IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2014 - 18

Regional

Network Bridging Among Professionals
By Xiaorui Zhu

am honored to deliver the opening
remarks of a series on Chapter activities on behalf of the IEEE Robotics and
Automation Society (RAS) Chapter
and International Activities Committee.
This committee is in charge of organizing
and fostering international cooperation
among scholars and students, mainly
through the Chapters of the Society,
which are an important means toward
this goal. Kenji Suzuki from the University of Tsukuba, Japan, has made great
efforts in his previous term leading the
Committee. I, Xiaorui Zhu, am from the
Harbin Institute of Technology Shenzhen
Graduate School and have led the IEEE
Women in Engineering committee
within RAS over the last two years. Now,
Kenji and I are cochairs of the Chapter
and International Activities Committee,
serving the membership for the next two
years to make use of our experiences and
advance the development of RAS membership, especially in local Chapters.
Like all IEEE Societies, the membership of RAS is made up of individual
IEEE Members. RAS has over 12,000
members around the world and is the
fastest-growing Society within the IEEE.
RAS membership has seen dramatic
growth at all levels over the past five years.
Our goal is to provide aid in promoting
close cooperation and exchange of technical information and opportunities
among individual members, although
they are scattered all around the world.
Many RAS members are relatively
new to the Society, with 36% of mem-

bers in their first year, and only 34% of
RAS members have been with the Society for over five years. Of the first-year
members, 54% are student or graduate
student members.
How can RAS form better connections and encourage long-term membership? Technical committees are an
important network for these members in
terms of the field of interest. Another
essential network is provided through the
local Chapters (Section/Branch Chapters,
including joint Chapters with other IEEE
Societies); they can unite the individual
members according to geographic location. Through these Chapters, we strive
to ensure that the members of all regions
are well represented and feel equally at
home in the diverse Society activities,
such as conferences, summer/winter
schools, and elections.
As can be seen in Figure 1, the number of local Chapters has increased since
the birth of RAS and reached 78 Chapters this year. There has been a 30%
increase in the number of local Chapters

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2014.2334141

Figure 1. The history of RAS Section Chapter development, not accounting for Student
Branch Chapters.

Date of publication: 10 September 2014

IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

since 2011. A sharp jump was also
observed in the number of student
Chapters, with 82 student Chapters in
2014 compared with the year of 2013.
This growth is very encouraging for us,
as we aim to provide more services to
support RAS Chapters.
Therefore, in the next two years, we
will take action in different ways to
improve the network of the local Chapters
and the Society. As usual, we will keep
providing sufficient funding each year to
support the diverse technical and educational activities organized by the Chapters.
The opportunities include the following.
●● Local Chapter support requests of up
to US$2,000 are granted, depending
on the quality and quantity of the proposals. The application form can be
found at http://www.ieee-ras.org/
images/Chapter%20Grant%20Application14-15.pdf. Chapter grant proposals will be reviewed at each IEEE
Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) and IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - September 2014