O.V. Stukach, "XII International Siberian Conference on Control and Communications SIBCON-2016". Global Communications Newsletter. Communications, IEEE. P 3-4.
http://gcn.comsoc.org/xii-international-siberian-conference-control-and-communications-sibcon-2016
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=7509365&punumber=35 (contents)
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/icp.jsp?arnumber=7509372 (info)
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7509372 (PDF)

The flagship event of the joint COM/AP/ED/MTT/EMC Tomsk Chapter, Siberian Conference on the latest advances in communications and control systems was held in Moscow, the Russian Federation, on May 12-14, 2016. About 180 participants of SIBCON-2016 from 23 countries presented 232 technical papers in 12 oral sessions. It was five workshops and seven short courses in addition to a number of related events. Discussions will include emerging wireless related growth areas such as 5G technologies, networking control, electron devices, wearable electronics, Internet of Things (IoT), and Coms/microwave technology in life. The Conference as a whole has demonstrated continuing interest in analysis and control methods for communications.

The best activity of chapter is organization of conferences. In some extent we united by a joint passion - a passion of organizing of events. "Oh, conferences once again", you exclaim, "there are a lot of conferences worldwide”. I will try to argue that our event is specific. It is completely unpredictable both in planning, and in the background. As a rule, well-known flagship events of ComSoc and other societies are hold by a similar scenario. Also participants know exactly what they can expect. They can plan their participation in individual sessions as well as in the cultural program.

Probably it is not for us. In our conditions the planning conference in advance for 1.5-2 years is a great achievement. We had a few examples of shifting the venue three days before start, despite the preliminary agreements. A positive issue of this occasion was more comfortable meeting buildings.

SIBCON has a 20-years history, but for the first time it took place in Moscow, in Higher School of Economics (HSE). Our geographic location leads to the fact that for many people participation in conference is a rare set of circumstances. It is the reason why, since 2011, we developed the conference in different cities of our country. Here a time limit of presentations is generally difficult to set up: people want to communicate and discuss reports for a long time, may be much more. At last SIBCON-2015 (see ED-S Newsletter, January 2016) despite of planning of addition time, one session was continued for the next day. According to rumors it was not enough. Truly there is nothing more valuable than the luxury of human communication.

Collaboration of industry and academia is great value for us. It has allowed to bring together and to cross-fertilize ideas from applied areas which have many similarities. Such a possibility arisen due to support of the Conference by National Instruments company and HSE. A number of papers addressed the problems of engineering design of cyber-physical systems. Significant attention was paid to analysis and design of network control systems and communication. Also the papers with applications to problems of measurement based on the National Instruments technologies have been presented.

The major goal of the Conference, to bring together researchers from various fields, to advance the state-of-the-art control theory and technology for the communications and to gain some general and unified perspectives in this interdisciplinary field of advanced research, was achieved.

There are two things that changed our work much better. Firstly, it is a revolutionary reorganization of MCE with additional service to the conference organizers – cross-check, Electronic copyright form, PDF-Express etc. Secondly, it is change of evaluation criteria for research activity. Many authors want to write paper indexed in databases to have stability on the job market. We did not pay attention to scientific writing before. Now we have the opportunity to choose to presentation the best papers among a lot of submitted works. Percentage of acceptance is now almost equal to 30, that was almost unattainable previously. It is true that we have addition work due increasing of papers submitted to SIBCON. As a result, we keep an eye on increasing of interest to ComSoc: engineers and professionals have become more reading in English and compare their results with high quality papers. We hope that this sharp jerk to quality will continue during following years.