Yearly Archives: 2012

HISTELCON 2012
The origins of electrotechnologies
5 – 7 September 2012
Pavia, Italy

HISTELCON 2012, the 3rd in its series (after HISTELCON 2008 in Paris and HISTELCON 2010 in Madrid), is organized by IEEE Italy Section, IEEE Region 8 and the Research Centre CIRSTE operating in the Museum of Electrical Technology at the University of Pavia, in conjunction with the ninth Historical Conference held by the IEEE History Committee and the IEEE History Center.

Conference objectives
HISTELCON 2012 aims to increase the understanding of the origins and of the early developments of electrical technologies – in particular of telecommunications.

• Original and innovative contributions are invited in areas including, but not restricted to:
• Origins and early developments of electro-technologies
• Milestones in different fields of electro-technology, both early and modern
• Scientists and Technologists involved in the above
• Museum items and educational methods illustrating the above

Call for papers
Abstract Submission
Interested participants are invited to submit their abstracts for oral or poster presentations to the Conference Secretariat by electronically sending a 500 words abstract, written in English, with the title, the name(s) and affiliation(s) of the author(s) in MS Word format. All abstracts will be reviewed by the Conference Technical Program Committee. Presented papers will be included in the Conference Proceedings and in IEEE Xplore. For each presented paper or poster, one presenter will have to register for the Conference. Guidelines for preparation of papers and posters will be provided in due time.

Special Sessions and Panels
Proposals to organize a special session and/or a Discussion Panel on a specific subject (e.g. related to an IEEE Technical Society) are welcome. Special session presentation abstracts will be reviewed in a similar way to regular presentations. The duration of a session or a panel discussion will be 90 minutes.

More Information at the Official Website

Two webinars were organized on July 3, 2012. The organizing team was comprised by Saurabh Sinha, IEEE Region 8 Vice-Chair: Technical Activities and Niovi Pavlidou, IEEE R8 Lead Volunteer for CE (Educational Activities Subcommittee (EASC)). The events were technically supported by George Michael, Electronic Communications Coordinator, IEEE R8. The webinars were quite well disseminated through the e-Notice service and, by George Papadopoulos, through the R8 Continuing Education Forum email lists.

The first webinar, entitled “Fuzzy Logic Systems in Educational Assessment”, was intended to all members of IEEE Education Society in R8, to the Section Chairs of R8, and to Region 8 EA officers. Niovi Pavlidou welcomed the participants and introduced various subcommittees relating to technical activities, with emphasis on educational activities in Region 8. The central speaker of the webinar was Dr Riadh Besbes, an educational supervisor for secondary schools in Tunisia. After the presentation a questions and answers slot was offered to the participants.  The duration of the webinar was one hour, the lectures and discussion slots as a whole. The event was organized on WebEx facilities and the attendance was considered as moderate.

Some technical problems with the voice quality have been referred. A main problem to be noticed is the non-availability of toll-free telephone number provisions with some Region 8 countries (for example, Serbia and Montenegro) and the attendees from these areas who joined the session were disappointed. The VoIP connection will strongly improve the success of the seminars and this feedback has been coordinated with the IEEE Member and Geographic Activities Information Management (MGA-IM) team by the continuing education coordination for Region 8.

The second webinar was supposed to start half an hour later. The title of the webinar was “Introduction to Electric Vehicles”, and the speaker was Vladimir Katic, IEEE Serbia and Montenegro Section. It was intended for members of IEEE Vehicular Technology Society (VTS) in Region 8, to the Section Chairs in Region 8 and to Region 8 EA officers. Though, even if the attendance was considered as satisfactory, the speaker was not able to use the toll-free phone line, because WebEx does not support it for Serbia & Montenegro.

After some efforts performed by the organizers and the speaker (including the use of other parallel platforms – Skype – in parallel to WebEx), Niovi Pavlidou apologized for the inconvenience, and closed the session promising that the VTS affiliated webinar will be offered again soon.

Prof. Niovi Pavlidou
IEEE R8 Lead Volunteer for Continuing Education
IEEE Greece Section Membership Development Officer

The IEEE VTS & AESS Joint Greece Chapter has organized a Final/Diploma Thesis Competition (Academic Years 2009 – 2011) in the scientific field of “Advanced Wireless Communication Systems” with great success. There were 19 submissions from institutes all over Greece. The submissions were performed to a server host provided and supported by the International Hellenic University (IHU). Each Thesis was evaluated by 3 independent reviewers, and they all admitted the level of the participations was high. The 8 submissions with the highest score, coming from 5 different universities, were qualified to the second-final round. The final round reviewing process was performed by the Scientific Committee of the Competition.

The final round presentations and the awards ceremony took place on February 17^th 2012, with about 60-65 alternating participants, students and academics, at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTh), which provided the room. Two of the final round participants were not able to attend, so they provided a video-presentation and connected through skype for the questions section.

The winner of the Competition, Kampianakis Eleftherios, coming from the Technical University of Crete, was awarded with an iPhone 4 offered by the sponsor of the event Cosmote Mobile Telecommunications S.A. Also, gifts and certificates of participation were distributed to the participants of the Competition.

The final round presentations and the awards ceremony was live broadcasted and is available in the website of the Chapter (http://ewh.ieee.org/r8/greece/avtc/events/eventsen67.html). The symposium was very successful receiving congratulations and enthusiasm from all the participants of the event, the students-candidates and their Thesis supervisors.

The great success of the event has motivated the Chapter Committee to organize the Final/Diploma Thesis Competition every year. Stay tuned with our events at http://ewh.ieee.org/r8/greece/avtc/.

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