IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2010 - 6

whose proceedings are in IEEE Xplore at a very reasonable rate
of US$40 for Members and US$20 for a Student Member.
Two changes were made about the 2010 page budgets. For
T-RO, the original page budget of 1,496 pages was reduced to
1,180 pages because of fewer than expected submissions. At the
same time, the original page budget of 800 pages for T-ASE was
increased one time to 1,000 pages to reduce the serious backlog
of accepted papers. Based on the above, the 2011 page budgets
were approved at the May AdCom meeting as follows: T-RO
1,200 pages, T-ASE 896 pages, and RAM 480 pages. Now it is
a great time to submit papers to T-RO in view of its very short
lead times from submission to decision and from decision to
publication. It is also a very good time to submit papers to
T-ASE since its backlog issue will be significantly alleviated.
IEEE Transactions on Haptics (T-Haptics) is cosponsored by
the RAS, the IEEE Computer Society, and the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society. The founding Editor-in-Chief Prof.
Edward Colgate is currently serving the third year of his threeyear service. Following the procedures of Haptics EiC Selection
Guidelines, feedback on Prof. Colgate's reappointment was
solicited from all cosponsoring societies. With excellent comments received and the Haptics Management Committee's
own evaluation, Prof. Colgate was unanimously approved by
the Management Committee in 24 March 2010 meeting for
the second three-year term as the EiC of T-Haptics starting 1
January 2011. Please join us in congratulating him for his excellent achievements thus far and for his reappointment as the EiC.
Peter Luh
VP for Publication Activities

Conference Activities
The RAS Conference Activities Board (CAB) oversees the conferences that are technically cosponsored or financially sponsored/cosponsored by RAS. Conferences are becoming very
important, not only as networking events but as the forum for
delivering exceptional services and a glance at the state-of-theart to our Members. Moreover, conferences and the reported
intellectual property are rapidly transforming to major financial
driving forces for our Society. The business model is shifting
toward the timely delivery of a high-quality product to our
Members. The number of paper uploads is a significant revenue
source for our operations. This allows us to offer tutorials with
minimal cost, and many online products are in the works.

RAS ByLaws Change (Approved 8 May 2010)

ection 7.02 Composition. The vice president for Conference Activities shall chair the Conference Activities
Board. This Board shall consist of its chair, the vice president for Financial Activities, the vice president for Technical Activities, the immediate past, current, and immediate
future chairs of the Conference on Robotics and Automation, THE SOCIETY TREASURER, and five (5) FOUR (4) other
members to be selected by the vice president for Conference Activities with the approval of the Society president.

At ICRA 2010, we first heard from Antonio Bicchi, the Conference Editorial Board (CEB) editor-in-chief for our conferences.
The major discussion was about how to provide high-quality
reviews of the thousands of papers received by ICRA or even
International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
(IROS). One issue that was mentioned was that reviewers are getting overwhelmed with too many papers of questionable quality.
We would welcome volunteers to help or even suggest ideas on
how to address the problem. George Lee, chair of the Steering
Committee on Technical Programs (SCTPs), talked about new
ideas on how to monitor the quality of technical programs of all
IEEE RAS conferences. Maintaining consistency in technical quality is one of the key goals of SCTP. Issues of plagiarism, self-plagiarism, copyright, and transactions publication policy were discussed.
One of the recommendations was that "RAS should encourage
authors to submit their ICRA/IROS papers to T-RO for possible
publication, provided the papers have been modified, and extended with added value (e.g., proofs or experiments)."
We also talked about the problem of closing conferences on
time. Late closings cost the Society thousands of dollars a year in
penalties by the IEEE since we have conferences not closed since
2006. The decision was to ask small groups of the CAB members
to strongly encourage their acquaintances to close the conferences in their immediate technical areas. As a result of these efforts,
more than ten conferences were closed the last month. Improved
collaboration with the IEEE headquarters is a key here.
Venkat Krovi is the new CAB treasurer, and we will try to
help you submit conference proposals (the ICRA's 2016 RFP
is out), organize them in a consistent way, and close them. We
hope that relevant information will be soon available, and a
pertinent wiki will be possible. The issue of memoranda of
understanding (MOU) with other groups was discussed, and a
subcommittee is formed to deal with the thorniest ones.
Several technical cosponsorships were discussed and approved
along with the budgets of conferences such as Humanoids 2010,
ICRA 2012, and IROS 2011. We intend to streamline this
process, and, thus, we submitted the following motions to the
RAS AdCom that passed them:
u Motion 1: Move that conference sponsorship or cosponsorship requires the submission of the budget and other pertinent
material (COI forms, MOUs, etc.) to the IEEE and the CAB
treasurer. To be guaranteed full consideration, the request
must be submitted by 1 April of the year before the conference is held. For fully sponsored conferences, previous years
(geographically appropriate) comparisons should be included.
u Motion 2: Move to include the treasurer in the CAB and
to reduce the number of VP-appointed members to four.
Bylaws change: relevant text in Article VII, ROBOTICS
AND AUTOMATION SOCIETY BYLAWS CHANGE
(approved 8 May 2010).
u Motion 3: Move that technical cosponsorship requests
(including MOUs) should be submitted to CAB two
months before the CAB meeting.
(continued on page 16)

IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine

SEPTEMBER 2010

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2010