IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2016 - 4

President's message
by Kamal Sarabandi

GRSS Is Vibrant and Steadily Growing

am delighted to have another opportunity to extend
my greetings to you from Ann Arbor, Michigan. This
is the last message that I will send to you as president
of the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society
(GRSS). These past two years as GRSS president have
been a very rewarding journey for me. In this position,
I was not only able to meet many more of our Society
members in person but to also interact with many IEEE
officers and the IEEE Technical Activity Board, which
includes all IEEE Societies as well as many other organizations with which our Society interfaces. These experiences have enriched my personal and professional life,
and they are the reason that I would like to encourage
you to donate some of your time to engage with your
professional Society as a volunteer. This can be accomplished through many paths, including becoming active
in your local IEEE GRSS Chapter, serving as a reviewer
or associate editor for our publications, participating in
a GRSS technical program committee or in the organizing committees of our conferences, and joining the Administrative Committee of GRSS.
I am very delighted to report to you that our Society is
vibrant and has been steadily growing in size and activities. The Society's technical activities are expanding to
cover an increasingly wider range of topics in science and
technology to enable us to better understand and unravel the complex processes that govern our environment
and the livelihood of our planet. Our Society footprint is
expanding to all corners of the globe in an effort to be inclusive and unite our efforts in tackling very challenging
problems, such as environment, natural hazards, and
food concerns, with which the Society at large is grappling. For this purpose, we have created a globalization
task force to better engage with developing and underdeveloped countries in Asia, Africa, and South America.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2016.2615260
Date of publication: 16 December 2016

During the past two years, we have almost doubled
the number of active GRSS Chapters around the world
(currently, we have 57 Chapters). Part of the logic for
this outreach has been the dissemination of knowledge
and recruitment of young, bright minds to IEEE GRSS
fields of interest. For these reasons, we have also created
an education task force, whose broad activities include
the formation of summer schools, significant travel
grants for students to participate in our conferences, remote sensing caravans, tutorials, and enhanced Distinguished Speaker programs. In support of diversity, GRSS
has also established a GRSS Underrepresented Program
that conducts many activities and runs numerous initiatives both locally and globally. Our technical committees have expanded and are more active than ever. We
have also completely overhauled the Society web page
to make it more useful for our members and technical
committees for improving the dissemination of information and to serve as collaborative platforms. Implementation of such diverse activities required substantially increasing our operating budget. During these
past two years, we have been able to increase the GRSS
operating budget by more than 70% and access our
substantial and growing reserves. We are very lucky to
have a dedicated group of Administrative Committee
members, our journals' editors-in-chief, chief technology officer, and other officers serving GRSS who have
brought our Society to its prominence. It has been an
honor for me to work with this group in a collegial and
supportive environment.
It has been a bit more than two months since our
large gathering at the 2016 International Geoscience
and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), which was
held in the historic and vibrant city of Beijing, China,
on 10-15 July 2016. For me, it was a unique experience
to participate in a well-organized conference and, at the
same time, be able to visit an exotic location with a rich
culture and long history. It was also a great pleasure to
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december 2016

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - December 2016