In the last three years, membership in the ComSoc Saudi chapter has decreased due to many reasons, mainly because it was idle for a time. In April 2017 a new chair took the lead to revive the chapter and re-activate it. Dr. Abdullah Almuttiri, the new Saudi chapter chair, formed a diverse committee to steer the chapter. The chair started with three activities that draw attention to what IEEE ComSoc is doing.

The first event was a workshop held in partnership with the Ministry of Commerce represented by the Riyadh Chamber of Commerce. A workshop on a vibrant hot topic of this decade was conducted in collaboration with Saudi Telecom Company (STC), the leading telecom operator in Saudi Arabia. The topic of the workshop was “Internet of Things: Definition and Business Opportunities,” presented by Dr. Abdullah Almuttiri, chair of ComSoc Saudi Chapter, and Eng. Othman Aldahash, VP in STCS. The event attracted about 80 attendees from industry and academia.

This event started with Dr. Abdullah, who gave an introduction discussing the fourth revolution that will transform human lives to a digitized life, followed by a walk through the mobile generations from the 1G to the current 4G features and how digital transformation evolved. This was followed by an introduction to 5G, with the features it will bring and the expected further transformation and digitization it will bring to humanity. Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Everything was then discovered and explained. The era of digitizing almost everything from small things to machine to machine communications was also explored. With the 5G capabilities of low latency of less than 2ms and high capacity with 256QAM, carrier aggregation and massive MIMO are a key enabler of mobile IoT and IoE. Next was a discussion of Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) and Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) and their role in providing a sufficient connectivity for IoT. The presentation concluded with a discussion of the IoT and IoE ecosystem and the features and technologies intersecting with them, i.e. cloud computing and big data analytics, and their role in enabling smart IoT and smart IoE ecosystems. Following this presentation, Eng. Othman Aldahash discussed use cases of IoT and several existing IoT applications that STC is currently working on.

The Saudi Chapter is currently co-organizing IEEE MENACOMM in collaboration with the Lebanon Chapter to be held in Beirut, Lebanon 18-20 April 2018. The Chapter’s diverse activities also included hosting regular webinars. A webinar on IoT Ecosystem Security was organized, attracting more than 70 attendees. Prof. Muhammad Khurram Khan presented this webinar, in which he explained how to gain trust in IoT ecosystem security. He started by defining IoT and showing the IoT ecosystem growth rate. He then spoke about how to encourage consumer trust in IoT, explaining the security and privacy requirements of smart IoT followed by the discussion of IoT consumer privacy violations. Next he discussed consumer communal acts of the IoT product lifecycle, and finally closed the webinar with recommendations for IoT stakeholders. The feedback from attendees on this hot topic webinar was outstanding, the webinar could be repeated soon.

The ComSoc Saudi Arabia Chapter values its members and strives to deliver activities on state-of-the-art technologies. The Chapter has developed a promising plan for its member for 2018 and will work hard to achieve this goal. For any inquiries or requests please do not hesitate to contact the chapter chair, Dr. Abdullah Almuttiri, at SaudiArabia_Chapter@comsoc.org or a.s.a@ieee.org