IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2015 - 120

student corner

Highlights from the Student Community
By Lauren Miller

s the current IEEE Robotics and
Automation Society (RAS) Student Activities Committee
(SAC) embarks on the second
year of our term, we would like to share
some highlights from the student community. It has been an exciting year, and
SAC Cochairs Jory Denny, Arash Ajoudani, Pat Wensing, and I have had a
chance to meet many members of the
RAS student body. We have loved working with all of you and are looking forward to another
great year.
The SAC has been
T h e S AC ,
formed to repreworking on several
s ent student
initiatives to ensure
interests in Society planning and
that our student
decision makmembers are
ing, has been
working on sevgetting the greatest
eral initiatives to
benefit from their
ensure that our
student memmembership.
bers are getting
the greatest benefit from their membership. Ongoing
projects include logo design and video
competitions, various events for students associated with conferences, and
new volunteer opportunities. A new
project that we are particularly excited
about is the upcoming launch of the
Young Reviewer Program (YRP), which
will pair students with mentors to
develop reviewing skills (see "YRP:
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2014.2385562
Date of publication: 13 March 2015

120

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

Toward the Improvement of Peer
Review Skills for RAS Students"). Read
on for more information about this program as well as other recent SAC projects and events.
As always, please stay in touch and
let us know if you have any ideas or
suggestions.
1) Visit the SAC Web site: http://
www.ieee-ras.org/membercommunities/
students for information on new programs, conference events, and ways
to get involved.
2) Follow the SAC on Twitter at https://
twitter.com/ieeerassac, and join the
RAS Facebook group at facebook.
com/groups/ieeerasgroup.
3) Contact us with questions, suggestions, and feedback at ras_sac@
ieee.org.
Conference Activities
One of the major efforts of the SAC is
organizing events and activities during
the RAS flagship conferences. These
events give students the opportunity to
network with their peers, interact with

leaders in our field, and have some fun.
The current SAC board had the opportunity to organize events at the 2014
IEEE International Conference on
Robotics and Automation (ICRA) (Figure 1) and the IEEE/Robotics Society of
Japan International Conference on
Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).
Becoming a tradition, we hosted Lunch
with Leaders events at ICRA and IROS,
as well as during the IEEE Conference
on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE). Lunch with Leaders provides students with the opportunity to
sit down with RAS and industry leaders
more than a casual lunch.
The SAC has also been organizing
several new types of programming at
conferences, including coffee breaks
where students can unload or work
between sessions with access to Wi-Fi,
coffee, and snacks, as well as social and
networking opportunities just for students. During ICRA 2014 in Hong
Kong, we had more than 50 students
turn up for a pub crawl to close out the
conference, and at IROS 2014, we had a

Figure 1. A view of the Chicago skyline from the Adler Planetarium during an IROS student
social event. (Photo courtesy of Kevin Luck.)

MARCH 2015

http://http:// http://www.ieee-ras.org/membercommunities/ http://https:// http://www.twitter.com/ieeerassac

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2015