Our London Section 2014 Annual General Meeting was held November 8th at the Delta London Armouries. This AGM celebrated the section’s 70th year of operation. The section was founded in Oct 1944 as a section of the Institute of Radio Engineers, which was merged with the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1963 to form the IEEE.

The meeting was opened by our Master of Ceremonies for the evening, our Vice-Chair, Trevor Grant. The first item was a video clip greeting from IEEE Canada President, Amir Aghdam, who could not attend.

The Chair’s report was presented by Murray MacDonald. One of the 2014 highlights was the move of Windsor area members from the SE Michigan section in Region 4 to our section. Windor has already submitted a petition to become their own section, and as of this report the IEEE board has approved this. Therefore, by year end, our membership will return to about 370 members. Best wishes to Windsor!

Our various society chapters and affinity groups held over 20 events in 2014 and are planning more for 2015. As always we need volunteers. If interested, please contact any of the executive shown on the new website at:
https://site.ieee.org/london/executive/

Our Treasurer, Allan VanDamme, presented our financial report indicating that we continue to have very healthy reserves.

Our Past Chair, Weiming Shen, presented a slate of nominations for the four executive positions for 2015 and then called for any further nominiations from the floor. Then were no new nominations and the following were aclaimed:
Chair: Murray MacDonald
Vice-Chair: Abdallah Shami
Treasurer: Allan VanDamme
Secretary: Ahmed Refaey Hussein

We then enjoyed a delicious dinner served by the Delta Armouries.

After dinner, formalities continued with the awards presented by Senior Past Chair Maike Luiken,

The PES chapter’s Outstanding Engineer award was given to David Weigand, recognizing “a lifetime of contribution to the electric utility distribution transformer industry”. Dave shared a few humorous stories from his long career.

Volunteer Appreciation certificates were presented to:
Weiming Shen for volunteer dedication in starting the joint Computer Society and Science, Man, and Cybernetics Society Chapter in the London Section,
Abdallah Shami for volunteer dedication in building the joint Computer Society and Science, Man, and Cybernetics Society Chapter in the London Section, and
Xianbin Wang for volunteer dedication in starting and building the joint Communication Society and Broadcast Society Chapter in the London Section.

A Friend of IEEE London Section certificate was presented to London Hydro for encouragement of employee membership, hosting section events, and support for IEEE Canada Conferences. The certificate was accepted by London Hydro CEO, Vinay Sharma.

Our key note speaker, Randy Frank, Technical Director – 3M Canada Company, presented an informative talk on “3M Innovation”. There were numerous questions afterward, reflecting the interest level in the audience. Randy has graciously allowed us to post a copy of his slides on our website at:
3M Innovation – IEEE Meeting – Nov 2014 Keynote Slides

The AGM was then adjourned.