王飞跃

摘自《IEEE ITSS Newsletters》Vol.9, No.4, Dec. 2007

Editor′s note: The following message was presented to the IEEE ITS Society′s Board of Governor’s Meeting on October4, 2007, at the Bill & Melinda Gates Commons, Paul Allan Center for Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.

Report to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society

Fei-Yue Wang

(Edited from the voice record by LC)

IEEE ITSS BoG Meeting, 4 October 2007

Bill & Melinda Gates Commons

Paul Allan Center for Computer Science and Engineering

University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

This is my last report to you as the President. At the Beginning of my Presidency, I should be visionary, and now I am going to step down, I should be reflective, and looking into the future.

I will do all three today.

Visionary?

Time flies fast. So my vision for future ITS is that traffic would flow like time flies, so fast, so smooth, so seamless, it is part of the environment, no pollution, and you are always on Time, no matter what! There will be no need for intelligent transportation systems by then, it will be everywhere and every time. We have done our job.

Time really flies. The last time I was in this city was 12 years ago. My whole family spent a week long vocation in Seattle and Vancouver. I rented a car and didn’t feel much traffic here at all. Bellevue had very few houses at that time. But when I come here this time, the traffic from the airport to our conference was terrible. It was just 2 clock in the afternoon, the highway was jammed, and we were either moving very slowly or not moving at all. It took me more than hour to get to our conference and I was told normally it should be less than 20 minutes. It was even worse than in Beijing. Apparently, Microsoft’s money works here: it has caused traffic jams in both physical spaces and cyber spaces.

The good thing about this is we need intelligent transportation systems more than ever, so the need for our Society, more than ever, I hope.

Reflective

First of all, I would like to thank many of you here today, especially Charles Herget, for your help in the transformation of our Society from the previous Council. For this, I have spent more than two years in preparation, talked to more than 30 IEEE S/C Presidents, drafted our Constitutions and Bylaws, and made two presentations to the IEEE TAB.

Here we are today as an IEEE Society. I am really happy about its formation and transformation, proud of my effort for its birth and its development, proud to be its First President elected.

To me, our Society was created for three things, to promote ITS research and application, to service our members, and in the end, to benefit our society.

How to achieve our goals as an IEEE Society? At IEEE, our strengths are conferences, publications, technical activities, recognition and promotion of our profession and our members’ interest.

1)      Conferences

We have gone from two major conferences to six now. I understand that sometimes some of you may have a different idea about those conferences, and sometime the income from some of those conferences did not justify the time our VP for conferences spent on the paperwork required by IEEE and our Society. However, I would like to thank Umit Ozguner, our Vice President for Conferences, for a great job well done.

The bottom line is that all of six conferences made money for us during my term.

Our two major conferences,

The IEEE International Intelligent Transportation Systems Conference (ITSC)

The IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Vehicles (IV)

are in good shape. Actually IEEE IV is in great shape and made a record this year, thanks to Umit for his leadership and his Turkish team.

Our four new conferences,

IEEE International Conference on Intelligence and Security Informatics (ISI)

IEEE/INFORMS International Conference on Services, Operations, and Logistics Informatics (SOLI)

IEEE International Conference on Vehicular Electronics and Safety (VES)

IEEE/ASME International Conference on Mechatronic/Embedded Systems and Applications (MESA)

are small but on track. We can still discuss the future of MESA in our Society, but I like the fact that SOLI extents us to INFORMS, and MESA connects us to ASME. I believe this kind of cooperation is extremely important to the future development of our Society and for ITS activities in general.

I want to thanks to Profs. H.S. Chen and Daniel Zeng for ISI; Prof. Robin Qiu for SOLI; Profs. N.N. Zhang and G. Wan, now the Minister of Science and Technology of China, for VES; and Profs. Albert Luo and Harry Cheng for MESA.  They helped me and sometimes “forced” me to establish those conferences.

Yes, I had put my hand in all those conferences, front or back, but I am not going to apologize for that. Instead, I am proud of what I have done. My philosophy is very simple, I will support you if you deliver to the IEEE ITSS, I don’t care whom you are.

You may think this is the work of “Chinese Gang”, again no apology from me. But tomorrow you could have an European President or a Japanese President, they can try their own effort, and this is a good way to make us really international, so I feel nothing wrong with this.

Hope those conferences will become strong and big in the future. I also hope they will help to strengthen our annual conference, as to be discussed late.

