2016 has been a busy and fun year as the Chair of the Vancouver IEEE Section. The backbone of IEEE Vancouver remains the many active technical chapter and affinity group chairs. As usual these hard working people have organized a wide range of activities during the year with interesting site tours, coding events, distinguished lecturer talks and many technical talks. I hope you were able to attend some of these. Besides being interesting these are good events to help you stay abreast of advances in your technical area.

Last year the executive made a decision to beef up our student scholarship fund. Our strategy to do this is via IEEE conference financial participation. A major effort this year was the hosting of CCECE, the Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering. Many of your executive, other local academics, and other volunteers made this a successful event. The statistics are:

• 241 paid attendees + 40 volunteers
• Papers accepted: 278
• Acceptance rate 69.5%

The section will use its approximately $25K portion of the surplus to beef up our scholarship fund managed by the IEEE Canada Foundation. IEEE Vancouver has also received many other contributions from locally held conferences exceeding $15,000.

While we are on conferences, I would like to remind everyone that Vancouver is a popular hosting city for IEEE conferences with Vancouver hosting the following in 2016:

1. 2016 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence (WCCI2016)
2. IEEE International Symposium on Power Electronics for Distributed Generation Systems (PEDG)
3. 2016 14th IEEE International New Circuits and Systems Conference (NEWCAS)
4. 2016 IEEE International Conference on Cybercrime and Computer Forensic (ICCCF)
5. 2016 IEEE Canadian Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering (CCECE)
6. 2016 IEEE International Symposium on Ethics in Engineering, Science and Technology (ETHICS)
7. 2016 Information Technology, Electronics and Mobile Communication Conference (IEMCON).

I note that we have an agreement to help host IEMCON in Vancouver for multiple years, which will help us grow our scholarship fund on a regular basis. You may wish to talk to your employer about paying for you to attend one of our locally held conferences.

The other major area we are working on in the section is to revitalize our Industry linkages. This initiative has started, but requires ongoing effort. I plan to work on this with the executive in my year as your Past Chair. Two things that did happen this year on this file are:

1. The Industry Forum held when CCECE was in town and
2. Our involvement with Telus on the IEEE/TELUS Student Innovation Challenge. The Industry Forum theme was “Grow Your High-Tech Business”. 105 registered for this event. The forum began with opening remarks by Daphne Meredith, Deputy Minister of Western Diversification. Following these opening remarks the forum was divide into three panels:
   • Accelerator Panel
   • Government Funding Panel
   • Industry Veteran Panel

Each panel covered an area that was important to understand if one is looking for support for a technology start up. We thank NSERC for supporting this event.

IEEE/TELUS Student Innovation Challenge was held with the support of Telus, IBM and the City of Surrey. The student teams were tasked with using IBM’s big data platform to find uses for Surrey to improve its operations using its existing databases. We are grateful for the continued support of Telus to the students and the IEEE Vancouver section.

IEEE Vancouver holds somewhere between 85 and 100 events year after year. This is as many events as some of the local government-backed technology support organizations, who use full time staff to do so. I would like to thank each of our many volunteers who make these events happen. It does take a lot of work. Please consider becoming active in your technical area to assist our busy Chapter Chairs.

Good luck to our incoming executive, under Rama’s leadership I am sure they will continue the fine (105 year long) tradition of providing many excellent technology and professional events to help you stay current in your career.

Best regards,
Lee Vishloff outgoing Chair