NCAS TC Minutes 2013
Location: Beijing China National Convention Center, China (in the framework of IEEE ISCAS 2013)
Date: 22 May 2013
Time: 13:10 GMT+8
Members present at the meeting (22)
- Francis Lau (Chair)
- Hiroo Sekiya (Chair Elect)
- Jinhu Lu (Secretary)
- Sergio Callegari (ISCAS 2013 NCAS Track Chair)
- Xiang Li
- Géza Kolumbán
- Izzet Cem Göknar
- Joos Vandewalle
- Gianluca Setti
- Wallace Tang
- Chai Wah Wu
- Ljiljana Trajkovic
- Yoshifumi Nishio
- Elena Blokhina
- Todd Freeborn
- Josef Nossek
- Zbigniew Galias
- Henry Leung
- Herbert Iu
- YiongXiang Xia
- Michael Tse
- Wei Xing Zheng
Non Members present at the meeting (4)
- Abdelali El Aroudi
- Todd Freeborn
- Dimitri Galayko
- Matteo Biggio
Guests present for part of the meeting
- David Skellern (IEEE CASS VP Technical Activities)
1. Welcome
The Chair, Francis Lau, opened the Annual Meeting o the Technical Committee on Nonlinear Circuits and Systems (TC-NCAS), welcomed all the participants and presented the agenda, including the following points:
- Welcome
- Introduction of NCAS TC officers and members
- Confirmation of minutes
- Matter arising
- Report on activities during the period from ISCAS 2012 to ISCAS 2013
- Report on paper submission/acceptance rate for NCAS track at ISCAS 2013
- (Co-)Track Chair for ISCAS 2014
- International Workshop on Complex Systems and Networks 2013
- NCAS TC Website
- Outreach initiative
- Any other business
2. Introduction of NCAS TC officers and members
All the TC officers and members briefly introduced themselves. The Chair, Francis Lau, informed all the participants that this edition of the NCAS TC meeting had some guests:
- some non-members who are active in the field, interested in the Committee activities and potential candidates for membership;
- the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Vice-President for Technical Activities, David Skellern, in visit to provide some information about how the CASS Executive Committee plans to manage and enhance interaction with the Technical Committees.
The non-members present to the meeting also introduced themselves.
3. Confirmation of minutes
The Chair, Francis Lau, recalled that some corrections were made to the minutes after comments were received from the participants of the last meeting.
All members confirmed that the last revision of the minutes for the last meeting was provided to them in advance and approved it.
4. Matter arising
The Chair, Francis Lau, provided the following information about recent matters:
- A plan is in place to fully synchronize the NCAS TC “business year” to ISCAS rather than the solar year and have all the officiers being effectively in charge from the day after the annual meeting held at ISCAS. This proposal was discussed among the current officers who expressed a positive opinion.
- At the 2012 meeting a new website for the TC was announced. It was expected to be active shortly, but in fact it only became operative recently, due to the need of migrating the data present in the legacy site and some technical issues. The officiers would like to apologize with the NCAS TC members who last year volunteered to help maintaining the site, and whose help could not be used. A specific point in the agenda is dedicated to the new web site.
The chair also informed the audience that at the next ISCAS 2014 the CASS FEST event will be focused on memristors, a topic with strong links with our Technical Committee. Consequently, all the TC members that work on the subject are strongly invited to participate and help the committee to give at best its contribution to the success of the event.
5. Report on activities during the period from ISCAS 2012 to ISCAS 2013
The activities were summarized and shown to members by the Chair, Francis Lau. The Chair also reported that the updated list of activities including members’ activities will be put on the NCAS TC website and made available to all members.
6. Report on paper submission/acceptance rate for NCAS track at ISCAS 2013
The NCAS Track Chair for ISCAS 2013, Sergio Callegari, gave a presentation on the track organization, also providing some statistical data on submissions, acceptance ratio, review process.
- The track had 80 submissions.1 submission was immediately rejected as non conforming to the conference standard (too long); 3 submissions were redirected to other tracks as more suitable for them.
- The acceptance ratio was approximately 45%, making the track slighly more selective than the ISCAS average (50%).
- The review process let the submitted papers receive 3.6 comment sets each on average, which is in line with the ISCAS average.
- The previous data makes the Nonlinear Circuits and Systems track about 5% of ISCAS in submissions and about 4.5% in accepted papers.
