A message: a message from your division director

The IEEE is one of the largest professional societies in the world. Its 180,000 members from all over the world have a great variety of interests. The Board of Directors is charged with the responsibility of discerning the needs of the members and setting policies and priorities that result in activities that meet these needs. Because of the heterogeneous nature of the membership, the Board of Directors has been structured to give significant respresentation to specific interest groups. Ten of the members, called Regional Directors, represent geographical areas - six in the United States and four from the rest of the world. Seven members, called Division Directors, represent the Groups and Societies (G/Ss). The representation for the G/Ss is obtained by assigning each G/S to an entity called a Division. Each Division has approximately the same number of members, and the G/Ss within the Division generally have some commonality in technical interest. The ten Regional Directors and seven Division Directors constitute a majority of the 29-member Board. As Director of Division I, my assignment is to represent the following four Groups and Societies: Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing; Circuits and Systems; Control Systems; and Information Theory. The total membership of these G/Ss is nearly 25,000. I urge all members of the G/Ss in Division I to express their opinion whenever possible, and I strongly encourage the individual G/Ss to conduct their own opinion polls on issues that particularly concern them.