Chair's message - June 2012

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