Systems, Man & Cybernetics - April 2016 - 55

conference site pointing to the corresponding journal paper.
Many authors of accepted journal
papers have agreed to this arrangement since this gives them an additional opportunity to promote their ideas.
(As of now, authors of such papers pay
full registration fees-although the
Society is considering the possibility of
special discounted fees since, for these
papers, we do not need to referee, so
expenses are slightly less.)
These papers are often the best
at the conferences since they have
undergone more rigorous vetting
than the usual conference papers.
Interestingly, since PES has adopted
this policy, conference attendance
has significantly increased, not only
by adding new presenters but also
by adding new nonpresenting participants who are interested in hearing
these results.
The above idea takes care of
papers that have a lready been
accepted by a journal, but what
about other papers, especially papers
presenting very recent new ideas?
For such papers, PES uses another
model: conference participants who

Society News

are interested in the future journal
submission declare this intent from
the very beginning. The corresponding submissions are then limited to
four pages, so there are usually plenty of possibilities to seriously expand
to a usual 8-12-page transactions
size; of course, journal reviewers
check the significance of the additions created by the authors.
The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) has a different
model. Since 1 January 2016, RAS
has launched a new publication,
IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, whose main objective is the
speedy publication of short papers.
After the first review, the editor may
recommend a paper to the program
committee of the relevant conference, after which the revised paper is
sent both to the journal editors and
to the conference program committee. If the paper is accepted by the
journal, it is published in the journal
(but not in the conference proceedings). If the paper is accepted by the
conference and by the journal, then it
is presented at the conference and
published in the journal. If the paper

is rejected by the journal but accepted by the conference, it is published
in the conference proceedings and
presented at the conference. The
paper is not published if it is rejected
by both.
The IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) has a similar model with
IEEE Signal Processing Letters. The
difference is that at SPS, not only
IEEE Signal Processing Letters editors can recommend papers to conference program committees but also
vice versa; a conference program
committee can recommend the paper
to the IEEE Signal Processing Letters editors.
How efficient are these approaches? In all three Societies, approximately 10-20% of conference presentations
were by journal papers, and conference attendance has increased by
more than that.
All these approaches lead to a
win-win situation: more quality papers appear in journals, more good
papers are presented at conferences,
and conference attendance increases.
Let us try something like this in our
Society as well!

(continued from page 52)

In addition, we allowed the audience
to interact with hands-on demonstrations, thus enabling them to experience the previously explained shared
control concepts. In this way, we
hoped to stimulate young researchers
new to the field while also inspiring
discussions with other relevant
research groups.
Our technical committee has also
organized events with the hope of
reaching other researchers interested
in shared control outside of the SMC
community. A half-day tutorial,
"Human-Centered Design and Evaluation of Haptic Shared Control," was
organized at the 2015 IEEE World Haptics Conference in Chicago, Illinois, a

highly interdisciplinary conference
that brings together psychophysicists,
engineers, and designers. This tutorial
focused on shared control through
physical interaction, or haptic-shared
control. The program consisted of presentations, hands-on demonstrations
with robotic devices, and a stimulating
panel discussion with invited experts
from both the neuroscience and engineering communities.
The year 2015 also saw the publication of a special issue on shared
control in the Journal of HumanRobot Interaction. This special
issue was made possible through
the visibility of our activities at the
IEEE SMC conferences a nd the
Ap ri l 2016

network of enthusiastic researchers
that the committee has built since
its conception.
In the years to come, we plan to
continue organizing special sessions,
workshops, tutorials, joint journal
publications, special issues, and
social events for the SMC and other
relevant communities, while actively
recruiting more members to our
Technical Committee on Shared Control. We look forward to meeting and
collaborating with others who share
our goal of advancing research on
sh a red cont rol a nd i mprov i ng
human-machine interaction!
-Tricia Gibo

IEEE SyStEmS, man, & CybErnEtICS magazInE

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