Farewell Message: Looking Back over the Past Two Exciting and Successful Years

It has been a sincere privilege and a great responsibility to serve as the President of the IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) for the years 2018 and 2019. Looking back over the past two years, I am very pleased to note the significant successes in meeting our goals in key areas, including conferences, publications, standards, and membership programs. Such success would not have happened without the outstanding efforts of our volunteer leaders, staff, and members who worked together in harmony and relentlessly to take our beloved society to a new level of excellence. I am particularly grateful to our Board of Governors (BoG), whose current volunteer members are listed in Table 1 as well as to our standing Committee Chairs, who are listed in Table 2. A close observation of these tables indicates that ComSoc volunteer leaders consist of a diverse list of dedicated industry and academic leaders from all over the world. For example, Table 1 indicates that one third of our BoG Members-at-Large (MAL) are female. In addition, about 73 percent of our BoG members are not from the U.S. and come from a diverse set of countries, including Brazil, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, China, Canada, etc. As the world’s leading organization for communications professionals, ComSoc has been at the forefront of technological development within a global professional community working together to create cutting-edge communications and networking technologies for the benefit of humanity through high quality publications, premier conferences, technology standards, and educational activities. However and as stated in my January 2018 President’s Page, ComSoc was at a crossroads with significant challenges: A substantial decrease in membership, especially student members; fiscal challenges; open access, etc. To fulfil our ambitions and address ComSoc’s challenges, a forward-looking strategic plan was designed in order to make ComSoc stronger and bring it to new heights. Six key priorities were set forth at the beginning of my term in January 2018 as listed in Fig. 1, to be executed by a harmonious volunteer and staff team. This is done by not only finding and addressing new technical frontiers, but also by enhancing ComSoc’s organization structure. In the following, we will briefly describe the key achievements and most important actions that were undertaken during my term.