2025 Vice President - Publications Candidate

Position Statement

Nei Kato holds significant experience in all levels of the editorial process at prestigious IEEE publications, providing him with knowledge about issues in all the steps of the review process at these journals. As Editor-in-Chief and Director of Magazines, he oversaw not only a massive increase in the number of submissions but also saw improvements in citation metrics and review turnaround time. Furthermore, during his term as Vice-President of Membership and Global Activities for the IEEE Communications Society, he helped address a downward trend in member recruitment by implementing policies that improved the number of members, particularly in smaller chapters. If elected as Vice-President of Publications, he plans to maintain the current positive momentum of growing submission numbers and citation metrics while implementing policies to help decrease review time by encouraging reviewers without compromising on review quality. He is a big advocate of increasing the recognition given to reviewers and editors for their precious time and plans to implement benefits for their service as well as awards for the best performers, as a way to recruit and train excellent researchers for these positions. He will also increase the recruitment of reviewers and editors in under-represented groups and regions, as a way to encourage authors from those demographics to submit more to IEEE Communications Society publications and also provide precious experience to those communities. He will also aim to establish new periodicals to address the current research trends and make sure IEEE Communications Society remains pioneer in the forefront of science.

Vice President - Publications Candidate Video

Biography 

Nei Kato is a full professor and the dean of the Graduate School of Information Sciences at Tohoku University, Japan. He is the current Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Internet of Things Journal (2023-2025). He is also a former Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Network (2015-2017) and IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology (2017-2021). He has also served as editor on multiple other publications. Additionally, he was the Vice-President of Membership and Global Activities (2018-2021) and Director of Magazines (2022-2023) of the IEEE Communications Society. He has almost 34000 citations according to Google Scholar, with a h-index of 92 across more than 500 published papers in prestigious peer-reviewed journals. He has engaged in research on computer networking, wireless mobile communications, satellite communications, UAV networks, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, Big Data, and pattern recognition. He is a fellow of IEEE and the Engineering Academy of Japan.