Message to the SMCS members from Dr. Edward W. Tunstel, Johns Hopkins APL, USA, junior past President of the IEEE SMC Society

Dear IEEE SMC Society Members,

As my term comes to an end, I’d like to thank our Board of Governors for the opportunity it gave me to lead our Society. It has been a good experience for me, and I hope that it has been for the Society as well.

With your support, we were able to:

  • continue operating constructively for our membership
  • add emphasis on promotion with messaging focused on who we are and what we offer
  • emphasize the importance of our attention to transdisciplinary S-M-C and our posture for being a leading Society in that regard
  • establish a firmer footing as a Society with a voice in the area of brain-machine systems
  • initiate new ways to highlight Young Professional and Student Member research
  • solidify a working systems-focused relationship with INCOSE
  • exercise our motivations to increase activity in Region 9 with an outreach visit to Brazil…and more.

Our publications are doing well with increasing journal impact factors, with inclusion of our youngest publications (Transactions on Computational Social Systems and SMC Magazine) in scholarly publication indices, and with the SMC Magazine’s impact factor assignment now imminent – not to mention progress made toward prospective new journals. I look forward to continuing to work with our continuing and, soon to be newly appointed, Editors-in-Chief for our publications.

In the area of membership, we’ve seen the addition of SMC Chapters and Student Branch Chapters in Los Angeles, Australia, China, Indonesia, Brazil, Republic of Macedonia, and two in Pakistan. (We still need more in Regions 1-6 and 9!) In addition, we’ve seen an impulse in student engagement and support through webinars and sponsorship.

Our annual flagship conference (IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics) continues to improve in quality (acceptance rate management, technical programming, and focus on strategic affinity groups). And we’ve extended our core conference portfolio with the approaching launch of our inaugural conference on human-machine systems, ICHMS (http://ichms.dimes.unical.it/). The traction gained with INCOSE represents steps toward enhancing our notoriety with industry-focused communities, and I believe we could go further with industry-focused research communities by affiliating with systems engineering research conferences fun by members of our Society such as CSER (https://cser2020.org/). Regarding our technically co-sponsored conferences, I’ve had the opportunity to carry our message and outreach to delegates at several of them this year, resulting in attracting new members. We have many such conferences in our portfolio, and I encourage continued presence at them to facilitate attracting more like-minded colleagues and students engaged in our fields of interest as new members.

Operationally, the Society remains financially healthy and attentive to our current five-year strategic plan. Among a number of opportunities, this positions us well to pursue opportunities such as leadership of emerging IEEE communities and global-level activity through a budding relationship with the World Academy of Art and Science. We can be confident going forward with the good fortune of continuity in our finance and organization & planning leadership.

In my terminal President’s Message in the October 2019 issue of the SMC Magazine, I expressed gratitude to all, including outgoing volunteers on our Board of Governors. And I look forward to working with the new incoming Members-At-Large. Here, I’d like to reiterate special thanks to our Executive Committee appointees – to Ying (Gina) Tang for serving as Secretary and serving double duty once she was elected as a Member-At-Large, and to Robert Woon for lending his continued support after many years as Treasurer and continuing to offer highly valued, essential, and unofficial meeting planner services for Executive Committee and Board of Governors meetings.

I now leave you in the good hands of President Imre Rudas and ask you to join me in supporting his leadership effective 1 January 2020.

Happy New Year to All!!!