The 2008 International Microwave Symposium will be held in Atlanta, GA for the first time in the 21st century. The Technical Program Committee, consisting of 241 reviewers in 31 subcommittees, worked very hard to provide the best possible technical program. Out of 762 submitted papers, 279 were selected for oral presentation and 132 for the Interactive Forum (IF).
This year we closely coordinated with the RFIC Conference and we have rearranged the regular sessions in five to six parallel sessions so that the IMS attendees have more flexibility to attend them. There are three Focused/Special Sessions organized by Gerald DeJean and his team, focusing on the history of MICs and MMICs, as well as on microacoustic front-end technologies.
Panel sessions organized by Chang-Ho Lee and his team occur during lunchtime (as usual) and focus on automotive radar, wireless medical technology, system/service engineering and cognitive radio. Our symposium this year will include an evening Rump Session (Tuesday) featuring a talk by Nobel Laureate and Princeton professor, Dr. Joe Taylor, entitled: “The Discovery of Gravity Waves Amidst the Noise."
We have clarified the rules for the Student Paper Competition and 31 finalist papers have been chosen to be presented in a special poster session in Tuesday afternoon in an effort coordinated mainly by Luca Rosseli’s efforts. Our Workshop Chair, Edward Gebara, and his committee organized 38 workshops of which four are jointly organized by IMS/RFIC and one is jointly organized by IMS/ARFTG. They are distributed on Sunday, Monday and Friday.
I would like to thank many individuals for making this event possible.
First are the three TPC Vice-Chairs, Kuytae Lim, John Papapolymerou and Stephane Pinel. Thanks to Jeff Pond, Jonathan Hacker, John Cressler and Roger Pollard for Electronic Paper Management. A tremendous amount of guidance was provided by Roger Pollard, Tatsuo Itoh and Joy Laskar. I am indebted to the dedicated effort of a number of volunteers from Georgia Tech, GEDC and GTRI.
Finally, I should note that this symposium would not have been possible without the dedicated efforts of the authors of the technical papers submitted for the symposium and workshops. It is my hope that you will enjoy the technical depth and breadth of the program during Microwave Week in Atlanta.