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 Thematically speaking, many of the activities and services organized by VTS members for our community during 2018 can be categorized into the following:
- Industry Engagement
2018 has been an outstanding year for providing services to our industry members. We organized our first Connected and Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) industry summit in Silicon Valley (January 2018) attracting ~200 industry practitioners. VTC2018-Spring and VTC2018-Fall each held highly successful industry programs consisting of world leaders and innovators, specializing in 5G and autonomous vehicle technology. Finally, a standing committee on industry engagement was created as part of the VTS BoG to explore new ways of providing more services to our industry members worldwide.
- Supporting VTS Women and Young Professionals
VTS supports all of its members within our global community. In 2018, several exciting events were organized to enable the professional development of our VTS members who are women and young professionals. The Young Professionals held a pizza panel discussion at VTC2018-Fall in Chicago, where approximately 40 young professionals attended to ask questions about career development, opportunities to improve professional growth, and gain insights from a team of expert panelists from both industry and academia. Additionally, a luncheon was organized at VTC2018-Fall in support of VTS women with an excellent keynote talk given by Professor Aylin Yener from Penn State University! The ~50 members in attendance were evenly split between male and female members.
- Emerging Technical Areas
We live in exciting times, with numerous technological innovations taking place all around us. In particular, we are experiencing new advances in autonomous vehicles, electric railway systems, and drone technologies. In order to provide our members with access to these latest developments in vehicular technology, the VTS has been organizing activities around these topics in order to better serve our members. For instance, the VTS created three ad hoc technical committees (autonomous vehicles, electric railway systems, drone technologies) in order to grow communities around these topics. Events such as the IEEE Connected and Autonomous Vehicles Symposium and the IEEE VTS Connected and Autonomous Vehicles Summer School @ WPI have been organized in order to provide opportunities for our members to learn and grow about these emerging topics.
- Enabling Professional Growth around the Globe
This year, we organized several new local workshops and conferences in places such as Africa (the First IEEE Wireless Africa Conference, Ethiopia, September 2018) and South America (First IEEE VTS School in Latin America & Caribbean: V2X Communications, Colombia, November 2018). Furthermore, VTS local chapters have been extremely active in supporting the professional development of their members, especially by hosting presentations via our Distinguished Lecturer program.
- Offering Premier Technical Conferences and Publications
VTS continues to provide high quality and high impact activities and services for our members. Our Transactions on Vehicular Technology (TVT) achieved an outstanding impact factor of 4.432, while our Vehicular Technology Magazine (VTM) achieved an impressive impact factor of 6.038! Both VTC2018-Spring in Porto, Portugal and VTC2018-Fall in Chicago, USA were wonderful successes in terms of the number of attendees and the quality of the technical programs, tutorials, workshops, and keynotes. Similarly, the Vehicular Power and Propulsion Conference (VPPC) in Chicago and the Joint Rail Conference (JRC) in Pittsburgh, USA were fantastic accomplishments in terms of providing a high quality technical program for the conference attendees.
In 2019, you can expect more events related to emerging areas in vehicular technologies: autonomous vehicles, drones, and electric railway systems. Furthermore, we will continue to support diversity in our VTS community for groups such as VTS women members and young professionals, by organizing workshops and panel discussions. There will be greater engagement with industry and providing these members with the new services and activities, including standards and local chapter activities.
All of these activities, events, and services are made possible by the dedication, hard work, and generous time provided by our VTS members. I would like to sincerely thank all of our volunteers from around the world for making our Society such a vibrant and exciting community that enables us to learn, network, and grow.
Wishing you all the best for a successful and prosperous 2019! |
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