The IEEE Group on Professional Communication is an association of IEEE members with a common professional interest in communicating technical information. Our members, about 1300 in number, are practicing engineers who are concerned about communicating and communicators who are concerned with engineering. We emphasize working together as individuals for mutual benefit from this dichotomy and for the benefit of other IEEE members.

Established by the PC Group in 1974, the Alfred N. Goldsmith Award is given in recognition of service within the Group's organization to improve the quality of engineering communication. Dr. Goldsmith died in 1974 at the age of 85. He had been Professor of Electrical Engineering at City College of New York, a Vice President and Consultant at RCA, a Chairman of the Board of the National Television Film Council, Honorary Fellow of the International College of Surgeons, and recipient of many professional honors. He also, in 1957, was largely responsible for establishing the IRE Professional Group on Engineering Writing and Speech, which since 1972 has been the IEEE Group on Professional Communication. The following awards were presented at the Administrative Committee meeting at IEEE Headquarters by Awards Chairman Francis E. Leib on February 18, 1977.

DURING 1976 the IEEE Group on Professional Communication took stock of its members and redefined its goals as 1) helping engineers improve their communication skills and 2) informing them of new ideas and methods in communication.

This panel is sponsored by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Group on Professional Communications. It is intended as an open discussion; we are restricting ourselves to technical composition and especially the problem of the composition of mathematics. I am going to ask each of our panelists to make a few statements about their views of “the problem.” When these are complete, we expect and hope that you will participate in the discussion. Today's objectives are to add (possibly) one more straw to the pile, in the hope that someone, somewhere, someday will be able to set a page of mathematics for $10 “as it used to be.”

As a man who once worked and earned his living as an engineer, I am honored that you have asked me to talk with you this morning on the general subject of communications.

This index covers all technical items - papers, correspondence, reviews, etc. - that appeared in this periodical during the year, and items from previous years that were commented upon or corrected in this year. Departments and other items may also be covered if they have been judged to have archival value. The Author Index contains the primary entry for each item, listed under the first author's name. The primary entry includes the co-authors' names, the title of the paper or other item, and its location, specified by the publication abbreviation, year, month, and inclusive pagination. The Subject Index contains entries describing the item under all appropriate subject headings, plus the first author's name, the publication abbreviation, month, and year, and inclusive pages. Note that the item title is found only under the primary entry in the Author Index.

During the past 30 years the technical report has developed into an important primary medium of communication in science and technology, to the extent that it is sometimes seen as a threat to primary journal publication. At the same time the (unclassified) report has been accused of not meeting the same standards of authority, scientific rigor, and retrievability as conventional journal publication. Report publication is reviewed in the light of standards commonly accepted for journal publication, and the inherent characteristics of technical reports are assessed. It is concluded that both reports and scientific journals have distinct roles to play in the communication of scientific and technical information, and that a cost-effective system will make full use of the strengths of both.

Instead of employing most of our communications professionals mainly as technical writers and editors, we should be encouraging them to apply their expertise in a much broader capacity. Rather than simply guide, advise and write for a handful of engineers or scientists, they should offer solid, practical training in communications and report writing to as many technical professionals as they can reach.

IN the March issue of this TRANSACTIONS, I had the privilege of outlining some of the 1972 goals for the Group on Professional Communication. Among these goals were a quarterly TRANSACTIONS, increased membership activity, more meetings, and stepped-up educational activities.

I AM very happy to talk to you who are dedicating your careers to helping us improve our professional communication. It has been my good fortune to have had the help of Jim Lufkin and Herb Michaelson in my own work, and I am sure your group includes many competent and dedicated workers like theme.

IT IS a pleasure to have this opportunity to meet with the IEEE Group on Professional Communication in its first independent conference. As a specialist in communication theory and research, I am delighted to find we share so many common interests.

Interprofessional communication depends largely on the specialist's ability to assess and make allowance for the cross-cultural distance between himself and his audience. This distance is composed mainly of differences in basic preoccupations, assumptions, purposes, methods, and terminologies. The most effective bridges consist of generalizations to which a minimum number of qualifications are applied, and in which jargon and clutter are near zero. The general equation of the first degree for the effectiveness of communication when the message is technical is as follows:

JPVJR Group's Conference on the Psychology of Technical Communications, held in Philadelphia this past February, served to dramatically display the widening scope of professional communications.Just as the many disciplines of science and engineering are merging to an extent where boundaries are obscured, so have the subdivisions of communications overlapped to a point where distinctions become very difficult.John Phillips, now our President, organized the Conference into its three major sessions: Communications among Engineers and Scientists.Communications to Engineers and Scientists, and Communications from Engineers and Scientists.The list of speakers included, in addition to professional communicators who specialize in the support and education of t(*rYin\rci\ nprcnnnp] workers in the field nf sociology, nsv-

THE EXISTENCE and makeup of this group seems to challenge a statement made recently by Derek de Solla Price. As many of you may know, Derek Price is Avalon Professor of the History of Science at Yale, and he has done considerable work in the how and why of scientific communication, especially as regards the literature. After a preliminary analysis of the use of scientific and technical journals, Price concluded that scientists write but don't read, while engineers read but don't write. That's an oversimplification, no doubt, but I suspect there may be more than a mere grain of truth in it. If there is, I'm obviously left with the problem of determining what an IEEE “Group on Professional Communication” is all about. One way of doing that was to try and discover what engineering journals are all about Setting out to do that, I realized that I'd have to first come to some acceptable definition of “engineer.” That's where I got stuck. Perhaps my difficulty with that definition has its roots in some of the same problems which suggested to the IEEE that a two-day conference on the “Psychology of Technical Communications” might be a good and useful thing.

LAST YEAR was one of accomplishment for the Engineering Writing and Speech Group. The external evidence is a new name for the Group (Professional Communication), new constitution and bylaws, and greatly expanded fields of interest. <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> Internally, the signs are more significant: there is increased participation by group members, new and old; ideas — some new, some old — are being offered and discussed; and more importantly, goals are being identified, established, and met.