I would like first, to pay tribute to the presidents who preceded me and who made our society a dynamic one, among the most agile and have established remarkable financial health that enables us to support our chapters and our members through many initiatives.
It is with great pride that I begin my term as President of our Society. I am aware of the heavy responsibility I will have, and I am sure that I can count on a collaborative spirit with all the colleagues from the ExCom and the BoG as well as the active support of our members.
I have just finished my term as President Elect during which I engaged myself and my colleagues from the Executive Committee, the BoG and the Long-Term Strategy Committee in the elaboration of a strategic plan 2020-2024. During this development process, we revised our mission and our vision, aligned with the United Nations priorities also known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Our society has a broad technical and scientific spectrum enabling it to cover most of these SDGs.
In addition to the revision of the mission and the vision, we have also defined a set of values: scientific excellence, inclusion and participation and service to humanity to name only a few.
This reflection also led us to define both global and technical strategic areas.
Concerning the global strategic areas, the service to our members is the main priority. Going beyond our borders will allow us to reach out to other categories of populations that are little or not at all represented and finally focusing on technical excellence and inspiration will establish the leadership of our Society in new emerging areas of circuits and systems.
Regarding the technical strategic areas, we have classified them into three complementary categories:
- New paradigms governing the engineering of Circuits and Systems encompassing interfacing, computation, and connectivity
- Applications of Circuits and Systems including food and agriculture, healthcare and livelihood, human-centric technology, mobility, and smart cities and sustainable energy
- The fundamental theory supporting emerging technologies
An in-depth analysis of the SWOT and the TOWS allowed us to define three strategic initiatives for each division (technical activities, publications, conferences, and regional activities and membership) which will constitute the frameworks of the annual operational plans of each division, details will be published on our website very soon.
To facilitate the achievement of our strategic plan we will rely on 3 main levers.
- Development of proximity with our members by meeting them at their place, by directly discussing with them their challenges and expectations
- Digital communication plan with an increased presence in social networks
- Outreach and growth of our activities in geographic areas such as Africa and Southeast Asia
Therefore we are going to launch several initiatives in January:
- Africa initiative
- Regional CASS Days following the successful Europe CASS Day
- Entrepreneurship initiative in connection with the SDGs
- Global education by reorganizing this activity within a Global Education Institute including the DLP and iDLP (industry DLP) programs, Seasonal Schools, Microlearning, e-books etc.
The content generated will be made available to our members free of charge in our resource center.
In addition, this body could be endowed with more prerogatives and governance which will be discussed within the ExCom and the BoG during this year.
To conclude, I would like to thank members of the ExCom and the BoG who finished their terms and welcome the new members. I count on the commitment of all the members of the ExCom, the BoG, the technical activities committees and all the chapter officers to help in the implementation of our strategic plan.
Warmly,
Amara Amara
IEEE CASS President 2020-2021