Blogs

Dear Members
We are drawing to a close this year with this last message for 2012. As we look back, I think we have had many achievements that we can feel satisfied about. Many of our members and OUs received well deserved awards and recognitions, many conferences, FDPs, SDPs and events were organized by our OUs, many new Student Branches, Society Chapters and SB chapters were created and so on.

All this goes to indicate that we are growing and also improving our visibility within the IEEE fraternity. Your section continues to be the largest section in R10 and has even more opportunities to grow. We must continue to grow both in size and in quality of our activities. Growth brings the advantages of scale and enhanced network of resources to tap. For example we conduct about 30 plus conferences each year. The experience gained from these conferences helps others to conduct more conferences. Conferences give great recognition to researchers and institutions globally which in turn motivates people to work harder to improve the quality of papers published.

On the governance side we were able to get a PAN card and register our section under the Societies Act. This gives us legal status and tax benefits which few other sections have. IEEE has appreciated these steps taken by us on governance. We have broad based our student projects initiative based on feedback from student members which has received very good response. We have initiated international conference travel support which was also a suggestion from the members. I want to assure you that all your section executive committee members are very positively inclined and responsive to feedback from members and each feedback is critically examined at the executive committee meeting before taking next steps.

If I were to reflect on the year gone by, I think our section is endowed with a lot of resources and opportunities that can be harnessed for the benefit of our members, institutions and the society at large. In my interactions with members during the year at various fora, I found of particular importance, the enormous enthusiasm of student members that can be usefully deployed for mutually beneficial engagements. One approach that I think may work is to involve and engage students in all section and society chapter activities. There is also tremendous scope for engaging members in a multidisciplinary manner to bring cross currents of ideas that can be implemented for the benefit of our members.

Do keep writing to us about your thoughts, suggestions, comments and feedback to make us serve you better.

Wish you all a very happy and prosperous 2013.

Yours voluntarily
ts.rangarajan@gmail.com

Dear Members
Hope all of you enjoyed the string of festivals this month.

Hurricane ‘Sandy’ managed to impact IEEE web servers by keeping them down for several days. It will be interesting to know how individual members were affected by this non availability of IEEE services on the web. Madras Section was affected because we were not able to reach our own site hosted by Entity Web Hosting. We were not able to access vTools. And some of our student branches organizing conferences were not able to access the conference platform. This incident has shown how much we have come to depend upon internet for our day to day activities and how important is backing up our data.

In this context I wish to remind all our Organizational Units (OUs) – student branches, society chapters and affinity groups to use the section website for all their activities and keep it updated at all times. We are using information available in this site for various purposes eg. – Proposal preparation, posting new circulars, hosting newsletters, seeking feedback etc. Over time we expect this site to become the central repository of all activities of the section and its OUs. There is a lot of scope for enhancing the features of this site to help us in all our tasks. As and when any new feature is required we can configure the site accordingly. The new Government of India portal http://npibeta.nic.in/ is also built on the same platform.

I also wish to remind all office bearers of our OUs that it is time to ensure that all their activities of the year are reported through vTools L31 report. This year, a couple of our OUs missed getting their rebates because of absence of L31 reports of at least 2 meetings per OU per year. The vTools and other IEEE sites are up and running now after the breakdown.

Finally, I wish to add that we are expecting a few administrative changes due to the establishment of an IEEE back office at Bangalore. All queries pertaining to IEEE activities in India will be handled by this office. We may be changing our calendar year to April – March from next year to align with Indian fiscal year. There may be some change in the way rebates are managed to comply with Indian Laws and so on. Also your section has now been registered under the societies act last month.

Yours voluntarily
ts.rangarajan@gmail.com

Dear Members
This month has been a rather eventful month for all of us. Four awards were won by students and student branches for paper presentation, website design and outstanding SB. An Indian IEEE member Mr. Ramakrishna Kappagantu won the election for R10 Director- elect – 14 years after the last Indian Dr. Harbans Lal Bajaj. Prof Roberto De Marca of Brazil won the election for President- Elect, IEEE and IEEE day was celebrated on Oct 2, 2012 by organizing an online symposium by students of Jeppiar Engineering College which attracted over 400 participants globally.

