Membership [President's Message]

Membership S ome argue our Society does not need a large quantity of members , but that it does need quality membership. Some argue that size does matter. We are the fourth largest IEEE Society with more than 16,000 members; however, we are the largest Society without our own division director (IEEE Board of Directors). Perhaps both are equally right—we need quantity and quality! The number of IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) members peaked at more than 20,000 in 1995, after which membership began to decline steadily. The reason was not because the field of signal processing became less active. On the contrary, the number of pages in publications has grown from 2,200 pages in 1990 to over 19,300 pages in 2012. And the number of submissions to and attendance at SPS conferences continued to increase significantly as well. It was the introduction of IEEE Xplore that changed the paradigm of membership and the notion of individual members. One no longer needed to join a Society to receive a copy of a journal thanks to institutional memberships, which cover the costs of journal subscriptions. Many individuals thus chose not to join a Society. During the Society's major bylaws revision in 2009, the Society decided to seriously face the daunting membership challenges by introducing the Membership Board, with John Treichler as the first Vice President chairing it, and which now consists of four elected regional directors representing the United States, Asia-Pacific region, Europe and Mediter-ranean area, and Latin America and Can-ada. These regional directors are also nonvoting members of the Board of Governors (BoG). Their job is to bring the regional voices to the attention of the leadership as well as channel the messages back to their Regions. We have a Director–Membership Services whose job is to oversee value and benefit issues that concern our members. We learned from past studies that one of the top reasons a member decided to leave SPS was the lack of continuing education learning programs. Frankly, that dissatisfaction was right on, for we have paid too much attention to original research publications in journals and conferences. Therefore, one key project of the Direc-tor–Membership Services is to establish summer and winter schools on various emerging topics. As Membership Services Director, Shuvra Bhattacharyya was in charge of developing such a program. Just last summer, three summer schools were offered in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, which …