Oral-History:José M. F. Moura

About José M. F. Moura

José M. F. Moura is the Philip L. and Marsha Dowd University Professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the 2019 IEEE President, the 2008-2009 president of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, a former vice president for IEEE Technical Activities (2016), and a member is Eta Kappa Nu. He became an IEEE Fellow in 1994 “for contributions to nonlinear filtering and model-based signal processing; and in 2013 he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in “for contributions to the theory and practice of statistical signal processing.” He is also a Fellow of the US National Academy of Inventors as well as American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a corresponding member of the Portugal Academy of Science

Moura received his D.Sc. (1975) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and an M.S. (1973) and E.E. (1973) in Electrical Engineering from MIT and an a Licenciatura em Engenharia Electrotécnica (1969) from IST, the Technical University of Lisbon. His research interests are in the areas of data and network science, statistical and algebraic signal and image processing and network science.

About the Interview

JOSÉ M. F. MOURA: An Interview Conducted by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, 6 December 2021 and 13 December 2021.

Interview #866 for the IEEE History Center, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.

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José M. F. Moura, an oral history conducted in 2021 by Mary Ann Hellrigel, IEEE History Center, Piscataway, NJ USA.

Interview

INTERVIEWEE: José M. F. Moura

INTERVIEWER: Mary Ann Hellrigel

DATE: 6 December 2021, 13 December 2021

PLACE: Virtual

Early life and education

Hellrigel:

Today is December 6, 2021. I’m Mary Ann Hellrigel from the IEEE History Center. I’m with Dr. José M. F. Moura who’s an IEEE Life Fellow, 2019, President of IEEE, and the 2008-2009 president of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. We’re here today, sir, to record your oral history. Thank you for your time.

Moura:

Thank you very much, Mary Ann.

Hellrigel:

If you wouldn’t mind, you were born in Portugal?

Moura:

I was born in Mozambique, East Africa [in 1946], and I was born and raised there. Mozambique was at the time a Portuguese colony, so I was a Portuguese citizen. Then I came to Portugal at the age of seventeen to go to college.

Hellrigel:

Were your parents college-educated?

Moura:

No. Myself and my siblings, we are first-generation college educated.

Hellrigel:

What did your father do for a living?

Moura:

My father was what we can call a self-made man. He was a very smart person. His parents were very poor, so he was able to do high school education, finish high school, and then he started working. He was born and raised in the north of Portugal in a very small city, [Vila Nova de Foz Coa. His parents, as poor as they were, emphasized education, he interned in a Jesuit school in some other small city, through middle school, and then high school in Porto, may be eighty miles away.] Then at the age of eighteen, seventeen or eighteen, when he finished high school, [his parents could not afford supporting him for college. He travelled in a steam ship all the way from Portugal to Mozambique,] where he had an uncle, an uncle, or an aunt, [actually an aunt]. He went to start his life there [at the end of the 1920s. He self-educated himself reading books and being active in the community.]

Eventually, he co-founded with others a company, and that company grew. It was a company that bought and sold stuff throughout Mozambique, and in particular [bought] agricultural [products like raw cotton, and sold from small market food stuff to everyday life things like soap to larger] appliances, [and then] tractors, and then cars and stuff like that. Eventually, it grew to be a relatively large company in a city in the middle of Mozambique called Beira. That’s where I was born.

When I came to college and my younger sister came to college the next year in Lisbon, Portugal, the whole family relocated, so my mother and my father came back. My mother was born in Lisbon, but she went as a baby, one year old, to Mozambique to the capital then, Lourenço Marques. Now it’s called Maputo. That’s where they met. [Her father worked for the local railway company as a machinist or something similar, my grandmother came from a family of small industrialists in a small village in the interior of Portugal, who lost everything in a fire, and moved to Lisbon, where, she recounted later, seeing as a kid from her window all the big social turmoil affecting Portugal at the beginning of the 1900’s. My mother was shy or reserved, but she knew what was best for the family and she gave it all to all of us, my father and their four children. I often joke with my kids, my father made all the grand decisions, my mother determined who we became.] The whole family relocated back to Portugal in 1964, I think.

Hellrigel:

Okay, that’s when things started to change?

Moura:

When things started to change also there in Mozambique. Actually, there was an independence movement that started in maybe 1963, 1964, and independence from Portugal as a colony was achieved [by Mozambique] in 1975.

Hellrigel:

Did your father lose his business then when he moved to Portugal?

Moura:

By the time he came to Portugal, the company had actually started a business, a new company in Portugal selling cars. They were selling Nissan. Nissan is a Japanese auto maker. It didn’t have a presence in Europe, and in 1966, maybe, or somewhere about like that, they decided that they wanted to have a presence in Europe. They started with Portugal, and my father and his colleagues, founded the company that was like a Portuguese version of what they did in Mozambique. Their first order of business was selling Nissan-branded cars, so the company had both the Portugal presence and the Mozambique presence. Then they went into other businesses in Portugal. They had a big supermarket chain.

Hellrigel:

They were diversified?

Moura:

Diversified, diversified. My father was not only a co-founder of the company, but also a board of directors member and manager or director of the company.

Hellrigel:

If you don’t mind, what was your father’s name?

Moura:

Yes, my father’s name is José, my first name, and he didn’t have a second name. I do have a second name, Manuel. I’m José Manuel Fonseca de Moura. Manuel is like also a Christian name. In Portugal, everybody treats me by Manuel because José is too common a name, and people tend to call each other by the second name or the first and the second. In the U.S., you know everybody’s first name, so I’m José in the U.S. My father’s name was only José.

Hellrigel:

And your mother’s name?

Moura:

My mother’s name, again, it’s the same thing. Her first name is Maria, but she was always known by Maria José.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

You have one sister?

Moura:

I have two sisters and a brother. I am the third one. I have an older brother, [José Maria,] and I have an older sister, [Isabel Maria,] and I have a younger sister [Teresa Maria].

Hellrigel:

Did any of them also go into engineering?

Moura:

Actually, that’s an interesting point. My father always dreamed to be an engineer, so fate had it that out of his four children, three are engineers. These children ended up marrying and having partners that were three engineers, and all the grandchildren of my father, eight grandchildren, I think I count maybe five or six that are also engineers. So, engineers, [and I count computer scientists as engineers,] became like a --

Hellrigel:

A family calling.

Moura:

A family calling, although not everybody practiced engineering, but at least they have a degree in engineering [or computer science].

Hellrigel:

One of your sisters is an engineer.

Moura:

My sister, the younger sister, is a chemical engineer, and my older brother is a mechanical engineer.

Hellrigel:

How did you decide to go into electrical engineering?

Moura:

An interesting question. I think that since the very beginning as a little kid I wanted to teach, so I would imagine always being in a classroom and lecturing to students. This was maybe even in I wouldn’t say first grade, but at least I don’t know, fourth or fifth grade. Then also for some reason I think my father bought me some books in physics at some point in one of his travels, and I was a kid, maybe ten, eleven-year-old, and when people would ask me, so what do you want to do, and I’d say, well, I want to be an electrical engineer. Don’t ask me why, because I didn’t know why, and what electrical engineers do. I said, also, I don’t want just to be an electrical engineer, I want to teach electrical engineering, and that’s exactly what I did. I never really practiced the profession, I always taught. Here I follow a very common saying that if you don’t know how to do it, teach it, so that’s what I did.

Hellrigel:

Yes, some of those sayings. I also like to ask people, from an early year, when you’re growing up, you had an interest in science, math, and engineering? Did you have any subjects in school that you hated or disliked, or maybe liked less than others?

Moura:

Oh, yes. When I was growing up throughout my academic student life, both secondary education and in college, I had to draw. There were drawing courses that I hated, and I was always barely passed those courses. Even in college I had two years, two full years, two-year-long courses in drawing. Of course, in college it should be already engineering drawing, technical drawing, stuff like that.

Hellrigel:

Yes, mechanical drawing or drafting.

Moura:

Yes. I still barely passed them. So, if you ask me, yes, drawing was clearly the least I liked of all the other subjects. I think I would accept them, and I think I did well in all the other subjects.

Hellrigel:

How did you decide which college to go to for your undergraduate degree?

Moura:

I was in Mozambique, and at the time there was no university in Mozambique. When I was in my last year of high school, at that time actually it was only eleventh year, there was no twelfth year, so I was a seventeen-year-old and all my colleagues and everybody was gearing up to go to the new university that had just opened in Mozambique. I was living in Beira which is in the middle of the country. As I said, the university was to open in the capital of Mozambique, which is in the south, about 800 miles south of Beira, in a beautiful city, Lourenço Marques, now it’s Maputo. The university was opening, and all my friends were going there, so I was determined to go there. But one day my father entered my room, and as a matter of fact said, no, you are going to Instituto Superior Técnico, the School of Engineering at the University of Lisbon, and that’s it. There was no possible discussion. I think that my father was, again realizing his dream, but in a sense, I think that he always thought that there was only one school of engineering, and that was the Instituto Superior Técnico where my brother already was a student and where my sister became a student the year after. All the other siblings and partners went through that school, too.

Hellrigel:

Your spouse is an engineer also?

Moura:

[Manuela], yes, she is an engineer. She did it through Instituto Superior Técnico, but now she is a computer scientist, so I am including computer science as an engineer degree. She’s a computer scientist, and AI robotics person.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay. You’re at this school, and you had decided from your youth that you’re going to be an electrical engineer; however, at that point did you know you had to go on for the Ph.D. to teach?

Moura:

Yes.

MIT

Hellrigel:

How do you end up at MIT then?

Moura:

At that time engineering degrees in Portugal were a six-year program?

Hellrigel:

Whoa.

Moura:

You’d start your academic career by being a teaching assistant.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Moura:

The teaching assistant was different from what teaching assistants are in universities in the U.S. Teaching assistant was a like a steppingstone to become in due time a professor, so you’d be a teaching assistant of second class, then a teaching assistant of first class, then an assistant professor, then an associate, then a full professor. You’d start and this would take forever to go through these steps. I was going to become a teaching assistant. There were several incidents to become a teaching assistant. A professor that was my mentor, [Professor Faro], said, okay, José, I’d like you to become my teaching assistant. I said, oh, that’s great, that’s really my dream job, but I do have a thing which is I want to go for the Ph.D. What that means is that I would stay the first year as teaching assistant, but then I’d leave, and I wanted him to know that I was going to leave to go for the Ph.D. He was a very nice person and a great mentor, and he said, of course, you go, and when you come back you join us. I was going to apply, but I didn’t know anything about [the U.S.] and everybody in Portugal would go to either the UK or France or Germany. Those were the places where people would go for graduate education. Mostly people in physics, math; very few engineers would go. But the ones who went would go to the UK or Germany or France, or something like that. For some reason I said that’s not where I want to go. I want to go to the U.S. Now, that posed a problem because I would go on a fellowship from a Portuguese institution, okay? I didn’t know that the U.S., if you were a grad student in engineering you could get anything such as a fellowship, okay?

Hellrigel:

Funding, yes.

Moura:

I knew that I had to get a fellowship from some Portuguese institution, but Portuguese institutions would not give fellowships to the U.S. because they were too expensive. The tuition was extremely expensive, and in Europe there was no tuition, so it was only living expenses. In the U.S., it was tuition plus living expenses, so no fellowship. But I insisted that I am going to go to the U.S., so, okay, which university? Well, I didn’t really know. I went to Fulbright. Fulbright is an institution that facilitates people to come to the U.S. They had an office in Lisbon, so I went, and they had all these books about these universities, but I couldn’t understand anything. Then I remembered that my brother had a book, and that book was in mechanical engineering. The book about the resistance of materials by an author called Timoshenko. I didn’t know what the subject was, but that professor was from this university, MIT. So, I said, it must be a good university, so why don’t I apply to MIT? I applied to MIT, and I think I was very fortunate to be accepted because MIT had never had a Portuguese student for their Ph.D.

Hellrigel:

Really?

Moura:

Yes. For some reason, they decided that maybe they should try me, and I was their first Ph.D. student, doctoral student from Portugal. Then I turned around and I said, oh, now I have to find a fellowship. I didn’t want the Fulbright fellowship because Fulbright fellowships had the condition that you had to go away from the U.S. for two years after completing the Ph.D., and I was very uncomfortable with the condition. Not that I intended or planned to stay, but they said, okay, if you go with this fellowship from Fulbright, which was a very small thing, but anyway, you have to get out of the U.S. when you graduate for two years. And not that I planned to stay in the U.S., but I didn’t want to have that condition. So, I didn’t accept the fellowship from Fulbright, but eventually I got a fellowship from Instituto de Alta Cultura, the Portuguese Science Foundation.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Moura:

Yes, they made an exception. They said, okay, let’s try. So, I came supported by the Portuguese. It was not called the Portuguese Science Foundation, but it was equivalent. I was the first student that was fully supported in the U.S. by the Portuguese fellowship. I came to MIT, [and graduated with my Doctor of Science degree, D.Sc., as I say the first MIT Ph.D. from Portugal, and also with the first fellowship to the U.S. by Instituto de Alta Cultura.] And, when I finished, I didn’t have to go back to Portugal, but I felt obligated to go back. They had invested in me with this fellowship, so I felt that I had go back.

Hellrigel:

How did you figure out who to study with at MIT?

Moura:

Yes, it’s interesting, because now I applied to MIT and I still had one full year or six months that I was still in Lisbon, and I was teaching as a teaching assistant, and I was also in the research center. Professor Faro who was my mentor and who was my professor there, Professor Faro, he had to find me a position in this research center, and there were--it was a very small center, but it was a center dedicated to what’s called signal processing. And in that center, there was a researcher called Fernando Rebelo Simões, and he was much senior than me, but he was still a teaching assistant. I told you it takes forever.

Hellrigel:

Professor Simões?

Moura:

I’m sorry, he was a teaching assistant and eventually got to be a professor. At the time he was still a teaching assistant, but he was much more senior than me. He was also the direct advisor within the center for my work and he was very much into this signal processing which was a kind of new area at the time. Again, he had a book that just came out. We are now in 1970, and this book had come out in 1968. He showed me the book and said this is a great topic of research and a great new subject and was by a professor called Van Trees, last name was Van Trees (Henry Leslie Van Trees). It turned out again that Van Trees was a professor at MIT, so when I got to MIT, I had this name also on the back of my mind. At MIT there was another person that was very famous, which was called Shannon.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes, Claude Shannon.

Moura:

When you are at MIT at that time you had to go around and talk to professors and find one that you’d like to work with, and the professor that would like to work with you. I said, okay, there is this guy called Shannon, and I had taken a subject called Information Theory back at the Instituto Superior Técnico taught by Professor Faro. And so, I said, well, my first choice would be Shannon. So, I went to Shannon’s office, and I asked the admin, I want an appointment with Professor Shannon, and she looked at me and she raised her head, looked at me and said, what do you mean? And I said, well, I have to find an advisor, so I want to talk with Professor Shannon. And this now maybe fall of 1970. And she says, Professor Shannon hasn’t shown up in the office for the last ten years or six years or something like that. Shannon was still a professor there. He had an office and an admin; except he would not go to the office. He had no students. So, okay, Shannon was not to be, and I said, okay, the other great person I really want to work with is Professor Van Trees. His office was like two doors away, so I just walked into his office, set an appointment, and talked with him.

Van Trees is a very interesting person. He was writing the “Bibles” of the topic at the time. [Van Trees published a three-volume series of textbooks on the detection, estimation, and modulation theory. Detection, Estimation, and Modulation Theory, Part I. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1968. Detection, Estimation, and Modulation Theory, Part II. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1971. Detection, Estimation, and Modulation Theory, Part III. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1971. He published the fourth book in the series two or three decades later.]

He had already published Volume 1, then he was finishing Volume 2, and Volume 3. He had the galley proofs of Volume 2. And the way the professors would test students if they wanted to work with them or not was to give them a project for that semester. At the end of the semester they’d make, okay, yes, why don’t you work with me? And the student also could say, well, I don’t like this, I’ll go somewhere else. So, he had to give me a project, so he had the galley proofs of his second volume. His first volume was an 800-page volume. The second volume was the follow-up to the first volume, and he already was halfway through the third volume. So, he has the galley proofs for, let’s say, Chapter 10 of Volume 2, and in that Chapter 10 of Volume 2 he has some problems at the end of the chapter. He needs to make sure those problems are correct, so he turns to me and says why don’t you work out these problems. [Work out] problems 1, 2, and 3 of this Chapter 10 and come back and tell me. Now, this is, let’s say, Chapter 10 of Volume 2, which has as background the 8 or 9 chapters of Volume 1, which is like 800 pages plus the nine previous chapters of Volume 2, so you can imagine how much [work].

