Chairman’s Column

IEEE Region 10 - The major activity since the previous newsletter was the annual IEEE Region 10 meeting, which was held in Adelaide for the first time, 16-17 April. A considerable highlight was the bus trip to Urimbirra Wildlife Sanctuary and dinner at Whaler's Inn, Victor Harbour. Andrew Piotrowski and Zia Ahmed liaised with the Singapore office and provided the local input to the social program and satchel contents. We received very good feedback from attendees and congratulations go to Andrew and Zia for their capable arrangements.

A further highlight of the program was the presentation to Bob Bogner of an IEEE Region 10 Outstanding Volunteer Award. This is only the second such award made to an IEEE member in South Australia. Five awards were approved in 2003 and only two of these ("caption awardees") were presented in person.

Dr Jung Uck SEO, Region 10 Director presenting Bob Bogner the IEEE R10 Outstanding Volunteer Award

The Section took advantage of Dr Seo's visit to host a series of lectures entitled "From Bullock Carts to Information Industries - Transforming the Korean Economy" at the U. of South Australia, DSTO, and the U. of Adelaide. It was a fascinating account of a 40 year career from one of the real movers and shakers behind the economic miracle of the most northerly of the Asian tiger economies. The first commercial installation by SK Telecom, of the world's first CDMA cellular mobile telephone while Dr. Seo was President and Vice Chairman, is quite an accomplishment.

The Section Executive also co-hosted with Dr Seo a dinner for the visiting US IEEE staff and representatives, and IEEE AC members who arrived the evening before the meeting.

IEEE Region 10Meeting Gala Dinner

Seated L to R: Andrew Parfitt (NSW), Rae Kennedy, Bob Bogner, Olivia Robinson

Standing: Bruce Vyden, Andrew Piotrowski, ZiaAhmed, James Tien (USA), Keith Kikkert (NQ), Mike Liebelt, Michael Evans (SA), John Robinson (Chair AC)

IEEE Australia Council - The IEEE AC met during the Region 10 meeting as it has traditionally done. All Sections were represented and a large number of additional delegates were present from IEEE NSW and IEEE VIC as well as IEEE SA. It was a good opportunity for IEEE SA members to get an introduction to the other Australia sections as well as the three New Zealand section and council chairs.

IEEE South Australia Section - There is nothing further to report on the decision to amend the By-laws to return to the 3 year maximum term of continuous service in any office position.

Correspondence has occurred and we await a reply. IEEE ACT is in the same situation and has addressed it in an identical fashion!

Thanks to Damon Couper who has taken on the web page editorship, but the Publications Chair and Newsletter Editor positions remain vacant. If you can assist, please don’t hesitate to contact me. The Section Committee relies on new volunteers, and new ideas to keep IEEE in South Australia moving forward.

Dr Michael E. Evans

Chair, IEEE South Australia Section

April, 2004

Section Committee Officers for 2004

Chair: michael.evans@ieee.org

Vice Chair: zia.ahmed@ieee.org

Secretary: timferris@ieee.org

Treasurer: andrew.piotrowski@ieee.org

IP Chair bevan.bates@ieee.org

Membership andrew.udina@dsto.defence.gov.au

Profession bruce.vyden@dsto.defence.gov.au

Awards zia.ahmed@ieee.org

Education hgreen@ieee.org

Publications andrew.piotrowski@ieee.org

Student s.gordon@ieee.org

SP/Comms arek.dadej@unisa.edu.au

AP/MTT hedley.hansen@dsto.defence.gov.au

C/AES mark.pszczel@dsto.defence.gov.au

Computer enyo.agbodo@baesystems.com

Inf. Theory Lars.Rasmussen@unisa.edu.au

GOLD andrew.piotrowski@ieee.org

Student Branches

UofSA: nimrod.lilith@postgrads.unisa.edu.au

kutluyil.dogancay@unisa.edu.au

UofAdelaide ksyau@eleceng.adelaide.edu.au

samuel.mickan@adelaide.edu.au

Flinders U. sharmil.randhawa@flinders.edu.au

Jimmy.Li@flinders.edu.au

Membership Development

	28 Feb 03	29 Feb 04
Members	265	282
Senior Members	28	27
Fellows	2	2
Affiliates/Others	28	15
Students	72	44
Other	1	0
TOTAL	396	370

IEEE Higher Grade memberships are up 1.1% over last year (+2,806 members). Higher grade memberships (March) are also improved from the 0.8% gain posted in February. There continues to be a geographic unevenness in performance. All six of the U.S. regions are showing declines in Higher Grade memberships, while all four non-U.S. regions have posted gains! Region 10 surpassed Region 8, registered a mammoth 8.4% growth and now has the largest higher grade membership of any non-US region.

