CSBE/ SCGAB ANNUAL REPORT, 2015
President, Grant Clark
American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, Board of Trustees
I attended the meeting of the Board of Trustees (BoT) of the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE) in St. Joseph, MI, 17th April 2015. The meeting was chaired by current President Terry Howell. The ASABE staff and council members were extremely gracious and welcoming. As part of the agenda I delivered a short report on the state of our own society. I would like to reemphasize to the CSBE Council and membership the value of our society’s association with ASABE. This amicable relationship is of mutual benefit and we should take care to nurture and strengthen it. Representation at the BoT meetings is a clear signal to ASABE of our commitment to this association between our organizations.
ASABE membership is stable and the society is in a favorable financial situation. There is a substantial restricted reserve fund that currently provides resources to invest in strategic initiatives of value to the general membership. CSBE council or members can put forward such proposals.
The ASABE Council approved the release of a white paper on Global Partnerships for Global Solutions. This paper describes how the ASABE aspires to “be among the global leaders that provide engineering and technological solutions toward creating a sustainable world with abundant food, water, and energy, and a healthy environment.” CSBE Past President Bernardo Predicala is part of the Global Engagement Task Force that authored this paper. This paper will also be a useful marketing tool for CSBE and associated institutions in Canada (e.g. university departments).
Incoming President Mary Leigh Wolfe is leading a review of the ASABE strategic plan, including the establishment of priorities for the next few years. The Board has invested a fair amount of time during recent meetings to establish and refine these priorities. The CSBE should consider how we as a sister society can complement and strengthen the ASABE’s strategic vision to our mutual benefit.
There is ongoing investment in visibility, accessibility and marketing of the ASABE, including redesign of the website’s content to be more useful, user friendly, and to better incorporate current media (videos, etc.). It was suggested that there be a line item in the ASABE annual operating budget to cover I.T. expenses, including software and website upgrades, as these are necessary ongoing costs. CSBE already has a small line item covering this kind of expenditure, but we might consider increasing it, given the importance of the online aspect of the society.
ASABE is very active in the development of standards, including collaboration with the Canadian tandards Association on farm machinery standards. As discussed in the past, it would be good for CSBE to identify members who are involved in standards development and support and recognize the activity of our own membership.
A recommendation was made to the ASABE Publications Council to reconsider an open access model for the management and financing of ASABE journals. I mentioned that this would be in alignment with many public funding agencies, such as the Canadian Tri-Council funding agencies (NSERC, SSHRC, and CIHR).
Engineering Institute of Canada
I attended the meeting of the Engineering Institute of Canada (EIC) at the Omni Hotel in Montreal, QC, 24th May, 2015, prior to the opening of the fourth Climate Change Technology Conference (CCTC) at that venue. The meeting was chaired by President Om Malik. The EIC is an excellent forum for the CSBE to engage with and promote the interests of the broader engineering profession in Canada and I recommend our continued and active involvement with this organization.
Governor General David Johnston was inducted as an Honorary Fellow of the EIC at a small reception at Rideau Hall on May 12th. His Excellency is the 11th Governor General to be so named, although the last one was John Buchan, the Lord Tweedsmuir, in 1936.
Twenty-one people received the honor of Fellow of the EIC at the Awards Banquet at the CCTC 2015. No CSBE members were nominated for this honor. We should make an effort to nominate our deserving members for this honor.
The current Executive Director, John Plant, is to be replaced by Guy Gosselin beginning July 1st, 2015. This change follows an extensive search process and was approved by the board. John Plant will act as interim Treasurer until a permanent replacement can be found for that position.
The member societies were reminded of the service provided by EIC in endorsing and accrediting the process by which the societies offer Continuing Education Units (CEU) through their course and workshops. This service is becoming increasingly popular as engineering associations implement formal requirements for continuing education of their members. CSBE can take advantage of this service.
Mark Rosen has asked to be relieved as Chair of the History Committee. The council agreed that the mandate of the committee is valuable and should be supported. They are soliciting names for people who have the time, interest, and expertise to continue this effort. Several people involved in the recent formulation of the CSBE historical overview might consider becoming involved in this way. Contact me or John Plant about this.
Traffic through the EIC engineeringcareers.ca site, hosted by Workopolis, has leveled off. CSBE gets a return on revenue from this service proportional to our membership. The decision was made to discontinue the contract with Diane Champagne to promote this service and the LinkedIn presence of the EIC.
