IEEE APS: IEEE 2008 International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and USNC/URSI National Radio Science Meeting - Call for Special Sessions
5-11th July 2008
San Diego, Califonia, USA
Special sessions are solicited for the 2008 IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and USNC/URSI National Radio Science Meeting, to be held July 5-11 in San Diego, California, USA.
Requests and proposals for special sessions for the 2008 San Diego meeting must be submitted to the Chair of the selection committee, Nader Engheta, by 19 October, 2007. The deadline will be strictly observed. The selection committee will review all the requests/proposals for the special sessions received by 19 October, 2007, and may also propose and suggest other topics for such special sessions.
The person who proposed each of the selected special sessions will be informed of the decisions of the committee by mid-November, which will provide enough time for organization of the selected sessions. The identified organizer(s) of a selected special session will be responsible for ensuring that all of the papers associated with their session are submitted by 15 January, 2008, the deadline for the San Diego meeting. They are also responsible for providing a list of authors and paper titles for their session to the local organizers in the required format, so that the correct submitted papers can be associated with the special session.
Proposals should include the title of the special session, a brief description of the topic, and the justification for the "special" nature of the session. Proposals should be sent to:
Nader Engheta
University of Pennsylvania
Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering
200 South 33rd Street
Philadelphia
Pennsylvania
19104
USA
Tel: +1 (215) 898-9777
Fax: +1(215) 573-2068
E-mail: Engheta@ee.upenn.edu.
Background Information
In 2005, the Administrative Committee of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society and USNC/URSI put forth a new procedure for selecting from the requests and proposals for special sessions at the annual joint IEEE International Symposium on Antennas and Propagation and USNC/URSI National Radio Science Meeting. According to this procedure, there will be a limited number of special sessions: a maximum of two per half-day for every half-day of technical sessions held at the joint AP-S/USNC/URSI conference. The title "special session" completely encompasses all specially organized sessions: for instance, it includes sessions "in honor/memory of," and sessions on new research efforts or technology directions. With the five days of technical sessions, this amounts to a maximum of 20 special sessions. The number of special sessions allocated between the IEEE AP-S and USNC/URSI communities is in direct proportion to the ratio of the number of accepted papers between these communities at the previous year's joint conference. Special sessions are selected from the submitted proposals by a joint Special Session Selection Committee.
This committee consists of the following members: (a) the Chair of the New Technology Directions Committee (NTDC) from the AP-S AdCom, (b) the two immediate past AP-S Presidents, (c) the Technical Program Committee (TPC) Chair of the previous year's joint AP-S/USNC/URSI conference, (d) the TPC Chair of the current year's joint AP-S/USNC/URSI conference, and (e) two USNC/URSI representatives appointed by the Chair of the USNC. The NTDC Chair is the Chair of this committee. The reason for this distribution was to ensure the presence of a "corporate memory" in the process, to allow the meeting's local organizing committee to have some input into what special sessions will be hosted at their meeting, and to ensure that the newest technical topics of interest to both the AP-S and USNC/URSI communities will be selected. The AP-S AdCom also recommended encouraging at least one of the selected special sessions to have a commercial/industrial emphasis. This committee also selects which topics will be targeted for the interactive (poster) sessions for the joint conference.
