at the beginning of the year. Looking in retrospect, the most important results we have achieved in 2010 are: 1) Creation of two new publications, namely the ...
Past President’s Message Gianluca Setti Past President, IEEE Circuits and Systems Society
Dear Colleagues and Members of the Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society
B
y the time of writing this message, my term as President is almost over. I say this with a sense of relief. In fact, serving CAS in this capacity has been both a great honor and a privilege, but also a very challenging task for the enormous number of skills the position requires (maybe too many for any single person to have), and for the time necessary to devote to this. I would have miserably failed in this job if I would have not received the assistance of the wonderful team of volunteers, both in the Executive Committee (ExCom) and the Board of Governors (BoG), that I had the pleasure to work with. To all of them goes my deepest gratitude and appreciation for all the vital assistance they gave me and the Society in fulfilling many of the plans we had at the beginning of the year. Looking in retrospect, the most important results we have achieved in 2010 are: 1) Creation of two new publications, namely the IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems (JETCAS) and the IEEE Virtual Journal on Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC VJ). For this, I wish to thank Enrico Macii, CAS VP Publications, Mani Soma, CAS President Elect and David Allstot, CAS Past President for their continuous support during the several phases required for proposing these initiatives. 2) Creation of a new series of high-impact workshops, namely the technical Forums on Emerging and Selected Topics (CAS-FEST). In this case, my sincere appreciation goes to Thanos Stouraitis, CAS VP Conferences, who has been the true driving force behind this idea. 3) Providing more continuity to the International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) by approving a five-year contract for the paper selection software for the conference. 4) Increasing of the Value for CAS Membership, since, starting in 2011, all CAS members will receive free on-line access to JETCAS and to RFIC VJ, while all CAS student members will receive free on-line Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCAS.2010.940092 Date of publication: 18 February 2011
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access via IEEEXplore to all CAS sponsored publications and conference proceedings. 5) Redesign and enhancement of the CAS web page, a process which is still on-going, for which I wish to thank David Atienza, CAS BoG member and Sergio Callegari, who accepted this ad-hoc task, for being extremely instrumental in the process of selecting the proper vendor. 6) Restructuring the CAS Executive Committee, by extending the mandate of the CAS President to two years, by reducing the number of its members (to make it more effective and with a structure more similar to all other IEEE Societies) and by enhancing the capability for CAS to make an impact on regional activities, by involving more BoG members in membership activities to extend the great work made by our Regional VPs: Liming Xiu (R1-7), Angel Rodriguez-Vasquez (R8), Ricardo Reis (R9) and Rui Martins (R10) I have taken the liberty to highlight a few additional details on the above-mentioned results and to put them in the landscape of the most important CAS activities, in order to show the extremely healthy and technically lively status of the society. Publications This year CAS Journals have further increased the very high level they had achieved in terms of both technical quality and community recognition. Starting from the Society’s most well-acceded publications, the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems – Part I: Regular Papers (TCAS-I), the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems – Part II: Express Briefs (TCAS-II) and the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT), all have practically maintained or improved their position in the area of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (E&EE) according to Thomson’s Journal of Citations Report (JCR). More specifically, considering the ranking with respect to the well known Impact Factor TM (IF) or to more recent but also more reliable quality parameters such as the EigenFactor TM (EF) or the Article InfluenceTM (AI), TCAS-I positioned FIRST QUARTER 2011
respectively 80/246, 27/246 and 36/246, TCAS-II ranked 85/246, 36/246 and 45/246, while TCSVT resulted 24/246, 42/246 and 35/246. Additional important highlights for 2010 are the introduction of the CAS Magazine (CASM), and of the IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems (TBioCAS) among the set of journals for which Thomson computes all the above indicators, which is, by itself, a recognition of quality. Even more so, TBioCAS ranked 61/246 in terms of IF and 43/246 with respect to the AI, a very good result which is perfectly in line with those of the other CAS publications. It is worth stressing that CASM resulted, respectively, 106/246 in terms of IF (which is still one of the best result for magazines), but 1/246, i.e.,the first publication in the whole E&EE ranking, in terms of AI. This is certainly a very important result, which testifies the great quality improvement of the journal in the last years. As paramount importance for the authors, I wish to stress that the above increase of quality has been paired with a very fast turnaround time. I am happy to report that the current average time from submission to electronic publication (i.e. the moment in which an accepted manuscript is posted in almost final format in IEEEXplore) is 34 weeks for TCAS-I, 37 for TCAS-II, 67 for TCSVT and 44 for TBioCAS. As you can imagine, all these results have been achieved at the cost of countless hours of hard work that the Editors-in-Chief (EiCs) of our journals and their editorial teams have devoted to their very demanding jobs. I am, extremely grateful to Wouter Serdijn (TCAS-I), Yong Lian (TCAS-II), Hamid Gharavi (TCSVT), Tor Sverre (Bassen) Lande (TBioCAS), and Guanrong (Ron) Chen (CASM). To the landscape of very successful publications described above, CAS-S has decided this year to add two very important initiatives. For the first one, we have decided to focus on the long lasting tradition and ability of the CAS Society to embrace and foster core developments in new emerging technical areas by creating JETCAS. The journal will start in 2011, by publishing quarterly special issues only on the most exciting new areas of research and will be freely offered in electronic version to all members of the Circuits and Systems Society as an additional membership benefit (more information can be found at http://jetcas.polito.it). We believe that this will give a concrete chance of incubation to new activities, so that they will grow, and attract further attention, and eventually reach enough maturity to be included in the most appropriate CAS (or IEEE) publication. Of course leading a new publication to success is not an easy task and we are very fortunate to have Massoud Pedram as the first EiC for JETCAS: I wish him 8