BranislavDjokic again solicited the member societies for increased involvement in the Partnership Group for Science and Engineering (PAGSE), an umbrella organization through which several prestigious national societies advocate for the importance of science and engineering issues to Parliament. PAGSE publishes a newsletter that will soon be renamed PAGSE Science and Engineering Pages (from PAGSE Science Pages), runs a breakfast informational seminar series for Members of Parliament called “Bacon and Eggheads”, and generates reports and letters to Parliament on important science- and engineering-related issues. PAGSE hires graduate student interns to help research and write content for the newsletter and reports. They also solicit suggestions of topics and speakers for the seminar series. CSBE can contribute especially to the latter effort and by referring students as interns. We can also ask for PAGSE’s help to make government aware of issues that are important to our profession. EIC would like to have a member on the PAGSE committee. CSBE members can make their interest known through me or directly to President Malik.
The CCTC, hosted by the EIC, is underway as I write this report. The Honorable David Heurtel, Quebec Minister of Sustainable Development, Environment and the Fight against Climate Change, addressed the opening plenary on May 25th. Attendance is down compared to the third CCTC in 2013 and, financially, the meeting is expected only to break even. The question was raised as to whether the topic of the conference is still of general interest to the engineering community or if is now too mainstream to generate much attendance at a specialized meeting like this one.
There is the possibility that the EIC will raise membership dues, which have been static since 1990. This was not decided at the meeting.
I will participate in an ad hoc committee to reexamine the strategic plan for the EIC and to develop an action plan.
The committee will be chaired by Richard Bennett.
Marketing Brochures
I am working with Helen Cohen-Rimmer (HCR Photo) to incorporate the Council’s suggestion and finalize the brochures for the CSBE. I will present the proposed brochures at the next council meeting for additional suggestions or approval.
Vice-President (Technical) 2014-2015 Suresh Neethirajan
The past 2014 to 2015 year has been very busy for CSBE due to several challenges. Significant amount of time was spent in attending meetings and overseeing and helping to co-ordinate the local arrangements committee for the CSBE Annual Meeting to be held at Edmonton - July 5 to 8, 2015.
Early in 2014, I chaired the CSBE Journal Steering Committee. We met several times through conference calls. The last meeting was held on December 16, 2014. The committee composition is made of Sri Ranjan, Mano Krishnapillai, Stefan Cenkowski, Grant Clark, and Qiang Zhang. We discussed the progress to be made on reviewing the journal paper submissions, and discussed ways to improve the timelines. The CSBE journal does make a unique Canadian contribution to science and industry, but the viability and the value of the journal was analyzed. Resources required for efficient journal management and concerns regarding the availability of peer reviewer’s pool were points of discussion of this committee. It was recognized that the editor’s role is too large, being a taskmaster, a volunteer, and doing the editorial work. We also considered hiring a manager to ensure that the journal operates in a timely fashion. Performance indicators were set to demonstrate that the CSBE Journal is moving forward in a desirable direction. Because of implementation of some of the strategies discussed from this CSBE Journal Steering committee, the timelines in processing the journal papers have considerably improved. Serving as a VP (Technical) and also as an Associate Editor (Instrumentation) for the CSBE Journal, I was able to appreciate the challenges from both the journal operations side, and also from the executive member’s perspective in serving the needs of the members at large, i.e., authors and readers of the journal. The CSBE journal has started to achieve new rapid turnaround times in processing the papers recently.
I have been working very closely with the local arrangements committee and the technical committee to develop the technical program for the annual conference. Thanks to Ike Edeogu, Murray Tenove, Rick Atkins and all the other members of the Alberta Local Arrangements Committee of CSBE 2015 Edmonton for all their hard work, dedication and sincere efforts. A total of 6 sponsorships has been received from a variety of organizations namely Lakeland college ($750), OPI Systems ($1000), City of Edmonton ($2000 cash and $500 inkind), Beaver Plastics (app $2000 cash) Alberta Beef Producers ($1000 cash) and Serecon ($750). Thanks to Jason Price of the Government of Alberta for leading on this sponsorship engagement. Few letters of invitation were also prepared and sent to some of the international delegates towards assisting their Canadian visa application processes.
Dr. Stan Blade, the Dean of the Faculty of Agricultural, Life and Environmental Sciences of the University of Alberta will serve as the plenary speaker during our conference. On Wednesday July 8th, 2015 a panel will be held on 'The Impact of Social License on Sustainable Food Production in Canada'. Sean Royer - Executive Director of ARD, Lynda Kuhn - Senior VP of Maple Leaf Foods, Representative from both Beef Producer of Alberta and Ducks Unlimited will serve as panelists. A total of 108 presentations including oral and posters has been received from our members to date to present during the upcoming annual meeting. Three technical tours (Vegreville, Camrose, and the city of Edmonton) have been organized to showcase the wild rose country of Canada. Fundamentals of Environmental Law, Prospective People Skills, Bio-Energy Dialogue Workshop and Measuring Sustainability – The Canadian Field Print Calculator are the 4 workshops tentatively arranged for as of now to be held on July 5th and July 8th.
