November 9, 2017
As 2018 president elect Robert Fish will serve as IEEE-SA president in 2019, bringing his long list of previous IEEE-SA leadership roles including serving as a member of the IEEE-SA Board of Governors and as Chair of IEEE-SA’s Global Committee. He was a founding member of the IEEE-SA Corporate Advisory Group, and chaired both the IEEE-SA Global Coordination Committee and Standards Conduct Committee.
Fish is currently president of NETovations, a consulting company specializing in networking technology innovation. He is a Lecturer in Computer Science at Princeton University and is Vice President, Industry & Standards Activities, IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) for 2016-2018.
To give more visibility to IEEE standards, Fish was a co-editor of the “IEEE Standards for Communications and Networking” series in IEEE Communications Magazine, and he helped create the IEEE Conference on Standards in Communications and Networking (IEEE-CSCN). In 2016, he was awarded the IEEE-SA Standards Medallion Award and has been awarded 17 patents.
In his nominee’s statement and Q&A, Fish shared that “IEEE should be a leader in developing and maintaining the whole ecosystem of innovation, from invention to the marketplace, with standardization as a key component.” His priorities for IEEE-SA, include securing global recognition for IEEE-SA’s standardization process—along with cultivating relationships with other global standards organizations based on mutual recognition.
Fish supports promoting “new additions to the traditional standardization processes, for instance, support of ‘open source’ processes.” He encourages follow-up on recent IEEE initiatives in Smart Grid, Cloud Computing, IoT, SDN, and 5G, and recognizing the “great potential for new standards,” namely through initiatives on 5G Mobile Communications, Big Data, and Augmented Reality.