MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT AND VPs


Announcing a New Workshop Series of the Circuits and Systems Society

For more than sixty years, the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS) has been actively embracing, fostering, and bringing to full development new research areas. CASS is a truly interdisciplinary society with a broad technical scope but with an emphasis on fundamental research that lays out the foundations of new disciplines, even long before there become profitable commercial exploitations.

As such, CASS is a breeding ground, on which new fields emerge, fields which may later lead even to new societies of IEEE.

We are very pleased to announce what we believe will be an important vehicle for further enhancing the strong tradition of CASS in embracing emerging areas, namely the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Forum on Emerging and Selected Topics (CAS-FEST).

CAS-FESTs are envisioned as one-day, high-impact, high-quality technical fora, each devoted to a specific topic. The first such meeting will be held on December 12, 2010 in Athens, Greece. The topic for this first meeting is Variation-Aware Design for Nano-scale VLSI. More information about the meeting can be found at www.ieee-cas-fest.org.

CAS-FEST is in several ways different than a regular symposium. On one hand, a goal is to match the high quality of the accepted papers with the high quality of presentations and an increased learning experience for the audience.

Specifically, CAS-FEST will run in a single track, with each presentation lasting for about 30-40 minutes. It is also required that the presenter of each paper, who must be identified upon submission, should be the most experienced author of the paper. A student may be the first author of a submitted paper, but the paper must be presented by their advisor, unless all authors are students.

On the other hand, the Proceedings of CAS-FEST will be published as a special issue of the new IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems (JETCAS), which CASS is launching in 2011 and which will be freely offered to CASS members.

The papers to be presented at the meeting will be selected after a thorough and rigorous review of full-length manuscripts submitted to JETCAS (similar to that of all other CASS journals), in response to the call for papers for CAS-FEST (more details on jetcas.polito.it, starting from August 15, 2010). This means that the quality of the papers presented at the conference will be comparable to those in archived journals. We are committed to ensuring the highest quality for all our conferences and we expect CAS-FEST to serve as a model for achieving this goal.

For the first time in the history of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, we plan to provide live feeds of the CAS-FEST for virtual attendance, while the video and audio feeds from the meeting will be available for future downloads.

We have made the cost of attending the meeting as low as possible for members of the Circuits and Systems Society. For both on-site and virtual attendance, the Society members will receive a 50% discount over the full registration rates. This is a significant reduction over IEEE member rates for registration and yet another benefit of CAS Society membership.

It is easy for you to attend the first IEEE CAS-FEST, if you plan to attend ICECS 2010, in Athens. The meeting takes place on Sunday, the day of tutorials at ICECS 2010.

If you want to have an exciting overview on the latest advancements in Variation-Aware Design, we look forward to meeting you this coming December in Athens, for the first edition of CAS-FEST.

Please see the 2010 CAS-FEST call for papers or announcement in this issue of the Newsletter.


Best regards,

Enrico Macii (CASS VP-Publications)

Vojin G. Oklobdzija (CASS VP-Technical Activities)

Gianluca Setti (CASS President)

Thanos Stouraitis (CASS VP-Conferences)