IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015 - 8

President's Message

Grading on a (Growth) Curve
By Sharon Peng

he Consumer Electronics (CE)
industry is experiencing significant changes and challenges that
have never before happened. As
an integrated multidiscipline advanced
technology, CE is transitioning from
traditional linear technology to exponential technology that accelerates on
an exponential growth curve. Quoted
from the book Bold by Diamandis and
Kotler, "When a woman in Outer Mongolia answers her smartphone, she's
using a device a million times cheaper
and a thousand times more powerful
than a supercomputer from the 1970s.
That's what exponential change looks
like in the real world."
Right now, and for the first time ever,
technology is easily accessible by individuals all around the world. It creates not
only more business opportunities but also
more challenges and problems. The CE
industry, from a traditional hardware-driven community, becomes a more and more
software-oriented and user-experiencedriven integrated multidisciplinary industry. All of these changes set a challenge in
front of every industrial and academic
player. As a community leader, the IEEE
Consumer Electronics Society has taken
on the challenges and started making
changes to our strategic plans, gradually
opening opportunities for new technologies into our field of interest and providing
our members with the updated technology
platform and network. These changes are

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2015.2463291
Date of publication: 29 October 2015

8 IEEE ConsumEr ElECtronICs magazInE

embraced and reflected in our conference
programs and member activities.
I would like to use this opportunity to
give our members a brief summary of
the last few months. From April to July,
our Society has organized multiple conferences and membership activities to
help our members and community to
steer, network, learn, and adapt to the
changes in our industry.
First, based on society review feedback from IEEE, the Board of Governors
and Executive Committee members held
several sessions to discuss strategic plan
revisions that would meet the new challenges in the CE industry. Generally
speaking, the concept of CE devices is
growing broader and stepped into a gray
area that multiple technologies and applications integrate and merge. For example,
health care functionality has been migrated from pure medical devices to consumer devices, such as smartphones. The
main goal of our new strategic plan to to
help our members to learn, innovate,
develop, communicate, and build technical communities that can support these
newly adapted technologies.
During the June Board of Governors
meeting, our brainstorm and discussion
session focused on four areas:
1) engagement of underserved communities
2) Chapter development
3) membership retention
4) recruitment and engagement of
industry professionals.
The brainstorming session resulted
in three immediate working groups that
began projects immediately. The three
working groups' focuses are:

october 2015

1) Provide support to enable more chapter
activities. This working group will aim
to support workshops and training programs for Chapter chairs and local
activity organizers. It will also form connections with local and regional industry
leaders and make regional activities
more accessible to broader engineering
communities and organizations.
2) Professional education training. This
program will help interested members
receive professional training in various professional education programs.
Some English technical writing and
English-speaking skills will also be
available in our Asian conferences.
3) Engaging underserved communities
via "new style" events and tracks at
CE Society conferences. This program focuses on helping young professionals, female engineers, and
startups with career building and
standard training workshops.
Some of the activities have already
been planned and will be implemented
in the coming conferences and regional
workshops and activities. I welcome our
members' participation and feedback.
Together we will build our member
community with sound curation, good
competency, interesting content, and
excellent coverage in CE technical areas.
In early May, the Boston Chapter of
the CE Society held a joint event with
Solid State Circuits Society at the headquarters of the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department
in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This
event was well prepared and well attended by both Chapters. The topics covered

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - October 2015