The IEEE had its final face-to-face meeting series on November 19-25 in Dallas, Texas. This includes the penultimate meeting of the IEEE Board of Directors, BoD, which I chaired as IEEE President and CEO on November 24 and 25. The final BoD meeting will be a short one in December where we will decide who the IEEE Medal of Honor Winner will be in 2025 and will thus receive $2M.
This meetings series was a wrap on a very busy year. Many projects which had begun in 2023, became official IEEE activities at the beginning of 2024 and reached at least a partial finish at the end of 2024. During my talk at the beginning of the BoD meeting I spoke about the objectives that I wanted IEEE to address in 2024, in particular, retaining more of our younger members, greater engagement with industry, increase our outreach to the broader public, investment in new products and services and working to develop the future of education.
This year I felt that we were able to work very well together with greater trust in each other and with a focus on IEEE as a whole rather than just the various organizational units that make up the IEEE and from which our board members originate. I think that this was enabled by the work we did to create a strategic plan for 2025-2030 for the IEEE. Every board meeting we spent time working on this strategic plan, with the final plan accepted at the November BoD meeting. Below are the 6 goals that we approved at the November IEEE BoD meeting.
Also, since IEEE is a non-profit, we did a lot of work this year on looking at how we can better measure our public benefit and increase it. This focus on working together and being a non-profit has started us on a process to changing the financial and budgeting model that has limited our ability to work together and make important investments in our organizational units and well as IEEE as a whole.
Some significant changes in our budgeting process were made this year and I expect that there will be more in 2025. The strategic plan and a new budget process should help our board to think about how to make IEEE as a whole more effective. We also plan to do a companion report to the IEEE annual report showing the organization’s public impact in 2024.
This year I spoke to many students and young professionals all over the world as well as with companies, working to get younger members to stay and to create greater engagement in industry, where most of our student members end up working. The IEEE’s Industry Engagement Committee has come up with hopefully a more engaging Premier Corporate Program and is working on finding new ways to recognize and engage with companies that already support IEEE in some way.
We want to provide resources that can enable employees who are IEEE members to be some of the best employees at a company through continuing education, technical networking and leadership experiences as an IEEE volunteer so companies want to support their employee’s IEEE membership.
IEEE is already involved in many activities that appeal to various parts of industry. These include industry-oriented events, including SC24, which I recently attended. They also include IEEE Entrepreneurship activities such as 3 days of programing and participation at the GITEX event in Dubai as well as many standards activities.
IEEE is also working on numerous efforts driven by volunteers as well as staff on applying artificial intelligence, AI, on IEEE content to improve search capabilities as well as to enable next generation analysis of the information in IEEE’s many publications and documents.
AI could also be used to mine data from DataPort, an on-line repository for data that has grown from about 5.5M users in the Fall of 2023 to close to 14M users and over 7,100 data sets in 2024. Up to 2TB of data can be uploaded free to DataPort. The goal is to have many more data sets and over 25M users in 2025.
IEEE also approved the formation of a 3-year matrix organization to pursue its activities around climate change. These include new sustainable standard activities such as e-Liability which will create a certifiable way to measure the carbon content in a supply chain as well as port electrification.
The IEEE has also been pursuing activities related to worldwide activities to strengthen the semiconductor supply chain, including support for the CHIPS Act in the US. IEEE Future Directions has 4 new technology roadmaps and has supported a number of activities in 2024, including conducting a telepresence robotic race in the Mohave Desert, won by a remote team in Australia, as well as an updated Megatrends Report.
IEEE is also increasing its outreach to the rest of the world so they know who we are and what we stand for. This includes increasing the award for the IEEE Medal of Honor, MoH, to $2M. The IEEE MoH award winner will be announced in a press conference in early 2025 and presented at the IEEE Honors Ceremony in Tokyo, Japan in April 2025. The picture below shows me with Ray Liu, 2022 IEEE President and the chair of the IEEE Committee on Raising the Prestige of IEEE Awards during a break in the IEEE meeting series.
The board approved the creation of a IEEE Distinguished Young Professional Innovator and Laureate Forum during the November meeting, which will honor accomplished young professionals from industry, government and academia before the 2025 IEEE Honors Ceremony and which will expand to become a two day event bringing together accomplished younger professionals with MoH and other IEEE awardees for mentoring, education and networking.
At the IEEE BoD meeting we saw a viewing of some of the latest professionally produced membership promotion videos, focusing on IEEE as your professional home and featuring members from Japan and the UK. These will be aired on TV and video streaming services starting in 2025. Between 2020 and 2023, the initial video campaign, IEEE is my competitive edge, had a reach on TV, Cable, and Streaming of more than 7.6 million people airing more than 3,300 spots.
I was very proud to have been a member of the IEEE Board of Directors in 2024. We spent many hours working together to enable a bright future for the IEEE and to pursue our mission of advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. I look forward to being the Past President in 2025 and, as chair of the IEEE Strategy and Alignment Committee, create plans and metrics for the next five years that will enable us to pursue our strategic goals.
