Malaysia Chapter Bags Chapter of the Year Award Again: What’s the Secret?

By: Syed Abd Rahman Abu-Bakar, 2018 Chair IEEE SPS Malaysia Chapter 
School of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, Malaysia.

Malaysia Chapter Receives the 2018 Chapter of the Year Award! This was one of the highlighted top articles as read in the Inside the Signal Processing Newsletter, December 2018 edition. The news was really a big surprise for us as we did not expect it at all. Having in mind that we have “grabbed” this prestigious award twice already in the past (2011 – when it was first introduced, and three years later in 2014), winning this award again after four years is something really unbelievable. It must be admitted that such an achievement wouldn’t have been possible without a strong commitment and cooperation amongst the committee members. Despite the fact that the committee members are scattered throughout the country, some live and work more than 200km away, we are yet able to hold four to six face-to-face executive committee meetings in a year.

One of the successful recipes that keeps us together is the Edutour program that we organize almost every year, where we visit a city in a neighbouring country, based on available budget. In this trip, we normally visit the local universities (up to 2 universities) in the city, discuss with the academic staff on possibilities of collaboration, “market” the IEEE benefits for informal recruitment of non-members, and visit a few labs along with a short campus tour. The 2-day Edutour typically ends with visiting some interesting places in the city. We found that this program is very useful in keeping us together. Additionally, the annual family day we organize for all SPS Chapter members and their families also strengthen the ties. Mutual understanding and cooperation are the key ingredients in successfully organizing of the many technical events the Chapter conducts, such as our two annual free symposiums: Image Processing, Image Analysis and Real-Time Imaging (IPIARTI) symposium, and Symposium on Acoustic, Speech and Signal Processing (SASSP), various technical workshops, including the introductory Arduino workshops for the high school students, and the IEEE SPS Winter School 2018 on Big Data and Deep Learning in Healthcare; and most importantly our Chapter flagship conference, the IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (ICSIPA), which has been organized biennially starting from 2009. Consistently, it has attracted many international participants and in this year, 2019, we will have the sixth one in Kuala Lumpur itself. As a highlight, Prof. Dr. Ali H. Sayed, the current SPS President has agreed to be one of the keynote speakers. Please visit our website at http://sps.ieeemy.org/icsipa2019/ for details on the submission and deadlines. Do come to IEEE ICSIPA 2019 and visit us.