Hellrigel:

You had to read so much material.

Moura:

I don’t think I made a lot of progress on those two or three problems, but it was enough progress, or I spoke enough intelligently that Harry Van Trees accepted to take me as a grad student. Unfortunately, Harry found a job another job two or three years later and he left MIT. I continued with Harry, but Harry was now away, and I finished my Ph.D. with another professor, Arthur Baggeroer. Arthur is a great professor and also at MIT.

Hellrigel:

That’s a fascinating story. Both are fascinating, including Claude Shannon not being there, and that you pretty much had in your mind before you started at MIT that you’re going to focus on signal processing.

IEEE Signal Processing Society

Moura:

Yes. At the time, the subject I started was not called signal processing. The official name was detection estimation theories, and those were like random signals. Signal processing at the time was very much non-random, non-statistical, and was what’s called digital signal processing. The subject I was taught, learning, and doing research, was more in the area of communications, communication theory. I did a thesis in communication theory in radar, sonar, statistical signals, and stuff like that. Detection estimation, that’s what I did in my doctoral thesis.

[I also took a course on digital signal processing (DSP) taught but none other than Al Oppenheim (Alan Victor Oppenheim) who was still writing what became the landmark book of DSP. Shannon was not there, but I was fortunate to take a course in Information Theory taught by Peter Elias. Information theorists will know well who he is, supposedly following the book by Gallagher, except he taught from his notes and from whatever his mind was thinking about at the time. And beyond these, courses by Sanjoy Mitter, Michael Athans, Jan C. Willems, and many others.]

At the end, I returned to Portugal, and I was a professor at Instituto Superior Técnico. I became an assistant professor, and full professor [skipping associate level]. What happened is that that area of research [I studied as doctoral student] tended to migrate within IEEE to the IEEE Signal Processing Society. You, see?

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Moura:

It was at the time more in the IEEE Communication Society and IEEE Information Theory Society. I was very theoretical. It was in the IEEE Information Theory Society, but as we start processing more signals and more data, and the systems in the real world, communications became very focused in communication systems, per se. The information theory became very focused on Shannon, theory and coding, and stuff like that, and signal processing actually started enlarging itself, and went from the digital, non-random signals to the random signals and the processing signals of different nature, different applications.

I was doing a lot of radar, sonar kind of stuff, and that also became the natural province of signal processing. Today, I call that signal processing, but I started more on the IEEE Information Theory Society and the IEEE Communication Society, and then IEEE Ocean Engineering Society also because I was doing sonar. I only migrated like ten years later to signal processing.

Hellrigel:

Yes, and that’s part of trying to figure out between differences and fields in the various IEEE technical societies and councils and the evolution of the fields, but also the clustering within IEEE. Some of that could also be EMC [IEEE Electromagnetic Compatibility Society], at least a little bit.

Moura:

Yes. It’s an interesting thing, because signal processing as a society you may know it claims to be the oldest, number one society, because it started as a group I think in audio, audio and acoustics in 1948.

Hellrigel:

Yes, a group in the IRE.

Moura:

It was very dominated by filter design, sampling, and transforms for—

All these are eventually, in the 1950s and mostly the 1960s and early 1970s, migrated to become digital signal processing. But it was non-random signals, no noise involved. It was more transformations, and with applications very much focused on speech, speech and audio, and acoustics. In the 1970s, there was a workshop, maybe in 1976 or so, in Italy, I can’t remember the name. That workshop, again, on signal processing, audio acoustics, and speech, became ICASSP, International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Progressing, in 1977 or something like that. It was a workshop that went for two or three years and then evolved into ICASSP. Again, it was very dominated by digital signal processing stuff, no noise, but then it starts opening up. My first paper in an IEEE Signal Processing Society venue was 1982 ICASSP in Paris. I come in and there are already others who work in what’s called in the field as spectral estimation, which starts becoming more random signals, and the basic theories go back to the 1930s and 1940s and to a great scientist called Wiener, Norbert Wiener.

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Moura:

Okay, and so signal processing was not like what Wiener worked on when it started. It was more names like [Harry] Nyquist and others like that. But, in the maybe late 1970s or early 1980s, signal processing field, it starts moving into this random things, and I start finding that others are doing things more akin to me that were a mix of theory and a mix of practical things. Practical in the sense of we were targeting some real-world applications, very much radar/sonar kinds of things, radio and phone transmission, but also remote sensing, and what’s called physical layer communications.

Hellrigel:

Biomedical, too, right?

Moura:

And, also biomedical. In all these things the signals have a very dominant random component, which were not the dominant thing in the analysis of signals before. So, we start finding in the Signal Processing Group, Society, but a group like me and others. Mos Kaveh (Mostafa Kaveh) and many others, start finding the natural place for us to publish our work in ICASSP and other workshops that start springing up within the IEEE Signal Processing Society (it had a different name at the time) like the spectral estimation workshop and things of that sort that start really in the early 1980s. Even the flagship journal that was called Transactions on Acoustic Speech and Signal Processing, changed its name, if I’m not mistaken, in 1980 and becomes Transactions on Signal Processing. It becomes broader, and people start publishing there.

Hellrigel:

The IEEE Signal Processing Society becomes your technical home in IEEE?

Moura:

Became, yes. I started in IEEE as a graduate student member in I think 1970 or 1971 in the IEEE Information Theory Society and then I joined maybe the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society, because I had my first technical papers and first conference paper in ocean engineering. Ocean Engineering [the Council of Oceanic Engineering] started in 1975 or 1976, something like that, and their journal started a few years later. I have papers in their first volume, 1978, or second volume, and I went to their conference. That’s in San Diego, in 1979.

Then [I published in] Information Theory, really, because although I say that my work was practical, it was really theoretical, so information theory. But information theory, as I said, became much more focused and dominated by coding and all that, my areas of detection and estimation started moving away from the information theory society, so for me it was more communications and then ocean engineering, and eventually signal processing.

Once I published my first paper at ICASSP 1982, and I found a community of people that thought a lot like me and where I could go and listen to their papers, that became my dominant society. That was very good because you really saw signal processing as an open-minded group of people. They did not say, no, our niche is this one, we want to be on this area. No, okay, here is an interesting area, let’s do a workshop or do a new special session at ICASSP on this, or a special issue of the journal on that.

Hellrigel:

That’s very broad.

Moura:

Very broad.

Hellrigel:

That’s very broad because, [just an example,] the past president Leah Jameson, I believe she does signal processing, speech.

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Past IEEE President John Vig with his military research did some work with signals, I think.

Moura:

John Vig is in another society. He is in UFCC [IEEE Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control Society].

Hellrigel:

Yes, UFCC. Does that have technical overlap with the Signal Processing Society a little bit?

Moura:

My understanding of UFCC is that they make the sensors, and we process the data, so there is a common interest, but very different technologies. [But I have a former student who publishes and attends the UFCC conferences. So, yes, there is overlap.]

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Moura:

But Leah Jameson is more on the computer side because when you process signals you also need a computer. Let’s say, special hardware to handle those signals. I think Leah is very much into that part, [but found herself also in the IEEE Signal Processing Society].

You see that at the beginning none of us would find a home in signal processing. But because it was a very open community that accepted going into all these directions, and the field was moving so fast, and the field was having so many challenges that we turned them around into these opportunities that it grew and became much broader, broader society.

Hellrigel:

It’s one of the larger societies, is my understanding.

Moura:

It’s the fourth-largest society.

Hellrigel:

They’re very active. I’m working with them for their anniversary to work on oral histories, so you were the trifecta. Signal processing list, life fellows list, and president’s list.

Moura:

Okay, well, that’s great now.

University of Portugal, Carnegie Mellon, NYU

Hellrigel:

You’re working on your publishing, so you’re advancing at the University of Portugal.

Moura:

Yes. I came back to Portugal in 1975 and I stayed there until 1984, and as I said, in 1979 I became a full professor, so I had a very meteoric career in Portugal. I told you that it would take forever, but--

Hellrigel:

Quickness.

Moura:

I was pretty quick, right, because of circumstances, I won’t go into them, but there were circumstances that facilitated all that.

[While in Portugal, I started a collaboration with Dick Bucy (Richard S. Bucy), of Kalman-Bucy filter fame. I had met Dick in 1973 at a non-IEEE workshop, my first, in San Diego. Dick was a professor at the University of Southern California (USC), so I visited USC for four summers in a row, from 1978 to 1981, and Dick would also visit me in Portugal. The first time, in 1976, Dick visited me in Lisbon, at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), my university, and we used one of the first commercial internet companies (Timenet?) to access a supercomputer back in the U.S. from Lisbon. (This is the beginnings of the Arpanet.) And we used intensely email to communicate among us. All brand-new nascent technologies, back then in 1976. We would make from Lisbon a phone call through a 300 baud modem to a company in Madrid and through them access the supercomputer in an Air Force base I think in Florida. We organized in 1982 a memorable two-week NATO Advanced Study Institute, in Algarve, Portugal. At USC, I remember the excitement in July or August 1980, when their first VAX computer, a DEC computer that replaced the DEC PDP-10 and 11 machines, was installed. DEC produced the minicomputers that you could have in your Lab, competitors of the main frames dominated by IBM, large machines requiring large rooms, the IBMs 360 and 370, if I recall correctly, and that I had used at MIT in my doctoral research. I should correct myself because I also used a PDP-10 then, at MIT, in Project Mac using Macsyma.]

In any case, in 1984, I thought that I had accomplished a good deal of what I really wanted to do in Portugal which was to set up a research group; have masters and doctoral students in Portugal; have them graduate or be ready to graduate; and for them to become professors there.

[My group at the time was already quite large with over a dozen people. I also collaborated with two colleagues, Professors José Tribolet and Lourenço Fernandes from IST, to set-up the first private nonprofit research institution in Portugal, we called it INESC, co-owned by a state institution and private companies, in this case by my university and the telecom companies. This allowed direct funding of research by companies and had a very light management structure, outside the state bureaucracy. This became a model followed later by many others in Portugal. As I say, in 1984.]

I was looking for a different challenge, so I went on sabbatical. I took a one-year sabbatical that became a two-year sabbatical. I went back to MIT. I was a chaired visiting associate professor at MIT, Genrad Associate Visiting Professor in EECS, in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. I co-taught there for two years, [with two great senior professors, Seeley, who wrote early books in electronics and solid state, and then Siebert]. It was a wonderful experience, and I did a lot of research [with my students back in Portugal, but also with Sanjoy Mitter and Art Baggeroer at MIT and others]. In Portugal, I was doing research and setting up my group with students, but because everything was from scratch, I had to fight a lot to find resources. It was like a lot of activity which did not give me enough time to do what I wanted to do, which was research. At MIT for two years, I was teaching and doing full-time research. I didn’t have any bureaucratic administrative responsibilities. I had my students in Portugal. This is the beginnings of email, so we were doing all our research through email and faxing documents. So, all Stone Age kind of technology.

Hellrigel:

Yes, those rolls of paper streaming out of the fax machine.

Moura:

Rolls of paper, all that. I came for sabbatical for one year and I extended it for two years. Then at the end I said, well, I can go back to Portugal, but why don’t I try my luck here in U.S.? I looked for a job, and the first place I interviewed was at Carnegie Mellon. I came to Carnegie Mellon University one day and gave a talk and I talked with a bunch of people. By the end of the day the department head of Electrical Engineering, Steve Director, this is back in 1986, said, okay, we are going to make you an offer. I said, oh, gee, that’s interesting. He made me an offer and said would you accept this offer. And as I said, my first interview, my first job, really job looking for a job. I had no idea, and I said, of course I accept this offer. I accepted the offer.

This may have been like February or March or April, I don’t know. Then in August, I packed the family. Manuela, my wife, Manuela Veloso, was studying at Boston University for her master’s degree in Computer Science. She applied for a Ph.D. at CMU [Carnegie Mellon University]. She was accepted, so we packed the family. We had a little boy by that time, he was five years old, André. I had my daughter from my first marriage, Bárbara, and we had also one of my nieces, Marta, that was visiting us at MIT. We packed everybody in the car, took a roundabout from Boston to Pittsburgh through Niagara Falls, and we arrived in Pittsburgh. This must have been at the end of August 1986 or the beginning of September. It must be August. And we stayed there until today, which makes over thirty-five years.

Hellrigel:

Do you like Pittsburgh?

Moura:

We love Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is the best city to raise a family. It’s a relatively small midwest city. The people are wonderful. The people, for example, when you are driving and you are on these two-lane roads and suddenly you realize you want to be on the right lane instead of the left lane, or vice versa, and the other lane is packed with traffic. Oh, they don’t mind. They stop and wave you. Come in, come in front of me. Try to do that in Boston or New York.

Hellrigel:

No. You may get run off the road.

Moura:

You get run off the road. It’s a wonderful city. It’s a wonderful city, and we love it there. We had another child, Pedro, that was born in Pittsburgh. We went to all the school events, all the high school meets, and everything for so many years. We went to all of those. We could go because the city doesn’t have any traffic.

Hellrigel:

That’s very fortunate.

Moura:

Very. We live about seven minutes away from Carnegie Mellon. My wife is also a professor at Carnegie Mellon in Computer Science, AI and Robotics and Machine Learning, or was, now she left, but she was a professor there. If we have three cars in front of us, we’d say, oh, gee, today there is a traffic jam in front of us because there were three cars in front of us. That’s what allowed you actually to go to all these meets because you could leave, go to the other side of the city, come back, and still do some further work.

Hellrigel:

You enjoyed a good quality of life both on campus and off campus.

Moura:

Yes, very good.

Hellrigel:

You stayed at Carnegie Mellon University, but a couple of times you went to NYU [New York University] in New York City?

Moura:

Yes. Then sabbaticals. So, I joined CMU in 1986. My wife finished her Ph.D. in 1992, and she became a professor of Computer Science, so I couldn’t do a sabbatical before she was able to do a sabbatical. She could do a sabbatical in 1999. That’s when my son André went to college. He went to Harvard [University], so we went on sabbatical, both of us, to MIT. So, we were back in Cambridge, and that’s 1999, 2000. Then we retuned on sabbatical in 2006. My second son, Pedro, who was born in Pittsburgh, also went to Harvard, so we did a third sabbatical for me at MIT in 2006-2007, my wife at Radcliffe College, Harvard University. Then in 2013, we were going to go again on sabbatical and my wife said, oh, we are not going to Cambridge, we are going to New York. Why? Since our children were living and working in New York, we came to NYU, and it was a great experience. It was a marvelous experience.

Hellrigel:

I read that by 2015 you had forty-one Ph.D. students or graduate students. Do you still have students?

Moura:

Yes. By now the count, I think, is fifty-two graduated Ph.D. students, and currently I have ten. My life took a turn because three years ago my wife was offered a position to start an artificial intelligence research at the bank JPMorgan.

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Moura:

Yes, and that’s in New York City. She moved to New York City in July 2018. We do have a house in Pittsburgh, but I commute between New York and Pittsburgh. Of course, during COVID there was no commuting, so 2020 I really stayed in New York, and I was on sabbatical again. It was a sabbatical to happen at New York University, NYU, except that COVID happened, so there was no sabbatical. Now I commute between New York and Pittsburgh. I go back and forth, and I have my group at Carnegie Mellon, it’s ten graduate students. One or two will be graduating soon, but yes, I continue my teaching.

Hellrigel:

I also read that you also hold fourteen patents or maybe more now.

Moura:

Yes, I hold seventeen patents. Actually, one was just issued last week.

Hellrigel:

Wow. I also read you were successful in that legal case?

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

That must have been trying.

Moura:

Yes, a lot of learning. It was in the early 1990s. I was part of a team that applied for an NSF, National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center to develop the next generation of hard disk drives. I was charged within that team of twelve professors with developing the detector, which is the algorithm that decides if the signal you are reading off the disk corresponds to a 0 or to a 1. I was charged with designing the detector for the next generation of hard drive disks. The hard drive disks that would be in place, say, ten years later, so in the 2000s. We are in the early 1990s and we are looking forward to the 2000s. Some of the other team members were developing the new materials for the disk drive surface. The others were developing the new heads that would write and read. They were promising that they would be able to write bits on the surface of the disk at a much higher density, like a factor of 10 to 100 higher than the disk recording density in 1990, a much higher density. In the space where in the early 1990s you could record maybe one bit, one magnetic transition from 0 to 1 or 1 to 0, they would promise to write 10 to 100 more bits. And what that meant is that the signal that you would read off and feed to the algorithm to decide if it’s a 0 or 1 would be a very different signal because it would be a much weaker signal dominated by noise. But the noise, nobody knew how to characterize that noise, and so nobody really knew how to design a good detector, and that’s what they asked me. José, why don’t you do that? And, of course, I didn’t know anything about magnetic recording, but it was an interesting problem.

