1. Membership Committee Report
Wei Yu
2nd VP – July 2019

2. Membership Committee Chair: Ex-officio 2VP (Wei Yu)
Coordinate the Padovani and Distinguished Lecturer selection process.
Chapters Liaison (Camilla Hollanti)
Coordinate Chapter-of-the-Year Award. Organize chapter chairs luncheon at ISIT.
WITHITS Liaison (Tara Javidi)
Two events: ISIT and ITA/Allerton
IEEE Women in Engineering (WIE) representative
Information Theory Schools Liaison (Stark Draper)
Student and Outreach Liaison (Vincent Tan)
Two events: Meet-the-Shannon-Lecturer, Roundtable Mentoring
Including IEEE Young Professionals Representative
2-year staggered term for each of the 5 voting members with BoG approval

3. Membership Committee Budget (2019)
Initial budget: $10K for membership, $3.8K for Distinguished Lectures
Revised budget: $20K for membership, $12K for Distinguished Lectures
For 2019, we were able to fund the ITA event as a new initiative.
As of July 2019, out of $20K membership budget:
WITHITS at ISIT ($3.7K). Meet-the-Shannon-Lecturer ($4.5K). Mentoring ($4.9K)
Recording ($1.6K). Student T-shirts ($1.1K).
Still have about $4K for possible ITW or Allerton events.

4. Distinguished Lecturers Program
Marco Dalai, Amos Lapidoth, Vincent Tan, Sennur Ulukus, Aaron Wagner
Distinguished Lecturers ( )
Syed Jafar, Roy Yates, Aylin Yener, Natasha Devroye
IEEE denied the selection of a DL based in Iran due to U.S. sanction
DL program rules:
DL should visit IT Society local chapters.
DL program pays for airfare and travel. Local chapter pays for local expenses (hotel).
If traveling to a different continent, visits to two locations are required.
DL lectures should be freely accessible to the public (i.e. no registration fees).

5. 2019 Distinguished Lectures (so far)
Sennur Ulukus to Australia
Vincent Tan to Taiwan
Amos Lapidoth to North Macedonia
Natasha Devroye to Texas
Our budget can accommodate a few more DL tours in 2019.
Call for next year’s DLs will be around October 2019.

6. Information Theory Society Local Chapters
Chapter-of-the-Year Award:
JAPAN
This is the third time that Japan received this award (2002, 2005)
New Chapters: Estonia, Qatar ($1000 initiation grant)
Expression of interests from Lebanon
Texas A&M was not able to form a chapter based on minimum 12 signatures. The IEEE Houston Section insists on requiring 25 signatures.
Chapter chairs appreciation lunch on Wednesday (10 chapter chairs)

7. Student and Outreach Subcommittee
Chair: Vincent Tan
Members:
Mine Alsan, Martina Cardone, Patrick Schulte, Farhard Shirani, I-Hsiang Wang, Yonathan Morin (YP Rep), Wei Yu (ex-officio)
Meet-the-Shannon-Lecturer (Thursday) > 250 registrations
Organizer: Farhard Shirani
Interviewers: Emmanuel Abbe and Ido Tal
Round-Table Mentoring (Friday) > 190 registrations
Organizer: I-Hsiang Wang and Martina Cardone
Buffet Lunch: 14 Discussion leaders around high tables on career advice

8. Women in Information Theory (WITHITS)
Co-Chairs: Christina Lee Yu and Gireeja Ranade
WITHITS Event on Monday (170 registered!)
Theme: "Tooting our horns: Creating research pitches”
Feature: Tara Javidi
Goal: To practice research pitches and to build confidence for networking.
Box lunches provided.