The Spain CAS Chapter Won the Best Chapter Award
The Spain Chapter of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, chaired by Prof. Antonio Lopez Martin, from the Public University of Navarra, received the Best Chapter Award of the IEEE-Spain Section in 2018. The awards ceremony was held in Madrid, on November 23th, during the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the IEEE Spain section and the IEEE-DAY in Spain.
Upper left photo shows Prof. Antonio López (right) receiving the award from Dr. Antonio J. Calleja (left), Chapter aids for activity promotion of the IEEE-Spain Section. Upper right shows a panel session held during the celebration of the 50th anniversary of the IEEE Spain Section.
Antonio Lopez-Martin, CAS Spain Chapter Chair
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Santa Clara Valley Chapter Q4 2018 Report
The IEEE Circuits and Systems society (CASS) Santa Clara Chapter (SCV) co-sponsored an event with Solid-State Circuits Society (SSCS) and Signal Processing Society (SPS) that was held on July 19th, 2018 at TI Auditorium in Santa Clara, CA. The lecture titled “Review of Lidar, Localization and Object Processing for Safe Autonomous Systems” was given by Dr. Kiran Gunnam. In the first part of his talk, Dr. Gunnam reviewed the state-of-the art architectures for LiDARs, lasers, photo diodes, transmitters and receivers including time to digital conversion, matched filtering for detection and cross-talk avoidance. In the second part of the talk, he described recent groundbreaking work (by Apollo AI) in integrated perception that can be easily embedded into the LiDAR sensors which consists of LiDAR+camera+IMU fusion, robust mapping, localization and object processing for safe autonomous systems. The total attendance for this event was 118.
Left Photo: CASS AI Forum speakers, organizers, sponsors, and co-sponsoring society officers. From left to right: Dr. Yen-Kuang Chen (CAS Board of Governors / Intel), Dr. Tong Zhang (Intel), Robert S. Ogg (CAS-SCV Chair), Dr. Yong Lian (CAS President), Dr. Jongsoo Park (Facebook), Dr. Mark Sandler (Google), Dr. Vivienne Sze (MIT), Dr. Debbie Marr (Intel Labs), Eduard Alarcón (Vice President - Technical Activities CAS), Mojtaba Sharifzadeh (SSCS-SCV Chair), Dr. Mehran Nekuii (ComSoC-SCV Vice-Chair)
The “Artificial Intelligence for Industry Forum,” sponsored by Circuits and Systems Society, was held on September 21st, 2018 at Intel Auditorium in Santa Clara, CA. The event was organized by Dr. Yen-Kuang Chen and Dr. Tong Zhang at Intel Corporation and co-sponsored by Santa Clara chapters of CAS, SSCS, ComSoc, SPS, and CIS. The speakers invited to this forum were: Dr. Debbie Marr (Intel), Dr. Vivienne Sze (MIT), Dr. Mark Sandler (Google), and Dr. Jongsoo Park (Facebook). The event attracted 334 attendees that included IC designers, systems and software engineers, academics, and students from local industry and schools.
Right Photo: CASS Lecture, “Advanced Capacitive Sensing for Consumer, Industrial, and Automotive Applications,” by Dr. Hans Klein at Cypress Semiconductor Corp.
On October 18th 2018, CASS co-sponsored an lecture event with SSCS and Computer Society (CS) titled, “Efficient Circuits and Systems for Computational Imaging and Vision on Mobile Device,” which was given by Dr. Prianka Raina. Dr. Raina began her talk by motivating the audience on the need for energy-efficient hardware accelerators targeted for image processing on mobile devices. The images taken on a mobile device involve a number of computational imaging algorithms such as high dynamic range (HDR) imaging, panorama stitching, image deblurring and low-light imaging. Because of their high computational complexity, mobile CPU or GPU based implementations of these algorithms do not achieve real-time performance. Moreover, offloading these algorithms to the cloud is not a viable solution because wirelessly transmitting large amounts of image data results in long latency and high energy consumption, making them unsuitable for mobile devices. Dr. Raina’s approach to solving this problem has been to design energy-efficient hardware accelerators for these applications. She described the implementation of three complete computational imaging systems for energy-constrained mobile environments, energy minimization techniques, and energy scalability by trading off accuracy with execution time. The total attendance for this event was 70.
