Statement of CandidacyWhen a colleague recently
posted on Facebook about attending an IEEE meeting, one response hit close to
home: “How quaint that the IEEE still thinks it is relevant!” As a candidate for the IEEE-CS Board of
Governors, this comment made me think: how does CS, and the broader IEEE,
stay relevant in an environment where most content is free and where people
are interconnected through social media and not merely at professional
conferences? As a magazine editor, two-time
technical committee chair, conference organizer, and author, I have seen many
aspects of the Computer Society. I see
the benefits of curated content,
the magazines where professional editors ensure that content is presented
clearly and in a way that is accessible to a broad audience. However, membership is declining as people,
and the organizations that employ them, have other priorities. Similarly, I see subscriber lists decreasing
every year. For increasing membership, the move to electronic publishing
offers a great opportunity. The
marginal cost of supporting an online-only member should be nearly zero. The society should therefore offer free student memberships with online access to Computer, to attract new members.
Companies should move beyond standards membership to full corporate
membership giving online-only membership to employees; companies with several
individual members should get group discounts. The CS Digital Library should be made more
affordable to large companies like mine when they have relatively few
employees who would access it, similar to a floating license: we could
increase revenue by charging less but dramatically broadening the base of
subscribers. The portfolio of
publications and conferences has grown considerably over the years: the
society therefore competes with itself,
let alone other organizations. I want
to be aggressive in identifying these overlaps and consolidating the
portfolio into a smaller set of key publications and conference venues. If the fraction of content that could
appear in either of two magazines or journals is substantial, there may not
be room for both. Overlap in
conferences is much more common, but those also need scrutiny to keep overall
quality high. I also find great concern
among my colleagues over the variation in publication policies. While other organizations offer open access
across the board, it seems CS distinguishes between a small set of new
open-access publications (authors pay to publish) and a larger set of
traditional publications with the old restrictions. CS has difficulty attracting authors to
volunteer their content under a strict copyright, and some authors (and
companies) avoid publishing with IEEE as a result. Finally, I would like to
see CS make conference organization easier for the volunteers. I have run
conferences for both CS and USENIX and there is an enormous difference
between them. USENIX has staff who are
responsible for many of the logistics such as local arrangements and
registration, so there is no separate “general chair” ... the volunteers are
responsible for content while USENIX is responsible for logistics. Obviously USENIX is much more focused than
CS, but many people who may organize an event in the areas of interest for
USENIX (such as distributed systems and security) view USENIX as the first
place to turn, not CS. In fact, a
workshop once run by CS became a USENIX event instead several years ago! CS operates under different constraints
than USENIX, especially operating as a society within the broader IEEE, but
it can do better. My goal as a member of the Board of
Governors would be to make CS events easier to organize and to make CS the
first place one would turn when starting a new event. If USENIX can have professional conference
organizers handle the role of five chairs (general, finance, local
arrangements, proceedings, and publicity) then CS can do the same. |
Biography
Fred Douglis holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from U.C. Berkeley and a B.S. in computer science from Yale. He has worked in industrial applied research throughout his career, including Matsushita, AT&T (Bell) Labs, IBM Research, and currently as a research scientist in the CTO office of EMC Core Technologies Division. At EMC, he works on advancing storage and cloud computing capabilities, as well as mentoring engineers with respect to academic publishing. Douglis has also has been a visiting professor at VU Amsterdam and Princeton University. He received an IBM Outstanding Technical Achievement award for his contributions to System S, productized as Infosphere Streams. His research interests include storage, distributed systems, and Internet tools and performance. He has published one book, over 50 workshop or conference papers, 7 journal or magazine articles, and over 50 patents. His CV is here and his LinkedIn profile is here. Douglis has volunteered with IEEE-CS since 1993 and has been a senior member of IEEE since 1997. He served as editor in chief of IEEE Internet Computing from 2007-2010 and has been on its editorial board since 1999. He formed the Technical Committee on the Internet, chairing it from 1997-2000, and previously chaired the Technical Committee on Operating Systems and Application Environments from 1996-1998 (now STCOS). He chaired several steering committees; helped organize the first IEEE/IPSJ Symposium on Applications and the Internet (SAINT) in 2001, serving as program co-chair; and was general chair of the 1993 IEEE Workshop on Workstation Operation Systems. In recognition of his contributions to the Computer Society, he was named a member of the Golden Core in 2011. Outside IEEE-CS, he has been program chair or co-chair of four major
conferences: WWW2005, the 8th International Web
Content Caching and Distribution Workshop (2003), the USENIX 2nd Symposium on Internet
Technologies and Systems (1999), and the 1998
USENIX Technical Conference. |
