This page is Howard Michel’s personal web site and does not necessarily reflect the opinion or position of the IEEE.

Howard E. Michel

Candidate for Region 1 Director-Elect 2006-2007

Position Statement: I understand the problems facing our members. I have been an engineer, engineering manager, and I am now an academic. I am a leader in the IEEE, having served as a Section chair in two regions, Central New England Council Chair, and currently as Area A chair coordinating activities for five sections. I can improve IEEE services to you and our profession.

As Region Director, I will facilitate sections developing a variety of programs and venues such that every member of the Region who wants to participate can find something of value to participate in. I propose to do this by "thinking outside the box" to enable synergism between the sections. I plan to be an active facilitator and communicator. I have done this successfully as Area A Chair, and will continue to do it as Region Director.

As Region Director, I will be a strong voice for the Region on the IEEE and IEEE-USA Boards of Directors and elsewhere in the IEEE and IEEE-USA organizations. I will encourage the IEEE to make business decisions to maximize membership advantage for both the member and his or her employer. I will fight any motion that denigrates the importance of having a professional degree in our professional society. The significance of the IEEE is not in the number of members that we have, but in the technical knowledge represented by those members.

As Region Director, I will use the resources of the Region to convince local employers to support and encourage IEEE membership. I want to build an awards program to broadly recognize engineers and their employers for technical and professional excellence. Such an awards program is the first step in improving the image of engineering as a profession. Additionally, I will actively promote and support student branches and GOLD activities. These engineers are the future of the profession and they must be engaged now or we all will suffer.

Biography: Howard E. Michel has been an IEEE member for over 31 years and active in regional leadership positions in both Regions 1 and 6. Howard is currently Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Associate Director for Research at the Center for Rehabilitation Engineering, both at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Howard is also a retired U. S. Air Force officer, having served as a pilot, satellite launch director, engineer and engineering manager, including a tour in the People’s Republic of China where he served as the senior U.S. Government technical representative enforcing technology-transfer control plans and operations during satellite launch operations. Howard received his Ph.D. from Wright State University in 1999, an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1988, a MS in Systems Management from the University of Southern California in 1981, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 1975. He has a patent for the design of an artificial neural network based computer system for tracking aircraft, and another pending for the design of an artificial neural network chip. He has co-authored a text book, Computer System Performance Evaluation and Prediction, as well as over thirty articles on image processing, optical computing and artificial neural networks. Howard is Co-Principal Investigator for a grant valued at over $450,000 from the National Science Foundation, and project director leading over thirty students and industrial collaborators in constructing an autonomous vehicle to race across the Mojave Desert in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Grand Challenge. He is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, as well as the Tau Beta Pi engineering honor society, Eta Kappa Nu electrical engineering honor society, and Omicron Delta Kappa leadership honor society.

IEEE Activities – (S’73-M’75-SM’02) REGION: Area A Chair, 2004-present; Executive Committee member, 2004-present; Educational Activities Coordinator, 2004-present; Board of Governors, 2003-present; COUNCIL: Central New England Council (CNEC) Chair, 2004, Vice-Chair 2003; SECTIONS: Providence Section: Chair, 2003 and 2004; Vice-Chair, 2002; Educational Activities Chair, 2002-present; PACE chair, 2000 and 2001; Program Committee Chair, 2005-present; Executive Committee member, 2000-present; Vandenberg Section (Region 6) Chair, 1990; Vice-Chair 1989; STUDENT BRANCH: Faculty Advisor for the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth student chapter, 2000-present; SOCIETIES: Computer Society member 1973-present; Computational Intelligence Society (formerly Neural Networks Society) member 1994-present; OTHER RELEVANT PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), 2004-present; Member of the Program Committee and Session Chair of the Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery: Theory, Tools and Technology program at the SPIE AeroSense 2001 and 2002 conferences. Session chair for the IASTED Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing 2002, the 2004 International Conference on VLSI and the 2004 International Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Reviewer for the Civilian Research and Development Foundation, a foundation authorized by Congress to provide productive research opportunities for scientists and engineers from the former Soviet Union. Reviewer for IEEE Transaction on Neural Networks, and the 2003 IEEE David Sarnoff Conference.

Major achievements for the IEEE: As section chairman, Howard restructured EXCOM and technical meetings such that they are now attended by a significant increase in active volunteers. This has enabled the Providence section to plan meetings six to nine months in advance, to significantly increase the number of meetings it holds, in general have them better attended. Additionally, the section had four short courses in 2004 and two in 2003. The section had no education program when Howard assumed the position of Educational Activities Chair in 2002. Additionally, under Howard’s leadership, the Providence section had its first Member Professional Awareness Conference (M-PAC), started a graduates of the last decade (GOLD) affinity group, and developed an active pre-college education program. As Area A chair, Howard “invented” the position for the Area. In one year, section leadership has come together to form two ad-hoc committees—one to hold a day-long area-wide meeting and the other to investigate virtual meetings. The area has also completed a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis, and expects to make significant strides in cooperation among sections in the area.