I recruited a student, Alek Kavcic. He was from Serbia, but he was graduating with a master’s degree from a university in Germany, the Ruhr University, Bochum. His advisor there was a very good friend of mine, [Professor Johann Bohm].

When I was reading the applications of the students, this is in the spring of 1993, I’m looking at the applications, [and] I’m looking for a student that wouldn’t mind studying magnetics because the problem was magnetic recording, and to be also interested in signal processing. I came across his résumé, so I called this professor that was my friend and the advisor in Germany. Eventually, I could talk to him, and he gave me the best reference about the student, so I recruited the student. If I’m not mistaken, the student, Alek, came in the fall of 1993. I told the student, look, this is the problem. But Alek only wanted to do signal processing, and I said, no, wait a minute before that you need to learn about magnetic recording. But he said, I don’t like magnetic recording.

Hellrigel:

Now he likes it?

Moura:

I said, “One of us needs to learn and I’m not going to learn it because you are the student, I’m the professor.” I convinced Alek to take all the courses that my colleagues in magnetic recording were teaching and all the related physics courses. He became very, very good. He was the best student in those courses, too. Then, first we developed a model to understand what type of noises would dominate the readback signal if my colleagues were successful in packing 100 bits on the space of one bit. Ten years from now how would the signals look like? So, we understand first [what type of signals and noises corrupting them] and developed models for that, and once we understood that we said how do you design a good algorithm to do that, [detect the bits out of the noisy signals? But note, the models were too detailed, too detailed to be used directly to derive the detector. The models were useful for us to abstract some major characteristic of the noise – it turned out to be noise that was signal dependent. If you recorded many 1’s or 0’s in a row or you alternated a lot between 1’s and 0’s the noises were very different, and very different from the additive white noise that everyone used in all similar problems from phone or satellite communications to recording and applications in between. It was for that type of noise, that we designed the detector.] That’s what we designed.

We patented this in May 1997 because the student was going for an internship, and I told Alek, well, before you go to the internship, we better file for a patent. We filed what’s called a provisional patent, and one year later, before he graduated, we filed for the patent. You file for a provisional, and then you have one year to file for a patent, and we did that in April 1998. Then eight months later we filed a second patent. He had already graduated, and he became a professor at Harvard. We met in the summer of 1998, at the IEEE Information Theory Symposium at MIT, and we worked at some additional things, and we filed the second patent. We have two patents. One is the so-called 839 patent, and the other is the so-called 180 patent. The patents were issued in 2001, I think, 2000 or 2001 and 2002, in that timeframe.

In 2003, I told CMU why don’t you tell all these companies in the magnetic recording business that we have these patents? CMU wrote a letter to six or seven companies. Some companies replied and said, well, we are no longer in the business. [There was a lot of consolidation in the magnetic recording and disk drive industry and the OEMs.] Some other companies said, well, we are buying all the chips from these other companies, but the companies that we knew had to be using our technology, they ignored us. Once you tell these companies why don’t you talk with us about these patents, it’s like you are giving a warning that somehow you know they are using it. Then at the same time there was a clock, and this was like in April or May of 2003, a clock started. And that clock at that--the law changed in the meantime, but at that time gave us only six years

Hellrigel:

Oh.

Moura:

Yes. [It was called latches.] If you don’t file within six years, you lose all past royalties from the company till you file the lawsuit, you can no longer claim anything from the company till you file a lawsuit and go after the company. The clock started, say, in April or May of 2003, and would end in April or May of 2009. Now I am looking at this clock and I’m telling CMU, please, you have to do something. But universities are very reluctant to go to court; it’s very expensive. They are not in the business of suing, and they are always hoping that companies will turn around and support the research.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Moura:

But the company that we knew was using the technology because there would be no other way not to use what we did, okay? We were very reassured of that. Eventually, at CMU internally there were professors that didn’t want CMU to file because they were working in that area. They wanted the company to support their research, but CMU eventually made the decision, if we don’t defend our intellectual property in this case, that it’s so blatant, then why are we filing for patents? [Here I have to recognize the leadership of the CMU Legal Chief Officer, Mary Jo Lively.]

In February or March of 2009, they filed a lawsuit, and that lawsuit went to trial in the federal court, jury trial, in the Western Pennsylvania Federal Court on the day after Thanksgiving, or Monday after Thanksgiving of 2012, so three years after, three years and a half after filing the lawsuit. The verdict came out the day after Christmas, on December 26, 2012. In that jury verdict the company was found that they had infringed the patents. The patents were valid. They had 2,000,320,000-blah-blah-blah--no, 2,320,000,000-blah, blah, blah, chips that were infringing, and they awarded $0.50 per chip.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Moura:

Together that came to $1,160,000,000 (one billion one hundred sixty million dollars), [with some additional chips that infringed and some additional penalties, when the Honorable Judge wrote her final decision it came to over $1.5 billion verdict. Of course, it didn’t stop there because the company was not going to pay by then $1.5 billion to CMU, so they appealed in 2013.] The verdict came out December 26, 2012. The judge then had to write the decision and that only came in June 2014. The judge took a year, a year and a half to actually write the final decision from her court. The company appealed, and it was heard in the circuit district in Washington, D.C. in April 2015, and the circuit court that is the appeals court wrote their opinion. It’s called an opinion. The circuit is the appellate court. They immediately said the company infringed and the number of chips infringed--the company immediately had to pay about $360,000,000. Then the difference had to go back to the court in Pittsburgh to decide where did the selling of the chips happen. Where did the sale occur? That was the question. The reason for that is because the chips were manufactured in Taiwan. The company would take the chips in Taiwan and ship some of them back to the U.S., and those corresponded to the $360,000,000 or so. The others were in disks all over the world. Our patent was filed only in the U.S.

Well, if the sale had occurred in the U.S. and everything happened in the U.S., except the manufacturing, then the company was liable for also those chips that didn’t come to the U.S. but were sold in the U.S. was what the circuit said. [This is called extraterritoriality.] This issue has to go back to Pittsburgh to the federal court, to the district federal court, for them to decide [where the sale occurred]. In September, October 2015, it came back [to the federal district court in Pittsburgh to decide where did the sale occur]. The judge called the parties, CMU and the company, and said you now talk to each other and try to reach a settlement. The company was now liable for about $1.5 billion because they had continued selling chips.

Hellrigel:

They kept doing it.

Moura:

[They continue to this day.] Between 2012 and 2015 they kept doing it, so now it was liable for [well over] $1.5 billion. CMU has already in their pockets $350 million. The difference was between $350 million and say $1.5 billion, and the judge said before I do anything I want you guys to discuss it. She appoints another judge, a retired judge, and goes through this process [called mediation]. The president of CMU at the time, Subra Suresh, is the one who engaged with the company, and they have several meetings. I think that in the end they split the thing in the middle, agreeing to a $750 million settlement on February 16, 2016. [I was at an IEEE Board meeting in Seattle. I received a call from Subra saying José come to West Palm Beach because we are going to announce to the CMU Board the settlement and I want you to be there and say a few words to the Board. Manuela and I flew there. And at 4:01pm on possibly a Wednesday, CMU and the company announced to the world the settlement. We were sitting at table in this fancy hotel in West Palm Beach, by the pool, with the CMU PR Vice President and he is showing us all the hundreds and thousands of tweets when it became public.] If you count the years, it’s about twenty-five years after I started the project, after we got the engineering research center at CMU. You have to do good science, technology, and engineering, but you have to be persistent, and it’s hard. I will tell you, between 2009 and 2016 we had almost weekly meetings with the lawyers, and the lawyers were tremendous, very good. [The best, now called K&L Gates, I will name the four lead ones, Doug Greenswag, Pat McElhinny, Mark Kneidsen, and Chris Verdini.]

Hellrigel:

I guess that would be your entrepreneur hat.

Entrepreneurship, publications

Moura:

Yes, I also had the start-up company in another technology, a technology called Spiral, which is computers programming themselves, so generating automatically very high-quality software. That software tool was licensed by Intel. It’s a software that we developed from our research projects at CMU with funding from DARPA, NSF, Office of Naval Research, and others, and companies. Then we licensed the software to Intel. Once you license the software you have to maintain it, and it became very difficult to maintain it within the confines of a research project, so we got a start-up company called SpiralGen that commercialized that software. That company is still going. It’s a relatively small company but has customers and sells software.

Hellrigel:

You’re the president of that company? You’re the co-founder?

Moura:

I am the president of the company, [we were five co-founders,] but the company runs almost on its own. It has a group of potential customers, and it has developers and maintainers of the software. Sometimes we join forces to go after funding, but I have very little to do with it. I am the president, but it’s almost a nominal position.

Hellrigel:

Are you done with companies and entrepreneurship?

Moura:

I would love to have a company because now I’m doing very interesting work in Graph Signal Processing, in computer vision, and imaging processing. But I don’t know if I have the cycles to do it. Being president of IEEE and being on the Board took a lot of my time and energy. I’m still recovering, so I don’t know if I have the time.

Hellrigel:

It took a lot of your steam.

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

You talked about wanting to teach. Then you did research, you had to publish, and you got these companies. Do you still like to teach?

Moura:

I love to teach, and that’s why I am still going back and commuting with CMU this semester. Last year, of course, I was on sabbatical, and it was COVID, so you could not travel. I was mostly in New York, and my students, my grad students, my Ph.D. students, were all working from home, so we did it a lot of Zoom. I felt that I was missing something, so back at the end of August this year, 2021, I start going back to CMU. I love to be in my office. I love to have my students in the physical space where my office is, bumping into them, calling them to my office, and we discuss. I also love to be in the classroom, so I teach usually in the fall a sophomore course, a second-year-level course. It’s a course with about 120 students, and we taught that course this semester. We are two usually teaching the course, and we split the lectures half and half, so, I gave half of the lectures. I love giving those lectures and I love listening to my colleague teaching, also. Not just this course, but I have taught these types of things for ten, twelve years already, but listening to my colleague give the lectures it was like my first time listening to that subject. I really love to teach, so, I like it. I like it.

Hellrigel:

You’ve published two textbooks?

Moura:

I have notes, complete notes of textbooks, and I have two edited books.

Hellrigel:

Got it.

Moura:

The notes are all in a book form, but they never saw the light of day of a publisher. Whenever I teach the course, I go back to those notes and I rewrite the chapter or I rewrite something, and it’s never done. I needed a co-author that would say, José, that’s enough, let’s publish, but I don’t have it, so I keep rewriting.

In 1982, so back in the day, and in 1992, I organized with a co-author a small conference, and the proceedings of those conferences--they were not really conferences, they were more like advanced study institutes on certain subjects. We invited a bunch of other professors to come and lecture, and then we have a bunch of students. That came two books, but those were more edited books.

Hellrigel:

Do you spend much time giving papers at conferences and workshops these days?

Moura:

Yes. I spend a lot of time giving many talks and lectures and plenaries and keynotes and traveling the world, not in the last two years since COVID, but before that I would go to many, many conferences. Yesterday, for example, I gave an invited talk at a conference. It was a Zoom, which is very different from going to a conference and actually face-to-face giving and then immediately interacting with people. But, yes, it’s a rewarding experience. You go, you give your lecture, and then you immediately receive feedback because people are interested in that topic of research. They engage with you in the hallways and ask you questions, so it’s very interesting.

IEEE section and society activities

Hellrigel:

Your work with IEEE, includes you helping found the Portugal section in 1980.

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

When you were a student did you think about joining other societies or organizations?

Moura:

I was at MIT as a grad student, and my professor said, well, you should become a member of the [IEEE] Information Theory Society. So, the group I was, as I told you, Shannon was part of the group, Van Trees was part of the group, Peter Elias, Bob Gallagher were part of the group. So, the great eminences at the time of the IEEE Information Theory Society were all part of the group at MIT that I was starting at. So, I was a member of Information Theory. My first IEEE conference paper was actually in 1976 at the Information Theory Symposium in Sweden. Then my first paper where I was present and presented was in IEEE Ocean Engineering Conference in 1979 in San Diego, and then 1982 at ICASSP.

I didn’t have much activity within IEEE. When I went back to Portugal with a bunch of colleagues, we kind of said, why don’t we have more presence of IEEE here? So, we founded the section. We didn’t know really how to do it, but we learned. In 1982, I hosted the visit. I think it’s 1982 as well maybe when IEEE accepted our signed documents saying, okay, now you become a section. The president of IEEE at the time was Robert Larson and I hosted him. He visited Portugal, and I was his host. I think he brought a document that said, okay, you are a section now. I took him around, and we had a great relation.

Then I became involved in IEEE when I came back to the U.S. In 1987, at the workshop on spectral estimation, in Boston, I presented a paper, and this professor from Minnesota called Mos Kaveh, listened to my paper then started talking to me. I was then already a professor at Carnegie Mellon, and he was involved with the Transactions on Signal Processing. He went back to Minnesota, and he invited me either to review papers and then a little bit after to...

Hellrigel:

Okay, we froze up a little bit.

[Silence]

Moura:

Mary Ann?

Hellrigel:

Yes.

Moura:

Sorry, my computer went down.

Hellrigel:

Okay, no problem. You became more involved with IEEE, and you were asked around 1987 to start editing the Transactions of Signal Processing.

Moura:

Yes. First as a reviewer and then I became associate editor, and maybe in 1987 Mos Kaveh was the person that invited me. I think he was maybe the Chair of the Publications Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, or Vice President of Publication, something like that. I don’t know, don’t remember. I became associate editor, and I loved the job. It was a very demanding job, and then in 1995 I received a call from Mos Kaveh asking me if I wanted to be editor-in-chief of the Transactions, and I almost fell off my chair. I said, well, I better think about it, but I didn’t think I needed to think about it because I loved to do the job. I was a little bit concerned I wouldn’t be up to the task, so I slept over it and then I called him back and said, yes, I’ll accept the job. To tell you the truth being the editor-in-chief of the flagship journal in my area, in my field, Transactions on Signal Processing, was the best job I ever had with IEEE.

We did a lot of things then. Everything then was done outside IEEE. It was done with a wonderful man, [Pierce Wheeler, and his wife, Barbara], that was like this executive editor that handled all the paperwork, sent in the papers from the author to the reviewers. We [would receive from Pierce a copy of the paper, okay, then choose the reviewers and Pierce would send the papers to them, but all other correspondence with reviewers and authors was us Associate Editors,] and there was no internal staff at IEEE to handle or help with the Transactions, so it was a very intense, intense job. [We would handle maybe fifty new papers a year or more, multiply by at least five reviewers, plus authors, it was a lot of letters back and forth. As Associate Editors, we handled all the communications with the reviewers. I developed a software. Actually, if I recall correctly, Ahed Tewfik who was Editor-in-Chief for the Signal Processing Letters wrote a first draft of the software to write and print the letters and the labels for the envelopes to automate the letter writing.]

When I was Editor-in-Chief, in that span of years, we recruited the first person that came to work for the Signal Processing Society in the periodicals or publications office within the society. That person was Nancy, I don’t remember her last name. Mercy Kowalczyk was Executive Director and with me we interviewed a bunch of people and recruited Nancy, but Nancy lasted only three months because then she left. She didn’t want to stay, but we recruited a second person called Debbie Blazek [Deborah A. Blazek]. If you go to the roster of the Signal Processing Society staff, Debbie is still there. Debbie has been working there since 1996, maybe; something like that. I was editor-in-chief, and we brought the office, the publications office into IEEE. So, with Debbie, Mercy, and then others that we recruited along the way, we brought the office, meaning we left Pierce Wheeler.

Then there was this company called Scholar One that started having a web-based tool for authors to submit their papers. We transferred also the paperwork of submitting and doing all that to Scholar One. We were one of the first journals, and we suffered a lot because there were a lot of bugs in the system. We suffered a lot, but that’s back in the late 1990s.

In 1999, again my friend Mos Kaveh, calls me and says, José, we need a new vice president for publications of Signal Processing. Do you want to run for this job? I thought to myself, wait a minute. I love to be EIC [editor in chief]. Why am I leaving the best job I have to go to another job that I don’t already think about? But, you know, yes, why not?