From the figures it would appear that associates are becoming members; the number of members was up by 17, and associates down by 13.

Globally Fellows, and Senior Members represent about 2% and 10% of total higher grade membership. On these figures South Australia Section should have 8 Fellows and 40 Senior Members.

IEEE Student Memberships are rebounding this year. Through March, Students are up 4,093 (+7.4%) over the level of a year ago with Region 10 the highest at 13.4%. While this has not completely erased the decline experienced in 2003, it has recouped a good share of it.

Professional Development

IEEE SA is co-sponsoring the conferences:

5^th Biennial Asian Control Conference

Melbourne, 20-23 July 2004

Sponsored by IEEE (SA, NSW, QLD), IEAust, U. of Melbourne

http://ascc2004.ee.mu.oz.au

Eighth IEEE International Symposium on Spread Spectrum Techniques and Applications

30 August - 2 September, 2004, Sydney

http://www.isssta2004.org/

IEEE Student Activities

A joint meeting of the three SA university student branches, as well as representatives from the SA Section committee (including the Chair), was held on Thursday 11 March in the city. This was the first meeting of its kind for the SA Section, and was organised to promote the relationships between student branches and the Section, as well as to arrive at ideas for future collaboration.

As a result of the meeting, each of the student branches now have a better understanding of how the other branches, as well as the Section operates. There is also a desire to plan joint activities between the branches, some of which may include: software courses (e.g. Matlab), site visits, career development days and technical seminars. As the planning of events unfolds, input and assistance from all IEEE members will be solicited.

The next Student Activities meeting is planned for the start of Semester 2 (July/August).

Steve Gordon

Chair, Student Activities

s.gordon@ieee.org

Student Travel Awards

The Section has approved the following post-graduate travel grants so far this year.

Peter Celinski, U. of Adelaide

Logical effort based design exploration of 64 bit adders using a fixed dynamic-CMOS/Threshold-logic Approach

Hybrid parallel counters-domino and threshold logic

2004 IEEE Computer Society Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI'04), 19-20 February, Lafayette, USA

Nimrod Lilith, U. of South Australia

Dynamic channel allocation for mobile cellular traffic using reduced-state reinforcement learning

IEEE WCNC 2004, March, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

Mark McDonnell, U. of Adelaide

Signal reconstruction via noise through a system of parallel threshold nonlinearities

ICASSP 2004, 17-21, May 2004,Montreal, Canada

Yong Shyang Liaw, U. of South Australia

Throughput Performance of Multiple Independent Paths In Wireless Multihop Network

IEEE Int'l Conference on Communications (ICC 2004), 20^th – 24^th June 2004, Paris

Awards

IEEE SA Section Distinguished Service Award

A draft terms of reference has now been established for this program and nominations are invited for awards to be presented in 2004. Please forward nominations to IEEE Awards Convenor, PO Box 53, Elizabeth, SA 5112, by 30 September. (or contact Zia Ahmed for details)

Chapters/Branches/Affiliates

Control, Aerospace and Electronic Systems Chapter

The Chapter sponsored (4 Apr 04) Dr Hugh Stone, U.of Sydney, to deliver The T-Wing tail-sitter UAV, to an audience at DSTO and U.of Adelaide, as part of the joint CAES/AIAA activity program.

If you would like to be put on the mailing list for future meetings please contact me.

Dr Mark Pszczel

Chair, CAES Chapter

NEWS

GOOD NEWS - U.S. Lifts Restrictions on Publishing.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) ruled on 2 April that the IEEE's publishing process is exempt from OFAC regulations and licensing requirements for scholarly papers submitted by authors from Cuba, Iran, Libya, and Sudan.

