On behalf of the Vancouver Section of the IEEE I would like to wish you all a prosperous new year.

I would like to thank Rama Vinnakota for his most appreciated services and dedication as chair in 2017 and his services prior to that year; I will do all I can to serve as well as he did in the role of Vancouver Section Chair.

2018 is off to a great start. The Think Engineering Conference held on January 26^th was a tremendous success and much appreciated by all participants and sponsors. The officer and volunteer training session of February 3^rd was also very much appreciated by all participants. And most important we have the Annual General Meeting (AGM) coming up on Saturday March 24^th, so mark your calendars for this highlight event.

This Contact Newsletter is also the result of a new advance in how we run the Section: we are now generating the Contact newsletter and the website directly from the vtools event planning tool. As such, when volunteers enter an event into vtools, it will automatically be reflected in the Section website and into Contact, which will reduce the amount of time volunteers spend to publicize their event. Many thanks to Sanjeet Sanghera for this accomplishment.

The Section depends on the enthusiastic participation of our volunteers and we are delighted to see so many new volunteers contributing to the section this year. We look forward to your enthusiasm and drive; the executive committee is ready to help in as many ways as possible so do not hesitate to contact myself or any other exec. There are always opportunities to help out so we encourage you to check out our website at vancouver.ieee.ca/ to see all opportunities and contact information for the executives.

The members of the Section have worked tirelessly for the past few years to raise money to pay for more scholarships to support outstanding students in the Section, and late last year we were delighted to give a cheque of $50,000 to the IEEE Canada Foundation to pay for more scholarships. We now offer $4000 per year in scholarships. The deadline to apply is March 4^th, 2018. For more information contact Nico Dreyer at nico.dreyer@ieee.org.

Finally. I would like to take the time to remember Nick Keenan, a very long time IEEE Volunteer who contributed so much to the Vancouver Section over the past decades. He passed away on January 1^st of this year. His tireless work and devotion to the cause of helping and informing the Section members was much appreciated and will very much be missed.

Do not hesitate to contact should you have any questions or comments.

Best,

Guillaume Boisset
Vancouver IEEE Section  Chair