But before that, let me tell you something. In 1998 or 1999, that’s when several societies including Signal Processing, it was like seven or eight societies, started a project to essentially what many years later became [IEEE] Xplore. [They started a project] digitizing the content and putting in a computer, and then selling CD-ROMs to libraries. I don’t know if that’s 1999, or before, or when that is. What happens is that I was editor-in-chief for the Transactions, and I had the idea, well, why don’t we digitize the content, but not just of the Transactions of Signal Processing, but of all the workshops, all the conferences, all the journals of the Society, all the newsletters, everything. I convinced the IEEE Signal Processing president, which I think was Leah Jameson at the time, she might have been a past president at that time. But I convinced the Board--I was not on the Board--I convinced them to spend $500,000 which in 1999 or 1998 dollars is a lot of dollars.

Hellrigel:

Whoa.

Moura:

I convinced them, too, and Mercy and I went around to find a company that would digitize all our content, the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s content. We found this company in San Diego called Parity, so Mercy and I went to Parity in San Diego. We visited. They were a fledgling company. This was a professor from San Diego that had got a bunch of students together, a bunch of Xerox copiers, and a bunch of equipment to do optical character recognition.

Then I went around and collected a bunch of stuff, including all the workshop proceedings since the very beginning, since 1948; all the board of governors’ minutes; all the newsletters; and all the ICASSP proceedings and by then ICIP proceedings (the image conference the Society started in 1994). I went to libraries and asked for them. Some libraries said that [they were] unique exemplars, and they were not very eager to depart with those unique things because Parity would have to rip them off and then rebuild the thing. But eventually we convinced everyone, and here the CMU Library was a great help, and we published in, I don’t know, the newsletter or magazine, whatever, an appeal for authors to send us their workshop proceedings because for many they were not generally available.

By the end of 1999, Parity had digitized all our content, and I had convinced the board that we would make a lot of money by selling what we called the Electronic Signal Processing Library, which were like three CD-ROMs with all our content. Now, I was very good at convincing the board, but very bad at selling these things. We didn’t sell any, not one. We gave them for free. But the society was extremely good, because the following year when I became vice president then I was on the board, and then I convinced my colleagues and said, well, look, maybe we don’t make a business out of this, but we could do another good thing which is let’s give this to IEEE and let IEEE do the marketing. So, IEEE all of a sudden had all the Signal Processing publications, workshops, newsletters, minutes of board meetings, whatever, all digitized in what later became [IEEE] Xplore. We were followed by others and were not the only ones; ten others. Ocean Engineering [IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society] copied exactly what we did, [but they had only started in the 1970s while we went back to 1948]. Before us Information Theory [IEEE Information Theory Society] did their transactions. Then a few years later Communications [IEEE Communications Society] did it. Eventually, I think most, if not all, societies digitized their journals. I don’t know about the proceedings of their conferences.

Hellrigel:

Yes, a lot has been digitized, but not everything is in IEEE Xplore. Sometimes we get boxes of publications at the IEEE Archives and Nathan Brewer, the digital archivist, checks IEEE Xplore. If it has included in IEEE Xplore, then the hard copy has to be retained for future digitization.

Moura:

Yes, yes. Yes, I don’t know if IEEE is still using Parity, because after we used-- Signal Processing, Parity, IEEE start using Parity.

Hellrigel:

I don’t know.

Moura:

And the company, as I said, we may have been their first real customers, and then they had a lot of business with IEEE for the first few years when I was still connected to the publications within there, but then I lost track and I don’t know. I know that several years later, when IEEE digitized The Proceedings of the IEEE, they used Parity.

Hellrigel:

You’ve had a very varied career at IEEE. You were very active in pubs, and then education.

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Just looking through everything you’ve done with IEEE, it’s--

Moura:

Yes, so, I started within the Signal Processing Society, and I went through—I was Editor-in-Chief of the Transactions on Signal Processing, interim Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Signal Processing Letters, I was Vice President of Publications for three years and we brought all our publications to this thing that I was talking about, Scholar One, where everything is electronic. Then this is the time when IEEE is discussing, is very afraid that their publications business that is paper-based and that libraries buy subscriptions, IEEE is very afraid that an electronic library-based model could destroy the paper-model-based business. And IEEE is now putting together their electronic library, and there are a lot of questions. Should IEEE move to electronic version and stop with the paper? Is the electronic library going to be protected or is everybody going to copy for free our library? So, this is the discussions going on at IEEE. But we decided within the Signal Processing Society we really wanted to go electronically, and so not only had we brought the editing of all our journals, everything, in-house with Scholar One, but then when I was president, which is around 2008, 2009--

Hellrigel:

2009.

Moura:

I convinced the Signal Processing Society board members that we should offer with the membership to the society electronic access to all our publications. So, with a single membership fee of whatever, $20, $30, you’d have access not to a single journal, which was the model at the time. You have access to the Transactions on Signal Processing, or one of the six or seven journals of the Society. But now with your Society subscription you’d have electronic access to all the society journals, all the journals of our society. If you wanted a paper copy, then you’d have to buy that. So, this put signal processing really at the forefront of the electronic publishing. No paper publishing of our journals.

Hellrigel:

And a new business model.

Moura:

As a new business model. We were not going to--we said paper is outdated, outmoded, so we have to move our members from the paper version to the electronic version. But people are reluctant to not receive a paper version, so we offered as an inducement your membership fee pays for access to all our journals, electronic access. But if you insist on having a paper copy, then you have to buy that, okay? [To facilitate the transition, Mercy and I came up with what we called the Signal Processing Gazette that was then paper published monthly and listed the contents and abstracts of all the papers in the Society Transactions.] And after a couple of years everybody went electronic and we stopped having paper copies of our journals.

Hellrigel:

Now, is it still that way? You have to be a member of signal processing to get to signal processing publications?

Moura:

Unless the institution you work for that has an account with IEEE Xplore and access to the whole collection, and then they just--yes. If you are not part of an institution like my university or like IBM or some company, then you need to be a member of Signal Processing Society. Then you have access to all the publications. By now it’s eight or nine or ten journals that you access. Then you have for free with your membership free access. Students, for example, pay whatever they pay to be members. They have access to all the journals.

I was Vice President for Signal Processing in 2000 to 2003. No, 2000, 2001, 2002, in that period, a journal called Signal Processing Letters went through a very bad period, and the Society wanted to kill the journal, but I said, no, don’t. We can turn this journal around. I became interim editor-in-chief for a few months, and then I found a great editor-in-chief for the journal. The journal now is a very successful journal. At the same time, Signal Processing co-founded with sixteen or seventeen societies the IEEE Sensors Council. John Vig was the person behind that.

Signal Processing was one of the societies, and I became at the same time Vice President for Publications on the Sensors Council. So, we launched within the Sensors Council, as Vice President I launched their journal, Sensors Journal. Chose the editor-in-chief, and the journal is a very successful journal also now in their twentieth year of publication. So, this is the years between 2000 and 2002. Then I start becoming involved with TAB [IEEE Technical Activities Board]. In my first TAB job was in a committee that was called the IEEE Periodicals Review Committee, and now it’s called Publications Review and something else Committee. [My name was suggested by Leah Jamieson, and the Chair of the committee was Steve Yurkovitch.] And that was a great committee, because what our task was to review every five years, that committee would review the journals of a society. So, you’d be interacting with the members of the committee that are very dedicated volunteers that are very concerned with publications, the quality of the IEEE publications.

Then you’d meet with the volunteers of these publications and engage them. You’d learn from them, and you’d give them best practices and so forth. I loved that job, and that went for four or five years. Then I guess I had other things. Then I became involved also with PSPB [Publication Services and Products Board]. I was Vice Chair of PSPB, but that’s like 2012 or 2013. I became a TAB member when I was President of the Society 2008-2009, and then I got involved with other things. [I had been in the mid-1990s a member of the IEEE Press Board, the book publishing arm of IEEE, my name was suggested by a CMU colleague, Stan Charap, then President of the IEEE Magnetics Society.]

Hellrigel:

Yes, IEEE publications.

Moura:

Anyway, I had several IEEE-level, corporate-level, then in 2012-2013 I came back to TAB [IEEE Technical Activities Board] now as Director of Division IX. In between 2009 and 2012, I may have been at PSPB, which is the Publications and Services Products Board.

I was Vice Chair in 2012 or 2013 and appointed by TAB. TAB appoints the vice chair and the president at the time, Roberto de Marca [J. Roberto de Marca] appointed me. I was part of their Strategic Committee also, the PSPB Strategic Committee. In 2013, when I was Director of Division IX, and I was a Board member. I was also, of course, still part of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. The IEEE Signal Processing Society every other year carries out a strategic planning day, and they invited me, as director of the division, to attend. At that time, [when Ray Liu [K.J. Ray Liu] was President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, Mercy had retired] and we had recruited a new executive director [of the Society], Richard Baseil.

Rich is a person that came from Bell Labs and has a lot of management skills and business acumen and knows all those things. He made a presentation in [the Society strategic planning, in January 2013, organized by the IEEE Signal Processing Society President Elect Alex Acero,] about the Signal Processing Society finances. I realized that there was a lot of overhead that IEEE corporate was taking that was not well-explained. The president of Signal Processing Society at the time, Ray Liu and I discussed it. We went back to TAB, we were both members of TAB, and we presented a motion [in February or June 2013,] to TAB that required IEEE to explain why that overhead was being charged to societies. [TAB approved the motion overwhelmingly.] What IEEE did was say, okay, 30 percent of all the revenues that come from IEEE Xplore, are skinned off top [to pay for corporate expenses like marketing, legal, corporate. Societies could not see the gross revenue numbers, how much money IEEE Xplore actually made from subscriptions. Societies could only see and receive a much smaller fraction, so called net revenues, with little insight of where the rest went.] We didn’t like that, and that started a movement within TAB called financial transparency. We were looking for financial transparency. That provoked a big reaction from the treasurer of IEEE, several treasurers, and the staff person.

Hellrigel:

At that time was Jim Prendergast the executive director

Moura:

Jim was the executive director, but I mean the financial person. What’s it called, Vice President for Finance?

Anyway, the staff person and the treasurer, they didn’t like that. They didn’t like it. They said, you guys don’t need to know, and that took many, many years and TAB was very persistent. Ray Liu then formed the committee [on financial transparency] within TAB. It was an ad hoc committee. It was not a real committee. It was a bunch of people together. [President Roberto de Marca appointed an ad-hoc Board committee to look at these issues. But the following Presidents or Boards ignored these issues, and nothing came of it, and not only Societies did not have access to the gross revenues as IEEE as a whole was running with operating budget deficits continuing at the rate of more than $10 million every year.] I moved on [in 2016] to become VP TAB [and supported the financial transparency committee], but then I went to the Board of IEEE as president-elect of IEEE.

But TAB persisted on financial transparency, and when I ran for president of IEEE, I said one of my three things is to make IEEE financially transparent, and end all the financial operating deficits, operating budget deficits. We want to understand where the money is going. [You’re overspending in the operations budget and TAB and Societies don’t understand why so much is skimmed off top – my recollection was that of every 3 dollars societies say one, some numbers like these.] Eventually, when I was IEEE President, we, [the Board,] passed a motion [in November 2019,] and that set up that IEEE would develop a new financial system that would enable any staff person and any volunteer that needed access to a certain level of the IEEE finances, the system provides you that. [Societies have access to gross revenue. A treasurer of a Society can interrogate the system and find out why they are charged x dollars for some service provided by an IEEE organization. And overheads came down to 18 or 19 percent.] That’s what we call the financial transparency. That project was approved in November 2019, and it started being implemented in 2020 and in 2021 and I think. Now it has been fully developed. That started with a motion that Ray Liu and I presented at the TAB June meeting of 2013. It gave rise to the financial transparency, provoked a lot of internal reactions, but eventually I think IEEE saw the light, and I think we are all much better with that.

IEEE presidency

Hellrigel:

Was your interest in financial transparency the reason why you ran for IEEE president? Given your IEEE career, was it a natural progression to become the IEEE president?

Moura:

Yes and no. I loved to be President IEEE Signal Processing Society, and I was done with it. Then I was at TAB, and I thought that TAB was a great organization within IEEE. It was my colleagues, presidents of societies, and so forth. I’m really a TAB person, a Technical Activities person, very much into the publications and all that. So, I thought, okay, that must be great to be TAB Vice President. To stay with TAB, I put my hat in the ring. I didn’t think I was going to win, but I won, and so I became Vice President-elect of TAB, and then Vice President of TAB, and then Past President, 2015, 2016, 2017. In 2015, as Vice President of TAB, I had to appoint, I had to choose a treasurer, for TAB. It would be the assistant treasurer to become treasurer. I looked around and I said, gee, there has never been a woman, and there were a lot of very good candidates. But I picked one that became the first woman vice president, the first TAB treasurer that was a woman. She did a wonderful job, and everybody now recognized that. She was a wonderful treasurer. But again, it was not easy.

Hellrigel:

Who was she?

Moura:

She was Vice Dean of Research at Purdue University, Melba Crawford. She’s a professor at Purdue. Melba did a wonderful job. Of course, this is being recorded, and I shouldn’t say these things, but not everybody agreed with that. Everybody was saying we should have diversity in the positions and so forth, but when you come to say, okay, I’m going to pick this person, there are all these other reasons why you should not pick that person because there is this other one that is much better, more experienced, and blah, blah, blah. One lesson that I learned is that when you are in a position to make a difference you should not be afraid of doing it. It’s a risk, but you should do it. And more often than not, those are great exemplars to chance things, and I’m very, very happy. Actually, practically everybody I appointed also--it was not the first one, but I appointed a woman that was the chair of the Society Review Committee, and she also did a wonderful job.

Hellrigel:

Who was that woman?

Moura:

I would have go back and check. I’m sorry, and I apologize, but I am terrible with names.

Anyway, there were others like that that I did, and I was very happy. In 2016, when I was Vice President of TAB, of course I was a Board member. When I landed on the Board, I had been on the Board in 2012-2013, and three years later I come to the Board and the Board is obsessed with a constitutional amendment. The constitutional amendment that some in the Board want is to say our volunteers are very good, but really, IEEE is a corporation, a $500 million corporation. We should be managed by a Board that is a board of professional people, so the volunteers [IEEE members] will elect a body that is the assembly, and the assembly will then pick the directors. Currently, that’s not the way it is, or at that time. The IEEE membership votes for the members of the assembly which are the delegates, and the delegates, twenty members of the assembly, and these twenty members are all also Board members. Ten Division Directors and ten Region Directors.

Hellrigel:

Right, right.

Moura:

But in 2016, the president, the president-elect, the past president and part of the Board were obsessed that this was not right, that IEEE should have a Board not of thirty-three volunteers, but of the three presidents elected by the membership, and then only ten corporate members selected from companies, whatever, and they would be selected by the assembly. The membership would only vote for the delegates and not for the Board members, but that required an amendment. So, I came to the Board, I was Vice President of TAB, and I wanted this to be discussed in TAB. I brought this to discussion in TAB, and TAB was completely against it. Now, at the Board level, the corporate staff, the legal, and the presidents and all that, they didn’t want TAB to discuss it. They didn’t want me to present what TAB discussed. They didn’t want me to give TAB the feedback, and it created a very stressful situation. It was a division of one part of IEEE that said, no, we are a membership-driven organization. Let the members select the Board members, and the other part, the corporate part, the IEEE Board or part of the Board wanted, no, we want to have this thing, reorganize IEEE and do this. So, what happened was that the amendment was proposed for 2017, which by the way the membership did not approve the amendment in 2017, but this is 2016. In 2016, I put my hat forward for president-elect, and the IEEE Nominations and Appointments Committee put my name forward for IEEE Board, but IEEE board selects the slate for President-Elect to submit to the membership vote.

They didn’t select me, they selected two other very good volunteers. I said, okay, I’m done with this. I don’t need this. I’ll go home, but many of my colleagues said, José, you can’t do that because there was this big rift between TAB and the Board. We need you to go, and I said, well, but to go I need a petition and get 3,600 or some large number of signatures. I can’t do that, it’s not in my nature to go around and request people to sign a petition. They said, don’t worry, we’ll do it for you, and they did, so I became a petition candidate. I said, okay, if I’m going to be president then I’m going to have three major points. One is the financial transparency, to finish, to terminate the operation budget deficits. We are in 2017, and for the last seven, eight, nine years IEEE had operating deficits on the order of between $10 and $20 million. I wrote that in my statement back in Spring of 2017.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Moura:

In May 2017, the IEEE Board was prognosticating a deficit of $25 million. I became a petition candidate [for IEEE president] in that period of time. When I was being petitioned, I was saying, okay, we have to win this, so that was financial transparency and the deficits.

