Welcome to the 2020 edition of The IEEE World Congress on Services. The Congress planners and organizers, volunteers and staff together have been working tirelessly for a full year now. We have overcome unexpected obstacles including the global pandemic, initial hesitation of submissions for fearing of the virus and travel bans by potential authors, and the overhead of the total virtualization of the Congress in the end. For the first time in 2019 we moved the entire Congress out of the United States to Milan, Italy, and enjoyed a great success. The original plan for 2020 was to continue the rotation pattern and move the Congress to the Asia Pacific region with Beijing as the primary host city. In March 2020 the Steering Committee decided to move the Congress date from July to October in anticipation that the pandemic would recede by then, and hopefully we could still hold it in a face-to-face fashion, although we also decided to provide attendees the remote-participation option. That plan did not materialize, and in May we finally decided to completely virtualize the Congress. We were fortunate to have come across Underline Science as an emerging virtual conferencing provider with help from the Computer Society staff. Underline is a relatively young organization, but one with great vision. This Congress event has indeed presented a lot of challenges to this young company but in the end they have prevailed. We invite our audience to test out their services and the various features provided through their digital platform. We ask you to please return your feedback through the survey and if the feedback is very positive, we may continue to grow with Underline. Our long-range plan is to continue the rotation pattern between the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific. As such, on behalf of the Steering Committee, I am pleased to announce that the 2021 IEEE World Congress on Services will be held in Chicago, USA tentatively scheduled from September 5–10, 2021 if the conditions allow us to do so, and it is very likely that the event may be arranged in a hybrid format with some live presentations and discussions with some interactions occuring remotely. Please mark your calendar accordingly, and check the Congress site often for the latest developments.
展开▼
