May 2006 newsletter

Dear Fellow TCCC members,

This email newsletter has certainly been long overdue! In addition to regular content on upcoming and past conferences, I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce myself as the new chair of our TC (note that our Technical Committee on Computer Communications or TCCC is usually referred to as T-triple-C by those in the know!), introduce additional members of the Executive Committee and provide you an initial update on my priorities and planned activities for our membership.

First, and foremost, I wanted to introduce myself. I am a researcher at IBM’s TJ Watson Research labs in Hawthorne, New York, USA and had previously served as the Untethered Network Technologies chair for the TCCC. As many of you would have noted, I was elected chair of the TC for the period 2006-2007 through an election conducted in November/December 2005. I want to thank all of you for your vote of confidence in me and my agenda. More importantly, I want to sincerely thank all of my worth colleagues who stood for the election—we had three other very well qualified and enthusiastic candidates whose nominations reflect very well on the vibrancy and international nature of our TC. Given that these positions are voluntary and honorary, and can sometimes seem to involve thankless chores, I think all of us must acknowledge the willingness of all the candidates to serve our community. Personally, I shall certainly be looking forward to the support of all the candidates, and involving them in our activities going forward.

Before proceeding to other business, I’d like to acknowledge the immense contributions of our previous chair, Joe Bumblis, in revitalizing our TC and its activities. Over the previous four years, Joe has been instrumental in not only reinventing a TC that was lying moribund for a long time, but expanding its scope and activities. With the help of a very diverse and well-respected executive committee, under Joe’s leadership, the TCCC membership strength stablilized at around 8,500, and we started several new conferences (such as Percom and WoWMoM) that have rapidly become premier events in the community. Thank you Joe for your leadership—all of us shall be relying our experience and organizational expertise as we extend the reach and activities of our TC.

One of the first tasks of my tenure involves the constitution of a new executive committee. One of the main objectives of the re-organization is to ensure a proper balance between continuity and the desire to diversify our committee to involve new members of our community. In particular, as you may have noted from my manifesto, I shall be working actively to globalize the TCCC ExCom, as I believe IEEE must move aggressively to serve our large and expanding base in many developing economies, specifically in Asia Pacific and South America. Based on these twin objectives, I am pleased to have our past chair, Joe Bumblis, and our past vice-chair, Prof. Sajal Das, remain as members of our standing committee. In addition, Prof. Sanjay Jha from the UNSW continues as a member of the standing committee, acting as a contact point and advocate for our activities in the Oceania region. In addition to these returning members of our ExCom, I have also recruited two new members so far. Prof Sunghyun Choi (from SNU, .Korea) takes over from me as the new “Untethered Network Technologies” chair—Prof Choi is an internationally recognized expert in wireless MAC and networking protocols and I am confident that he will provide us expert guidance and globalize our efforts related to wireless technologies. In addition, Dr. Sanjeev Rai (CEO of ARE) will serve in the newly created position of “Radio and Convergence Technologies” chair. Sanjeev has been active in his local IEEE Computer Society chapter, and I think appointments such as his, are specially relevant to my desire to expand our activities to reach out to our practitioners and engineers. I am confident Sanjeev will provide significant effort to make IEEE relevant at the intersection of research and entrepreneurship, acting as conduit between the academic and VC/corporate communities. You will find the bios of all our new ExCom members at http://. Of course, I fully realize that many other positions in our ExCom are currently open, and I strongly encourage you to write to me if you have interest and relevant experience in these positions. I am deliberately filling up the posts slowly, to ensure that we have a good geographical diversity and a balance between academic and industrial members.

Before moving on to the conference reports and call for papers, I want to take a couple of paragraphs to outline my priorities and agenda for the next few months. As I’ve mentioned in my election “manifesto”, I’d like to concentrate on two specific areas:

  • Foster activities in applications of communications/networking technologies to some key vertical industries, notably healthcare and automotive.
  • Initiate new activities that bring a business perspective to our technology activities.
  • Develop our Website to act as a repository of initiatives and activities by our members, with the hope that this becomes a means for people to find out individuals working on similar project and initiatives.

Accordingly, I am working to have our TCCC initiate or sponsor specific activities in healthcare and automotive, and hope to formalize these activities ovrer the next 4-5 months. Similarly, our ExCom members will be working to organize events with a “crossover” flavor, specifically targeted to enabling interaction between our engineers and the investor community. Finally, I am looking for volunteers to help us upgrade our web site to enable more effective posting of project activities and initiatives.