The second was we are a very large, diverse organization, so I defended diversity as being a big concern that IEEE should look at. Diversity is gender diversity, but it’s also professional diversity and industry. It’s also regional diversity, because you have people from Region 10, Region 9, and all Regions. They all should be well represented in every committee and every award committee. They should be well represented. That was my second issue.

That also coupled with the other issue which was that IEEE was looking only to their members, the paying members, and I thought that we should also serve the community, the technical community. So, we had about 420,000 members, but the technical committee that identifies with IEEE, the people that go, for example, to IEEE Xplore every year, they run into the 5 million people. So, it’s like one order of magnitude more. And I said, we should look not just at our members, but look broader. So, that was the second, the diversity, so the first was the financial, the second was the diversity. Oh, and I had a third one.

Hellrigel:

Oh, the budget deficit.

Moura:

Yes, that was the financial. The third one was transparency. It was to turn IEEE back to become a membership-driven rather than a corporate-driven organization. What I meant was to allow the IEEE committees to discuss the IEEE Board decisions or, or before IEEE Board made big decisions like let’s move into this amendment let the volunteers discuss that.

Hellrigel:

Okay, you want the members to be permitted to discuss these major issues and potential changes. The members.

Moura:

Actually, in all these three things that we did, we made a lot of progress when I was president.

Hellrigel:

What were some of your favorite trips when you were president? Did you do any fun things?

Moura:

When I was president-elect and president I travelled a lot, but as past-president, there was COVID, so I could not travel.

Hellrigel:

Right, right.

Moura:

By travelling through all Regions and many Sections as President-Elect and as President, I became much more aware of the other side of IEEE that I was not so much aware, which was the Regions and the Sections. As I told you, I founded the Portugal Section, but then all my activity was within Technical Activities. But as president-elect you have the chance to move around, to visit the Sections, and to meet and talk to people. That was tremendous, and I did a lot of travel during those two years. I met a lot of volunteers. I visited the countries in Region 10 and I visited countries in Region 9. For example, I visited Peru, Mexico, India, Japan, Singapore, Korea, and Hong Kong. I didn’t visit China. I visited Australia. I went to Africa, to South Africa. I went to Malta for Region 8 meetings in Malta. I visited the UK several times. In all those visits it was a pleasure to talk, to attend Section, Chapters, and Region meetings, and to talk to them, and then turn around and try to address their concerns. I came back to IEEE and worked with the staff, worked with the Board, and tried to address those issues, but some we could not. Some were left for Toshio Fukuda’s presidency, or for Kathy Land’s [Susan K. (Kathy) Land] presidency. But I’ll tell you, one of the big pleasures of being IEEE president was to come across the many Section meetings in the countries I mentioned as well as in Canada and the U.S. I went to Alabama, I went to California, I went to--I don’t know, Arizona Section meetings and Region meetings; it was always a pleasure. And meeting also women in engineering meetings, the young members.

Hellrigel:

Young Professionals at the Rising Star conference?

Moura:

Yes, and also a Region 8 young professionals meeting in Porto, Portugal. All those. That was for me maybe one of the more pleasurable things of being IEEE president.

Hellrigel:

What do you think was your biggest accomplishment as IEEE president?

Moura:

I won’t say two, I won’t say one, I’ll say three. Sorry.

Hellrigel:

Comment on as many as you want.

Moura:

I’ll say the financial transparency. We got it addressed, and when I was going around talking about financial transparency, people, many people, I told you many treasurers, IEEE treasurers, and Tom Siegert.

Hellrigel:

Thomas Siegert is on the IEEE staff. He is the Chief Financial Officer, so the financial director on the staff side.

Moura:

Everybody said, don’t talk about financial transparency. It seems that there is some funny business going around. I said, no, I’ll explain. It’s the negative operating [budgets and the gross revenues versus net revenues, Societies understanding how much comes in and where it is spent– So, ending them, the operating budget deficits, and having the Board approve the new financial system at the November 2019 Board meeting that was for me a big thing. By the way in 2018 and 2019, when I was President-elect and President, the Board operating budget ran a positive budget on the order of $30 million and then $50 Million or so—a shout out to Steve Welby that understood the need to reorganize the budgetary operations of IEEE. In a single year, we went from chronic deficits to a very healthy surplus, while having to divest from a very bad 2016 investment whose loss we had to absorb in 2018 and 2019.]

The second was on the diversity. As Vice President of TAB, I appointed an ad hoc in TAB to look at diversity and inclusion issues. I asked Andrea Goldsmith, she was a professor at Stanford at the time. Now she’s the dean at Princeton. I asked her, Andrea, we have a chance to make a difference. Do you mind doing this? She was a champion. She was chair of this ad hoc I appointed as TAB vice president, [but it was an ad-hoc that ended at the end of my TAB Vice-Presidency.] Kathy Land, when I was past president of TAB, the job was not still done within TAB, but Kathy Land was [TAB] president-elect at the time. I’m sorry, vice president TAB elect, and she said, José, don’t worry, I’ll finish it. She was able to have TAB approve a standing committee on diversity and inclusion, and the first time around it was chaired by Andrea. So, this we did at the TAB level. When I became IEEE president, I told you, diversity was for me a big thing. So, I went back to Andrea Goldsmith and said, Andrea, we did that at TAB, but now we can do that at the IEEE level. I appointed a committee, an ad hoc committee on diversity, inclusion, and equity, and professional ethics, and Andrea chaired that. The IEEE Board approved completely revamping a statement on diversity and new ethics principles.

[The Board approved the new IEEE ethics and a standing committee at the November 2019 Board meeting. This was a tour de force because not only did you need the Board to approve but also to change all the IEEE working documents. It took 2020 President Toshio Fukuda to reappoint the ad-hoc committee chaired by Goldsmith, and then again 2021 President Kathy Land to reappoint the committee and finish the job.]

Again, Kathy Land was the IEEE president-elect when I was past president, so the ad hoc that I appointed for diversity, inclusion, and the ethical, professional ethics is now a standing committee of the Board. It’s ad hoc only for one year. Standing committees live until whenever the Board decides to end them. Kathy was able at the Board level now to transform the ad hoc into a standing committee, and I think Andrea is the chair of that committee. I consider that a fresh air into IEEE. IEEE is at the forefront of the professional organizations in terms of diversity, equity, and professional ethics.

The other one was this transparency issue at the governance level. We also had the Board approve reorganizing the Election Oversight Committee to make sure that the different boards of IEEE can discuss things before the Board takes a position. The reason is that once the Board takes a position the directors are bound by that position, and they cannot argue it outside the Board. If they are against the position. By forcing the Board, if they are going to make a big reorganization, first they have to let the different boards of IEEE, including TAB, MGA, and whatever, have an opportunity to discuss before the Board takes the position. Okay? That was approved; that’s how it is now.

So, these three are major things, and I’ll say the fourth one was that thing of looking at IEEE not as a 400,000, but 4 million. Okay, let’s look outside our members to the whole community. IEEE adopted a position that we really are going--we called it a mobility strategy for IEEE that tries to engage community at large, and started with the IEEE app. So, we have the first IEEE app developed during my year as a proposal of an ad hoc that I proposed that I put in place in 2019. And, so maybe these four things are four things that I’m very proud of. The IEEE app is targeting anyone interested in reading any, say, IEEE Spectrum, can read it using the app, even if they are not members, let’s say. If they want to be related to IEEE and so forth, the app needs a lot of development; it has not yet been fully developed. But the counterpart to that is that IEEE gets to engage with the broader community, learn what are the things they want, and from all the data that they can collect through these interactions, maybe IEEE can design new services, new products to offer to the community. So, that’s the goal. It was only the kickoff in 2019

Hellrigel:

Right. I started my job at the IEEE History Center in early January 2016, and I’ve seen a lot of change at IEEE. Documenting the history is a challenge. I noticed there is considerable change and a lot of momentum, especially on diversity and global growth. To promote student membership there are special programs, including one that offered a 50 percent discount and others offer additional reduced membership fees. A lot of students joined in Region 10, so IEEE is increasingly and truly global now.

Moura:

Yes. IEEE now is basically 40 percent Americas, if you add Canada, U.S., and South America and Latin America, [you still fall under 50 percent and 50+ percent] is Region 8 and Region 10. It’s like 32 percent Region 10, 18 or 19 percent Region 8. It is no longer [majority] U.S. It’s no longer [only] North America.

IEEE Fellow advancement, conferences, publications

Hellrigel:

Another topic we should discuss is your election or promotion to IEEE Fellow and now IEEE Life Fellow. You became an IEEE Fellow in 1994.

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Your IEEE Fellow citation stated you became a fellow “for contributions to nonlinear filtering and model-based signal processing.”

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

They have officially labeled you for these technical contributions.

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Where were you when you found out you became an IEEE Fellow? Like they ask people where you when you found out you were an Academy Award nominee.

Moura:

I think it’s when I was at CMU, and they must have told me in November 1993. I am pretty sure I was somewhere at CMU reading my email, opening this email, and falling off the chair.

Hellrigel:

You did your happy dance?

Moura:

Yes, something like that.

Hellrigel:

Then you become an IEEE Life Fellow because you stick around long enough thus meeting the age and years of membership requirement.

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

What does being an IEEE Life Fellow mean to you?

Moura:

To tell you the truth, it means nothing. I don’t even know, unless you remind me, I think that IEEE Life Fellow means not paying dues at the end of the year.

Hellrigel:

Yes, I think so.

Moura:

It’s for free.

Hellrigel:

There is also the Life Member status, too.

Moura:

I think IEEE should be more choosy. If you can pay your membership fee, you should continue paying and offer the money that we don’t pay for membership to someone in a country in Africa or something and increase the membership there. It’s a great perk and I don’t say no I don’t want it. Of course, I would continue being a member anyway, and I’m very active yet. I’ve been active and the Board continues to ask me to do things. I haven’t been involved with any activity of the IEEE Life Fellows. I appreciate very much that they have a newsletter and I read their newsletter, but I read it as a member and not as an engaged volunteer.

Hellrigel:

There are some people who are more active in different things than others and there are many ways to become involved at IEEE

Moura:

Yes, exactly.

Hellrigel:

And it changes over time during one’s career and lifetime.

Moura:

Exactly.

Hellrigel:

Do you look forward to traveling again? Well, you said you were supposed to go to Europe.

Moura:

So, I have my siblings and my wife’s family, siblings, and parents, all in Portugal, so we go often to Portugal. We go over the summer and we go over the Christmas holidays. Last year, of course, that was not possible, but we already went this year over the summer. I also have a big relation with different universities in Portugal between Carnegie Mellon University and the universities in Portugal, so I also travel a lot on business, CMU business, to Portugal to engage with researchers and professors.

Hellrigel:

You founded that scholarship fund in Portugal? Is it a scholarship fund?

Moura:

No, it’s more than that, it is dual-degree programs. Yes, it provides support, fellowship support, for students to engage, to be students at Carnegie Mellon and students in a Portuguese university. Ph.D. students spend two years at CMU and three years at a university in Portugal, and they have co-advisors, two advisors, one from each. At the end they get a degree (master’s degree if in a Master Program, or a Ph.D. if they are doctoral students) from CMU and the partner Portuguese university. We also fund research projects, very large research projects, with a team from CMU, a team from a university in Portugal, and often a company, also. We sponsor visitors, six-month visits, from professors in Portugal to CMU, and from undergraduate students that come to CMU for research. It’s a very large project, and it has been going for fifteen years, so it has been going for a long time. It requires a lot of interaction with the professors in Portugal, so I keep traveling. I have lots of visits from people from Portugal to CMU, and then altogether, we have had 260 graduates in master’s programs. We also had five master’s programs that were dual degree between a university in Portugal and CMU. The students would spend one semester at CMU and two semesters in Portugal, and then they’d get the master’s dual degree, one from CMU and the other from the Portuguese university. We have 260-plus dual degree Master graduates. We no longer have those master’s programs, but we continue to have the dual degrees, Ph.Ds. We already have 120 over the fifteen years, so it’s an average of fifteen to twenty students per year. I’m sorry, ten students, 120 in, fifteen years; about nine or ten students per year. They stay, of course, for five years in the program. We more or less admit ten of those students. They’re spending two years at CMU, three years in Portugal, but of course, with the Zoom technologies, email and all sort of conference, WebEx, all sorts, they work together, professors at CMU with professors in Portugal, and the students. The student is like the glue for this partnership. By now about ninety dual degree Ph.D. graduates, all receiving a Ph.D. from CMU and a Ph.D. from a partner Portuguese university – in all we partner with nine major Portuguese universities. All this is to say that I travel a lot to Portugal.

Conferences, unfortunately, there was no travel last year. IEEE, we have in 2020 all the conferences virtually, and this year all conferences are virtual, so I attend conferences virtually. My students still present papers, but virtually. I’m eager to go back to face-to-face meeting, hopefully 2022.

One thing that happened during my IEEE presidency was that open access became a big thing, and IEEE, at the Board, we approved a new policy to launch fifteen open access journals. You have open access journal, for example, Open Access Transactions on Signal Processing is open access. Open Access Computer Transactions and Open Access Transactions on Communication are open access. It’s a completely independent journal with their own editorial board and their own EIC, so it’s not a hybrid journal. Our regular Transactions are hybrid. They accept open access and library-sponsored subscription model. The open access, the author pays for the paper to be published.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay, that’s right, the author has to pay a fee.

Moura:

IEEE had launched about twelve years ago, maybe, IEEE Access. I was in their first editorial board, the IEEE Access, which is an open access journal, and it’s a very broad journal. It’s like the IEEE Proceedings [Proceedings of the IEEE], it’s across all areas of IEEE. Then in 2019, during my IEEE presidency, we saw the writing on the wall that maybe the funding agencies were going to move to require that all their sponsored research be published in an open access journal, so we moved very fast to approving in TAB, and then to launch. Fourteen or fifteen open access Transactions were approved by TAB and the Board in 2019. It was very, very successful. Everybody in IEEE was very eager, very engaged, and that’s a big success. So, the first journals were January last year, 2020.

Hellrigel:

I know we’re running out of time. Is there anything you would have liked to have done as president of IEEE that you didn’t get to do?

Moura:

I would have liked to have moved IEEE definitely into what I’m calling a data organization, meaning IEEE has a wealth of data. IEEE Xplore, which is the technical repository of all our journals and conferences. IEEE conferences involved 500,000 to 600,000 individuals that come to our conferences every year. We have 420,000 members in 160-plus countries. But depending to who you talk to our community reaches the technical community of 4 million to 10 million professionals. IEEE should look at this as the biggest opportunity they have now, and if we could really engage with this 4 to 10 million people out there, So, develop an IEEE app that provides a service that people really want to use and interact with IEEE. IEEE starts learning what is it that these people really want and let me develop new services and new products that I call data-driven products. We gave the first small step. First of all, at the beginning when I talk to my Board and say, I started at the retreat in January. We had a retreat January 2019 in Portugal, and I started by saying we are not 420,000, we are a 4 million organization. People would laugh and they would call me the 4 million guy. Okay? My point is, if we looked in a much broader sense, you see technology has evolved, but we still call ourselves too much electrical engineering. We are computer science also, [and much broader, like physicists, medical doctors engaged with technology, or even some in the legal profession.] The computer science professionals are our core people also, so we have to be broad. Computer science people, [computer] professionals, have to look at IEEE and say, this is my professional home. Okay? But to do that you need to reorganize yourself and to find what is it that these people want, what really appeals to them. And what appeals to them is, is to use your cell phone to have access to everything, and to have free services.

Hellrigel:

Yes, free is good for the user, but that is a new direction and a different expectation.

Moura:

They don’t want to pay anything, right?

Hellrigel:

Right.

Moura:

So, you have to start thinking, how do I offer services that are interesting to these people, to these young professionals, that they don’t have to pay for? I have to find ways of making money out of those services paid by someone else.

Hellrigel:

Do you do this by sticking paid advertisements in the free products?

Moura:

[May be, but there are other alternatives, companies may be interested in learning what our broad community is interested in to advance their own products or services.] That’s what I hope that I would have started. It was a very small step, the IEEE app. But the IEEE app is still not there because it doesn’t offer services. I am a member, and I started IEEE app, but I never go to IEEE app. I receive everyday emails from other organizations that I read because they tell me things that I’m interested in reading. I go to apps that I’m interested in, and I don’t pay anything for this, by the way. Somehow these other people are finding ways of making money because they keep developing [their apps or sending me interesting emails that I read]. That’s what I think I would have liked. I was so successful with the diversity and with the financial transparency and all that, but I was not as successful [with the data and the IEEE app] because the Board [or the staff] did not buy into this, and even the organization itself has not said, okay, gee, this is the direction we have to move. It’s going to be slow. Maybe this year. The coming president Ray Liu I think is also very much into this, so maybe we will move the needle forward.

