Looking Forward to Serving SID

Looking Forward to Serving SID

by Amal Ghosh
President, Society for Information Display

I look forward to serving as the President of SID for the next 2 years.  As you may know, our premier society for displays is in its 52nd year of existence and is doing well.  An organization such as ours is primarily based on the hard work of many volunteers, without whom SID would not survive.  To that end, I would like to thank all the SID volunteers for the countless hours of personal and professional sacrifice they have made to help SID become a better society.

Display Week is SID’s main annual event. Display Week 2014 was held in the beautiful city of San Diego and, overall, it was a very successful conference.  We had more than 6,000 attendees this year, which is about a 10% increase over last year.  We saw attendance improvement in most of the separate areas of the event, including the seminars and short courses.  Our technical symposium had an attendance improvement of 10%.  The symposium featured many very interesting papers on a wide range of topics, including OLEDs, LCDs, flexible displays, oxide TFTs, and more, and these hot-topic sessions were especially well attended.  Finally, our exhibitor booth sales were also better than last year and continue to reflect the optimism of a modestly recovering global economy.

Both the Display Industry Awards and the Best in Show Awards are an important part of Display Week.  This year’s Display Industry Award Gold winners were Samsung’s 5.68-in. curved flexible AMOLED display, receiving the Display of the Year award; Universal Display Corporation’s green phosphorescent universal PHOLED material, receiving the Display Component of the Year award; and LG Display’s G Flex phone, with the Display Application of the Year award.  The Silver winners were LG Display’s 55-in.  FHD curved OLED TV, Canatu Oy’s Carbon NanoBud Film, and Google’s Chromebook Pixel.  The Best in Show winners, selected at Display Week from exhibitors on the show floor, were Nanosys for its high-dynamic-range wide-color-gamut display experience and GroGlass for its AR-coated glass and acrylic in the small-exhibit category; AUO for its WQHD smartphone displays in the medium-exhibit category; and LG Display for its UD OLED TVs and BOE for its 8K × 4K display in the large-exhibit category.

SID’s I-Zone has continued to be popular as a place to experience prototypes first hand.  In many cases, these are early versions of products based on technology discussed in the technical symposium and other Display Week events.  This year’s I-Zone committee gave the Best Prototype Award to Ostendo Technologies, which demonstrated a novel display device it calls a Quantum Photonic Imager (QPI).

This year’s show featured our Special Networking Event aboard the USS Midway, an aircraft carrier from WWII.  We plan on continuing the networking event next year, along with the President’s Cocktail Reception before our International Awards Banquet, and three other networking receptions for our Investor’s Conference, Business Conference, and Market Focus Conferences.  SID intends to continue to offer a host of networking opportunities at Display Week events for many years to come.

I have set some aggressive goals for the 2 years of my presidency.  These include increasing the society’s individual and corporate memberships.  The goal for individual membership growth is about 5% and for corporate memberships about 20%.

We are expecting to increase attendance for all SID conferences by at least 10% over the next 2 years.  Since the display industry has a large presence in Asia, a major goal is to reach out and expand our activities in that region.  Our primary focus will be in China, where the display industry has seen very rapid growth over a short period of time.  SID would like to participate and contribute toward this growth in China.  More SID-sponsored conferences and the introduction of educational programs are some of our initial strategies.

In any society such as ours, publications play a crucial role.  Our Journal of SID and Information Display magazine are the two key periodic publications, while our Symposium Digest and technical books play significant roles as well.  John Wiley and Sons is our primary publisher, and this partnership is vital to the progress of our publications.  Our goal for the next few years will be to improve and expand the quality and quantity of these publications which, in turn, should vastly improve the society’s impact factor.

Lastly, the society’s governance structure is more than 50 years old and needs an overhaul.  The executive committee is in the process of strategizing a new structure that will not only be more efficient but will also allow for a more streamlined administration.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank our outgoing President, Brian Berkeley, and the entire SID leadership team for doing an outstanding job of turning around the financial health of the society.  Just a few years ago, due to various unforeseen worldwide issues, including the SARS virus and economic downturns, the society’s very existence was in question.  Under Brian’s leadership, the society has made a comeback and is once again doing well financially.

By the time you read this, SID and the Korea Information Display Society will have held the IMID 2014 conference in Daegu, Korea, in the last week of August.  (This took place in conjunction with the SID board meeting.)  The other major event of this year will be IDW (the International Display Workshops)  in Niigata, Japan, to be held in December.  I hope many of you will be able to attend this conference.

Finally, I hope you had an enjoyable summer vacationing with family and friends.  We look forward to an exciting and productive fall season.  •