For a stretch in the early 2000s, I served as Co-Chair of the IEEE Computer Society's Washington/Northern Virginia chapter. The chapter ran technical meetings for working software and computer engineers across the DC area, and the officers were the ones who made those meetings happen.
This was not an award. Nobody hands you a plaque. You volunteer, you get elected or appointed, and then you owe a room full of engineers a worthwhile evening every month.
The work
What running a chapter meant
Chapter work is logistics plus judgment. Find speakers worth an evening of an engineer's time, pick topics ahead of the hype curve rather than behind it, arrange the room, and keep the thing going month after month.
The DC area made it interesting. The audience mixed federal architects, contractors, university people, and product engineers, so a topic had to survive questions from all four at once.
It was an early version of something I still do: put practitioners in a room, or on a stage or a microphone, and make the conversation worth their time. HealthIMPACT and the radio show are the same job at a different scale.
The record
- Listed as Co-Chair on the chapter's officers page, hosted on IEEE's own site.
- Served alongside Co-Chair Tirumale K. Ramesh of Boeing.
- Returned to the chapter as a speaker in February 2019, presenting on healthcare AI and machine learning.
References
- 01Chapter officers listingIEEE Washington/Northern Virginia Computer Society ChapterArchived officers page on IEEE's official site listing Shahid Shah as Co-Chair.
- 02Opportunities created by Healthcare's adoption of AI and Machine LearningSpeaker DeckThe 2019 return to the chapter, this time as the speaker.