It is heartening to note that many student branches are enthusiastically organizing events for students. I have also been invited to many of these events. With the experience of participating in these events, I wish to share a few thoughts on best practices for organizing such events.

a. Every IEEE event should in some way relate to the mission of IEEE viz. Advancing Technology for Humanity. This will bring focus to the mission and continuously emphasize the need to ‘give’ to the community. It can be done by innovating events around the theme of the mission and thus help the participants to be creative. One good practice that I have seen in some events is to begin by administering a survey on expectations from the event or information on relevant issues of the event using vTools or survey monkey.
b. All events must be extensively and creatively marketed. Each society chapter, affinity group and student branch must create and maintain databases of prospective participants within IEEE and outside relevant to their area of specialization and focus. For example, if we are conducting an FDP – which is exclusively meant for faculty – we must target our program only to faculty IEEE members and non-members because it is not meant for others. Creative use of social media – Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Madras Section website etc. are very good contemporary methods. To begin with the society chapters, affinity groups and student branches can mine SAMIEEE (the IEEE member database) to create their own exclusive databases.
c. Every event must begin by creating a website and using the various tools available such as Google Forms or Madras Section website Web forms, survey tools etc. to share event details and updates. Rapporteurs must be appointed very early on for the event. They must focus on documenting, recording, photographing, keeping the event website updated and in general ensuring that enough collateral of the event is created for publications and posterity. All this collateral can be uploaded / linked to Section Website so that future organizers can view and learn from past events.

I hope you find these best practices useful.

Yours voluntarily
ts.rangarajan@gmail.com

Dear Members
As the largest section in R10, Madras Section has considerable resources and opportunities to engage its members in a number of activities that can continuously enhance our awareness and application of knowledge to advance the interests of our society.

I believe that several organizational units under Madras Section – student branches, affinity groups and society chapters are doing yeoman service by organizing events, conferences and workshops. In the past month I have participated in many such events and I am very encouraged by the volunteer efforts of so many of you who take time out from your precious and busy schedules to work for IEEE. Many of us do so out of gratitude for an institution which has provided us such a wonderful forum.

IEEE has several ways to recognize such volunteer effort and I feel it is the duty of each one of us to identify and recognize our colleagues from IEEE for their selfless service. There are awards for a number of categories which are periodically announced and circulated. Some of them allow self-nominations, some of them can be done online and others require endorsements and recommendations.

There is no greater joy and pride than when a member gets recognized by his / her peers for the contributions made by him / her. It is similar to your paper being accepted by very discerning and sceptical peers after a tough scrutiny. Such recognitions in my view are the greatest motivators and a motivated and enthusiastic colleague is likely to contribute even better quality service while upholding the high ethical standards that IEEE is so very well known for, in its over 125 years of existence.

My colleagues in the executive committee have shown exemplary support for painstakingly suggesting, nominating, doing the paper work and follow up for such recognitions in this year. At the section level I can assure you that we are committed to encourage creation of new student branches, new society chapters, new affinity groups and many such activities. But we need your help and support to identify members who take these initiatives and continue to serve IEEE’s activities in our section. Personally I feel the best job that the executive committee members could do is to spot volunteers who deserve recognition and provide them what they deserve.

I believe if we do that continuously, Madras Section can scale its activities to greater heights on the shoulders of these tireless volunteers.

Yours voluntarily
ts.rangarajan@gmail.com

 Dear Members

Dear Members
After the summer break, colleges have reopened and so have IEEE activities. We are seeing new student members and great enthusiasm among student branches to start activities. While interacting with members in various fora and through various communication channels, I would like to share a few perceptions that I have gathered

a.    Some institutions are very aggressive in deriving benefits from IEEE memberships. They encourage their students to become student members of IEEE early in college and progressively improve their awareness to obtain support for their projects, participate in competitions, apply for awards and recognitions etc.
b.    Some institutions leverage IEEE for the conduct of conferences, publishing papers in IEEE-Xplore and thus increase their visibility in international space
c.    Many institutions start student branches and even student chapters of various societies with a lot of enthusiasm but are unable to sustain them year after year due to various reasons
d.    There is a vast difference in awareness of IEEE and the benefits of its membership among members of all categories inspite of all the information being available online

Most longstanding members of IEEE continue to be members because not only do they see some immediate benefits but over a period, with increased awareness about IEEE and its vast resources they see new opportunities to learn, network and enhance their knowledge, skills and competencies.

In its more than 125 yearlong history, continued membership of IEEE has helped countless professionals in the world to seamlessly and successfully navigate their career from education to jobs and finally to a very satisfying post retirement engagement as well.