With this annual report, I am concluding optimistically that the upcoming year will be an uphill task for CSBE focusing on a period of performance, membership engagement, and rebuilding our capacity. We are committed to an unwavering focus on technical operational improvements to enhance the mandate of our CSBE society.
President-Elect 2014-2015 – Sylvio Tessier
The annual report for the president “in waiting”, aka President-Elect ought to have been a daunting task for all of my predecessors. Actually, my review of past Perspectives seems to suggest that the task might be as recent at Ron Macdonald’s turn as President Elect. Our by-laws dictate a number of tasks for the President Elect to fulfill, such as membership to the Nominating Committee and the Bylaws Committee, carry out a forward planning process, and reporting to Council for the Awards Committee.
So, this report will cover the forward planning task associated with the job. Mainly through past experience in various government offices, and my time at Université Laval, time in agricultural equipment manufacturing industry, and some 10 years involvement in grants selection committees (Mechanical Engineering, Discovery Accelerator Supplement, etc…) serving the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council, I came to appreciate the evolution breath of biosystems engineering. The VP membership will assuredly report that our membership is stable, which is good news. What is not so good is that while Biosystems Engineering/Bioresources Engineering/Génie Agro-alimentaire department are churning relatively large number of students, we fail in recruiting them into our Society. This issue is not new; it has been contemplated by my predecessors for a long time.
Few of you recall that my original specialization plan was food engineering, and that my M.Sc. was squarely in that area. How many practicing and recent graduates with food engineering interest do we cater to? I know quite a number, but do we retain them all? Do we “serve” them appropriately? By looking at the Technical program for our AGM 2015, we could conclude: not bad… Now, what do we do for our Environment stream graduates? There again, I know a number, but do we cater to all of the Environment Engineering graduates? And again, the technical program of AGM 2015 does cover that territory. Last winter, I taught a class of 44 Biosystems Engineering students at University of Manitoba; about half of them had in mind Environment Engineering, the other half Biomedical Engineering: I did try my best to tweak the course content to keep their interest, that is quite a department from the original Civil Engineering content in that class. But I unfortunately cannot report that the Society will count 44 new members two years down the road on their account. Recently, a couple students graduating from Biomedical Engineering made it into the Faculty Medicine, and study towards an up and coming new breed of physicians. Not the beginning of a new trend: I reviewed a number of top notch Discovery grant applications for NSERC prepared by M.D. with an engineering degree as backbone to their practice. Will they abandon their Engineering skills once MD’s? But how can we offer them something more than a banquet to “chew” on? That is the question.
I used the word “cater” often enough to suggest that the Society is there for the members. My forward planning will focus primarily on building on the work from Qiang, Grant and Bernardo, both in terms of Council membership, technical programs, and promotion of the profession with the engineers we collectively train and mentor, and the Societies that seem to attract them based on focus. This effort will begin with a brainstorm session in parallel with the AGM 2015, and I am specifically inviting department heads, undergraduate program chairs, and interested engineers practicing in Food, Biomedical, Environmental Engineering to come and share their interests, with the objective of making the Society a better care taker of their professional development and needs.
Past-President 2014-2015 –Bernardo Predicala
As the Society’s Past President, I was involved in a number of things, including serving as Chair of the By-Laws and Nominating Committees, as well as of the Advisory Council of Past Presidents. As such, I convened the Council of Past Presidents last 23 October 2014, which was attended by 5 Past-Presidents, the current President and President-Elect, and our Society Manager. We discussed critical items for the Society from the point of view of each participant, including those initiatives from past terms that may have been lost in transition but still have significant potential value to the Society. As Chair of the By-Laws Committee, I have been compiling throughout the year any needed amendments to the By-Laws that has come up, in particular those pertaining to eligibility to Member Emeritus status as well as those needed to be in compliance with new requirements of the Canada Corporations Act. These proposed By-Laws amendments will be put forward for approval by the general membership at the upcoming AGM. At the same time, I have compiled the changes needed for the Procedures & Operations Manual to keep it up-to-date, particularly those dealing with procedures related to Member Emeritus and the guidelines for Fellows nomination. As part of the tasks of the Nominating Committee, I have worked with the Council to identify positions with term ending this year, and to search for suitable nominees for the impending vacancies. The slate of candidates will be standing for elections which will be held in time for the AGM. Finally, as an ex-officio member of the Awards Committee, I have worked with the committee Chair in evaluating the nominees and selecting the awardees for the various Society Awards to be given out at the upcoming AGM.