Stefano Maci
It is my deep honor and pleasure to serve as the 2023 president of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (AP-S). During the first few months of the year, several important discussions and decisions have been taken by the Society. What we can do to serve our members was a primary topic of discussion at the AdCom meeting held in Dubai on 25 February 2023. The proposal by Branislav Notaros, president-elect, and myself to lower the registration fee for student members of AP-S to US$1 has been approved by the AdCom. This will allow our Society to attract many more student members in the near future. The balance of the Society for 2022 is extremely positive with a surplus mainly due to publications, paper downloading, and conference revenues. In 2022, we have had significant investments in new initiatives, mainly addressed to students and early-stage researchers, like the AP-S Fellowship (48 students awarded), Student Travel Grants (34 students awarded), and Undergraduate Summer Research Scholarship (20 students awarded). These initiatives are in addition to the several already existing successful programs to support students, including the C.J. Reddy Travel Grant.
New conferences have been sponsored by AP-S, sometimes cosponsored with our sister Society, the IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society (MTT-S). This is the case with two new conferences, the Microwave and Antennas and Propagation Conference (MAPCON) and International Microwave and Antenna Symposium (IMAS). The first MAPCON was held before the end of the last year in Bangalore, India, and will be repeated on 11–15 December 2023 in Ahmedabad, India. The first conference has been a great success with more than 460 papers and 800 attendees from 20 different countries. I would like to thank Puneet Kumar Mishra and Yahya Antar for the kind invitation to give a plenary lecture and the presentation of the Society. The other new cosponsored conference I had the pleasure to attend was IMAS, held in Cairo on 5 February 2023. Thanks to Hany Hammad for the invitation. The conference was also a success, with about 250 attendees. I will attend other exciting events before the end of the summer. The first will be the IEEE RADIO international conference, organized by Vikass Monebhurrun, in Balaclava, Mauritius, Africa, from 1 to 4 May 2023. The second is IMS 2023, the flagship conference of MTT-S, on next 11–16 June in San Diego, CA, USA. Attending IMS on behalf of AP-S is truly a pleasure because it gives me the opportunity to meet MTT-S members who I may not otherwise meet and to exchange information on future and present joint initiatives, like the Joint Distinguished Lecture Program that MTT-S and AP-S recently started. I would like to thank Nuno Carvalho, IEEE MTT-S president, for inviting me to the MTT-S AdCom meeting in San Diego and for exchanging ideas on the common interests of the two Societies. I have reciprocated the invitation, asking him to attend our next AdCom meeting in Portland. The preparation of our flagship conference in Portland is proceeding well. This year, we got about 1,500 paper submissions, in line with the results obtained in 2021 and 2022, a bit less than the pre-COVID numbers. I would like to thank Jamesina Simpson and Reyhan Baktur (general cochairs) for the exceptional organization they are managing and Andy Chrysler, Karl Warnick, and Christos Christodoulou (Technical Program cochairs), for arranging a formidable technical program.
I wish to conclude this column by saying that in November of this year, we will have the review of the Society by the IEEE TAB, a review that occurs every five years. Branislav Notaros and I are working on collecting the rich documentation that will show the perfect shape of our Society! We will do our best to request timely coordination efforts from our AP-S committees.
Best regards.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MAP.2023.3267862