Hello IEEE Chicago Section Members,

Spring is in the air. A time for renewal and growth. New and hopefully improved versions are created. Like a tree whose leaves fell off at the end of the year looking forward to the buds and warm weather bring back leaves that provide much needed nutrients to support it. An IEEE Section is like a tree and its members are the leaves. New branches grow from the old to expand and create new areas of problems to solve. These new branches are the worlds our students and young professional members live in. They are the seeds to future growth of our organization. They need the support, guidance and wisdom of our older members. Yet they need to be listened to and allowed to provide input to the organization. Today’s engineers are drastically effected by Moore’s law. While the number of processors increase as their size decreases, the time expected to produce a new or make improvements to produce a better product decreases as well. Not only must you solve problems quicker, your work load is increasing as companies cut back and you find yourself doing part of someone else’s job. These are the stresses and problems our new and veteran engineers face alike.

IEEE Section member numbers are growing smaller each year. Like a tree some of our leaves fall off and do not come back. We need to reach out to them and find out why. If you know of an engineer who is no longer a member talk to them. The answer may be as simple as it slipped their mind due to the increasingly busier schedule. If it is a lack of programs, point them to our web site and show them the events we have planned. If we are not providing events in their area of interest, have them contact me to see what we can do to correct this problem. Joint meetings or creating specialty groups such as SmartGrid, Big Data, Internet of Everything and Cybersecurity are not out of the question to help meet these needs. Without their membership and support, providing meetings pertaining to their interests grows harder. The Chapter chairs and Executive Committee cannot provide meetings on a subject if we do not know what our members are interested in it. Volunteering is another way to help keep the areas of your interests alive. Without volunteers to help plan and assist with meetings the area of a member’s interest may not get addressed. We all have demanding and busy lives and the IEEE is only as good as we make it. We help educate and keep each other current with subjects relating to our jobs and interest areas at meetings and workshops while setting standards to help insure everything works together. Remember all of us are volunteers and no one person can do it all. If each member contributes a little a lot can be accomplished.

Graduating students are seeds which may be taken away from the section by their new jobs. We need to track them and be able keep them as IEEE members even if it is with another section in another region. We also need to know if students have entered our area. If your company hires any of these recent grads please tell them what the benefits of being an IEEEE member are and how the IEEE can help with their careers. I would like to congratulate Dr. Rafeeq Al Hashemi, Jonathan Levine and David Welch who were elevated to the Senior Member grade. May they continue their growth and perhaps reach the Fellow level someday. I would also like to welcome our 157 new members. Technical Information and Networking are a consistent theme as to why you joined. If there is anything you would like to see happen at the section or any of the chapter’s levels please contact me. I will bring the subject up at an Executive Committee meeting, if need be, to see what can be done to address the concern. Please do not hesitate to come to our Executive Committee meetings held the second Tuesday of each month at the DeVry Addison Campus.

I would like to thank those who have replied to forming a Robotics and Automation Chapter. This will become a new branch to our sections tree. Our next steps are to get enough signatures to create the chapter, find a meeting place and elect officers. If someone would like to volunteer to be an officer for this chapter please contact me. We need to have two meetings a year to establish and keep the chapter alive.

Speaking of meetings, we have a lot going on in the section. I would like to thank Noah Parr for taking over the Chicago IEEE Computer Society Chapter Chair position. He can be reached at Noah.M.Parr@IEEE.org. The Computer Society Chapter and Technical Engineering Management Society Chapter are in the process of finalizing at least four meetings each in the next few months. Keep your eyes on our calendar at www.ieeechicago.org as these and other meetings get finalized. Come out and support the Chapters. A list of dates and chapter activities are listed below. Hope I see you at some of the meetings. Remember a member can attend any chapter meeting and non-members are welcome as well. So invite a friend to come with you and see what we are all about. For more membership information contact our membership chair Dan O’ Sullivan at dan.osullivan.us@ieee.org.

Annual Chicago IEEE EMC Mini-Symposium on May 03 at the Holiday Inn, 860 West Irving Park Rd., Itasca, Il. 60143  Cost – $60 ($50 – IEEE Members) lunch is included!  More information can be found here: http://www.emcchicago.org

May 23 – May 27       30th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium @ Chicago Hyatt Regency

IPDPS is an international forum for engineers and scientists from around the world to present their latest research findings in all aspects of parallel computation. In addition to technical sessions of submitted paper presentations, the meeting offers workshops, tutorials, and commercial presentations & exhibits.

The SCTECH  Supply Chain Technology Conference on July 19th and 20th at Navy Pier. Conference information can be found here: http://www.sctechshow.com

Coming this Fall – 2016 – IEEE Chicago Section Symposium More information coming soon.

To volunteer at one of these conferences or ask questions, please contact dan.osullivan.us@ieee.org

For more information about these events and what is going on in your section, visit the web site at http://ieeechicago.org

Thanks for your continued support,

David Richardson

IEEE Chicago Section Chair