IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015 - 23

(public policy manager of Google,
Greece), Fotis C. Plessas (assistant professor of the University of Thessaly), Kyriakos Agavanakis (CTO of ThinkRIT Ltd.),
Epameinondas Hatzidimitriou (freelance
computer engineer), and Thanos Polyzos
(freelance electronic engineer).
Pending elections for a new Executive
Committee (EC), a temporary committee was formed by Thanos Kakarountas
(chair) and George Koutsoyannopoulos
(vice chair), with Nikolaos Zervas and
Nikos Moshopoulos as members. Other
than the chair, who has been an academic for the past decade, the rest of the
members of the committee are wellknown Greek entrepreneurs, founding
some of the most innovative and hightech companies in Greece. The committee meets twice a year.
In addition to the EC meetings, the
Chapter arranges two to three technical

meetings in various geographic locations
each year with varied themes centered
around technology transfer and innovation. Technical meetings usually attract
50-100 attendees and include innovative
human-computer interaction technology
(i.e., interactive display technology and
extended-reality technology at the
National Technical University of Athens
and the TEI of the Ionian Islands),
embedded systems for multimedia (at the
University of Thessaly, Lamia, with the
support of the Corallia Clusters Initiative,
a European awarded business cluster),
and medical technology.
Technical events take place over a
wide area of Greece, covering the locations of half of the IEEE Student
Branches, achieving extraordinary coverage of the country. It is often said that the
awareness campaign is the most successful among the IEEE Chapters in Greece.

The Greece IEEE CE Society Chapter
has managed to develop a fruitful collaboration with the Spain Chapter (2012-
2013) that is focused on technology
transfer. Recently, it has also worked with
the Serbian CE Chapter and the Russian
CE Chapter to organize and support the
International IEEE CE Workshop that was
held 11 March 2015 in Novi Sad, Serbia.
This year's schedule included the support of the Hellenic Students and Young
Professionals Congress 2015 at Thessaloniki, attracting student members from
Greece and Cyprus. Furthermore, next
year the Chapter will organize or participate in technological events in Greece,
including Digital Athens, Game Expo, and
Patras IQ. Finally, the Chapter is planning
to organize the first Internet of Things tech
forum in Greece in 2016 or 2017.
-Athanasios (Thanos) Kakarountas

Bob Frankston Delivers Distinguished
Lecture to Hong Kong Chapter

he Hong Kong Chapter of the
IEEE Consumer Electronics (CE)
Society is about to celebrate its
25th year. Formed by Robin
Bradbeer and George Woo in 1991, the
Chapter has hosted many distinguished
guests in its existence. The latest was
Distinguished Lecturer (DL) Bob
Frankston on 3-4 June 2015.
The Hong Kong Chapter is one of the
IEEE CE Society's average-sized Chapters, with around 40-50 members over
the years. It is also a unique Chapter
since the majority of its members work
in a different country than the one in
which they reside; two-thirds of the

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2015.2462533
Date of publication: 29 October 2015

members work in mainland China at
some point during the week. This makes
arranging technical meetings quite difficult. Like other IEEE Society Chapters
with a similar problem, most of the technical activities are jointly arranged
between Society Chapters within the
Hong Kong Section, which only has
around 2,500 members. Most of the
technical meetings are also jointly organized or supported by other professional
societies-such as the IET Hong Kong
Branch, the Hong Kong Institution of
Engineers, the British Computer Society,
and the China Institution of Electronics.
It helps that there is considerable overlap
and duplication of membership between
these organizations in Hong Kong.
The Hong Kong Chapter has successfully organized a number of CE

DL Bob Frankston delivering his talk in
Hong Kong on 4 June 2015.

october 2015

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

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