Hellrigel:

The IEEE president has a one-year term, and one year is a really short time period.

Moura:

It is short.

Hellrigel:

Did we not cover any topic you would like to cover?

Moura:

So, Mary Ann, why don’t we stop here, and let’s maybe plan a half-hour discussion in a week.

Hellrigel:

Another meeting, okay.

Moura:

A half-an-hour discussion in a week or after the break. Whatever fits your schedule.

Hellrigel:

I’m flexible. I’m not going anywhere.

Moura:

So, maybe next week?

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Moura:

We can find a time, and we say, no, we already covered everything, or maybe I forgot to mention this, or you may have some other questions.

Hellrigel:

Cool.

Moura:

Let me finish with two comments. One is the history. When I was president of IEEE Signal Processing Society and I was not the only one doing that, all the presidents before me, and Mercy Kowalczyk in particular, she was executive director, we have great respect for the IEEE History Center. The IEEE Signal Processing Society, as least until I was president, every year would contribute to the History Center. I hope that IEEE Signal Processing Society continues to contribute because we had a lot of respect for what you guys do. Okay?

Hellrigel:

Thank you.

Moura:

So, that’s the first. The second is, I’m really honored that you decided to stick up with me and waste two hours and a half of your time talking to me.

Hellrigel:

This has been fun for me.

Moura:

I really appreciate that.

Hellrigel:

No, this is fun. I like talking to the big fish to find out what’s going on, and when I can travel again, I look forward to meeting more members. Yes, in 2019 I was on the road sixty days for IEEE.

Moura:

You beat me, you beat me.

Hellrigel:

I was away from home sixty days for IEEE because all these people wanted to talk about setting up oral history programs. Jessica Perry, a staff member at the IEEE Signal Processing is just a joy to work with on this new initiative on oral history. You were on their list, and this has been fun, sir. I know you have to go. I’ll be in touch, and we’ll pick a time for next week.

Moura:

Okay. Thank you, Mary Ann.

Hellrigel:

Thank you.

Moura:

And sorry for my computer going down in the meeting.

Hellrigel:

Oh, no, no. I was just happy mine didn’t go down. Mine’s going on seven years old now.

Moura:

Okay.

Hellrigel:

Take care, sir.

Moura:

See you, Mary Ann. Talk to you next week. Thank you.

Hellrigel:

Yes, sir.

Moura:

Bye-bye.

Hellrigel:

Bye-bye.

Moura:

Bye.

[END Part 1 – 6 December 2021]

[START Part 2 – 13 December 2021]

Hellrigel:

Today is December 13, 2021. This is Mary Ann Hellrigel with Dr. José M. F. Moura, and we’re here for part two of his oral history, and we’re going to continue where we left off last week. Thank you, sir.

Moura:

Thank you very much, Mary Ann.

Youth hobbies

Hellrigel:

I think when we left off, we were focusing on some of your contributions as IEEE president. I wanted to take one step back to your youth. There were a couple of questions I forgot to ask. Did you have any hobbies or anything when you were young such as making a ham radio and things like that?

Moura:

No, I really didn’t have any hobbies, maybe, except reading.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Moura:

Mostly reading.

Hellrigel:

Reading.

Moura:

Reading at the beach.

Hellrigel:

Staying out of trouble.

Moura:

Or practicing some sports, but not really hobbies.

Hellrigel:

Oh. What, what sports did you like?

Moura:

Oh, because this was in Africa, the two major sports that I practiced were, well, one was golf.

Hellrigel:

Golf.

Moura:

Yes, I played golf throughout [junior, middle and] high school, but then that’s it. I never played again except more recently with my kids. They invite me, and of course I’m a terrible player now. And horse riding.

Hellrigel:

Oh, horse riding.

Moura:

Yes, that gives you the nature of the type of life I had back then. It was a very relaxed way, it was a small city, and the people could move from one place to the other very fast. So, there was this opportunity, and that’s what I did.

Hellrigel:

Do you miss any of those activities?

Moura:

I do, but I never practiced them again consistently well. I never rode a horse again since I was a boy, and golf, as I said, I tried to get my kids to play when they were at home, but they didn’t, and only much more recently. I didn’t practice either, and much more recently they started playing or trying to play golf, so they challenge me to come and play. But of course, it’s not anything like what it used to be.

Hellrigel:

Yes. Then when you got to Portugal, and grad school you didn’t have time for any of that.

Moura:

Right, exactly.

Hellrigel:

You were too busy with books.

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Have you visited Mozambique since you left?

Moura:

Yes, we visited twice, my wife and me. She had never been in Mozambique. We went there in 2014 because the American ambassador in Portugal, actually, he organized a group of people to go there, people that had an interest in Portugal, and in Mozambique, and an interest in the U.S. He came across me and said, you fill up these three things, so why don’t you join us? It was a very nice visit; that was in 2014. Then when I was president of IEEE 2019, I went on a mission to South Africa, and of course we fly to Johannesburg. Johannesburg is one hour away from Maputo which is the capital of Mozambique, so I hopped on a plane and went for a day or two to Mozambique in 2019. Both visits were great, and I’m looking forward to my third visit.

Hellrigel:

After the current plague, the COVID pandemic?

Moura:

Yes, yes. That’s exactly what it is. One needs to wait to be able to reconnect with others.

Education, ABET

Hellrigel:

Oh, good. That’s good. Yes, I think everybody’s waiting to see what’s going to happen soon enough. Yes, those were just a couple of little things I remembered after we ended last time. We were talking about your interests. One of your key interests always has been education.

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I guess you still teach now, so what classes to you teach?

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

You teach two classes per year?

Moura:

Yes. I teach one class in the fall and one class in the spring. Usually, it’s an undergraduate class, a large class, a sophomore class, 100-plus students. We are usually what we call co-teachers, so we have two faculty members teaching and a large pool of teaching assistants. Then in the other semester, usually in the spring, I teach a graduate-level course with much fewer students, a more advanced Ph.D. and master’s level course.

Hellrigel:

Okay, and this is one of your key interests. We were also talking about one of the programs you started trying to continue education in Portugal.

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I didn’t know if you wanted to talk a bit more about your interest in education.

Moura:

Absolutely. It’s a program that started in 2006, so it goes now for fifteen years. We introduced what’s called dual degrees. Dual degrees means that the students get two degrees, get a degree from Carnegie Mellon and a degree from our partner institution, partner university in Portugal. The program is totally open in the areas of computer science, engineering, and engineering and public policy. In these three very broad areas we partner with many schools, many universities in Portugal. We had in this program [five] masters dual degree [programs], what we call dual degree professional master, so those were a three-semester master programs in advanced technology areas [like information networking, cyber security, human computer interaction, even entertainment technology, but also] public policy, [or entrepreneurship], and [electrical] engineering [and computer science related] areas. The students spend one semester at CMU and two semesters in Portugal. The classes can be taught at CMU or in Portugal. We call them vetted classes, so they are like CMU courses being taught by colleagues in Portugal. The [professors from Portugal] spend one semester or one year at CMU. They co-taught the course with some CMU faculty, and then they returned to their institution in Portugal. The students take these three semesters. At the end, they get a degree from CMU, a master’s degree, and a master’s degree from the university in Portugal. We have the same for Ph.Ds. So, the Ph.D. is also dual degrees. They spend up to two years at CMU and up to three years in Portugal. They have two advisors, one at CMU and one in a partner institution in Portugal. They have to fulfill all the requirements of each of the partners, all the requirements for a Ph.D. degree at CMU, and all the requirements for a Ph.D. degree at the partner institution, but the programs are structured in such a way that many of those requirements are performed in one of the institutions and the other institution accepts the requirement. As I mentioned, there are two thesis advisors, so one on each side, and that’s very good because this fosters the partnerships in research and so forth between teams from CMU and teams from Portugal. We have these dual degree programs. We graduated about 260 professional masters’ with these dual degrees. We have more than ninety Ph.D. students that have gone through this dual degree Ph.D. program. We have currently thirty-four in the pipeline, so, in different stages; eighteen of them are actually this semester at CMU. Besides these education programs, we also sponsor research projects, and overall, we have sponsored about seventy-five research projects. The research projects involve a team from CMU, a team from at least two research institutions in Portugal, and in the last few years they also have involved a company. It’s to foster the relations, high-quality research, but also in the context of some social problem that impacts the real world. [Through the program we also identified and trained great leaders. For example, João Barros and then João Claro, both young professors at the university in Porto. Barros accepted in 2009, early in the partnership, to become Director of the Partnership in Portugal. What happened is that two years into the Program he visited me at CMU. We are in my office. He has strong opinions and starts telling me about so many things that the Program should do better. Now this young guy is telling me, this senior person, how I should do it. So, a few months later I had to propose to the funding agency in Portugal a name for Director of the Program in Portugal. I proposed João Barros, who, of course had no seniority. But he turned out to be a great leader. Fast forward a few years, Barros goes to found his very successful start-up with technology from a CMU-Portugal project that he had started before becoming Director. Later, we chose another young faculty, now João Claro to become Director of the initiative in Portugal. He comes in with ideas to develop a new initiative to support early phase start-ups. A big success. João Claro is now President of the, possibly largest, research institution in Portugal. Let me just refer a third person, of many others, Nuno Nunes, then a professor of computer science at one of the smallest universities in Portugal, University of Madeira. He not only launched the dual degree master program in human computer interaction between Madeira and CMU, but also a new by now quite large and well-funded research institution in Madeira and doing so essentially started a department of computer science in Madeira, recruiting excellent faculty from all over the world. Many other leaders became academic leaders or founders of companies or had great success in research.] A byproduct of the program has been the startups, the companies that were spin-offs of research products. We have very successful ones, at least twelve or thirteen, of which two of them already reached the size of what they call unicorns, so valuations in the capital markets of over $1 billion dollars. Two others are on their way to that, and these were all spin-offs of the programs--

Hellrigel:

One billion dollars.

Moura:

A billion dollars. A billion-dollar valuation.

Hellrigel:

That’s extremely successful.

Moura:

Yes. That was extremely successful, and we were very, very happy, and we just hope that a few more reach that level.

Hellrigel:

Are these companies founded or based in the U.S.?

Moura:

No, they are all in Portugal, except one that is headquartered and incorporated in Germany. This one was founded by a group of four master’s students. It was a master’s program that we had a dual degree master’s program in Human Computer Interaction at the University of Madeira, [as I mentioned founded by Nuno Nunes]. It was a master’s project, and it had four students. I guess two were from Germany, one she was from Portugal, and the fourth one I don’t remember. They did a very nice project of microfinancing. They went to Mozambique, sponsored by a [Portuguese] company, actually, a Madeira company, to develop microfinancing for women in Mozambique. That was their master’s project. When they returned, they were very successful, they graduated, and then they decided to pursue it. This was maybe ten years ago. They incorporated in Germany, so they continued, and now they are a very successful company that’s called Mambu. I think their valuation is actually several billion dollars, not just one.

The other company is Feedzai. Feedzai is also the outgrowth of two faculty members, [Paulo Marques and Pedro Bizarro,] from the University of Coimbra in Portugal, [and a third colleague], and they came to CMU, spent time. They were involved in the professional master [dual degree program in software engineering, they spent six months or a year each at CMU teaching and doing research with CMU colleagues and pursuing joint projects, and then they returned to Portugal and they said, we have this technology] why can’t we do a startup since at CMU so many people do startups? They did a startup and that startup initially--well, the technology was to identify anomalies, events, events in software events. For example, the power grid. There was a failure on the power grid, they could determine that, and then they switched gears, and instead of doing that in the energy field or in the telecom field they did that in the financial markets. What they are doing is identifying fraud detection. They are doing fraud detection for credit cards, financial transactions, and so forth. It turned out that they were extremely successful. They have like Citibank, all the major bank credit cards, Visa, MasterCard, and so forth, as customers. They were very successful. They are incorporated in Portugal, and except for Mambu, all the other companies, have all the engineering in Portugal, and for marketing, and they may have teams all over the world. Yes, they were very successful, and we are very happy, and the sponsor [of the Program is also very happy].

All the sponsorship is from the Portuguese National Science Foundation, [except the dual degree Master Programs that were supported by three Portuguese companies and by the Government of Madeira. This partnership between CMU and the nine Portuguese universities is a very expensive program, so it’s the only way that we could set up a program that included dual degree Ph.Ds. and dual degree masters and these projects and so forth.] Then the outcomes were very good, so I think we made the point to the Foundation, and the Foundation continues supporting the program.

Hellrigel:

Another goal of the program was to produce people that could teach in Portugal?

Moura:

Yes, yes. But we didn’t restrict the program to Portuguese students, so the students are recruited all over the world. In the first ten years, actually, it was dominated by students from all over the world, and very few from Portugal. Now we have made a more concerted effort of recruiting from Portugal, so we have a better share, maybe 40 percent of the students now are coming from Portugal. What that means is that many students after graduating, actually find jobs in all the high-tech companies all over the world. They find jobs in universities outside Portugal, and some, of course, in Portugal. But still, it’s very effective because it creates networks, networks of excellence, and so it connects people back in Portugal in the companies, creates opportunities, and all that. It’s not a requirement that people stay in Portugal after graduation.

Hellrigel:

Do you get people from around the world asking your advice and your colleagues’ advice about replicating your program?

Moura:

Sorry? I didn’t get the question.

Hellrigel:

Since your program is successful, do people ask for advice about creating a version in their own country?

Moura:

Yes. Actually, the program has been replicated at CMU. They’re having attempts, but I’ll tell you, this is a very expensive program. You need to find someone with a big vision at the partner country because a question that people ask in Portugal, for example, is why is it that we are sponsoring an American university? Why are we giving resources to an American university?

Hellrigel:

Sure.

Moura:

So, you have to have vision people that can dare to do that and have faith in the results. Then you have to deliver results because if you don’t deliver the results the programs will not succeed, and it will not be renewed. Of course, these programs can be terminated with six months’ warning.

Hellrigel:

Ah, that can create a lot of pressure to succeed.

Moura:

They have to be continuously successful so that the funding agent finds that it’s worth to continue funding. We have a lot of questions. When we started these dual degree programs, this is different from joint degrees. Joint degrees means two universities get together and they give a single degree which lists both universities. We do a dual degree, so the student does get two independent degrees, has two degrees, of course, awarded because the student completed the requirements of each of the degrees separately. But, for example, as I said, some of these requirements we accept as partners, we accept that the student performed at the other institution. For example, we accept that the Ph.D. thesis is the same, okay. It’s not two Ph.D. theses; it’s a single Ph.D. thesis. This involved a lot of handshaking agreements, and memorandums of understanding between the institutions. At the beginning, it was not easy either because how come I’m going to allow that other university to use my requirements? How am I going to recognize that the student does something at the other university and not from my university, and I’m agreeing for that to contribute to my degree? All that was overcome because people have vision on both sides.

Hellrigel:

How about an organization like ABET [Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology] and curriculum accreditation for your program? You also had to work with them?

Moura:

ABET, as far as I know, it does not, accredit graduate-level, post-graduate programs.

Hellrigel:

Oh, okay.

Moura:

But for example, at CMU there is another type of accreditation which is I think called the Middlesex accreditation, or something. There is some organization that is like several states of the U.S., maybe you slice the U.S. in four or five areas. Then there is some organization. So, at CMU we had to accredit these programs, so we had to explain why you’d count as a fulfilled requirement something that the student did at the other partner institution. We had to go through that, which is also good because it’s a proof of quality to an independent body. You have to show that you are not watering down your requirements, and that’s a very important thing. Also, exactly because of that, any requirement that is on the other side, you have to have people on this side that is satisfied that the standards are met, okay? That’s the way also to engage faculty on both sides, because they say, my degree is on the line, so I better engage with the other side. So, all this is like a puzzle, you need the pieces to work together so that it’s successful

Hellrigel:

When you were president of IEEE, how did that impact all your other interests? I imagine someone had to take over some of your responsibilities at CMU and the program in Portugal?

Moura:

When I was president, my university did something that I didn’t expect they would do because I did not ask. They recognized it and they gave me like a sabbatical, so I didn’t teach.

