IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - September 2020 - 8

President's Message

by Frede Blaabjerg

The New Today

nfortunately, with a continuous growth in number of
infected people and deaths,
the COVID-19 pandemic continues to play a more dominant role
around the world. What was expected to be just a seasonal short event
seems to be a very long lasting challenge for the planet, where we are
all waiting for effective solutions
from the scientific community-a
powerful vaccine for COVID-19 and
efficient methods to treat people
who are infected. However, in worst
case scenario, this can take years
before an effective remedy is available. Consequently, safety precautions will have to be taken for a
long time. Therefore, as IEEE Power
Electronics Society (PELS) president, I will discuss what is going on
in PELS and what I see as the new
today for the Society.
Although PELS has moved almost
all sponsored conferences into the autumn, the IEEE Transportation Electrification Conference and Exposition (ITEC) 2020 was the first virtual
event held in June-it was a great success where the ON24 virtual platform
was used to run the conference and it
was a combination of live events and
recorded presentations. We got lot
more attendees because many could
more easily attend as they did not
have to travel. But, we also lost few at-

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MPEL.2020.3011093
Date of current version: 15 September 2020

IEEE POWER ELECTRONICS MAGAZINE

tendees as they were missing important networking events and the physical exhibition. Nevertheless, it looks
now that all conferences will have to
offer a virtual platform because there
will be some authors who are unable
to travel for a number of reasons and
they should have the opportunity to
present their latest research, and get
challenged by their peers. So for me
the New Today for conferences is
clearly a virtual platform in combination with in-person event as there is a
good chance that many participants
will be able to attend.
For IEEE, safety and health is a
top priority when making decisions
for conferences and related activities. Therefore, it will take years to
build economically feasible conferences around a virtual platform. Full
virtual conferences present challenges in terms of time zone as it is hard
to cover the entire planet at the same
time. But, on the other hand, all presentations are often streamed, and
participants can play/see all activities on demand. Thus, allowing participants to play/see presentations
more than once for better understanding. For the moment, the IEEE
Energy Conversion Congress and
Exposition Asia (ECCE-Asia), International Symposium on Power Electronics for Distributed Generation
System, ECCE-NA, and Workshop
on Control and Modeling for Power
Electronics are planning for hybrid
solutions, while EPE ECCE-Europe

z September 2020

has opted to become fully virtual. The
virtual event has in general less cost
risk and can easily attract more participants because the only expense
will be registration and the time to
attend. There will be no travel and
hotel expenses. Subsequently, we
can expect larger attendance for such
conferences in the future. As lot of
infrastructure is not needed to hold
such virtual events, it can be more
easy to build new type of such events
in the future. However, we face challenges to offer the same service and
exposure to manufacturers and companies who prefer an exhibition, and
we have to work on that, as it is an
important part of our Society.
Many of our chapter activities are
also in-person events for doing networking and we have seen a decrease.
We are now seeing that chapters are
organizing virtual events, which is a
very good way to exchange information and also offer networking. Going
forward, PELS will also support more
such events. An interesting outcome
of such virtual events is that they can
now be more global, even though it is
organized locally. Thus, in the coming
years, we can expect chapter activities to go the virtual way.
The PELS society is now doing
strategic planning for 2020-2024.
All the sessions are now virtual,
led by senior past president Braham Ferreira with help from different executives who are part of
this process. The goal is to have a

IEEE Power Electronics Magazine - September 2020

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