Left Photo: CASS Lecture, “Advanced Capacitive Sensing for Consumer, Industrial, and Automotive Applications,” by Dr. Hans Klein at Cypress Semiconductor Corp.
Next joint event between SSCS and CASS was held on November 15th, 2018 where Dr. Laurence Nagel gave an interesting talk on “The Life of SPICE.” Dr. Nagel gave a historical account of the most popular circuit simulation program in the world. What began as a teaching program at the University of California, Berkeley, spread into industry and has been around for almost fifty years! The total attendance for this event was 68.
On December 6th, 2018 CASS organized a lecture given by Dr. Hans Klein who is currently the Analog CTO at Cypress Semiconductor Corp. The lecture titled “Advanced Capacitive Sensing for Consumer, Industrial, and Automotive Applications,” was given at the Main Auditorium at Cypress Semiconductor Corp. San Jose Campus. The lecture covered basic and advanced capacitive sensing for a variety of consumer, industrial, and automotive applications such as “single-pixel” buttons, sliders, touch screens, and “kilo-pixel” fingerprint readers. In addition, sensors, architectures, algorithms, and circuit technologies to handle signals from the pF range all the way to fractions of an aF were discussed. The last part of the lecture described future challenges and emerging solutions. The event attracted 42 attendees that included IC designers, academics, and students from local industry and schools and another 8 joined remotely on Zoom conference system.
Left Photo: CASS Lecture, “Advanced Capacitive Sensing for Consumer, Industrial, and Automotive Applications,” by Dr. Hans Klein at Cypress Semiconductor Corp. From Left to right: Imran Bashir (CASS-SCV Vice-Chair), Dr. Hans Klein (Analog CTO, Cypress), Robert S. Ogg (CASS-SCV Chair), Amit Jha (CASS-SCV Treasurer); Right Photo: Dr. Hans Klein during Q&A session.
Future Events: We have 4 talks confirmed in 2019 and two of those are CASS Distinguished Lecturer Events. The first lecture will be held on Jan 31st, 2019 in the Main Auditorium at Cypress Semiconductor Corp. San Jose Campus. That lecture is on “Vehicle Re-Identification for Smart Cities: A New Baseline Using Triplet Embedding” and will be given by Dr. Ratnesh Kumar who is currently working in Deep Learning for Computer Vision at nVidia Inc. The second lecture is tentatively planned on February 22nd, 2019 and will be given by Dr. Massimo Alioto who is part of the Green IC group at National University of Singapore. While the agenda for the lecture is not finalized, we expect it will include topics such as Hardware Security, Energy-autonomous Systems and Wireless Sensors. The last two talks are CASS Distinguished Lecturer events. The lecture on March 8th, 2019 given by Dr. Gabriel A. Rincón-Mora from Georgia Tech will cover topics such as Energy-Harvesting, Piezoelectric Chargers, Photovoltaic Charger, and Inductively Powered Battery Chargers. The lecture on April 25th, 2019 given by Dr. Alyssa Apsel from Cornell University will cover topics such as Ultra Low Power Radios, Flexible Radios and Flexible Networks. We plan on broadcasting these events live using Zoom conference system.
The recordings of our past events with Dr. Gabor Temes and Dr. Mihai Banu are now on IEEE TV (https://ieeetv.ieee.org) and have been viewed 139 and 239 times respectively. The recent lecture on Capacitive Sensing by Dr. Hans Klein will be posted on IEEE TV soon. You can join our events from any-where around the world through Zoom. Sign up for our listserv (http://sites.ieee.org/scv-cas) to get event notification and registration information. Only those who register for the event will be sent Zoom Conference details one day before the event. Also, please visit our Facebook website (by typing “IEEE SCV CAS” string) for event details and pictures.
Imran Bashir, CASS Santa Clara Valley Chapter Vice-Chair