The program I continued managing, and all my research I continued handling it, but I didn’t have to teach, and that was the only way that I could do the job. At that time, I was commuting because in 2019 my wife was already living in New York, so I was commuting from New York to Pittsburgh. Basically, I’d go there often to meet with my grad students, manage the CMU Portugal program, and all these things. But I spent a lot of time in New York, so I would go every day that I was in New York to the IEEE office on 3 Park Avenue. I spent many, many days, at the New York office and I came to know many of the people, the Spectrum, [Legal,] and others that work at the office.

Hellrigel:

How did you like the IEEE office at 3 Park Avenue? It’s pretty fancy.

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

When I’d go in there to set up the museum exhibits, I noticed the differences compared to the IEEE Operations Center in Piscataway, New Jersey.

Moura:

Yes, very different, and very nice. I loved it. I loved it. My office was on the 17th floor, a corner office with a beautiful view of New York. I would admire all the exhibits that you did there. I think you did quite a few in 2019 because when I started there was not many exhibits. Then during that year lots of things showed up. I’m assuming that you were very active in 2019.

Hellrigel:

Yes, I put them in the lobby, and then along the wall.

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

We’re expanding it now, putting in a few more cases. I have to be creative given the layout and the size of the cases. Some cases on the wall are very narrow at only three inches deep. Afterall, what I say is we are a History Center that does exhibits, we are not a museum.

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

People have liked that, and we also got new exhibits at the Operations Center. I rotate some and others are more semi-permanent or at least longer term.

Moura:

Okay.

Hellrigel:

Karen Bartleson was IEEE president when Awards installed the Medal of Honor Wall, the interactive exhibit in the basement of the Operations Center in Piscataway, New Jersey. I installed an exhibit about the IEEE Medal of Honor and the Edison Medal in conjunction with the Medal of Honor Wall.

Moura:

Okay.

Hellrigel:

There’s been some attempt to bring more history into the visibility as people come into the Operations Center and the office at 3 Park.

Moura:

Whenever I had visitors at the New York office people liked very much to see the exhibits.

IEEE, history and the future

Hellrigel:

One of the topics we were going to talk about was history, and I guess your interest in history, and maybe what role it plays in an organization like IEEE, maybe remembering what it’s done and what it can do.

Moura:

Yes. I think it’s very important, and of course, IEEE by now, if you count from the origins of the two sister organizations, it’s well over 100 years. Even since the fusion of the two it’s more than fifty years now, right? It’s 1963 or something. Yes.

Hellrigel:

Yes, the AIEE and the IRE merged in 1963 to create IEEE.

Moura:

It’s very important because it chronicles the technology and the role that engineers, and particularly electrical and computer and electronics and all that, have played. Also, I think that it can play a role regarding the vision for the future, so it’s not just looking back. It could also be used to look forward because the people in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and so forth, when they decide getting together, and they decide to start the meetings, groupings, and journals, they are usually predicting an evolution of technology. They are putting together some incipient effort that then grows, and in most of the cases, very successful. I look at history also as a way of building the future, actually, telling us how to do it for the future. I could talk about the way technology in my own field of signal processing evolved. The last time we talked a little bit about how I became involved with the Society in the late 1980s, because the field really as a group, as a society, it started in 1948, but of course, the field was already there, but the recognition of the technical people of the time, they realized, let’s start a group, and that group was dominated by what we call deterministic signal processing, discrete signal processing in the 1950s and 1960s with computers and digital world so forth became very much dominated by them. That was really at the roots of the society in the 1970s when the conferences started, the journals evolved, and so forth. But they start having a shift, it started in maybe late 1970s and the 1980s when the signal processing professionals start attracting others, and the conference, I guess, started running itself [in new areas, and new workshops, and new technical committees]. I was part of some of the early efforts there of creating what we call the technical committees inside the Society that went beyond the traditional ones, traditional ones of acoustics and audio, of speech, then of imaging processing. Then we start having theory and methods, statistical signal processing, sensor and array processing, and later biomedical imaging, and other things. Then what is the name, machine learning technical committee, and so forth.

Hellrigel:

Oh, yes.

Moura:

That’s exactly what I’m saying. We had a history. When the Society was fifty years old in 1998, if you go back to that history, which is very much as history is very much the founders and the origins, it’s very much dominated by the digital signal processing. The statistical side, the noise side and so forth, is starting to become a reality [within the society only in the 1980s and then 1990s.] If you go now, you’d find that our journals grew from in the 1970s when it was basically one. Then it split in two, then three came along, four, and now we are seven or eight or even nine journals. You will see that it covers areas that didn’t even exist ten years, twenty years ago. The statistical side, the noise side, the non-deterministic side is a main component of that history, and that really happens in the 1980s and 1990s and so forth.

Hellrigel:

How did this growth impact the functioning of the IEEE Signal Processing Society? You have these new committees. Were there any growing pains?

Moura:

As usual, you do, but the Society has always been very analytical in terms of its management and very well managed. We had a very effective executive director, Mercy Kowalczyk, she joined in maybe 1992, 1993, so when the Society started growing, she was like the interface with IEEE. She knew how to function inside IEEE and with the volunteers, all very good leaders. As we would create these alternative technical committees and all this, what happened was that we always tried to collect the best practices, existing best practices, not just from our Society but from others. The new committees would always adopt those best practices. For example, I remember that maybe in 2003 or 2004, they asked me to look at--and this also goes to the fact of the growth and being aware of where technology goes. So, there was a point in maybe 2004, 2005, I don’t remember, the president of the IEEE Signal Processing Society said, José, do you mind chairing this committee that’s going to look at the speech and audio because we feel that the Society is missing out on opportunities. On the other hand, the volunteers involved in speech and audio, mostly speech, let’s say, at that time, the concern was with speech, they think that the Society is not reflecting their interests.

Hellrigel:

Okay.

Moura:

[I chaired the committee, by the way appointed by then President of the Society Fred Mintzer, must have been 2005, and the committee produced a number of recommendations, which, for example, led to the journal of transactions on speech to become transactions on speech and language technology, which broadened very much beyond the techniques that until that time maybe were dominant within the Signal Processing Society, but others wanted to pull the work into other directions that were becoming prevalent in the real world. The Society adopted them and went that way, and the Technical Committee on Speech became the Technical Committee on Speech and Language, and Language Technologies and all that.] When you do that, you become aware that it’s very important that you don’t stay still. We created along the way other technical committees, and we would make sure that they were populated by people that were very dynamic and very involved in that, and we would give them the power to empower them to make it happen, basically. It was not like top-down. It was a response to what people were saying.

The other thing I wanted to say in terms of your question, and again, this happened also when I was president [elect of the signal processing society as a consequence of the work of the committee I had chaired about the speech problems, it was felt that the Society should review the technical committees every five years, and] we instituted the review of the technical committees every five years. Oh, and now it was the outgrowth of that committee that I chaired that we felt what this means is that technical committees need to be challenged and reviewed every so often, so they don’t stay still. Speech had been--you’d have these people there, but the way the Technical Committee was formed, the power structure and all that, did not allow it to move, so we instituted this five-year review, [instituted three-year terms for the technical committee members, all being elected by the technical committee membership]. All the technical committees of the Signal Processing Society are reviewed every five years, and the review means that the volunteers are challenged to say where do they want to go and reflect on the previous five years. Did you produce activity that justifies you continuing being a technical committee? Who are the leaders? Are you open to new leadership, to new blood, and so forth? Where are you going? Where do you want to go in the next five years? Are you structured in the right way to achieve those goals? I think that was very good. I think this is the way this particular society has grown and kept managing well the aspirations and the evolution of the technology. It was a response to what people were saying.

Hellrigel:

Right. One of the buzz phrases, emerging technologies.

Moura:

Yes, yes.

Hellrigel:

Have other societies and technical councils within IEEE followed this pattern and learned from the efforts of the IEEE Signal Processing Society?

Moura:

Yes, I know that many societies have technical committees, and I don’t know, I’m not familiar with and I have not been involved with other technical societies. I don’t know, for example, if they reviewed their technical committees, but at the IEEE level, at the TAB level, Technical Activities Board, societies are also reviewed every five years and journals are reviewed every five years. So, there are two exercises at the TAB level that reviews societies and reviews the journals, so societies have to reflect on what they did in the last five years. Are they still updated in terms of technologies in their areas of interest? Are they managing their resources? Are they giving opportunity to new blood, to new volunteers, to new members? Where do they want to go? Do they have plans to grow or to redirect their field of interest, if that makes sense. I don’t know particular societies, but I think that at least at the TAB structure, at the TAB there is this reflection and this continuing reviewing of our own activities and making sure that they are being pursued and managed well.

Hellrigel:

In regard to SPS [the IEEE Signal Processing Society], how has the global growth and more members of IEEE outside of Canada and North America, how has that impacted the Society?

Moura:

I don’t know the numbers now, but I would guess that more than 50 percent of our membership, of the membership of SPS, is outside the North American. There is a lot of interest in Asian countries and in Europe, so my guess is that Signal Processing Society has followed the IEEE demographics, and 50 percent or more are outside the U.S. Yes, I’m pretty sure. SPS has grown and is between 16,000 and 17,000, so it’s the fourth society. I think that it has the potential to grow much, much bigger.

Hellrigel:

What do you think some of the future goals might be for SPS now that you’re one of the senior statesmen?

Moura:

I think that SPS hasn’t stood still, but SPS, the conferences, the workshops, the journals, have to follow some of the very strong new areas. New areas are coming from learning. This is not just machine learning, it’s learning in general, artificial intelligence, automation, so the predominance of data. The world is really dominated by data, data science, to analyze data all across the pipeline. It’s not just the algorithms themselves, but also the collection of the data, and cleaning of the data, the preprocessing of the data, then the processing of the data. Then closing the loop so you inferred something from the data, and then that that data is going to act on the real world. I think that there is a lot of potential to grow.

The other is the interdisciplinary team, is signal processing, is the silent or invisible technology behind many of the advances. We need to continue to be highly tied to the real world, so it’s not just very theoretical analysis, it has to be also deployed in the real world, the methods [need to be tested with real data and in the real world solving real world problems of great impact. So, the assumptions, the high-performance algorithms, they have to be realistic and reflect the real world.]

I think these are all opportunities. For example, when we set the biomedical imaging maybe ten or fifteen years ago, I was one of the volunteers that set up the technical committee on the bioimaging and the medical signal processing. Then we thought we need to connect with the medical doctors, radiologists, and so forth, so we launched a new conference, the International Conference on Biomedical Imaging. I don’t remember the exact name now. But because we wanted to bring the “practitioners,” we teamed up with another society, with the EMBS [IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society]. For example, at some other point we also set up, and this is also in the early 2000s, when I was, I think, vice president for publications of SPS, [actually possibly in 1999 and led in the Society by Rich Cox,] it was recognized that we needed to get into the field of multimedia and start a new journal, a new effort on multimedia. We set up a technical committee on multimedia. We set up a journal, but we recognized that there were other societies at IEEE that have the common interest in that area, so we teamed up with the Computer Society, with the Circuits and Systems Society, and with the Communications Society. Together, we launched the journal on multimedia with an executive committee. I was part of that executive committee in the 2000s. I think that’s the same thing here. We have to recognize that many of these opportunities are shared with others, so we have to partner with the others.

There are opportunities where IEEE doesn’t have a strong presence. For example, in the AI area, which I think is squarely in the Signal Processing Society interests, in the Computer Society interests, and several other societies’ interest. We don’t have a consistent effort on that area, and we are leaving it basically to [AAAI and] ACM [Association for Computing Machinery] which is a partner, which is a sister society of IEEE. [AAAI] is dominating there, and we, IEEE, should have a more consistent effort in these areas. This means it doesn’t belong to any specific society, it belongs to several societies because they share common interests, so you see, these are areas. For example, AI today is an all-encompassing area. It’s very broad; anything that has automation, anything that has “intelligence,” inference, automatic inference, automatic interventions and so forth. Now, you cannot do it only with SPS alone, and if you do it in signal processing it’s going to be a very narrow interpretation. It could still be so much broader. People that come to your own initiatives will be narrow-minded too, and so it won’t have the impact that you find that [AAAI and] ACM are having with some of their conferences. I think that we have to realize that it’s good to have narrow focus efforts like technical committees on X, Y, and Z, and the new area comes along, you create another technical committee, but you also need to recognize that there are areas that are areas that cut across societies. The Technical Activities Board has to move into that direction as a start, rather than launching new societies. It has to start maybe combining societies, or at least launching very strong efforts that cut across them and have conferences that are not from any particular society but are the convergence of several societies. That’s what we did with the journal on multimedia, which is a very successful journal. The initiative might have come from us, from SPS, but at the time we recognized there are others that had interest. So, let’s team up.

Hellrigel:

To use business language, there’s a lot of talk of the silos or distinct separate entities that do not or chose not to interact

Moura:

Yes, actually.

Hellrigel:

But as you said, maybe it has to come from the TAB end to take control. They would also need the power from the Board and the IEEE president to make it happen, because everything is so society-driven, correct?

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

That’s a part of the frustration I hear a little bit from you, to think broadly.

Moura:

The Board cannot come top-down, but the Board can create incentives. They could create incentives, but I think TAB has the energy and has the power. The leaders need to recognize that, and more and more are. For example, when I say the Board can create incentives--for example, when I was IEEE president, 2019, open access became a major issue. That was because in Europe there was a committee at the European Union level, and they put forward a proposal that said that all research that was sponsored by any government money in Europe would need to be published in an open access channel. For them, open access meant a journal with an independent editorial board, and where there could be no papers published. The subscription model is the other model where patrons do not pay and the libraries pay a subscription. IEEE had been discussing open access for many, many years. I wrote an editorial on open access to the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine in 2008, and I called it the elephant in the room, but whenever I raised the issue in the PSPB board, I got shut out. No, open access is a danger to IEEE, and so forth. We did have some small steps, and we created what’s called hybrid journals, [when Fred Mintzer was Vice President for TAB, jointly with PSPB, I think the PSPB Vice President was David Hodges,] which means you could publish an open access article in any of the transactions, but you pay through the nose, and of course no one wanted to do that.

In 2018. when I was IEEE president [elect, the president Jim Jefferies created an ad-hoc of which I was part to look at open access, and then in 2019 when I was president,] we were faced with this decision by this European Union which might be followed by other agencies in the U.S., and maybe in China. Who knows? We [helped Societies and TAB] create [in 2019] from scratch fourteen new open access journals with independent editorial boards, everything. What did the Board do? I was president. The journals usually belong to Societies, so we didn’t go to the Societies and say you have to do this. No, we went and worked with TAB, created the joint committee with TAB, an ad hoc committee that I appointed and my predecessor [Jim Jefferies] also appointed. This committee worked to develop plans to make the study to figure out the cost to launch new open access journals. Its financial incentives for Societies to do so, and then fourteen societies bought into it. Fourteen journals were launched by the end of 2019. So, that’s what I’m saying; you cannot go and say you have to do it because then nobody does. But you can foster the discussion, then create incentives, and show how to launch this effort.

The same thing could be done, for example, at conference levels. The Board could say, okay, we do need these new types of conferences, let’s create a committee with TAB and the Conference Committee of TAB, and start discussing and creating incentives for a conference that bridges these new technologies, and have completely different formats. I think that the Board can do these types of things, but it cannot go and tell them in TAB do a conference on X; nobody will do it. I think TAB is realizing these things and they are discussing. I don’t know if the Board is doing that like we did in open access, but these are the types of activities we should be doing. I’m pretty sure that’s what we will be doing in the near future.

Hellrigel:

Right. It’s interesting because while open access may have been discussed earlier, it seems to have been implemented near the time of the COVID pandemic when they had to spin to the virtual conferences. Do you think that they may still be reeling from these two significant changes? There has been much talk about are the finances and where we do we stand now as the COVID pandemic wanes a bit. I think with open access they were afraid of losing the revenue stream.

Moura:

Yes, yes. There is a very good example, you know, of Kodak. Kodak invented the digital camera. They were afraid, and because they were afraid, they lost both their markets at the time, the film, and then the digital camera. That’s the example we keep bouncing around in IEEE saying, in the early 2000s the same argument was around with IEEE Xplore. People were saying we have a great business with paper, libraries subscribe to all our journals, and we ship to them all these thousands of pages every year. If we go electronic, people will start reproducing for free, and there goes our business because you can buy the copy and then make dozens of electronic copies, and that’s it. Well, the fact is, that didn’t happen, and the other way happened is that we created the most successful digital library in our areas of interest. We dominate the market. We have 95 or 90-whatever percentage, a very high percentage in the electrical engineering, computer engineering, and I can even say computer science, even with ACM. We have a tremendous presence, and multiplied by 10 or 100 our business, really. It’s a risk, but it’s also a risk if you don’t do it, because someone will do it.

