Dear SMC Members: Ladies and Gentlemen:
A year is coming to the end soon. Our Society has made a tremendous progress this year due to countless contribution from you.
This is the first completion cycle of continent-rotation in conference venue for our annual conference -America (Regions 1-7&9), Asia/Pacific (Region 10), and Europe (Region 8). Repeating the same rotation, next year, our 2014 annual conference will be held in San Diego, California, USA, followed by Hong Kong in 2015, and Budapest, Hungary, in 2016. A similar new rotation will repeat again.
During the year, the Executive Committee met several times and has accomplished tasks that fit society goals and missions that, I believe, top many of other IEEE societies.
In publications, we have renamed the title by re-arranging the scopes of our Transactions, from Transactions on Part A-B-C to IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, and IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems. We thank the efforts from our EiCs to maintain the standard of less than 9% of acceptance rate and continuous support from the authors like you. We plan to increase the publications from bi-monthly to monthly very soon. With the efforts from our Vice President on Publications and President-Elect, Professor Ljiljana Trajkovic, and other colleagues, one great news and announcement to share with you is that the Society will launch a new transaction in March, 2014: IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems (with Computer Society), which is the first new additional Society Transaction in our 40 years of history. Professors George Cybenko from Dartmouth College and Enuice Santos from University of Texas, El Paso will be the founding Co-EiCs. This will increase SMC Society’s spectrum to cover current emerging technology and we welcome you continue to support this new Transaction. In addition, a SMC Magazine proposal by Prof El-Hawary to the IEEE is also in the planning stage and hope we will also launch this soon.
In addition to our annual SMC conference, we also initiated and implemented our S-M-and-C technical regional conferences, namely, (1) Int’l Conference in Systems Sciences and Engineering, mainly, in Region 10 (this year is in its 4th year); (2) Int’l Conference on Cybernetics in Region 8; and (3) a plan-to-be Human-Machine Systems conference. The collaboration efforts between our three Technical Activities Vice Presidents and Conference Vice President are highly appreciated.
Our Long Range Planning and Finance Committee, led by Professor Irv Engleson has completed SWOT analysis and launched our Long-Term Strategic plans to guide the direction for the Society.
In addition to our regular Distinguished Lecture program and membership activities, summer school program, student-oriented conference, our Membership and Student Activities Committee also planned and held two distinguished lecture tours in Europe and China during the year. Also, this is the first time that the Society supports a Chapter activity in STEM area for Ghana, Africa. With more than 6 million USD of reserve in the Society, we welcome you to suggest any initiatives to better the Society.
As usual, the Executive Committee and our Board of Governors continue to serve the best to our members and continue to maintain and to be the leader in Systems, Man, and Cybernetics areas in the professional societies.
Sincerely,
C. L. Philip Chen
President, 2012-2014 IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society
