VOLUME 8, ISSUE 3, JUNE 2014

SOCIETY NEWS


IEEE CAS Awards 2014

IEEE Circuits and Systems Society is pleased to congratulate the following recipients of the 2014 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Awards. The Society is especially proud and happy to honor their outstanding accomplishments and we look forward to their continuous involvement and close contact with the Circuits and Systems Society.

Charles A. Desoer Technical Achievement Award
Paulo Sergio Ramirez Diniz
For proposed fundamental structures and design procedures for limit-cycle-free digital filters, proposed low-power and computationally-efficient set-membership affine projection adaptive filters, developed state-of-the-art design methodologies and structures for high-resolution filter banks, and recently developed minimum-redundancy fast multicarrier transceivers.

Industrial Pioneer Award
Babak Parviz
For visionary leadership in wearable technologies including the invention, research, development and commercialization of Google Glass and the active contact lens technology for glucose monitoring

Darlington Best Paper Award
Katharina Hausmair, Shuli Chi, Peter Singerl, and Christian Vogel
“Aliasing-free digital pulse-width modulation for burst-mode RF transmitters,” IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers, vol. 60, no. 2, pp. 415-427, February 2013

Circuits and Systems for Video Technology Best Paper Award
Teng Li, Tao Mei, In-So Kweon, Xian-Sheng Hua
“Contextual Bag-of-Words for Visual Categorization,” IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, vol. 21, no. 4, pp. 381-392, April 2011

Very Large Scale Integration Systems Best Paper Award
Subho Chatterjee, Mitchelle Rasquinha, Sudhakar Yalamanchili, and Saibal Mukhopadhyay
“A scalable design methodology for energy minimization of STTRAM: A circuit and architecture perspective,” IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems, vol. 19, no. 5, pp. 809-817, May 2011

Pre-Doctoral Scholarships
Chamith Wijenayake
Mohammed Affan Zidan

Chapter of the Year Award
Central Texas
Chapter Chair, Seth Wilk

Region 1-7 Chapter of the Year
Vancouver
Chapter Chair, Ljiljana Trajkovic

Region 8 Chapter of the Year
Turkey
Chapter Chair, I’zzet Cem Göknar

Region 9 Chapter of the Year
Rio Grande do Sul
Chapter Chair, Ricardo Reis

Region 10 Chapter of the Year
Malaysia
Chapter Chair, Fawnizu Azmadi Hussin



2013 Networking CASS Chapters in Asia-Pacific Countries

Brief description of the program

There exist 25 IEEE CASS chapters in Asia-Pacific (Region 10) countries.

http://ieee-cas.org/community/chapters/region-10

According to the annual report, the chapters in this region keep a good activity level in average. The objective of this program is to make networks between/among chapters in different Asia-Pacific countries in order to raise the activity level of all the chapters in this region.

In this year, we select 8 chapters in R10 according to the submitted visit plans, whose representatives and student members visit other chapters in different R10 countries, and award at most USD 1,000 per chapter as a part of the travel costs. The selected chapter is under obligated that:

  1. 1.the representative of the chapter (a chapter officer is advisable, but an IEEE CASS non-student member can also represent the chapter) and one (or more) student (undergraduate or graduate) visit a chapter (the chair or an officer) in a different R10 country,

  2. 2.the representative introduces the chapter’s activity to the host chapter and discusses possible future collaboration between the chapters (joint technical workshop, joint WiCAS/GoLD activities, joint summer school, student exchange, etc.),

  3. 3.the student presents his/her research in front of students in the host chapter, and

  4. 4.the representative completes the visit and submits a 1-page report with an expense report by Nov. 30, 2013.


In 2012, this program supported 5 chapters, hence after finishing all the visits in 2013, we expect 13 links among 25 chapters in Region 10. If we can continue the same activity in future, more new links will be added to the network. After 5-10 years, the complexity of this network grows and we hope that many different kinds of collaborations will appear.


Selection

I distributed Call for Visit Plan to the chapter chairs of 25 IEEE CASS chapters in Asia-Pacific (Region 10) countries on August 29, 2013. The following 7 proposals from 7 different chapters are submitted by the deadline (September 20, 2013) and I accepted all of them.

