VTS Distinguished Lecturers and Speakers Program

By Fabrice Labeau, VP Membership

Since 2010, VTS has developed a Distinguished Lecturers (DL) program that is now one of the largest such programs within IEEE.

The program was launched as a response to some of the results from the biennial VTS Membership Survey, in which members expressed a strong interest in local chapter activities involving internationally renowned speakers.

As a consequence, the VTS DL program was launched with an inaugural class of more than 40 Distinguished Lecturers, all well-known figures from academia and industry, in areas covering the fields of interest of the Society, from automotive electronics to wireless communications. The Society funds these speakers to travel to VTS chapters around the globe.

Over the years, the program has benefitted from several improvements, including the recent creation of the Distinguished Speaker category: Distinguished Speakers are Distinguished Lecturers who have attained the end of their mandate, but whose talks were in such demand that VTS keeps them on the roster, and that funding is given for shorter trips to a neighboring chapter.

The VTS DL program has grown to become an important membership benefit, and one of the most concrete motivations to establish a local chapter. Every VTS chapter may receive funding from VTS for up to two visits from Distinguished Lecturers (fully funded) and two visits from Distinguished Speakers (funding up to US$500) per year. This investment seeds the technical activities for each chapter.

The 2017 Class of DLs was announced in July, and includes speakers from all over the world, covering topics as varied as automotive Cyber-Physical Systems, RF energy harvesting systems, networking for IoT systems, and security in multimedia transmission, among others.

Distinguished Lecturers—Class of 2017

For more information about the program, a list of speakers and proposed topics, feel free to refer to the official VTS DL webpage at http://dl.vtsociety.org.