What Is Your Main IEEE Society? [Editor's Remarks]
Hisao Ishibuchi · IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine · 2014
T he IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine (CIM) is mainly sent to members of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS), so I am fairly sure that you are an IEEE CIS member.However, "CIS" is not necessarily your answer to my question because you may be a member of two or more IEEE societies.For example, while the current CIM issue includes profiles of four CIS members who have been elevated to IEEE Fellows from the CIS, some other CIS members have been elevated from other IEEE societies.Recently, I read a newsletter of the IEEE SMC Society (SMCS).The newsletter included a list of new IEEE Fellows among SMCS members.I was surprised to find that all four new IEEE Fellows from the CIS are also SMCS members.If I change my question to "What is your main academic society?" some of you may choose a non-IEEE international society or a domestic society.An example is the Japanese Society for Evolutionary Computation (JSEC).The photo below shows a banquet at an annual conference of JSEC.Every December, JSEC organizes a two-day conference with about 100 attendees at an isolated spa resort.I always enjoy the sense of unity at these conferences.There is a comfortable feeling of belonging to a group of researchers with the same general interest in evolutionary computation.The group might be referred to as "the EC community" in Japan.I think the photo below gives a sense of the feeling of community that has been fostered at JSEC conferences.Many EC researchers in the photo have been deeply involved as local organizers for the 2015 IEEE CEC conference in Japan.I hope that you will come to Japan and enjoy the conference with us next year.The main theme of the current CIM issue is "Community-Centric Systems."I do not think that this is a well-established concept."Human-Centric Systems" seems to be more familiar.Since a community is a group of people with a common special interest, these two concepts are closely related to each other.There are, of course, many different types of communities, such as local, academic, business, and political communities, so individuals may have different views about Remarks