Dear ISCAS delegates,
The time has come for the first-ever ISCAS virtual edition!
We’re eager to welcome all of you to this special edition of our annual worldwide gathering, aiming for a virtuous virtual meeting. We have devised and put together a conference and tools to enable its virtual edition for you to make the most of the event.
Here is the way things will work out:
Event Schedule: A major change in the timeline has been adopted in this virtual edition. ISCAS has been spread over more days, from October 10 to October 21, but reducing the number of hours per day to only 4 (excepting the tutorials day on October 11). Details are given in the Program Schedule website. This has been done to allow a better imbrication of the conference with existing activities at home or the office, as well as, to favor the participation of attendees living in different time zones.
Main track events will take place at two different time slots each day, starting Saturday 10 and unfolding up to Wednesday 21.
- The general slot is 4PM – 5 PM Central European Summer Time (CEST UTC +2:00). This slot will host most of the live content: keynote presentations, overview lectures, panels, competitions and awards ceremonies. This time slot has been designed so that delegates from the majority of the world can participate during waking hours (namely 7AM – 8AM Pacific Daylight Time (PDT); 10AM – 11AM Eastern Daylight Time (EDT); 10PM – 11PM China Standard Time (CST)). Events carried out during this general slot will be recorded and made available to those who miss them.
- The technical slots are 5PM – 8PM CEST (8AM– 11AM PDT, 11AM – 2PM EDT, 11PM – 2AM CST). These will host the paper sessions (oral, poster and demonstrations), as well as breakout dialogue sessions (see below).
Tutorials and Mini-Tutorials will be live events. However, while Tutorials will only be available for tutorial registrants on Sunday 11, Mini-Tutorials will be available to the whole audience and sessions will be recorded for later visualization.
Technical Sessions: Active participation in technical sessions will comprise two components:
- A prerecorded presentation of the talk will be upfront available two weeks beforehand in Open Preview, as will the full papers. The aim is that attendees will have the opportunity to go over the full program and select the talks that interest them. This will provide visibility to the technical contributions to authors, and they will remain archived and available in IEEE Xplore®. Synchronized transcripts made available by IEEE will enable search and maximize engagement and information retention. The platform will provide labeled video segments to ease navigation through the content of the conference in novel ways.
- A live session will take place during the assigned time slot, with the speaker participating via video webinar. The speaker will give a live recap of the talk (up to fifteen minutes for lectures and demos, and up to five minutes for posters), and then answer questions from the Q&A forum or directly made along the live session via chat. Questions will be handled at the discretion of session chairs who will moderate the discussion round.
Authors that do not meet components (1) and (2) will be considered "no-shows" and papers will be excluded from IEEE Xplore®.
Networking rooms: With the aim to foster technical and social discussion in topics relevant to the CAS community, these Networking Rooms, will facilitate interaction among and across participants. These networking rooms will be requested and announced upfront, and hence they will be pre-registered, medium/large in size, moderated by the full registrant triggering the request and attended by invitation. These meetings should fundamentally not overlap with the technical program and should be instead requested to occur during open time slots.
Ad-hoc delegate encounters in Autonomous Rooms: The spirit of these delegate encounters of crucial value for professional networking will be technically enabled all-pervasively to the timeframe of the program and throughout the whole conference in a more spontaneous manner without preregistration. The virtual platform will enable this facility at the delegates’ discretion by triggering Autonomous Rooms for spontaneous, small-sized, unmoderated and time-bounded discussions, for one-on-one/bilateral or multilateral groups up to 10 participants. Visualize this possibility as an analog to meandering through colleagues in coffee break conference areas to select with whom and when to meet and interact.
Availability of Technical Contributions: For the main technical track of the conference, we have negotiated with IEEE an attractive dissemination plan to ensure that technical contributions are widely accessible to delegates:
- All technical papers in the main track will generally be available worldwide from September 29th to October 10th as a preview of the content to maximize exposure. They will also be available during the conference dates. Following that, both papers and pre-recorded video presentations will be available through IEEE digital libraries in IEEE Xplore®.
- Recorded special live performances, namely, keynote presentations, overview papers, mini-tutorials, panels, contests and ceremonies will be made available through the CASS Resource Center, upon consent from the authors where apply.
We wish to reiterate our eagerness to welcoming you all to this first-ever virtual version of ISCAS. We are convinced that this format will be a compelling way to interact and participate in the event and will prove engaging. With this, we count on all of you to maintain the uniqueness of this annual flagship gathering of the Circuits and Systems Society to serve, mobilize and be fruitful for our scientific community.
We are looking forward to meeting you soon and, of course, stay healthy and safe.
Ángel Rodríguez-Vázquez, Manuel Delgado-Restituto and Eduard Alarcón
General Co-Chairs, IEEE ISCAS 2020