IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2021 - 8

PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

2020, 2021, and Beyond
By Seth Hutchinson

T

he end of 2020 marked the
midpoint of my two-year
term as president of the IEEE
Robotics and Automation Society (RAS). It is an understatement to
say that the first year was not exactly
what I had expected. In the early days
of 2020, COVID-19 arrived, followed
by weeks of uncertainty about its severity, scope, and duration. This posed a
major threat to our events and initiatives, particularly our conference
ac tivities. In
response, volunteers and
I am confident that
staff innovated,
we will see significant
planned, scrambled, replanned,
improvements,
hacked, worperhaps even a
ried, worked
revolution, in how we long hours,
and, in the end,
handle peer review
scored some
remarkable
and publication.
achievements,
including hosting both the IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) and IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent
Robots and Systems (IROS) as virtual
events at little or no cost to participants. Many of you experienced these
events, so I won't recount them here;
rather, I'll describe a few other initiatives that may not be as well known.
Our ad hoc committee to evaluate
RAS educational activities finished its
work in 2020 and presented a compreDigital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2021.3059384
Date of current version: 22 March 2021

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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hensive report of its findings
during the October Administrative Committee
(AdCom) meeting. Our
educational activities are vast
and diverse, including onetime activities such as sponsored
summer schools; continuing education
for practicing professionals; distinguished lectures; and a host of online
webinars, videos, and podcasts. In addition to these RAS-sponsored activities,
many of our members have made significant contributions to textbooks,
online courses, and educational software packages. Because these activities
are so diverse, and because they span six
of our boards (Technical Activities,
Member Activities, Industrial Activities,
Conferences, Publications, and Electronic Products and Services), we have
now established a Standing Committee
on Educational Activities, chaired by
Peter Corke (Queensland University of
Technology) and including members
from the six relevant boards, whose
purpose is to continually refine our
overall educational strategy, oversee all
of our educational programs, and
ensure quality and efficacy. Given the
importance and scope of these activities, and given the increasing importance of continuing education to our
membership, I anticipate that this committee will eventually become our Educational Activities Board, with its own
vice president, but the timing for this
remains to be determined.
Like our educational activities, the
scope and volume of research activities
in our community have significantly
increased in recent years, and with this

MARCH 2021

increase has come an explosion
in the number of papers submitted to our conferences
and journals. As a consequence, our editorial boards
for IEEE Transactions on
Robotics, IEEE Transactions on
Automation Science and Engineering,
and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters as well as for ICRA and IROS now
have a combined membership of hundreds of volunteers, serving as editors
and associate editors. These hundreds
of volunteers rely on a pool of thousands of reviewers to evaluate submitted
papers. With these numbers, our current model for the peer review process
is simply not sustainable. At the same
time, universities and companies are
reconsidering how to evaluate the quality of their researchers. For example, in
many disciplines, conferences are gaining credibility that rivals that of journals. These issues have motivated a
discussion, primarily within our Publications and Conference Activities
Boards, about the future of peer review,
editorial boards, conference and journal
papers, and the role of RAS in the publication landscape. These discussions
began some time ago, initially in random board meetings and occasional
dinner conversations, and have evolved
into a coherent and organized investigation of our publication principles and of
procedures that would effectively support those principles. Although I am
not yet sure where these discussions will
lead, I am confident that we will see significant improvements, perhaps even a
revolution, in how we handle peer
review and publication.
IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - March 2021

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