2)      Publications

We have our IEEE ITS Magazine now. I took the leadership in its creation, and I had supported its first two trial volumes, and will finish its first two issues next year. I want to thank Jason, our Vice President for Publications Activities, for his time and effort in getting the final approval from IEEE TAB for this Magazine.

I will step down as the EiC after next June. Bill will make a proposal on the new EiC of the Magazine later. I hope the Magazine will support itself in two years through the revenue of advertisements. I believe this Magazine is very important for the future development of our Society.

As for our IEEE ITS Book Series, I still hope we can get the final approval by the IEEE Press. I will find out what is happening with the IEEE Press next month at the IEEE TAB in Boston.

Last but not least in publication, our Transactions on ITS is in a great shape, thanks to Alberto Broggi, our EiC of the Transactions. Our Transactions on ITS has been ranked among the Top Five Journals in Transportation Research in terms of impact factors for the last three years, was in the second place last year. Transportation is a field with long history and many publications, our Transactions is only in its 7 years of history, and we are not really transportation in the traditional sense. What a great turn over from three years ago. Again, thanks to Alberto for your great effort and performance.

I want to thanks Jason, our Vice President for Publication Activities, for your time and effort in establishing ITS standards within the IEEE. We are still at the very beginning; we have a long way to go. I truly believe when the IEEE has standards for transportation, it will be more open and advanced, and the cost of related equipments and systems will go down dramatically.

As for conferences and publications, I am buying into former IEEE President Michael Lighter’s observations. I have mentioned his observations many times to our Board, and here I would like to repeat them again: At IEEE, the largest professional organization in the world,

l      We are good at conferences - best if we leave them mostly alone

      We are not good at starting new ones because we argue among ourselves –

AND WE DON'T MATTER

l      We are good at research publications - best if we let them operate without much interference

We are not good at starting new ones because we argue among ourselves –

AND WE DON'T MATTER

In our Society, I should add: For our members, remember we are not their boss. We are volunteers; we are here to serve our members.

3)      Technical Activities

We still have not finished the task initiated by Stefano Stramigioli, our former Vice President for Technical Activities and now the EiC of IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, on reconstructing our technical activities, but thanks to Daniel, we have made good progress along that direction. Our ISI, SOLI, VES, MESA are all running by their TC respectively, we should enforce this model of operation, and make sure a TC does serve our Society and its members, not just exists in name without activities. We should continue to improve our TC structure, find out what TC we need, and work hard to find right members who are willing to spend time and effort to organize, build, and lead them.

I would like to see our ITS Expertise Portal work along with our website. We still have not established the Board of Associate Editors for Conferences as we had discussed. This has taken longer that I expected. But we should continue the effort, and I will come back on this issue late.

4)      Awards and Recognitions

Awards and recognitions are important to our members’ career development, seniors or juniors.

Thanks to Christian Still, our Vice President for Membership Activities, and Chip White, Chair of our Award Committee, we finally have nominations for all four awards this year.

Christian had established the nomination procedure for the Best Dissertation Award. But there are only three qualified nominations, two from US and one from Europe, but the good thing I was told that all are very good and high quality works. Last year we had received 11 applications I remember.

As for Outstanding ITS Research, ITS Applications, both for individuals, and ITS Lead Award for groups or institutes, we should have good and clear choices for the next few years. But we need to improve our procedure for nomination and selection for those awards in the future.

The final winners for those awards will be announced at the end of this year, and published in our Newsletter, Magazine, and Transactions. The awards will be presented at ITSC 2008, and I will invite the winners to give keynote addresses about their work at ITSC 2008. I hope this can become a tradition of ITSC in the future, like CDC of the IEEE Control Systems Society.

The State of our Society

Our Society is in a good shape. We are the fast growing society within IEEE, and best part is: Our members are mostly new IEEE members, not the results of a re-distribution of membership within IEEE, as in the case for many other new societies. For this, I even got an award and a nice sport coat from IEEE TAB last year.

We have recovered from deep red deficit financially due to the new formula of infrastructure charge by the IEEE.  We did know the exact number yet, I was told that last year we should have a surplus, instead of a deficit close to 100 thousands dollars. Our ratio of reserve to deficit is more than 20 now, far higher than the required level of 3 set up by the IEEE. I was really happy for this.

Lessons learnt from IEEE TAB Meetings: more activities, and healthy growth. Although we have to watch our finance, but money with no use is no use at all, no services to our members is a disservice to them.

