Working groups and technical committees
New disciplinary groups appear in IMACS generally manifesting themselves at first by a few individuals having the intent of organizing a workshop or conference, then asking for or being offered our sponsorship -something that gives them recognition, status and the possibility of having the outcome of their work published in established journals .
Working groups after a while often become organized and administered as Technical Committees – IMACS TC’s – which consist of individual members that generally belong to academia. What is possibly the most important role of IMACS’s in this process is in recognizing new fields of research, establishing contact with representative members of those emergent communities. The connection with those groups works is often started at first informally – at the professional instead of administrative level (between professors, established researchers, etc. …). It has been with the establishment and coordination of such connections that IMACS has been changed from an association with very little happening between the Triennial World Congresses (which is what it was up to the 1970’s) and what it is now (we have about 25 “Technical Committees” in IMACS – generating jointly about one IMACS sponsored conference a month somewhere in the world).
As an organization, IMACS has become what is best described as an “International Federation of Professional Groups” working each in a different disciplinary field within the general framework of scientific computation, some of these groups covering different geographic areas, — whose activity consists in the organization of conferences, seminars, workshops, and in preserving standards of quality and of professional integrity in their respective sphere of influence in the sciences.
