Welcome Message from Congress 2020 General Chairs

Abstract

This year’s Congress is in many ways different from the previous editions. Due to the current health crisis, in May 2020, after a careful evaluation, the organization committee of the IEEE SERVICES Congress 2020 made a very difficult but necessary decision to transform most of events of the IEEE SERIVCES Congress 2020 into an on-line format; the result is the on-line IEEE SERVICES Congress spanning the week of October 18-24, 2020. Only the opening ceremony of the IEEE SERVICES Congress 2020 takes place as an in-person one-day event on October 18 in Beijing, China. However, the on-line format and the Congress rescheduling from July to October have provided some nice opportunities. In addition to the initial deadline for paper submission (March 5, 2020), we were able to introduce a second deadline (June 5, 2020). These two deadlines combined with possibility for authors to resubmit revised versions of their papers have greatly enhanced the technical quality of the papers. Registration fees have also been greatly reduced and we hope that many of our colleagues in academia, industry and government will take advantage of these lower fees.