UFFC-S President's Message - May 2019 - Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb
Dear UFFC-S members and affiliates,
I would like to wish you a great springtime in 2019, and welcome you to the UFFC-S Newsletter. As I look back at 2018, the first year of my UFFC Presidency, I can see many high notes for our Society.
Our membership is stronger than ever with close to 2500 members in the three technical areas. Our symposia have also been steadily growing with over 1500 attendees at the IUS in Kobe and over 1000 attendees at the joint ISAF meeting in Hiroshima. Our finances continue to be healthy and will allow us to give back to our members through new initiatives launched in the coming years.
Specifically, 2019 is marked by a substantial investment in student travel support for the newly created Technical UFFC-S Schools, the inception of a new UFFC-S Ambassadors program, and implementation of plenary and tutorial talks recording at all of our symposia. I highly encourage our student members to check out our UFFC-S School program. Specifically, the Ultrasonics schools centered on Ultrasound Contrast Agents (Boulder, CO, USA, May 2019), Ultrasound Motion Imaging and Phantom Experimentation (Lyon, France, April 2019), and Waves and Transducers (Shenzhen, China, May 2019). Frequency Control will support our students’ attendance of the International School of Physics Enrico Fermi in Verona (Italy) in July 2019. Ferroelectrics will host the summer school in China in late autumn, with dates and location yet to be determined. All our Schools are also accessible to other IEEE members and non-members by payment of the full registration fees. We hope they will prove to be an excellent source of continued education for our wider membership.
The UFFC Ambassadors program entails up to $2000 for local travel support of our Young Professionals to promote both their research and the UFFC Society. Interested members should submit a short CV and letter of interest with a list of the planned talks and visit locations to the Awards Committee. Lastly, we hope that a more formalized recording of the plenary and tutorial talks will offer an opportunity to more members and the public at large to view the presentations given by some of the best technical experts in our field. The pilot initiative will start with plenary, tutorial and invited talks, and we hope to expand it in the future to all the oral presentations at our flagship symposia.
Through IEEE, all our members have access to a custom @ieee.org email address and associated GoogleApps and Google Drive with 30GB of free storage. Similarly, expanded access is available to Box (cloud storage services), free Overleaf Pro (LaTeX collaborative composition of manuscripts) through IEEE Collaboratec, and IEEE DataPort (repository of datasets and data analysis tools). New offers for IEEE members are continuously updated, so make sure your membership doesn’t lapse!
Moving forward, the UFFC leadership will concentrate the efforts on two major areas: improving diversity and increasing inclusion, and enhanced ethics. For the first item, we have started efforts through the creation of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee, chaired by Prof. Alp Sehirlioglu (Case Western Reserve University). The committee has already started its work, with specific attention to the inclusiveness of the symposia and our awards selection processes. With respect to ethics, I want to remind everyone to make yourself familiar with the IEEE code of Conduct and Ethics. Specifically, all the abstracts submitted for our flagship symposia are considered as full manuscripts for IEEE, and as so they are subject to the ethical publication requirements: the definitions for plagiarism and self-plagiarism for IEEE submissions and the resulting corrective actions can be found in Section 8.2.4.D of the IEEE PSPB Operations Manual. We expect that all our members and symposia attendees will adhere to the Code of Conduct and Ethics Code.
Lastly, I want to take the time to thank a wonderful team of volunteers that served on the Administrative Committee in 2018 and welcome a new group of volunteers that will help us bring to fruition our goals in 2019. Anything we have achieved has been achieved as group and anything we hope to achieve has to be done with the support of as many of you as possible, as our Society’s members and as volunteers. Please feel free to contact me or any Committee Chair (you can find a complete list here), if you are interested to serve as a volunteer, contribute with your time and ideas, or simply if you have a question about getting more involved.
I am looking forward to continuing to serve as our Society’s President for another year, and hope to bring forward more opportunities for all of our members.
Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb, IEEE UFFC President