IEEE SCOOP - February

SECTIONS CONGRESS 2005 PROGRAM

The Regional Activities Board will present IEEE Sections Congress 2005 in Tampa, Florida, USA, 14-17 October 2005. The theme of the event is "Promoting a World-Class Volunteer Community." As part of the planning process, Program Committee Chair Dave Green has asked that current and recent Section leaders provide feedback on a number of suggested topics.

To that end, please visit http://www.surveysolutions.com/ieee/sc2005b.htm and complete the survey. Your answers will help determine what program sessions would be most valuable to the Section leaders attending Sections Congress.

If you have any questions, please contact Dave (d.green@ieee.org) or Tracy (t.hawkins@ieee.org).

The Institute Online- February

Board Approves Limited E-Mail Voting. IEEE units such as societies, technical councils, and committees can now vote by e-mail on a limited number of actions affecting their organizations, such as formal motions proposed by members. The Board of Directors approved this bylaw change at its November meeting.

IEEE Email Alias

Members with IEEE e-mail aliases have a new layer of protection against spam: a filter that detects unwanted e-mail by analyzing its words. So far about 6000 people have signed up for the service, which joins a virus-detection service introduced several years ago.

Those members who need to UPDATE THEIR IEEE EMAIL ALIAS, may do so by going to: http://eleccomm.ieee.org/

What Do You Think?

In a recent copy of IEEE SCOOP:

YOUR SECTION'S RESERVES

Putting money into savings is commendable, but how much should your Section keep in reserve and how much should be spent on Section operations? This question has been asked more frequently as many Sections have significantly lowered mailing costs by using the IEEE eNotice service for emailing newsletters and announcements, http://www.ieee.org/enotice.

The RAB Operations Manual, 9.4.I.11, says: "Sections may establish a reserve fund at least equal to one half of the total budgeted yearly expenditures." But how much is too much? Unit reserves should be adequate, but not excessive. As a general guideline, a reserve greater than three times the annual rebate, after known commitments and unusual requirements are deducted, would be considered excessive. To stay within this guideline, steps should be taken to increase the level of Section activity to avoid accumulation of disproportionately large reserves.

IEEE SA has reserves which exceed the recommended level which enable a level of activity which otherwise would not be supportable. If you have a view on this subject you are invited to send it to the IEEE Newsletter Editor, PO Box 53, Elizabeth, SA 5112.

INFORMATION - IEEE ONLINE COLLECTIONS

A new section of the IEEE Web site provides visitors with thorough, definitive information on IEEE online collections and other subscription options to access IEEE online technical documents. The new IEEE Publications Online information site is located at http://www.ieee.org/onlinepubs.

This online resource provides comprehensive information on IEEE publications, product features, and subscription options for libraries, members and individuals. The site also helps users understand the multiple subscription options offered by IEEE, and provides pricing details, licensing information, key contacts, support services, training options and other important details related to IEEE online resources.

Technology Futures – 2004, 3–4 June 2004

Technology Futures – 2004, “The Second National Electronics Industry Annual Conference” will be held on 3‑4 June 2004 at the Hilton International, Adelaide.

In 2004 the Conference will cover topics such as:

Future Technologies (The Future)
Emerging Technologies (Tomorrow)
Applications (Today)

· Commercialisation (R&D to Reality)

To complement the Electronics Conference, an exhibition showcasing new technologies and commercialisation practitioners will be held concurrently.

For further information http://www.eiaa.asn.au/event.html

MSIP Scholarships 2005

Masters by Coursework in Mathematical Sciences

(Signal and Information Processing)

Two Scholarships will provide remuneration of the full cost of course fees. Applications close December 12th, 2004.

http://www.cssip.edu.au/education/awards/index.html

IEE Student Paper Presentation Prize

IEEE Student Member Kerrin Pine, Flinders U., won the national 2004 IEE Student Paper Presentation Prize competition which was held at the Convention Centre, Adelaide, 2 Apr 04. Congratulations Kerrin.

MSIP Scholarships 2005

JOINT TECHNICAL PROGRAM 2004 - Electrical and Electronic Engineering