On behalf of the organizing committee, we are very pleased to welcome you to the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Communications (ICC) in Kansas City, MO, USA. The city was labeled as “Paris of the Plains” back in the 1930s. Kansas City is also known as “the City of Fountains,” with most working fountains than any other cities in the world including Rome. ICC is a flagship conference of the IEEE Communications Society, its origin dating back to 1960s. The theme of ICC 2018 is “Communications for Connecting Humanity”.
This is the first time Kansas City is hosting ICC. Kansas City has a long history of being a leader in communications. Almon Strowger, an undertaker, suspected that the telephone operator (who happened to be the wife of a competitor) was directing calls to her husband’s business. So, he was determined to remove the human operator and invented the first automated telephone exchange in 1889 for which he was awarded a patent in 1891 (US Patent # 447,918). The Strowger system was in use for many years in the telephone network, in some countries till 1980s.
This year’s ICC includes 970 papers selected for presentation in 13 symposiums, including one with 12 selected areas in communications (SACs) in emerging areas. These symposiums range from communications signal processing and wireless communications systems to communication security, and emerging areas such as Smart Cities, Big Data, and IoT. The symposiums papers are presented in 144 oral presentation sessions and 6 interactive sessions over three main days of the conference. Altogether, there are nearly 3,700 authors from 58 different countries. The five largest contributors are China (28.56%), the USA (26.02%), Canada (4.81%), France (4.60%), and the United Kingdom (4.30%). On the other end, we also have an author from each of the following countries: Colombia, Ecuador, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Macedonia, Poland, and Sri Lanka. The paper selection was led by 3 TPC chairs and 50 symposium co-chairs with the support of over 2,400 TPC members reviewing papers along with 30 additional reviewers.
This year’s ICC also presents 24 half-day technical tutorials by experts in the field. There are also 20 technical workshops, where 310 papers are presented. ICC also features a professional development workshop organized by the Networking Networking Women (N2Women) and Women in Communications Engineering (WICE).
We are pleased to have keynotes from James H. Thompson (Qualcomm), Nick McKeown (Stanford University), Elisa Bertino (Purdue University), Yongxing Zhou (Huawei), John Saw (Sprint), Thyaga Nandagopal (NSF), and Paul Tilghman (DARPA).
We like to thank our generous sponsors for their financial support that has greatly helped put the entire program together: Sprint, Qualcomm, Cisco, Huawei, Nokia, Garmin, Juniper Networks, Samsung, Ericsson, MathWorks, The University of Kansas, and the University of Missouri-Kansas City!
A conference of this size wouldn’t have been possible to organize without the dedication of many volunteers who spent countless hours. For their work, we thank the TPC chairs, symposium chairs, workshop chairs and workshop organizers, tutorials chairs, industry program chairs, publication chairs, student travel grant chairs, local arrangement chairs, finance chairs, TPC members, and reviewers. We also appreciate the feedbacks we received from GIMS and GITC. Lastly, we thank the ComSoc staff for their great work in making this conference a big success.
Enjoy ICC’2018 and enjoy your stay in Kansas City!
Sincerely,