The world today is a very dynamic place for each of us particularly in our professional life. From college we move to either a job or higher education. From higher education we move to a job or even higher education. We are constantly changing our jobs, institutions and roles. With this kind of dynamism in our professional life, we need some support in the form of a professional network on which we can rely to help us make these changes successfully. Being a member of IEEE year after year provides you with the consistent professional nourishment and networking that can make our volatile professional life easy to manage. Imagine your life without a home and a family!

Start your membership of IEEE in the first year of college and continue it all your life. IEEE is your ‘home’ in your professional career.

Come home to IEEE!

Yours voluntarily
ts.rangarajan@gmail.com

 

Dear Members

Your section is running 3 programs for you viz.

a.Conference Sponsorship Program – Technical and financial support to Institutions having student branches and who are organizing conferences / workshops / seminars and symposia under the banner of IEEE. IEEE has introduced a new conferences application platform called ICX wef June 2012 to enhance the user experience on conference organization.

b.Faculty Development Program – Conducting training programs for faculty in specific areas to update them on latest knowledge and enable them to be more effective teachers. The 22nd Faculty Development Program on "Soft Computing Techniques in Electrical Sciences – Recent Perspective" is scheduled on 30th June & 1st July 2012. Faculty IEEE members get 50% concession in course fee.

c.Student Project Support Program – For the second successful year this program aims to encourage student members of IEEE to experiment and explore their genuine project ideas as part of their curriculum. Your section funds the project either partially or fully depending upon the evaluation of the project by a committee.

During the last executive committee meeting, your section is considering adding 2 more programs viz.

d.Skills Development Program – One of the recurring feedbacks from previous faculty development programs is to consider running some skills based programs such as Matlab, Octave, Labview, Drupal etc. The IEEE GINI (Global Integrated Network of IEEE) and IEEE GOLD teams are already working on a program on Drupal (the open source CMS platform of our website)

e.Financial assistance for attending conferences – Many requests have been received by your section in the past, particularly from student members, exploring the possibility of financial support for presenting their selected papers at international conferences. The section is actively considering allocating a fixed budget for this purpose after the members work out the modalities of approval.

Your section’s executive committee is keen to identify areas where IEEE Madras Section can effectively contribute and make a difference by enhancing the value of IEEE membership. We welcome your suggestions in this regard and assure you that each suggestion will be taken up for discussion in the committee.

Each month we download the latest active members list from SAMIEEE to update our listserv ids and postal labels to ensure that all active members get our newsletters on time as also all the informative and very useful emails that we circulate. It pays to keep your membership active always.

Finally, I would like to point you to https://supportcenter.ieee.org/ for all your queries to be addressed through chat, phone or emails.

Yours voluntarily

ts.rangarajan@gmail.com 

Dear Members,

My dear members

In the month gone by, I had the opportunity to address a few conferences conducted by colleges.  IEEE Madras Section has been supporting conferences through technical and financial sponsorships every year. Financial sponsorship of conferences organized by student branches is now the biggest budgetary item of IEEE Madras Section. Globally IEEE‘s revenues from conferences accounts for 35.2% and expenses towards conferences is 31.2%.

IEEE Madras Section over the years has been systematically addressing the needs of various segments of its membership. We began by focusing on students first – supporting student branch activities and student projects. We then moved on to teachers by organizing Faculty Development Programs regularly. While we want to continue and enhance these activities for students and teachers, I feel it is time for us to focus on researchers. Most of the engineering colleges currently affiliated to universities are very keen to seed and incubate research in their institutions.

Earlier the goal of researchers used to be ‘publish or perish’, which has now moved on to ‘patent or perish’. We want to see this further to ‘produce or perish’ meaning encourage conversion of research outputs to products or services useful to society. This chain of activity from research to product / service development through patenting and IPR protection will require handholding and setting up of common platforms for enabling the transition.

Compared to its western counterparts the Indian education system continues to operate in a silo with little or no interaction with industry in its educational and research activities. For institutions to emerge as fountainheads of societal development it is essential to discard the silo type operation and embrace an open, collaborative and multidisciplinary approach to education. It should be possible for people to seamlessly move from institution to industry and vice versa thereby enriching both.

As a professional association with members from both institutions and industry, I believe IEEE offers a unique platform to help its members bridge this divide for the benefit of society, their institutions, their industry, their students and themselves. Recently IEEE Madras Section in consultation with Region 10 has identified an Industry Relations Chair to focus on this aspect.

I welcome suggestions and feedback from both institutions and industry on how IEEE Madras Section could address the institution – industry linkages with particular reference to helping researchers create, develop and produce solutions, products and services for the benefit of our society.

Till next time 

Yours Voluntarily

ts.rangarajan@gmail.com