The conferences, you are absolutely right that COVID made us experiment with a new model of conference which is the online conferences, which if you asked in 2019 and said let’s try new modes of conferences, and if you mentioned online conference they’ll laugh at you and say we are going to lose all our business. They’ve become very successful, actually, so people are discussing how to do both things, the traditional one and the new. For example, ICASSP 2020 [IEEE Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing] was in May 2020, and COVID happened in March of that year, so in two months they had to switch. ICASSP usually has the number of participants somewhere between 2,000 and 2,500; they had 16,000 participants.

Hellrigel:

Wow.

Moura:

16,000, okay? So, that means something, and I think that we have to live up to the new great opportunity, not challenge the new opportunity.

Hellrigel:

Right, and it’s an opportunity for people who cannot, chose not to, or cannot afford to attend the conference in person.

Moura:

My main concern is if we’re missing the new technical areas. Sorry, you were going to say something.

Hellrigel:

Well, yes, the new technical areas could be a great way of starting a new conference as you previously mentioned the potential for new conferences, publications, groups, and collaboration. I don’t know if it’s cheaper, but now that you have this platform and you could start virtually and then build in person. I don’t know which way the future’s going to go, but that seems to be a way to start right now due to the pandemic and obstacles to travel and meet in person.

Moura:

Yes, you’re absolutely right. Let me give you an example. There are conferences in machine learning. We have one, Computer Vision, where the number of participants is on the order of 10,000. Now with virtual we don’t have a number, a total number of slots, but when there is a physical presence, the place where you hold the conference imposes a maximum number, so, you say we can only have 10,000. You know that those 10,000 registrations go up in smoke in the first day. That’s what I mean by new areas. There are areas that are so hot, and people are so eager to participate, and we are living that. Except for Computer Vision, which we have two of the major conferences there, we are missing all these opportunities, and that’s what I think we need to do.

Hellrigel:

Are you and others talking about this and expanding or at least exploring new opportunities?

Moura:

When I was IEEE president, I started talking about this, but we have the open access and we have many other activities going, so I didn’t pursue it very consistently. We were talking then about new types of conferences, and maybe that was a mistake because by new types of conferences we were saying how do we bring technology to our current conferences, and now what I see is the conferences that we don’t have and we are missing the boat because of the technical areas. So, I don’t know how much [Toshio Fukuda and Kathy Land are] discussing that now, or the Board, for that matter, but I hope they are.

Hellrigel:

Are you still active? Like do you have friends that you could put it in their ear and when they go deal with the Board, TAB, and leaders in SPS?

Moura:

That’s the good thing about the face-to-face, right, you go and even if you are not invited you bump into people and you discuss these things. With COVID you attend meetings with an agenda, prefixed agenda, not to discuss things like this unless the meetings call for this. So, I haven’t been discussing this, but since you are talking about that, maybe I should start making an effort to discuss that with others.

Hellrigel:

At the cocktail hour.

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

Yes, the open sessions or even the open business sessions. I don’t know how much new business is discussed because Board meetings and other official meetings are conducted based on Robert’s Rules of Order. When can you bring up new business and will there be enough time?

Moura:

Exactly, exactly.

Hellrigel:

Maybe people can use Robert’s Rules to quiet people?

Moura:

Exactly.

Hellrigel:

The staff does talk about the buzz phrase emerging technologies and what should IEEE do. As a historian, when I look at it I might say that definitely was a successful emerging technology because we got a new journal, we got a new conference, we got a new society, but your point is that you’ve really got to be on top of that and start to grow it as soon as possible.

Moura:

TAB does have a Future Directions Committee, which is a very successful committee, and of course IEEE has the New Initiatives Committee.

Hellrigel:

Right.

Moura:

I had one proposal. I once proposed a new initiative to the New Initiatives Committee of IEEE on big data, and out of that came DataPort. Data is possibly one of the big potential new businesses of IEEE. [The Big Data initiative was my initiative and of a colleague, David Belanger, we proposed it to NIC [New Initiatives Committee] and NIC supported it.] Then I became Vice President for Technical Activities, and I thought that it would be a conflict of interest for me to be involved with one of the many initiatives of TAB, so I stepped down. From the initiative, DataPort came out as one of the big success stories, and actually the president-elect Ray Liu has asked me to chair a committee next year to look on how to strengthen and grow DataPort and make it a business. What’s the opportunities for making it a business? I think that I’m going to talk with Ray about this thing of conferences that you planted on my head, why am I not talking to others about this. I’m going to talk to him.

Hellrigel:

Yes, give him some more work.

Moura:

Yes, give him more work.

Hellrigel:

As the IEEE president, then, you can appoint chairs, so you have a little bit to set your direction.

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

The president elect has the year before their term to go around and twist arms. When the IEEE History Center was at Stevens Institute of Technology, we had a meeting with a big data research group associated with the business school. They talked about gathering data, analyzing it, and using it to predict technology trends, or something like that. It is outside my typical research area, and I deal with the past and do not spend too much time trying to predict the future. This big data concept, watching the trends and the data, and all these massive data sets. You know, it’s mindboggling.

Moura:

Yes, DataPort was very successful, and is very successful because they had what we call an exponential growth, so the number of users, the number of data sets, and the number of downloads. All those statistics, and because it’s a combination of a very good idea, a determined set of volunteers that keep discussing what’s the best way to make this evolve. A very dedicated staff. Melissa [Handa], I don’t know her last name, but Melissa is the staff person in charge of that. Rich [Baseil], the director of SPS is very involved with data. [When I was President, I had a meeting between IEEE Marketing, who had not been engaged, and the DataPort initiative, Rich Baseil, Melissa Handa, Ray Liu, to develop a marketing strategy for DataPort.] You need a combination of factors, a team of staff and volunteers, and then you need resources

Hellrigel:

Yes. I guess the committee can meet virtually and it would be a one-year chair that you have?

Moura:

Yes, [ad-hoc committees are for one year, appointed by the president].

Hellrigel:

A one-year program?

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

It is a one-year program, and the pressure is on.

Moura:

Now, we are going to brainstorm what’s the right format, what are potential businesses, and then hopefully the IEEE will identify some of these. Hopefully, we’ll be able to identify some of these, and then decide to invest. You see, there are two ways of making business, and the internet showed us that one is you sell a service. The other you make directly money off of the service, and that’s what Xplore is. It’s a product, you sell the product and you make money. The other is, you sell the service so that some other thing happens that makes you money. For example, IEEE Xplore is great, but maybe one needs to enhance the value of Xplore. IEEE DataPort could be a value enhancer of IEEE Xplore, to keep selling Xplore. You don’t sell IEEE DataPort directly. You make money because it’s a value added to something that is very successful; that’s one way. The other is, you do IEEE DataPort, and you sell it as a service so people can download and so forth. There is a third one which is you are going to sell IEEE DataPort, you are going to build DataPort, but then you are going to create a much larger community that is engaged with IEEE. Then it’s because you now have a much larger community, and DataPort is one of the factors that helps you with that. The other would be the IEEE app, explore itself. So, now you have this very large community, and now you have to provide a service, but you have a very large audience for that service. This is like Facebook, right? Facebook or Google give everything away, then they turn around and they make money because they have millions or hundreds of millions of people, or billions, to reach. They charge zero dollars [to each of their users]. Google charges nothing, and I am a heavy user of Google. I am not a user of Facebook, but apparently there is more than one billion people that are users of Facebook, and they charge zero to them. They are the most valuable companies. It’s very different from Microsoft, right? Microsoft businesses, Word, Excel, things of that sort, so they make a service. You buy their service because you use their service. IEEE is very much in this second one; we have a service, and we are very good at what we do, but I think IEEE has the potential also to explore the other side.

Hellrigel:

Yes, yes. You have talked a lot about there being millions of potential IEEE members, so how do you get beyond the 400,000 members?

Moura:

Right, right. Four million. That was my motto: four million.

Hellrigel:

Right, right, yes.

Moura:

At the beginning, when I did my retreat, and I came with the four million I was a little bit afraid that people would laugh at me. They didn’t laugh at me because I was IEEE president, so they had respect for the president. I repeat it so often, the four million, that by the end they didn’t laugh anymore because they started understanding that maybe there is something to that, but we need now to practice that.

Hellrigel:

Right. Then they’ll be at the next conference with the T-shirts.

Moura:

Yes, right.

Hellrigel:

Four million, just to give you a hard time.

Moura:

Right.

Hellrigel:

You mentioned the annual IEEE president’s retreat. It is at the beginning of the year when the president sets their agenda to all the Division leaders, Region leaders, and upper management IEEE staff. How important is that retreat? What was your experience with running that retreat?

Moura:

I think it’s very important because that’s when you as IEEE president come in. You have a Board and whatever you do, in the end, it has to go through the Board. For example, in my case, I wanted to do the financial transparency, but I knew that financial transparency meant a new financial system for IEEE, and that was expensive. It would have to be approved by the Board, and that would require both volunteers and staff to get behind it. That was one thing of the topics at the retreat. We discussed what it means, why we need it, and people got enthusiastic. They then want to participate and want things to happen. Same thing with diversity. I went there, I brought Andrea Goldsmith and Kathy Land, and I asked them to engage the Board on these. What does it mean? Everybody says when you talk about diversity that means quotas, and that means lowering the quality. I’ve been in meetings now because of the [IEEE] Fellow’s elevation process that [first, Toshio Fukuda, IEEE 2020 President, and then] Kathy Land, the current [IEEE] president, asked me to chair a committee to look at the [Fellow] elevation process. When we talk about diversity, when I talk about diversity to different constituencies, there are all these people that come back and say, you want quotas, and you want to lower the quality of our fellows. That’s not what we mean, and that’s why the retreat is very important because you bring in these people and they know what it means. They are given illustrated examples. They show why you gain a lot if you pay attention to these things. It’s very well-known too, for example, the CEO of Intel once said, look, my company is much more successful, much more valuable, when I have a divergence of opinions on my board. That means bringing people from different backgrounds. He was referring in that particular case to gender. So, people need to understand that they are not lowering, they are actually increasing the value of whatever they are trying to do. That’s why I brought these topics to the retreat that I organized. We organized a retreat in Portugal. I think that you have these thirty-three people there. They are very committed and very eager to be a force for the good, a force for change. Usually, it creates a lot of good will. Then you set up these ad hoc committees, and they live for a year. You populate them with volunteers and some members of the Board, and they work hard through the year. They come back to the Board reporting, and the Board is eager to see what they discussed in January happen before they step down. I found the retreat to be very, very important.

Hellrigel:

You’ve known Kathy Land for a while?

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

And Andrea Goldsmith, too?

Moura:

For maybe ten years, I don’t know. I think we were Directors. When I was president of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, Kathy, I think, was president of the IEEE Computer Society, or maybe was director and she was president; something like that. [As for Andrea, she was President of the Information Theory Society on my second year as President of Signal Processing Society, so we met in TAB maybe back in 2009.]

Hellrigel:

Part of another issue you spoke about is changing the culture a bit by having this transparency, openness to diversity, and maybe the freedom to speak.

Moura:

Yes, that’s a very important issue, because it echoes back to what I discussed. There is the financial transparency and we wanted to manage our resources very professionally, and not spend money where you don’t need to spend. Spend the money where the organization can improve and can go forward. There is the other transparency which is, I told you that in 2016 there was this split at the board level where some people thought we are essentially a corporation with $500 million business, and others said, no, we are a volunteer-driven organization which happens to be very successful because the volunteers and the staff are very successful, and we have a business of $500 million to serve the technical communities. That dichotomy meant also that, well, if we are a corporation, we want to keep everything under wraps because everything should be discussed in executive session, and a lot of that. The other side said, no, we have all these tens of thousands of volunteers. If we want them to continue engaging, we need to bring them into the discussion. When I was IEEE president, we adopted that you only move into this active session [executive session] if you are discussing people. If you are selecting people for some position, we want to freely discuss people, but you don’t want to hurt the reputation of anyone, so that’s in executive session. If you are strictly discussing something that is the competitive business of IEEE, so say that we are setting up the rates for our journals, and that might be something that our competitors are eager to know, or something like that. Or, maybe you are trying to get a partnership with a competitor or sister organization or whatever, and a competitor of yours might say, oh, they are doing that, let me step in and do it first. In those things that have a direct impact on your business, you should protect that. But everything else, no reason. I hope that IEEE continues to do that, and we adopted principles that defend that IEEE is a very open society, and all the documents we produce should be proprietary, not confidential, which means any member can have access to them. Now, if you want to say it’s not just proprietary but it’s some higher-level classification, then you should justify it very well, and argue for it. There should be a well-argued point why to restrict access to the discussion, not just say, okay, I want this to be classified, that’s it. No, why? Let’s discuss it. I think that openness, I think people adopt it, have been adopting it.

Hellrigel:

I guess I have one related question about that. I don’t know if it’s called the Compliance Department, the Legal Department, but that’s been a recent change, say, the past ten years. IEEE used to outsource legal work to a contracted company, but now it has its own legal department. I would think that they also work by the rules set by the IEEE Board of Directors.

Moura:

You are absolutely right. There was a change, and that was one of the reasons why IEEE became very corporate-oriented, because in the 2010s or so we set up an internal legal office. We brought in a tremendous person [Eileen Lach], but she was a corporate lawyer from a corporation. I remember my first meeting as a Director in 2013, no, possibly 2012, she had just joined, and the executive director and the president, their only concern was telling us brand-new Directors that our major concern as Directors was loyalty to the company, so nothing we discussed at the Board level should be shared with others. It was so much. It was terrible as an experience because you are eager to start and figure how do I contribute best to IEEE. Now here comes these concerns that you are going to hurt the corporation, you better be careful, and all that. Now, I have some experience with legal. Yes, unfortunately.

Hellrigel:

Yes, just a little. [Laughing]

Moura:

I handle lawyers, and one thing I learned is that lawyers are advisors. They give you advice, but you are the decider. You decide what to do, and I also give a good example. I don’t know if you saw that movie about the Washington Post. The owner of the Washington Post, [Katharine] Graham, is confronted with publishing or not publishing the Vietnam papers [The Pentagon Papers], and the lawyers tell her, no, you are going to destroy the company. It’s going to be the company of your grandfather and your father and your husband, and this and that, you are going to destroy it. She thinks and thinks and thinks, and then she makes a decision. She says, no, we are going to publish. The next scene in the movie that you see is in the Supreme Court, the same lawyers that told her that she is going to destroy the company and that she should not publish are now arguing that the journal should and had the right to publish the Pentagon papers. I found this very interesting. The same lawyers, in front of the Supreme Court, they are discussing why publishing the papers was in the best interest and was constitutional. The same lawyers that in the previous scene are arguing against her, saying that she’s risking the company, and it’s unconstitutional, she’s going to tell all these secrets and so forth.

Hellrigel:

I’ll have to re-watch it.

Moura:

So, the lesson is the lawyers give you their best advice, and you should listen, but it’s you that makes the decision. I think that we also did 100, I couldn’t say 180 degrees, but at least a 90-degree turn with respect to legal. When we recruited Sophie Muirhead in 2019, that was one of the concerns. Sophie, I told her, actually in the NY IEEE office, when I interviewed her, this is a volunteer-led organization. This is not for you to come and always be taking the most conservative position because the most conservative may turn around and it may turn against us volunteers, in which case the organization loses. The organization may lose either way, and you better tell us this. I think, at least my experience in the three years that I interacted intimately with Sophie, they were very good, and she was doing a very good job of balancing this, not being as forceful as before, telling you the pros and cons, being open-minded, and finding reasons why you can do it, rather than reasons why you can’t do it. I think we also learn from experience.

Hellrigel:

Yes, yes. It’s been a change.

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I don’t know if there are any other topics you would like to discuss.

Moura:

No, I think we covered it.

Hellrigel:

Okay. I know that I’ve kept you almost for another hour and a half, so that’s a long time.

Moura:

Yes.

Hellrigel:

I’ve truly enjoyed this.

Moura:

Okay, well, thank you very much and I also enjoyed.

Hellrigel:

I look forward to hearing about all your good ideas, so I’m sure we’ll cross paths again.

Moura:

I’m sure.

Hellrigel:

If you travel, be safe. If you don’t travel, be safe, too.

Moura:

Okay. Thank you very much.

Hellrigel:

Take care, sir.

Moura:

Safe travels for you. Happy holidays.