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and his team a very successful activity leading JETCAS to the level of quality of other similar IEEE publications. The second new initiative led to the creation of the RFIC VJ, which is the first Virtual Journal within IEEE. More specifically, the RFIC VJ will be a quarterly selection, with expert editorial comments, of previously published, peer-reviewed articles in the area of RFIC published in TCAS-I, TCAS-II, the IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits, the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques and all conferences sponsored by CAS-S, the Solid State Circuits (SSC) or the Microwave Theory and Techniques (MTT) Societies, such a ISSCC, RFIC Symposium or ISCAS. Arriving to a successful conclusion for this initiative has been particularly challenging, due to the involvement of three different IEEE societies, namely CAS-S, SSC-S and MTT-S as equal co-sponsors; yet the goal we have achieved will certainly be of great value for the RFIC community which is currently spread across the three societies. The RFIC Virtual Journal will be, in fact, an electronic publication offering a comprehensive web-based environment for collecting and disseminating knowledge on theory, algorithms, enabling technologies, design methodologies, fabrication, testing of RF integrated circuits and systems, and will certainly become the one-stop place to find RFIC publications within the IEEE. Last but not least, we have devised this new initiative, again, as a membership benefit: CAS-S, MTT-S and SSC-S members will start receiving the RFIC VJ by the end of 2011. Conferences CAS-S continued to fully sponsor or co-sponsor more than sixty conferences this year. It is impossible to comment on all of them. I will therefore focus only on ISCAS, CAS-S’ Flagship conference. In 2010, the symposium had, once more, a very successful edition. The number of submitted papers increased to about 2250 (the second largest ever) and with a 25% increase with respect to the average submission rate since 2007. Even more important is that the technical program was very successful, in terms of tutorials, regular sessions (for which the conference reached an acceptance rate of about 44%), special sessions, and keynote speeches. Reaching such a level of quality requires extreme dedication and the entire CAS community is extremely in debt to Amara Amara (general chair) and his team for their outstanding work. Among those, as president, I wish to extend my deep appreciation to the members nominated by CAS, namely Wouter Serdijn (Technical Program Co-Chair), Pau-Choo (Julia) Chung (Special Sessions Co-Chair) and Malgorzata ChrzanowskaJeske (Tutorial Co-Chair), who did a splendid job in FIRST QUARTER 2011
their respective tasks and in maintaining continuity for conference. As it has been for ISCAS2010, also future ISCAS organizers may rest assured that CAS leadership will be always at their side to help solving any impasse they may find in the conference flow. With respect to this, this year made an important step in this direction by awarding a five-year contract to guarantee, starting from 2012, the use of the EpapersTM paper submission and review management system for future editions of the conference. This will certainly be of tremendous help in arriving to formally and coherently assure for ISCAS the same level of continuity one can find at other top-level IEEE conferences such as DAC, ISSCC, and ICC. In terms of new initiatives, In 2010 CAS initiated CASFEST, which is envisioned as a series of one-day, highimpact technical workshops – to be held in conjunction with major CAS conferences – where the high quality of the accepted papers is paired with high quality of presentations, which must indeed be delivered by the most experienced author of the paper. At the time of writing this message, the first edition of CAS-FEST on “Variation-Aware Design for Nanoscale VLSI,” held in conjunction with ICECS 2010, is only a few days away. You may find more details of the exciting program put together by Sachin S. Sapatnekar by visiting http://www.ieeecas-fest.org/ where you will also have the possibility to download the video of all the presentations held there. The second edition of CAS-FEST is planned to be held in Rio, together with ISCAS 2011, on the exciting and truly interdisciplinary area of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCI). I am very excited about this, since this will be the first of a series of three workshops in this area organized in cooperation between CAS-S, the Engineering in Medicine and Biology (EMB) and the Systems, Man and Cybernetics (SMC) Societies, with the aim of crossfertilizing the research activities on this topic which are currently carried out by groups spread across all three societies. As you can imagine, the organization of these events requires an incredible amount of time and dedication and I would like to deeply thank Mohamad Sawan, who has already started to actively work on this. CAS-S Memberships and Administration In terms of membership, I am very happy to report that 2010 has been truly satisfactory. In fact, after many years of constant drop (at an average rate of 5% per year since 2004), CAS membership remained this year almost constant at the current value of more than 10000 members. This is particularly satisfactory since it is in line with the performance of other top-level sister societies, such as the Electron Devices (20.1%), the Solid State Circuits (23.9%), the 10
