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The first VTS Board meeting of 2017 was held on 21 January in Houston,
preceded by a strategy session led by IEEE staff the previous evening.
The Board welcomed new elected member Richard Yu, from Carleton
University in Canada.
There have been a number of changes to the VTS executive for 2017.
Nicholas J. Kirsch has been appointed as the new Fellowship and
Scholarship Committee Chair, with the task of overseeing the The Daniel
E. Noble Fellowship Award and the Transportation Electronics Fellowship
which will be reinstated after a number of years when they have not been
awarded.
Marina Aguado, the new Education Chair, will lead the VTS Resource
Center going forward, the the Board agreed policy which will plenaries
at VTC and VPPC recorded and posted, subject to the presenters’ permission.
Thomas Kurihara will head the Standards Committee. Thomas is Chair of
the IEEE P1609 working group, and plans to explore new opportunities in
ITS, Railways and Connected vehicle-related standards projects.
Oliver
Holland, from King’s College in London, has been appointed Chapter
Committee Chair. Oliver currently chairs the UKRI chapter. Finally, Ali
Balador has been appointed as the new Young Professionals
Representative. This has been identified as a priority for the Society—1 in 3 IEEE members are young professionals.
David Haccoun has stood down as Awards Chair, although he remains the
Society’s representative to the Wireless Communications Letters Steering
Group, which VTS currently has responsibility for chairing. Gordon
Stuber is taking over as Awards Chair, with his previous
responsibilities as Fellows Chair taken on by Abbas Jamalipour.
The Board received reports from a number of sub-committees. The
Treasurer, Tom Rubinstein, reported that the Society was on target to
meet its budget even given the large increase in pages in the
Transactions. The transactions published 6031 pages in 2015, up from
4800 pages each in the previous two years, and 10,300 pages had been
published in 2016.
VP—Publications Weihua Zhang noted that the number of
papers in the early access queue—which are papers that are available
to be published as soon as space is available—had fallen from 685 in
June to 498 now. She estimated the backlog in terms of number of pages
at the end of 2017 would be around 3000 pages.
The term of office of the Transactions Editor-in-Chief, Michael Fang, is
coming to an end, and the Board thanked Mike for his four years of
service. His replacement will be Prof Nei Kato, who is currently the
editor of IEEE Network.
On the Magazine, Javier is stepping down as
Senior Editor of Mobile Radio after 16 years, and Prof. Matthias Pätzold
was taking over the roll. Klaus recorded his thanks to Javier for his
efforts over the past 16 years, and Javier turn thanked the editors that
he had worked with: James Irvine, Charlie Backof, and Klaus David.
VP—Membership Fabrice Labeau described the very positive results from
the membership development activity in China. Javier did some additional
visits in China in conjunction with VPPC, and also in Colombia. A
priority area for 2017 is Queensland, in conjunction with the Sydney
conference.
VP—Conferences JR Cruz provided the BoG with updates on the conferences
and their financial conditions. VTC in Glasgow had proved to be the most
successful VTC financially in recent years, and will generate surplus of
around about $285,000. VPPC2015 generated a surplus of about $33,000,
but there would be no surplus from VPPC2016, which had focused on
enlarging the community.
Bih-Yuan Ku presented the status of the Land Transportation Division.
Priorities for the year were standardization and better liaison with the
RTSC. David Thurston is the JRC rep. There are 94 papers this year and
about 30 of these are in the electronics area. David will be chair of
JRC2018.
VP—Motor Vehicles Loic Boulon reported VPPC2016 accepted 245 papers
from 396 submissions. It had 250 attendees, compared to 200 in 2015. The
2015 VPPC keynotes were in the Resource Centre and two magazine articles
had resulted from the conference. The motor vehicle challenge had gone
very well, with the closing date for submissions having just passed.
There were 21 groups with 48 participants in all.
VP—Mobile Radio Jae Hong Lee noted that there were two main ongoing
activities—the 5G initiative and a proposal to hold a Wireless Africa
conference. A number of possible countries had been considered, but the
preference was for Ethiopia and Addis Ababa Institute of Technology.
James gave an overview of the current status of the 5G initiative. As
well as 5G, VTS has involvement in IEEE initiatives for Smart Cities,
SDN, and Symbiotic Autonomous Systems. In addition, meeting approved
joining the IoT initiative.
Executive VP Alex Wyglinski reported on the VTS Connected Vehicle
initiative. A first very successful workshop on security had been held
in Montréal, and an additional one was planned for VTC2017-Fall in
Toronto. The summer school had also gone very well, and sponsorship was
received from National Science Foundation. VTS is also co-ordinating a
MOOC on autonomous vehicles which IEEE Educational Activities is working on.
The next VTS Board meeting will he held at VTC2017-Spring in Sydney. | 
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