IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2018 - 6

President's Message

The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society
Is Working Well Even in Difficult Times
By Wolfram Burgard

E

arly this year, the IEEE Robotics
and Automation Society (RAS)
was faced with a major challenge
when our president, Ning Xi,
became unable to perform the duties of
his office. We had to react quickly to
stay operational and properly deal with
the multiple important decisions facing
our Society. Together with the IEEE,
the RAS Administrative Committee
(AdCom) held a special meeting to find
a solution. In accordance with the RAS
constitution and bylaws and with IEEE
bylaws, the AdCom decided to remove
Ning Xi from the office and elected me
to be the new president of the RAS for
the 2018-2019 term.
During this year's IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Brisbane, Australia, we
held a Town Hall meeting dedicated to
discussing the situation with all attending members. The current president of
the IEEE, James A. Jefferies, and the
IEEE managing director for Technical
Activities, Mary Ward-Callan, attended
this meeting. In addition to myself,
panel members available to answer
questions included Torsten Kroeger, vice
president of RAS Conference Activities;
Zhidong Wang, vice president of RAS
Electronic Products and Services; Yasushi Nakauchi, vice president of RAS
Financial Activities; Dominik Boesl, vice
president of RAS Industrial Activities;
Nancy Amato, vice president of RAS
Member Activities; Eugenio Guglielmelli, vice president of RAS Publication

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2018.2857240
Date of publication: 12 September 2018

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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Activities; and Lianqing Liu,
vice president of RAS Technical Activities (Figure 1).
The goal was to inform
everyone about this case
and to maximize transparency.
Overall, the many questions raised
and the detailed answers given demonstrated that the RAS is functioning well.
Even in difficult times, we are able to listen and identify solutions.
In addition, I would like to mention
that, when I was elected president of our
Society, I had served as president-elect for
just three months: my term as president
was supposed to start in January 2020.
The president-elect typically installs a
long-range planning committee to discuss future directions and potential goals
for our Society, which he or she aims to
carry out while serving as president. I had
to step into the presidency without such
an opportunity to plan, but I will dedicate
myself to the challenges facing the RAS.
For example, the RAS is not growing
at the same rate as IEEE Societies in

other areas, such as in computer vision, pattern recognition, and machine learning.
Here, we need to identify the
reasons and investigate how
we can attract more members,
especially representatives from
industry. At the same time, we need to
investigate how to deal with open
source publication strategies, which will
require innovative models for financing
our publication media. A further issue
will be monitoring our technically and
financially (co)sponsored conferences,
which will impose an enormous burden
on our volunteers.
Our Society has proven to be robust
against unexpected difficulties, even in
times where there are substantial challenges ahead. Our flagship conference,
ICRA, once again demonstrated an exciting interaction within the RAS. I look
forward to a great collaboration with all
of our Society members in the remaining
18 months of my presidency.

Figure 1. Mary Ward-Callan (left), managing director of IEEE Technical Activities, and
James A. Jefferies (middle), IEEE president, joined Wolfram Burgard, RAS president, at
the AdCom Town Hall held during ICRA 2018, Brisbane, Australia.

september 2018
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