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Microwave Theory and Techniques (20.5%) and the Signal Processing (15%) Societies. The reason for this, I am sure, relies on the efforts that CAS has put in increasing the quality and level of its activities as well as growing the overall “value for membership”. Among this, worth mentioning is the additional discount in the registration fee which has been offered to CAS members at ISCAS 2010 – something which will become a tradition at every ISCAS and hopefully at every conference sponsored by CAS- as well as the organization, during the same conference, of a very successful event for younger scientist and Graduate from the Last Decade (GoLD)1. Given the appreciable increase in the level of member benefits, like the already mentioned free on-line subscription to JETCAS and to the RFIC VJ to all members, and on-line access to all journals and CAS sponsored conferences proceeding for CAS student members, I sincerely hope that 2011 will see a continuation of this positive trend. Of course, even the most exciting and innovative action may fail to turn into an appreciated service to our members, if CAS is not able to present it in an effective and appealing way. From this point of view, an important step has been decided in 2010, namely the complete restructuring of the CAS-S web site, a project which is still underway and which should be completed in the first quarter of 2011. In addition to a more appealing look-and-feel, it will offer several exciting new features, including integration with social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, . . .), a repository of scientific material (notes, tutorial slides, video capture of keynote speeches at major CAS conferences . . .) which will be available to Society’s members only. This will hopefully greatly increase CAS-S’ outreach towards its membership, making known all our events and initiatives, and increase their involvement in our activities and in the Society’s governance. I need to be honest with you: concluding any of the tasks above needs not only personal dedication and time and great team work with members of the ExCom and BoG, but also a deep knowledge of the financial and administrative structure of both the CAS Society and the IEEE as a whole. As you may understand, one year time as president may not be enough for “learning the job” and leaves no margin of errors if one desires to conclude a task he/she has initiated. From this point of view, the extension of the CAS president’s mandate from one to two years, a follow up of a very long discussion in the society leadership dating back to 2005, is a significant step forward to assure more continuity in CAS 1
For more details on the latter please refer to http://cassnewsletter.org/ Volume4-Issue3/GOLD_News.html FIRST QUARTER 2011
governance. Such a change will certainly increase continuity in society leadership and increase the effectiveness to present CAS-S ideas and positions within IEEE. Another important change CAS-S approved this year relates to the reorganization in CAS leadership for regional activities. In a nutshell, the new structure enhances the current management of membership activities by involving more BoG members from all different groups of regions (one for each of R1-7, R8, R9 and R10) under the supervision of a newly created VP for Membership and Regional Activities; furthermore, the reduction in the number of CAS ExCom members by three units (which aligns its structure and composition to the one of all major IEEE Societies) involved in this reorganization allows consistent travel cost savings and the consequent allocation of more resources to membership activities, where they are needed. There are several tasks which are still open and on which the CAS leadership is actively working. The most important one is certainly the definition of new technical directions for the society. CAS has very strong core activities in classical areas of circuits and systems, as
well as a very long tradition of fostering new research areas. If CAS-S wants to keep up with our successful past, there is the need to clearly highlight which is the path to follow. Once more we are very fortunate, since this task is in the very capable hands of Vojin Oklobdzija, CAS VP Technical Activities. Our Society enjoys a superb support from IEEE. Our executive director, Heidi Zazza, has knowledge of the structure of IEEE which we can only define as being encyclopedic. It is only thanks to her and to her smooth and capable interaction with other IEEE staff that CAS-S could find this year the most proper way to successfully conclude many of the tasks it has initiated. My last thought is for my successor, Mani Soma, who is both a true friend and a great administrator. I wish to him and CAS a year full of success, which it will certainly be achieved thanks to the constant great support of all CAS-S volunteers. I wish you and all your families a happy and prosperous 2011. —Gianluca
From the Editor (continued from page 4) can be quantified can be ranked. Today, we read more and more headlines about different sorts of rankings and comparisons in academia, from degree program rankings to graduate school rankings, and from faculty rankings to university rankings, to name just some typical ones. Regarding ground-level management however, to quantify an individual’s academic quality for performance evaluation is much more difficult, albeit many measures have been proposed using primarily some data-based numerical indexes. No doubt faculty performance evaluation is very important, indeed necessary in order to maintain the health and promise of our academic institutions. Yet, assessment has been difficult and is becoming increasingly tedious, even grueling for many faculty members. Ironically, as I was told, “everything you did will come back to haunt you.” I used to evaluate my students’ course performance
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mainly by their homework and exam scores. Now I myself am being evaluated by university authorities in almost exactly the same manner. Although these two might be considered different issues, should I complain about being “studentized”? Here, of course, the key is how a professor scores his/ her students; likewise, it merely is a question of how university administrators implement the calculations and rankings to evaluate their professors. In practice, the challenge for senior management is to maintain a good balance among the different measures used for academic quality assurance in order to address the hurdle that many aspects of academic quality are incomparable and unquantifiable – sometimes, non multa sed multum, but other times, non multum sed multa.
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