IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - March 2020 - 4

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE
BY PAOLO GAMBA

Creating an Open Community of Communities

T

he IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Society (GRSS) Administrative Committee (AdCom)
elected me as president again for 2020, and so I am
working to augment and extend the activities started
in 2019. The AdCom membership has also been updated for 2020, based on the November elections. We
are grateful to AdCom members who have completed
their terms and will continue to support the Society
in other positions; these include Xiaolong Dong, who
will be part of the newly established China Working
Group led by Feng Xu, and Lori Mann Bruce, whose
leadership in establishing the GRSS Summer School
programs on a global basis has been very successful
and will be continued by Jun Li. New AdCom members
Nathan Longbotham and Sidharth Mishra will provide
additional support for initiatives focused on engaging
the global communities of data and service providers
and continuing the growth of our social media and
outreach programs (which have had a very strong start
over the past two years). Their expertise complements
that of the other AdCom members and technical committee chairs, consistently providing new ideas and interesting suggestions on how to improve our activities
and better serve our membership.
With these volunteers on our side, I am sure the GRSS
will be able to implement more and better opportunities
for the growth of our technical community. Specifically,
in 2019, we worked to become a real community of communities. In 2020, our target is to become an open community of communities. In my opinion, "open" means
being able to listen to requests not only from our members but also from those who are interested in GRSS publications, conferences, educational materials, and meetings but are not (yet) members, with the goal of satisfying
their needs as professionals and researchers. Moreover,
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MGRS.2020.2969837
Date of current version: 6 March 2020

4

"open" means being ready to engage in nontraditional
activities that are useful to reach other communities or
foster collaboration and cooperation. Finally, "open"
means being able to move outside our safe zone without
forgetting our legacy, to overcome the limits of what we
have always done, and to explore new opportunities.
Quite naturally, being open also means accepting
some risk. For example, the GRSS is currently accepting the risk of moving an established journal, our IEEE
Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observation
and Remote Sensing (J-STARS), to a fully open access
journal (see http://www.grss-ieee.org/wp-content/
uploads/2019/10/JSTARS_OpenAccess_Announcement
.png). Already, 11 special issues on very hot topics and
coordinated by top researchers in our fields are open for
submissions. Publishing J-STARS as open access is expected to reduce the Society's income and, consequently,
the amount of funds that we can allocate to other activities. This risk is, however, very limited, while the benefit
is huge, in terms of providing a service that our community has been requesting for long time, especially in the
research area of Earth observation data analysis.
As another example of the effort to become more
open and increase networking opportunities for our
members and other attendees, the GRSS has decided
(after much discussion) to change the oral format of
our flagship conference, the IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), by
reducing the time allowed for a presentation from 20
min to 5 min (https://www.igarss2020.org). Presenters have been asked to focus on the most important
portion of their work in these 5 min, and session
chairs will have to be strict on the time schedule.
Detailed explanations of each paper will be deferred
until the the associated poster presentation in the
same room. With this move, the Society and the conference may lose presenters who think they will not
receive enough attention. (However, at the time of this
IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE SENSING MAGAZINE

MARCH 2020

http://www.grss-ieee.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/JSTARS_OpenAccess_Announcement.png http://www.grss-ieee.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/JSTARS_OpenAccess_Announcement.png http://www.grss-ieee.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/JSTARS_OpenAccess_Announcement.png https://www.igarss2020.org

IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - March 2020

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing Magazine - March 2020