John Baillieul elected VP of publication services and products for the IEEE
ENG’s John Baillieul was recently elected vice president of publication services and products for IEEE.
John Baillieul, a College of Engineering professor and chairman of the aerospace and mechanical engineering department, was recently elected vice president of publication services and products for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). An international professional association for the advancement of technology, the IEEE consists of 39 societies and 5 technical councils that represent a wide range of interests in the field.
Baillieul, who also serves on the IEEE board of directors and chairs the publication services and products board, is working to ensure that the IEEE takes advantage of new technologies to archive its own publications — a key survival mechanism for a professional association in the age of online publishing.
“About 20 years ago, all scholarly publication was through technical journals,” he says. “People would join organizations in order to have access to the journals so they could keep up with their fields.”
Since the Internet has become the primary resource for many scholars, Baillieul says that authors can now bypass the journals altogether and opt for self-publishing. ”One of the things that you have to be concerned about if you are running a $400 million corporation whose business is publishing," he says, "is how to continue to deliver value and make this something that is a real service and worth money.”
Baillieul’s research interests include robotics, the control of mechanical systems, and mathematical system theory. He has been a member of the IEEE’s Control Systems Society since 1983, and he is director of the Boston University Laboratory for Intelligent Mechatronic Systems and the Center for Communicating Networked Control Systems.
Brittany Jasnoff can be reached at bjasnoff@bu.edu.