Dominique Schreurs and Pete Zampardi
We are honored to serve the International Microwave Symposium (IMS) and IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society (MTT-S) community as the Technical Program Committee (TPC) cochairs for IMS2023, in San Diego, CA, USA. Working with the TPC team, we developed a program that should have something for everyone.
For IMS2023, the call for papers and the Technical Paper Review Committee (TPRC) subcommittees have been reorganized to provide some balance to the number of submitted papers for each topic area and to emphasize the transition to systems. Two new subcommittees, Subterahertz (THz) and THz Systems and Model-Based System Engineering, emphasize this.
This year, we continue to tie in and increasingly highlight systems-oriented design and applications throughout the conference theme days. On Tuesday, wireless communications will be featured with the returning Connected Futures Summit (formerly the 5G Summit) along with MTT-S Future Directions Day on artificial intelligence (AI)/machine learning (ML). On Wednesday, space will take center stage along with the growing area of model-based system engineering. Finally, RF/microwave technology in biomedical applications will be the theme for Thursday. Since IMS is an international conference, we are excited to have microwaves in Latin America as a conference theme this year.
For IMS2023, we involved the MTT-S technical committees (TCs) in the development of this year’s TPRC subcommittee topics and evaluation of workshop proposals. They also helped identify “industry keynote” speakers, as we will discuss in the following. We would like to thank all the TCs for their contributions.
Figure 2. Submissions by country.
We have paid special attention to enhancing industry participation in IMS2023. This started by evaluating the makeup of the TPRC invitation list and closely monitoring the balance among industry, academia, and government in subcommittee assignments, resulting in a very diverse 168 unique affiliations represented in the TPRC. The makeup of the TPRC is 58% from academia, 35% from industry, and 7% from government and research institutes, which is very similar to last year. To encourage increased industry participation in the technical sessions, “industry keynote” talks will kick off many of the technical tracks. We received nominations from 20 TCs and have a total of 17 confirmed speakers at the time of this column. These talks will be delivered by industry experts providing an overview of and look at future directions of a given area. The Industry Showcase acknowledges the most outstanding industry papers, as recommended by the TPRC subcommittees. Finally, in addition to IMS’s three long-standing paper competitions (best student, best industry paper, and best advanced practice paper), a new competition for early career professionals (early career paper) will take place this year. This new competition is open to authors from industry and government agencies as well as postdoctoral candidates with fewer than 10 years of professional experience and who are not full-time students or faculty members. This new competition drew 135 entries (14% of the overall submissions), while the other competitions also continue to thrive.
This year, the conference received 742 paper submissions from 45 different countries/regions and representing 390 distinct submitter affiliations. Table 1 shows the paper submissions by subcommittee.
As something new this year, please keep your eyes open for information on “teaser tutorials” that will broadcast prior to the conference (see Matt Ozalas’ article in this issue for more information). These tutorials will be open to conference registrants only.
None of these activities would be possible without the dedication and support of our IMS2023 volunteers and professional staff. We look forward to seeing you in beautiful San Diego.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MMM.2023.3242768