In these last 9 months I had the opportunity of preparing a document for the IEEE Communications Society looking at a 2020 Horizon to provide “bread for thoughts” in setting up the COMSOC Strategy for this decade. The document stemmed from work at the Future Centre and the first draft generated discussions among a group of COMSOC volunteers and was then reviewed by several other constituencies. It should be finalized in the coming 2 months. I would like to share with you a few parts, it is a long document so I will take it slice by slice and just a subset of it, to get feedbacks from an even larger audience.

Let me start with the opening considerations on Technology Evolution.

Today’s telecommunications infrastructures are based on technologies contributing to the optical, wireless, processing (both hardware and software, including switching and signal processing) and storage (including distributed storage like clouds). These will continue to have a major role in 2020. Additionally, however, we can expect a growing importance of  bioengineering, nanotechnology, sensors and smart materials and more generally of smart environment, as small as a single object and as large as a smart building and a smart city.

It is to be noted that there is a third revolution in the making asking for a more comprehensive consideration of many technologies and approaches in science, rather than segmented approaches that focus on specific domain.

• This is a challenge that COMSOC will have to face, balancing specialization and in depth analyses with overall coverage. This latter is technology non-specific and application domain specific and contrasts with the present COMSOC that by large is technology specific and domain non-specific.
• COMSOC will need to promote the formation of new professionals to act as agent of multidisciplinary field
• COMSOC needs to pay attention to the number of multi-disciplinary areas in which telecommunications has a role and include them in its technical scope
• COMSOC should consider a revisitation of its Technical Committees, clearly identifying those that are looking at basic telecom/computation components and those that leverage on those components (applications areas). They will probably appeal to different constituencies and may be run in different ways. TCs shall become attraction points generating interest and membership growth, can be sponsored directly by industry.

Clearly, as you can see in the text, we are making specific reference to the impact of evolution on COMSOC but most of these considerations do apply, may be through a fine tuning, to Telecom Operators and all constituencies that work in of work with the Telecommunications.