Fall / Automne 2017 41 Congress 2017 AS A FIRST-TIME ATTENDEE at Sections Congress I was ex- tremely impressed by the or- ganization of the Congress and by the Region 7 organizers’ wonderful attention given to the Canadian delegates to help us figure out what to do and where to go. The Congress provided an excellent opportunity for people like me to fill in the blanks on IEEE initiatives and tools. Here are my thoughts on two of the top recommendations: Strengthen and Recognize In- dustry/Academia/Government Collaboration/ Partnerships. Collaboration and partnerships amongst these three groups are indeed really important. I’m not so sure an award will pro- vide any incentives to indus- try, though. Multidisciplinary events at an international level would complement what we are doing in Montreal and is be- ing done elsewhere within the region through Industrial Rela- tions Chapters. Develop an incentive program for corporations to join IEEE as Corporate Member. This is an initiative that in gen- eral I support; however, I hope consideration will be given to reduced membership fees for small business owners and their employees. For large corpora- tions, a well structured mem- bership offering would give suf- ficient access to IEEE resources for management to champion them with THE 2017 VERSION OF IEEE’s Sections Congress was again a great training oppor- tunity for volunteers, both new and more seasoned. There was a wide range of topics and for- mats ranging from five-minute IGNITE sessions as brief intro- ductions on topics such as IEEE Day, through training on the volunteer suite of tools, to long- er and more detailed presenta- tions. Interestingly, one of the top three recommendations from delegate voting at Sections Con- gress was “Develop (or expand existing) training programs and/or create partnerships with external organizations to allow members to provide STEM ac- tivities to pre-college students”. The voting delegates may not have been aware of the IEEE Teacher In-Service Program’s available resources and had not considered the logistics required to reach the world’s students. For example, there are over 5 million elementary and secondary students in Canada and only 17,000 IEEE mem- bers (of which only about 50 are actively involved in educa- tion outreach activities). It is clearly impractical for the IEEE to directly reach an impactful number of students even once a year. While engaging directly with the students may be ful- filling, providing the awareness and resources to teachers will reach many more students over many years. This is an embodi- ment of the proverb “Give a man a fish and you feed him Three Top Recomendations as voted by SC’17 primary delegates Three Top Recomendations from IEEE Canada R7 Recommendations response BY AMY PINCHUK Recommendations response BY MURRAY MACDONALD ● Strengthen and recognize Industry/Academia/ Government Collaboration/Partnerships - Create a Section Award for Industry/Academia/ Volunteer collaboration - Organize multidisci- plinary Industry/Academia/Government events focused on ‘hot’ issues - Develop a public com- munications platform to develop projects and share results - Create a ‘dating’ platform to communicate industry issues searching for solutions and possible ‘applications’ of research results. ● Develop an incentive program for corporations to join IEEE as ‘Corporate Member’. ● Develop (or expand existing) training pro- grams and/or create partnerships with exter- nal organizations to allow members to provide STEM activities to pre-college students. Pro- vide ‘canned’ or ‘in a box’ style demonstrations and presentations that local Sections can deliver to pre-college students. Re-evaluate a ‘Junior IEEE’ membership program targeted at pre- college students. ● Facilitate Industry and Academia Collaboration with IEEE resources. IEEE can play vital role by providing networking platform, engaging volun- teers and connecting local members. Volunteers can connect (i.e. sympo- siums) local industry professionals/ entrepreneurs/SMEs with academic re- search groups and government bodies to explore available resources (equip- ment, skill set, funding) and collabor- ate. Special recognitions can motivate volunteers (individuals) to contributing effectively. Successful sections/mem- bers/organization may receive awards or special recognition from IEEE. IEEE can offer funding in the form of schol- arships to students or as a grant to the faculties. To be implemented on a country by country basis. ● Increase resources for development of vTools. There has been a history of feature requests to vTools, however, progress to address these requests has been slow due to the lack of resources being given to the platform. It is sug- gested that IEEE increase support for vTools by hiring additional support to help address the backlog of feature requests and accelerate the completion and integration of these new options. ● Modify the Fellowship nomination forms and process to make it relevant to non-academics. Industry, govern- ment, military and other non-academic members are challenged as the applica- tion form only fits academics, who are expected to publish, write books and patent. This is not expected in the non- academic world; some are constrained by organizational proprietaryness or publishability. Reformat the nomina- tion form to fit non-academic member qualifications. (Continued on page 45) (Continued on page 45)