  1. 1.Hong Kong Chapter (visits Shikoku Chapter)

  2. 2.Shanghai Chapter (visits Shikoku Chapter)

  3. 3.Hyderabad Chapter (visits Kansai Chapter & Shikoku Chapter)

  4. 4.Fukuoka Chapter (visits Hyderabad Chapter & Delhi Chapter)

  5. 5.Shikoku Chapter (visits Taipei Chapter & Tainan Chapter)

  6. 6.Malaysia Chapter (visits Indonesia Chapter)

  7. 7.Singapore Chapter (visits Malaysia Chapter)

  8. Because we could support 8 chapters in total, I distributed the second call for visit plan on September 30 and accepted the following proposal which was only one submitted for the second call.

  9. 8.Seoul Chapter (visits Japan Chapter)


Visits

Shanghai Chapter withdrew its visit because of the VISA problem of the student.

Hyderabad Chapter modified its plan visiting 2 chapters in Japan (Kansai & Shikoku Chapters) to visiting only Shikoku Chapter, because Kansai Chapter declined to host the visit.

The other 6 chapters made their visits according to their plans. I have received the visit reports from these 7 chapters. These reports can be found on the CAS Website at:

http://ieee-cas.org/about/financial-activities/past-outreach-initiative-event-reports

It should be noted that 2 chapters visited multiple chapters during their travels. This can be more effective if two countries will launch a new CAS-related collaboration involving several chapters.


Expenses

The maximum amount of the support to each chapter is fixed as USD 1000. All the seven chapters sent their expense reports with a scanned copy of the receipts. The amount of expenses claimed from each chapter is as follows:

  1. 1.Hong Kong Chapter (visits Shikoku Chapter) : USD 1000.00

  2. 2.Hyderabad Chapter (visits Shikoku Chapter) : USD 1000.00

  3. 3.Fukuoka Chapter (visits Hyderabad Chapter & Delhi Chapter) : USD 1000.00

  4. 4.Shikoku Chapter (visits Taipei Chapter & Tainan Chapter) : USD 1000.00

  5. 5.Malaysia Chapter (visits Indonesia Chapter) : USD 1000.00

  6. 6.Singapore Chapter (visits Malaysia Chapter) : USD  985.04

  7. 7.Seoul Chapter (visits Japan Chapter) : USD 1000.00

and the total expense for this activity is USD 6985.04. Ms. Erin Bise, CAS Administrator and I have examined the expense reports and have approved their expenses.


Metrics to measure its success

    A. Number of proposals.

  1. target: 12,result: 8

    B. Number of countries of visiting chapters.

  1. target: 4, result: 6

    C. Number of countries of host chapters.

  1. target: 4, result: 5


Network

Through this activity, new 9 links (because Fukuoka and Shikoku Chapters visited 2 chapters each) have been added to the 5 links established in the last year among 25 chapters in Region 10 as shown in Fig. 1. I hope that this activity strengthened the relationship between the chapters and that they will create new CAS activities involving the members of both sides of chapters.

I also encouraged the chapters which joined this activity to submit their collaboration plans to the CAS Outreach Initiative in future.

Finally, I would like to thank the CAS Society for the support.



Yoshifumi Nishio, BoG Member, IEEE CAS Society (nishio@ee.tokushima-u.ac.jp)





IEEE CAS - Call for BoG Nominations

This message is to solicit nominations of candidates to serve on the Board of Governors of the Circuits and Systems Society (CASS). The deadline for nominations is July 31, 2014. The nomination information and form are available at the web link below:

Call for nomination link:

http://ieee-cas.org/cass-call-for-bog-nominations-2015-2017

CASS has many caring members and we really need you to nominate your outstanding colleagues for this very important service position. The Board of Governors (BoG) manages and directs the Society and is the final authority for all Society actions. 

If you yourself are interested, please find a colleague to assist with your nomination. If you are concerned that you do not know how the Society operates, please do not worry. Processes and procedures can be learned; fresh perspectives and passion to serve can't. 

We already know that you have talents; what we need is your perspectives and passion to contribute to improve the profession and our global society. So, please step up and participate in this BoG nomination process and, when the nomination slate is available in a few weeks, vote on the election.


Thanos Stouraitis, Chair, CASS 2014 Nominations Committee