soon.

• Long-Range Planning and Finance

Bill Gruver, our VP of Finance and Long Range Planning, reported that our new Constitution and Bylaws are now in effect. They were approved by IEEE last December and published in December 2002’s SMC Newsletter. Bill has also updated our society’s administrative information with IEEE, worked with Peter Beling on our web page, and has made recommendations for various long-range planning issues.

Mo Jamshidi, our Treasurer along with Julie Adams, put together an extensive budget for 2004

At the end of 2000, SMC had reserves of $2.3 million.

At the end of 2001, SMC had reserves of $1.887 million after an IEEE infrastructure (tax) charge of about $839,000.

At the end of 2002, SMC had reserves of $1.59 million after a $297,000 deficit caused by IEEE’s 2002 infrastructure charge of $404,600.

It is expected that at the end of 2003, SMC will be taxed again around $378,000, but, given that the stock market is up this year, our reserves will probably go up significantly.
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• Awards

Dick Saeks, Chair of SMC’s Awards Committee, announced SMC awards at the annual conference banquet, including 2001 and 2002 best paper awards. The proposal for establishing a Madan Singh Award is still being processed by the IEEE.

• Nominations

Pierre Borne, Chair of SMC’s Nomination Committee, ran the election that elected six officers at the BOG meeting last month for terms from 2004 to 2005. Also, as mentioned above, the election for the BOG will take place in early 2004.

Our volunteers are working hard to make SMC a successful professional society. For this reason, the future of SMC is bright!

To get more information on SMC, please visit our web site, www.ieeesmc.org. You can join or renew your IEEE and SMC membership for 2004 by following the instructions at www.ieee.org/portal/index.jsp and clicking on membership

If you ever have any questions or problems, please feel free to contact me anytime!

Dr. Michael H. Smith
IEEE SMC President
m.h.smith@ieee.org
November 2003