IEEE June Trips and IEEE Five-Year Strategic Plan

In June 2024, as IEEE President and CEO, I traveled to Bremen, Germany (to present an award) and Birmingham, England (for an IEEE milestone, but I included those events in my last blog). This is an account of additional travel in June 2024, including meetings during the IEEE Toronto Meeting Series.

After spending a few days at home in San Jose, California, I headed to the joint Region 1 and 2 meeting in Stamford, Connecticut. The ten IEEE regions hold a few meetings each year, but typically they hold one large meeting that is attended by many of the section leaders as well as other IEEE leaders. With this meeting, I will have attended 9 out of 10 regional meetings. I missed the Region 10 (Asia) meeting because I attended the Region 8 (Europe and Africa) meeting.

As in other regional meetings, discussions on local and global IEEE topics were held and presentations were made by the many organizational units of IEEE. Regions 1 and 2 held joint meetings because they will be merging into a single region (Region 2) by 2028 and these joint meetings help them prepare to work as a single region.

After the joint Region 1 and 2 meeting, I traveled to Denver to attend the International Conference on Communications (ICC) for a day to present the IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award for Outstanding Contributions to Communications Technology to Stephen B. Weinstein, Leonard J. Cimini, Jr., and Geoffrey Ye Li for their work on technology that enables high data rates in modern cellular and Wi-Fi systems. The image below shows me in front of an IEEE Communications Society booth at the conference.

After my brief stint in Denver, I returned to the San Francisco Bay Area where I was able to spend time at the IEEE Computer Society’s first Data Center Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) Summit (CS RAS Summit) in coordination with the Test Technology Technical Community (TTTC). The summit took place June 11-12 in Santa Clara, California. Jyotika Athavale, President of the IEEE Computer Society, was one of the co-organizers. With the increasing importance of data center computing to support AI training and inference, improving data center reliability will help make computing more efficient and sustainable.

I also gave a remote talk at the IEEE Computer Society Chapter Summit later in the week. On Sunday, June 16, I flew to Washington DC to meet with Steve Welby, Deputy Director for National Security in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and former IEEE Executive Director at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. I spoke to him about the state of affairs at IEEE and also about important technology developments that IEEE could contribute to. The image below shows Steve and me with the White House in the background.

While in Washington, DC, I also briefly attended the IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society (MTT-S) Adcom meeting and the International Microwave Symposium (IMS) Welcome Reception. I also had a bird’s eye view of the setup of the conference’s very large exhibit area where over 1,000 exhibits were to be held (I was at IMS on Monday and the exhibits didn’t officially open until Tuesday). IMS is one of the IEEE conferences with a significant industry presence. Engaging with industry is one of my priorities for IEEE in 2024.

On Tuesday, I flew to Toronto, Canada from Washington DC, where the June IEEE Meeting Series was scheduled to take place. On Tuesday, I attended the IEEE Industrial Engagement Committee (a standing committee of the IEEE Board of Directors), where we developed plans to increase our engagement with industry and provide value, particularly to young technologists in industry. The following day, on Wednesday, I attended the IEEE Future Directions Committee, which is a standing committee on IEEE technical activities that focuses on generating activity around emerging and significant technical developments that fall within IEEE’s broad areas of interest.

On Thursday, a very productive IEEE organizational luncheon was held, focusing on funding IEEE public imperatives. IEEE public imperatives are activities that IEEE should engage in as a nonprofit organization, whether or not they generate a surplus.

IEEE leaders have agreed on a set of principles that can help us better achieve our mission of “advancing technology for the benefit of humanity,” including a better understanding and potential expansion of imperative government spending. These principles will play an important role in our 2025 budget and in the process of creating the IEEE 2026 budget.

On Friday, after attending IEEE technical activities and IEEE-USA meetings (occasionally in between other commitments), I moderated the first of the 2024 IEEE President-Elect Candidate Forums, which was live for those attending the IEEE meeting series, streamed live on IEEE.tv, and recorded for IEEE members to view before they begin voting for these and other candidates starting August 15, 2024.

After the Candidate Forum, we held a karaoke event (IEEE’s Got Talent) where Executive Director Sophia Muirhead and I started the session by singing “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond. The karaoke session was a great success and I was impressed by the talent of some of the IEEE singers! Singles and groups of IEEE volunteers and staff joined in the fun and there was even some dancing and singing. We ended up extending the session an hour later than planned (until 10pm) and there were still people signing up for a chance to sing when we closed. The last song was “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” by Cyndi Lauper.

Following the educational, technical, and member and regional activities meetings on Saturday, the IEEE Board of Directors, including elected directors and senior staff, were invited to a reception hosted by the IEEE Toronto Local Section. We also invited local section leaders to our Board of Directors dinner on Sunday evening following the first day of our two-day Board of Directors meeting.

At the IEEE Board of Directors meeting, we had several very productive activities. In addition to supporting a new budget process that should benefit IEEE as a whole and allow us to do more good work together, Sophia Muirhead and I talked about the progress we have made toward our goals in 2024 and beyond (especially as we create our IEEE five-year plan this year, for 2025-2030).

We had presentations from some of our working groups and ad hoc committees on important activities to advance our goals, including the IEEE Catalyst Membership and Geographic Activities (MGA) Committee on Engaging Students and Young Professionals in Industry, the Future of Engineering and Technical Education Working Group, an ad hoc committee on Technology for a Sustainable Climate (continuing activities launched in 2023 by former President Saifur Rahman), and a Finance Committee on Facilitating Strategic Investments and Public Imperatives.

On the second day of our IEEE Board meeting, we spent the morning discussing our strategic plan for the next 5 years with EY Parthenon and Mckinley, which began at our January Board Retreat in Jamaica. The photo below shows me posting some comments on suggestions for our strategic plan.

We have devoted a lot of time during our board meetings to such strategic discussions to help us get the perspectives of all IEEE stakeholders and determine what our ambitious goals should be for the next five years and what we should do during that time to achieve those goals.

In June 2024, I traveled to Europe, then to Connecticut for the Region ½ meeting, then to Denver, Santa Clara, California, and toured the Eisenhower Building next to the White House. I presented several IEEE awards and worked with the IEEE Board of Directors to create a strategic plan for the next five years.