IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2020 - 6

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

Greetings From the 2020 IEEE Robotics
and Automation Society President
By Seth Hutchinson

n January 2018, Wolfram Burgard
officially began his term as president-elect of the IEEE Robotics and
Automation Society (RAS). Normally, the president-elect enjoys a
two-year term that affords time for
dreaming, planning, choosing a team,
and generally laying the groundwork
for a two-year term as president, during which time the team executes the
plan to realize the dreams. In February
2018, mere weeks into his term as
president-elect, events conspired to
disrupt the normal process. Ning Xi,
who had begun his term as president
at the start of the year, was removed
from office in March. Burgard immediately assumed the role of president
of the RAS. There would be no twoyear period of preparation; the term
would be shorter than normal, ending
in December 2019, and, perhaps
most signifi cantly, the term would
begin in a climate of uncertainty and
apprehension as a result of the circumstances surrounding the change in
Society leadership.
During this period of transition and
throughout Burgard's presidency, I
served first as a member of the Society's
Administrative Committee and then as
his successor president-elect. In those
roles, I had a front row seat from which
to watch him guide our Society through
difficult times. Like many of you, I
had known Burgard for years as a
researcher, but this was my first chance
to work with him as a Society leader.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2020.2969067
Date of current version: 18 March 2020

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

His leadership skills are rivaled
only by his scholarship. He
has been thoughtful, deliberate, well reasoned, and steady.
At the end of his term, our
Society had not only weathered storms; it had emerged
stronger, more stable, and better positioned at the leading edge of robotics,
one of today's most dynamic and exciting research fields.
By the numbers, our Society is
stronger than ever. We now have more
than 15,000 members, making us the
fifth-largest Society within the IEEE.
We have over 300 local Chapters,
including 225 student branch Chapters.
We sponsor or cosponsor more than 75
conferences, workshops, and symposia
and are financially responsible for more
than one-third of these. Participation at
the 2019 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, our
flagship conference, numbered over
4,000 registered attendees, a record
turnout. Our journals received more
than 4,000 submissions in 2019, up
from fewer than 3,000 in 2017, and
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
published more than 1,000 articles in
the past two years, making it the number one publisher of articles in the field
of robotics and automation.
Quantity is not, of course, a reliable
measure of quality, but I'm happy to
report that, by objective measures, the
quality of our Society has steadily
improved over the past two years. For
2018 (the most recent year for which
data are available), all of our periodicals
had record-high values for their impact

MARCH 2020

factors. In robotics, IEEE Transactions on Robotics was ranked
second by impact factor (trailing only Science Robotics), and
its articles were cited more
than 15,000 times, by far the
largest number of citations to any
robotics periodical (including Science
Robotics, which received fewer than
1,000 citations over the same period). We
successfully launched the new IEEE
Transactions on Medical Robotics and
Bionics in 2018 and have taken over the
leadership and development of IEEE
Transactions on Haptics, broadening our
scope in robotics research. The IEEE has
taken note of our Society's success,
launching its own webpage devoted
to robots as well as a section of IEEE
Spectrum dedicated to developments
in robotics.
Additionally, in the past two years
our Society has begun numerous activities that aim to make a positive impact
beyond our technical contributions.
Within our Society, we are in the process of developing a comprehensive
code of conduct and establishing the
Committee to Aid Reporting on Misconduct Concerns. Together, these initiatives will help to rigorously define
and vigorously enforce our Society's
core values, particularly regarding
abuse, discrimination, and harassment.
Beyond our Society, a newly appointed
ad hoc committee has been tasked with
developing a comprehensive strategy for
our educational programs, pulling
together activities ranging from our
program for Creation of Educational
Material in Robotics and Automation

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2020

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