IEEE Day was celebrated in Spain on Friday 22 October in Madrid, at the UNED’s Education Faculty. The event was conducted in a semi-presential format, with participants attending presentially and virtually.

Enrique Romero, President of the Spain Section, inaugurated the meeting with a brief description of the Section’s current situation. Jesús Fraile, the former President, honored the memory of Julia Merino, Section treasurer who passed away this year.

The program continued with a global presentation of IEEE by Antonio Luque, current Region 8 President, who highlighted the social impact of IEEE’s activities. Then Manuel Castro presented the case of IEEE-HKN (Eta Kappa Nu), the IEEE excellence and honor society, of which a Chapter had been formed in UNED in 2020.

The traditional Technical Section of the Spanish IEEE Day was given by Agustín Delgado, Director of Innovation and Sustainability at Iberdrola, and Rafael Estévez, Head of Industry Sectors – Utilities & Industria at Telefónica TECH. The main topic discussed by the speakers was the relationship between the energy transition and digitalization, two of the main transformations in current society.
The awards ceremony took place before the break. The Distinction to the Institution 2021 was awarded to the UNED in recognition of its constant cooperation with IEEE in the last 20 years. The Best Chapter award was given to the Spanish Power and Energy Society (PES) for the high number and high-quality activities fostered by the chapter in the last two years. The awards ceremony concluded with the presentation of the medals for the members with 50, 40, 30, 20, and 10 years in IEEE.

After the break, José Antonio Gómez presented SIGHT (Special Interest Group on Humanitarian Technology), a program launched in 2011 by IEEE HAC (Humanitarian Activities Committee) for fostering development cooperation and humanitarian aid activities within IEEE.

To conclude, Patricia Rodríguez, Student branches representative, summarize their current situation and presented a plan for increasing the presence of IEEE at the universities in the context of a higher number of presential activities in the university, whose reduction impacted negatively in the last academic year.

IEEE Day is an annual event where all IEEE members from different organization units can share ideas, challenges, solutions, and recent trends in technology.

This Year was special as COVID-19 pandemic prevent a lot of physical gathering events all over the world. Egypt Section and SAC branches accept the challenge of planning for event that gather SAC branches all over Egypt in large open area taking all health precautions into consideration.

IEEE Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime Transport (AAST) in Alexandria hosted the event in their campus.

Logistic team start to plan for transportation from different Egypt pick points to AASTMT campus using buses sponsored from them more than 150 members picked up from different locations all over Egypt.

After arrival IEEE Egypt Section welcome all members with small talk and event started with circle of confidence game to build bonds between different members.

Then, sports game time started all members divided into small groups and distributed to different fields.

The photo time came all teams start to wear their IEEE Day celebration T-shirt in orange color. After photo lunch break sponsored by AASTMT is provided.

Then, competition on the IEEE Egypt section trivia conducted with small gifts from IEEE Egypt section. Finally, the day came to an end with a lot of good memories and experience shared with members from different branches.

The third-year successively, IEEE Day is celebrated in the largest Technical University in Batiic states – Riga Technical University (RTU) by a series of scientific, promoting, and technical events. The core of celebration is the free-of-charge IEEE Workshop on Microwave Theory and Techniques in Wireless communications (MTTW’21) organized by IEEE Latvia Section COM/MTT/AP Joint Societies Chapter and IEEE Latvia Section with technical support of RTU and other European universities. The IEEE Day celebration has been organized in a hybrid format and continued for two days, from the 7th to the 8th of October, with the involvement of significant international and Latvian experts.

This year, Professor Nadezda Kunicina, Head of the IEEE Latvia Section, delivered a keynote address as part of the ceremonial events. She spoke about RTU’s wide range of research opportunities and emphasized the IEEE’s support for inter-university collaboration. Continuing celebration keynote speeches were delivered by experts from Europe: prof. Oscar Quevedo Teruel from KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden) gave a speech on “Geodesic Lens Antennas for 5G/6G and Satellite Communications”, while Gavle University (Sweden) was presented by Yuri Shestopalov and lecture “Complex Waves and Resonances. A Review on Recent Advances”, in turn, young researcher Marek Götten from University of Applied Sciences Wismar( Germany) announced the latest developments on “Fiber optical sensor networks.” At the end of the first day, presentations of the Latvian participants of the IEEE Workshop MTTW’2021 were taken in person and broadcast to all other participants.

On October 8, the event also took place both in-person and remotely. The second day began with the opening of the MTTW’2021 remote sessions and a hybrid lecture “Hyper-Performing Cities with Human Artificial Intelligence.” The speech was delivered by Professor Agnis Stibe, a Latvian scientist who currently works at the EM Normandie business school in France. The celebration program continued with a lecture on “Sorting Algorithms for Large Data Sets” by Shahriar Shirvani Moghaddam, Associate Professor at Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training Univesity in Iran. After that, the young researcher Andzej Borel from Vilnius Gediminas Technical University presented the latest findings on “Power Amplifier Linearization Methods for upcoming 5G networks”. In the afternoon, a remote part of IEEE Workshop MTTW’21 was organized in six thematic sessions: Beyond 5G technologies; Antennas; Microwave electronics; IoT, Sensor and other Networks; Optical communications and photonics; Signal processing for communications systems. The workshop has been attended by participants from 30 countries (Latvia, Germany, Turkey, Ukraine, Algeria, Greece, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, United Arab Emirates, Czech Republic, Russia, Brazil, Morocco, Ecuador, Canada, Croatia, New Zealand, Libya, Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Lithuania, Spain, Iran, Pakistan, Tunisia, Great Britain, Vietnam, China, Finland). Each day of the event was attended by more than 100 people who saw the broadcast translation or participated in the event in person. The photo gallery of IEEE Day celebration in RTU – http://mttw.org/gallery/new/
Special thanks for contributing to the organization of the celebration of IEEE Day at the Riga Technical University should be expressed to Assoc. prof. Arturas Aboltins – Head of the IEEE Latvia Section COM/MTT/AP Joint Societies Chapter, and Assoc. prof. Anna Litvinenko – Membership Development chair of the IEEE Latvian Section.