Interview with the Chair of the IES New Initiatives and Organizer of the IES Day, Marina Indri
Don’t miss the chance to discover more about Marina Indri, Chair of the IES New Initiatives… and an enthusiastic Ferrari fan! She gives valuable insights for young IES members to enhance their skills. You will also get exclusive details about the upcoming IES Day, and a chance to be part of this premiere event.
ITeN team: Dear professor, thanks a lot for being with us today, can you start by sharing some highlights of your career?
I am an Associate Professor of robotics and automatic control at Politecnico di Torino. I received both the master’s degree in electronic engineering in 1991 and the PhD in Systems engineering in 1995 from Politecnico. I started dealing with robotics during my master’s degree thesis and never stopped working with robots, manipulators, and mobile robots. Mobile robots have both the manipulation and the mobile parts and interesting challenges from the scientific and technological point of view.
I also received a couple of European recognitions for technological transfer. I’m proud of that because the collaboration between academia and industry is fundamental in engineering field, this helps to elevate the quality of the results for both.
In IEEE, my involvement within the Industrial Electronics Society community began in 2013 and I am now a senior member. My first official role was as a co-chair of the robotics track of ETFA, the Conference on Emerging Technology and Factory Automation. And since then, I’ve been collaborating in various roles in IES conferences.
I am an Associate Editor of the Transaction of Industrial Informatics (TII) since the end of 2015. Since last year, I’m a Senior Editor of the Transaction of Mechatronics.
I also chaired the IES Technical Committee on Factory Automation between the end of 2018 and 2021.
Within IES AdCom, I am an elected member at large since 2021 and a member of the IES Membership Activity Committee, in which I chair the New Initiatives subcommittee.
ITeN team: What are your missions or projects as the Chair of the IES New Initiatives?
My involvement with the Membership Activity Committee, chaired by Antonio Luque, began in 2023.
The New Initiative Committee started last year to promote initiatives to strengthen the community and to catch new members, for example at conferences among attendees, or authors of papers that are not yet members of our society.
The flagship initiative this year is the organization of the first edition of the IES day.
Save the date: the IES Day will be on Thursday, 14 November 2024.
This date holds historical significance, as in 1982 the society changed its name into the current one. And the first annual conference for the IES, IECON 1982, started on 15 November.
We aim to foster a sense of the community among members, this is a way to improve the Community through the years.
Therefore, we would like this first edition to build something different from existing events, which comes from the members themselves, not from the upper level.
We’re currently in the early stages of organizing, with more details to be announced soon on a dedicated webpage for the IES Day.
The IES Day will be 14 November but between 11 November and 6 December 2024, that means between IECON and ONCON, there will also be a series of events and seminars, both locally and online.
We have involved a team of young volunteers to help us create a logo and a motto for the IES day. The organizing team will be growing through the next weeks. Grants will be provided to chapters and student branches for arranging the local events.
We are also planning to host contests for chapters and student branches to acknowledge events that excel in motivating participation.
We will send an open call to ask for the active participation of all members who want to collaborate through the Technical Committees, the Students & Young Professionals, the various Vice-Presidents of the Society, Women in Engineering and of course the new Committee on Diversity and Inclusion. We encourage all members to get involved and share their ideas for shaping this event, writing to iesday@ieee-ies.org
ITeN team: Which advice(s) would you give to boost our young reader’s career?
My main advice to young members is to be always proactive, to listen to opinions of other people but in the end to take decisions on your own. And to be eager to learn, always, from all the activities you conduct. The IES community offers a lot of opportunities to let them grow in their competencies, for example:
Start as reviewer. As an associate editor of TII and a senior editor on TMECH I can say that if you have a valuable experience as a reviewer, you can become a better author if while writing a paper you implement what you ask other authors as a reviewer.
There are fundamental elements for a good publication, a careful analysis of the scientific contribution of course, but also clear presentation of your work, exhaustive tests proving effectiveness of the approach you propose…
Be involved in conferences. For example serving as a co-track-chair, you can have an inner insight into the organization of a conference. You can learn how to coordinate a team and how to balance reviewers’ comments and concerns that will come to a fair recommendation about acceptance of the paper.
When I was the chair of the Technical Committee of Factory Automation, together with Lucia Lo Bello and the rest of the team, we prepared a series of guidelines for conferences to keep a good level of continuity and of quality. One of the basic ideas was to put people from the local organization together with the people of the Technical Committee, and whenever possible an experienced co-chair with a younger one. In this way, young people can learn from inside how to serve in this role, and a lot of other things useful for them and for their careers.
Participate in Student and Young Professional events, and in industry forums. They provide opportunities to network with peers coming from both academia and industrial worlds.
If you are from academia, it may help you understand industrial needs and suggest new topics for your research with a concrete applicative interest.
If you are from the industry, it is the way to know something about the most recent research trends and understand if and how they can be included in your specific development plan.
These are good strategies to help young people to become volunteer. Do your best to exploit them, and when you engage in some role, don’t consider it as a job to do, but as an experience from which you can learn something new and useful for your competencies and career.
ITeN team: Now we will talk about something more personal. Whenever, if ever, you manage to get some free time, what are your hobbies?
In my free time, I enjoy traveling, reading mystery books, attending the theater, and playing tennis when I have time, but I don’t have so much time (laughs)!
One of my longstanding passions is Formula One, and I’m a proud Ferrari fan. I even had the opportunity to drive a Ferrari once on a secured motordrome.