The Key to Our Success

The first quarter of the year is always an interesting period, as it gives us time to contemplate previous successes and future opportunities. In our industry, the latter is in full view at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), where new tech advances come to life, including several that hold great significance for display professionals. For example, as manufacturers push for ever-more-flexible mobile phones and TVs, we are witnessing an explosion of new capabilities. Features that were experimental technologies only a few years ago—often first revealed at SID conferences such as Display Week—have gone mainstream. High dynamic range, a wide color gamut, 8K resolution (wasn’t 4K the new norm just yesterday?) and countless other features are par for the course now at CES. Another good external indicator of this surge in innovation is the number of bookings we received for this year’s Display Week Exhibit, which offers a platform for display companies and researchers to showcase their technologies. We have more exhibitors lined up now than in the past decade. With a few more months of registration to go, there is no doubt that Display Week 2019 will be one of our largest events ever. Exciting times indeed. For our society, this time of year also means that our committees are hard at work selecting candidates for major recognitions and Fellow designations, reviewing products for Display of the Year awards, and examining manuscripts to determine which ones are worthy of Best Paper trophies. We reveal the fruits of this labor during Display Week, but already the process itself is exciting. We received a record number of submissions for the Display Week Technical Symposium, so there are plenty of interesting papers to select awardees from. Similarly, because of the insurgence of display product innovations, both our awards and the I-Zone—our venue for recognizing emerging products and prototypes—are filling rapidly with high-quality submissions. In all this excitement, though, it is easy to forget the most critical ingredient of success: our volunteers. Their tireless efforts allow us to surface candidates for awards or papers, select deserving winners, and organize great conferences across the world. A society like ours is defined by the commitment of its volunteers. It is, therefore, with great pleasure that I inaugurate a new form of recognition this year; one that squarely focuses on the volunteers. With our executive board’s approval and the president’s discretion, SID will bestow up to five Volunteer Recognition Awards each year. These awards acknowledge long-serving volunteers who devoted significant effort to our organization at the international or regional level without necessarily serving in elected leadership functions or contributing to global flagship programs. (Those already have separate recognition mechanisms, such as Presidential Citations for conference chairs.) Our goal is to recognize the true backbone of our community at the point of impact. For this reason, we will present these awards outside the traditional awards ceremony during Display Week, and instead tie them to the awardees’ regions or events they have organized. Each award comes with a beautiful plaque, a permanent membership in SID (so that honorees can contribute for many more years!), and our society’s sincere gratitude. We recently presented these awards to the following inaugural recipients, all of whom are outstanding volunteers: Helge Seetzen (right), SID president, and Adi Abileah (left), regional vice president, Pacific and South America, present an award to Steven Bathiche (middle) during a Display Week Program Committee meeting. Image: Dana Bathiche Rashmi Rao (left), Display Week general chair, presents an award to Silviu Pala at an SID Detroit Chapter meeting. Image: Gela Pala, M.D. Paul Drzaic (left) and John Miller (right) receive their awards during the first 2019 Bay Area Chapter meeting. Image: Sri Peruvemba Congratulations to these deserving awardees on behalf of the entire society. For those of you serving in volunteer leadership roles in SID chapters or regions, please take a look at your communities and let me know if you have candidates for next year’s Volunteer Recognition Awards. For everyone else, I continue my call for volunteers. Starting with my first editorial at the beginning of my term, I received dozens of inquiries from individuals who want to step up. To my great pleasure, these voices hailed from all corners of the world and all demographics. I encourage each of you to consider becoming an active volunteer. This society is ours to build and grow. Helge Seetzen is president of the Society for Information Display. He can be reached at helge.seetzen@tandemlaunch.com.