Conference News

CONFERENCE NEWS
IEEE ISCAS 2008
This year the IEEE Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) took place in the beautiful city of Seattle in the Pacific Northwest of the United States of America from the 16th to the 21st May 2008. The theme of the conference was “Green” Circuits and Systems: Engineering the Environmental Revolution. The conference was a huge success with more than 1135 participants from more than 40 countries. Out of the 1858 papers submitted from 52 countries, 901 were accepted with an average acceptance rate of 48%. Thanks to the dedicated work of the program track chairs, Un-Ki Moon and Gianluca Setti, and their team of track chairs, reviewers and committee members, the conference had an interesting and highly interdisciplinary technical program spanning from the theory to the applications of circuits and systems. The final program included 11 parallel lecture sessions (119 sessions), 13 timely special sessions and 8 parallel poster sessions (47 sessions) covering different tracks of technical interest. A student paper contest and a successful live demo contest were also organized. The conference was preceded by 12 half-day cutting-edge tutorials which took place on Sunday 16th May. A workshop on Computer-based signal processing, organized by Microsoft, was also held in Redmond on May 22nd. Keynote lectures included the fascinating talk of Prof. John Delaney (University of Washington) on the ocean, the enthusing plenary lecture of Dr. John Cohn, Chief Scientist of Design Automation in the IBM Systems and Technology Group in Burlington, Vermont, and an IBM Fellow, on how to inspire the next generation of engineers and scientists and the interesting presentation of Mr. Allen Alley, Chairman of the Board of Pixelworks, Inc., and former Deputy Chief of Staff to Oregon Governor on energy efficiency. All the plenary speakers reinforced the green theme of ISCAS 2008 and delivered stimulating talks in their areas of interest. They passionately encouraged interdisciplinary research and teaching and pointed the audience towards novel exciting possible research directions for the circuits and systems community. A special IEEE Award Ceremony was held during the conference chaired by the President of the CAS Society, Prof. Ogorzalek, together with the Past-President and Awards Committee Chair, Prof. Ljiljana Trajkovic. Prof. Alfred Fettweiss (Ruhr-Universitaet, Germany) received the Gustav Kirchhoff medal for sustained contributions to circuits, systems, and signal processing, especially his seminal work on wave digital filters and the new IEEE Fellows of the Society were congratulated for their achievements. Following the tradition of ISCAS 2007, a student paper contest was held at ISCAS 2008 and sponsored by the Circuits and Systems Society. The four winning student papers were: “A Programmable 25 MHz to 6 GHz Rational-K/L Frequency Synthesizer with Digital Kvco Compensation” by Jae Y. Kim, Chih-Wei Yao, Alan N. Willson (University of California at Los Angeles);
“Impulse Based Scheme for Crystal-less ULP Radios” by Fabio Sebastiano, Salvatore Drago, Lucien Breems, Domine Leenaerts, Kofi Makinway, Bram Nauta (NXP Semiconductors, Eindhoven, Delft University of Technology, University of Twente);
“VLSI Architecture for Data-Reduced Steering Matrix Feedback in MIMO Systems” by C. Studer, P. Luethi, W. Fichtner (ETH Zurich); and “A 600-Mb/s Encoder and Decoder for Low-Density Parity-Check Convolutional Codes” by Tyler Brandon, John C. Koob, Leendert van den Berg, Zhengang Chen, Amirhossein Alimohammad, Ramkrishna Swamy, Jason Klaus, Stephen Bates, Vincent C. Gaudet, Bruce F. Cockburn, Duncan G. Elliott (University of Alberta). The technical program was complemented with an exciting social program organized with care by the organizing committee. The Welcome Reception held on Sunday in the grand ballroom of the Sheraton hotel in Downtown Seattle was followed by a banquet reception in the famous Tillicum village across the Seattle bay. The Farewell reception was hosted in the world-famous Seattle Space Needle, specially closed to the public for the occasion. From there participants could admire beautiful views of the city, the Puget bay and the Olympic mountains. The IEEE WiCAS (Women in Circuits and Systems) reception, also took place during the conference, and was an extremely successful event which included a motivating presentation by Eileen McDargh. All through the conference, its chairs, David Allstot and Mani Soma, together with the rest of the organizing committee made sure everything run smoothly making ISCAS 2008 an event to remember!
Mario di Bernardo, University of Naples Federico II, Italy (Email: mario.dibernardo@unina.it)

International Workshop on Continuous-Discrete Electronic Systems 2008, Hong Kong

Yet another satellite workshop was held in Hong Kong on June 10, 2008. The theme was continuous-discrete electronic systems. The organizers were Wolfgang Schwarz, Michael Tse and Ron Chen. Invited speakers from Germany, Japan, Poland and Switzerland presented their latest research works in the general area of nonlinear continuous-discrete electronic systems and related applications, including power electronics, nonlinear oscillations, synchronization of oscillators, chaos communications, artificial cochlea, space-filling curve applications, laser switching, particle swarm optimization, etc. The workshop was well attended, with over 40 participants from 6 different countries. Details about the workshop can be found in http://cktse.eie.polyu.edu.hk/CDES2008.
Apart from attending the intensive technical sessions, the workshop participants were given the opportunity of enjoying a range of social functions including a Chinese dim-sum luncheon and a seafood banquet held at Jumbo Kingdom Floating Restaurant in Hong Kong, where participants exchanged views about their research informally, formulated collaborative plans, and renewed friendship.
The workshop was financially sponsored and organized by the Department of Electronic and Information Engineering of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, co-organized by the Centre for Chaos and Complex Networks of City University of Hong Kong, and technically sponsored by the Technical Committee on Nonlinear Circuits and Systems of the IEEE CAS Society.
Michael Tse, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong (Email: cktse@ieee.org)