IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2018 - 6

President's Message

A Great New RAS Team
Taking the Next Step in Exciting Times
By Wolfram Burgard

A

society like the IEEE Robotics
and Automation Society (RAS)
must respond quickly to the
demands of its members as
well as changes in the field. For example,
the recent highly successful IEEE/Ro-
botics Society of Japan Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
confirmed that our conferences are
experiencing enormous growth. This
was evident during our flagship con-
ference, the IEEE International Con-
ference on Robotics and Automation
(ICRA), held earlier this year in Bris-
bane, Australia.
This need for swift reactions poses
significant challenges not only to our
conference organizers but also to our
Society as a whole. We must ensure that
our conferences are flexible enough to
respond to an unforeseen surge in atten-
dance and able to handle substantially
higher numbers of submissions. While
this pertains primarily to our confer-
ences-we are currently organizing 73
fully, financially, or technically spon-
sored conferences-there are many other
matters that the RAS must deal with,
including our publications, relationship
to the industry, member activities, tech-
nical activities, electronic products, and
services and finances. For each of these,
our Society has dedicated boards gov-
erned by vice presidents (VPs), whom I
introduce in this article.
Torsten Kroeger (Figure 1) is a pro-
fessor of computer science at the Karl-
sruhe Institute of Technology, Germany,
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2018.2876264
Date of publication: 12 December 2018

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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and is the VP of our Confer-
ence Activities Board (CAB).
As VP of CAB, he is res-
ponsible for managing and
planning all conference and
meeting activities for our Soci-
ety. This includes monitoring the
technical and scientific quality of con-
ference publications, supporting confer-
ence organizers, monitoring and helping
with conference finances and budgets,
managing the Society's conference port-
folio, and working with conference edi-
torial boards, competition committees,
and workshop oversight committees.
Eugenio Guglielmelli (Figure 2) is a
full professor of bioengineering and
vice-rector for research with the Bio-
medical Robotics and Biomicrosystems
Research Unit at the Campus Bio-Med-
ico, University of Rome, Italy, of which
he is founding chief. Since 2016, he has
served as RAS VP for publication
activities. In this role, he is responsible

for overseeing strategic
development and monitor-
ing and improving the per-
formance and quality of the
RAS periodicals portfolio,
which now comprises four fully
sponsored and 18 cosponsored jour-
nals. He is chair of the RAS Publication
Activities Board, which regularly orga-
nizes open meetings at ICRA and IROS.
He is also supervising the launch of the
new IEEE Transactions on Medical
Robotics and Bionics.
Dominik Bösl (Figure 3) is VP of
Consumer Driven Robotics at KUKA
AG, founder of the Robotic and AI Gov-
ernance Foundation, and a researcher at
the Technical University of Munich,
Germany. He currently serves as VP of
the Industrial Activities Board (IAB),
which focuses on maximizing the added
value that industrial partners experience
when working with our Society. An ex-
ample of one of the IAB's recent projects

Figure 1. Torsten Kroeger.

Figure 2. Eugenio Guglielmelli.

december 2018
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