The Future

Above all else, we should Keep Our Own Color, Our Own Identification. We are an ITS society within IEEE, not some traditional transportation society. For that we have ITE, the Institute of Transportation Engineers, and TRB, the Transportation Research Board. I was actually happy to be told by Bill a year ago that someone had commented that we were no transportation organization. Indeed, in the sense of traditional transportation, we are not now, and we should be not in the near future. We should be the force to force others to change. For that, we must have and keep our own identity.

What I see is the trend that some traditional transportation and OR organizations are moving along our direction. New ITS sections have been created within ASME, ASCE, INFORMS, and IIE, even in other four IEEE societies, along with new ITS publications and conferences. Although we are glad to see more ITS activities by others, we must think about the competition in the near future. We have to be better and do better.

We should be open and have more contents and interactions along the traditional line of transportation research and application. But computer, communication, and control, integrated with science and technology of intelligent systems, especially with the new Web Science, Services Science, should be our cores and our strength. We should be the leader in adapting computational thinking and computational culture in transportation.

Specifically, we should make fast and real progresses in the following areas:

1)      Conferences

We should make our ITSC strong and bigger; one way to do this is to combine SOLI, ISI, VES, and MESA into ITSC every four years. As Bill and I have talked yesterday, we should keep the size of ITSC above 500.

2)      Publications

We should streamline and integrate our Newsletters, Magazine, Transactions, our Technical Committees, and our Web under one. We must make our Web more attractive and more interactive. Web activities, especially web publishing and web broadcasting could be the key for our future revenue and development.

3)      Technical Activities

We should establish the Board of Conference Associate Editors as soon as possible. This will ensure the quality of our conferences, our Magazine and Transactions. It will also provide a working platform and structure of recognition for our junior members to participate and develop in our Society.

4)      Recognition and Award

Now we have four major awards in ITS, we should check and improve our procedure of selection and make sure about their quality and fairness. We should do more, and we should create best paper awards in our conferences and our Transactions, especially to junior researchers and PhD. Graduates.

5)      Long Term Planning Committee

This Committee is not function at this point, but it is very important to our future. I hope we can take advantage of Reinhard Pfliegl’s proposal for a forum of future transportation systems, and recruit active and experienced members for our Long Term Planning Committee. Actually, we should model after the success of the World Economic Forum, which have been attended by the state heads of major countries, and call our forum as The World Transportation Forum or The World Forum on Future Transportation, and invite Ministers of Transportation to attend.

6)      History Committee

I do have a strong personal sense of and interest in history; this was why I pushed to create the History Committee, chaired by one of our founders, Rye Case. Case retired two years ago and last year we had our annual conference in Toronto, partly due to our desire to honor his career and appreciate his effort in helping our Council and Society. We are still expecting a report on our history from Rye, but I would hope more of you will come up and write something personal about our history, and we can publish them in our new Magazine. I am sure I will do that.

The Friendship

I want to thank all of you for your help and support during the last seven years of my services to the IEEE ITS Council and Society, especially during the last three years as the President-Elect and President.

As many of you know, I started my research career in intelligent control when I come to USA more than 20 years ago, and our group’s first application of intelligent control was a hierarchical control system for urban traffic management in 1970s. Although I did not take ITS serious until 1990s, but this is an area I hold very deeply in my research career. So I am very glad I have this opportunity to serve, I value this experience very much, and I will continue to support our Society in the future.

I am also extremely happy to see all my predecessors share the same view about our Society. This is witnessed by the fact that all our former presidents are still on the board and serve this community with their time, effort, experience, and wisdom. I am glad to see this, and to see this tradition to be continued.

However, I want to make my position clear today. For the obvious reason, for the sake of new blood and young members’ career development, and for the healthy and sustainable development of our Society, I will not support any of our former presidents, including myself in the future, to run again for the president of this Society. I understand this may not be a good short term position, but I believe it is good long term position.

Thank You All

Now the torch is in Bill Scherer’s hand. I am sure, as always, you will help and support him with all you can, for a better IEEE ITS Society.

Over the last three years, as the President, I have ups and downs, highs and lows, we have arguments, and we have fights. But in the end, I enjoy my involvement with this Society, and enjoy your friendship, professionally and in private.

It is the time to end. From the bottom of my heart, to each of you, thank you very much for a wonderful time during my term as the President of this great Society.