- The number of submissions for the Nonlinear Circuits and Systems track has somehow fluctuated in the past years (in between about 75-100). A better view at the activity in the area can be obtained by looking at the evolution of the size of the track relative to ISCAS. In the past three years, this reduced slightly (by about 1.5%). However, the year on year variations appear to be reducing. Furthermore, the NCAS community appears to be extremely active in the organization and participation to Special Sessions.
The presentation was then commented by the audience. Particular attention was given to the following points:
- There is some unbalance in the number of submissions in the varius subtracks. This suggests to provide better information to authors on what can be suitable for certain sub-tracks and to increase cooperation with other tracks in order to assure that cases where authors indicate a track and a subtrack for which better choices exist can be considered together.
- In recent years the track suffered from the collocation of its sessions at the end of the ISCAS conference. Furthermore, there were some difficulties due to overlapping sessions and to sessions overlapping with Special Sessions interesting to or organized by NCAS TC members.
In order to improve the situation with respect to these issues, the following resolutions were made:
- Have two track co-chairs, renewing only one every year. This assures that every year there is one person who had experience in the previous year. Such an arrangement should favour the passing of experience.
- Anticipate the session scheduling at ISCAS by making proposals for the NCAS track collocation. Be pro-active in communication with the conference Special Session Chairs.
7. Any other business
The TC chair, Francis Lau, proposed to slightly change the meeting program, anticipating point 11, in order to let the VP Technical Activities David Skellern present some of the executive board programs to increase the involvement of the technical committees in many CASS activities.
The CASS Society VP for Technical Activities, David Skellern, presented the following points:
- The executive board would like to increase the involvement of the technical committees in the organization of the smaller conferences that obtain IEEE technical co-sponsorship in and in the assurance of the quality of their programs.
- The board would like to increase the involvement of technical committees in the organization of the CASS FEST events. He recalled that ideally the CASS FEST event should result in such high quality presentations to build a JETCAS special issue based on them. Historically, not in every year it was possible to follow this pattern. However, there is now a strong intention is to achieve this goal. Such a plan can have extremely high success chances provided that it is possible to rely on the TC experience for the proposal of timely subjects and the selection of top authors.
Finally, the VP for Technical Activities informed the TC members about the TC review process. The NCAS TC will go under review during 2013. A timeline for the process was anticipated.
8. Co-Track Chair for ISCAS 2014
The TC Chair, Francis Lau, illustrated to the TC members how nominations and self nominations for the ISCAS 2014 Track chair for the Nonlinear Circuits and Systems track were collected. Furthermore, he reported that the committee officiers evaluated the nominations suggesting Herbert Iu as the the new track chair.
The committee approved this suggestion, elected Herbert Iu as track co-chair and confirmed the 2013 track chair, Sergio Callegari, as the other track co-chair.
Lijljana Tajkovic noted that the geographical distribution of the TC officiers is unbalanced towards the Asia Pacific region and suggested trying to improve it in the forthcoming years.
9. International Workshop on Complex Systems and Networks 2013
Ljiljana Trajkovic, who is among the organizers of the 2013 edition of the International Workshop on Complex Systems and Networks, as well as the representant of the hosting institution, reported on the organization of the workshop. Some important point in her report are the following:
- the 2013 edition of the workshop will be hosted by Simon Fraser University in the second half of the year. The workshop will be held in Vancouver either in the university site or more likely in downtown Vancouver. It is important that all the TC members help passing information about the workshop, in order to make it a success.
- there is a strong will to help the participation of students. A supporting budget of about 20000$ has already been guaranteed to the workshop or is in finalization. Part of it will be directly used for helping students’ participation.
- Students’ response has historically always been very positive. This is one strong motivation for keeping the workshop running.
- In order to ease the workshop organization in the forthcoming years it would be good to devise a strategy and to make some financial support permanent. Due to its theoretical nature, the workshop cannot expect substantial direct funding in the form of sponsorship from the industry. Since, the topics are tightly linked to the committee activities, it is important that the committee is an actor in this strategic planning.
10. NCAS TC web site
The chair, Francis Lau, briefly introduced the new web site to the TC members, thanking Ljiljana Trackovic for having maintained the historic web site for many years.
Ljiljana Trackovic briefly commented on the process by which data was copied from the historic site to the new one, lamenting some communication issues.
The TC officers assured that an extra communication effort will be made with respect to the new site and that volunteer involvement will be increased.
11. Outreach initiative
The chair reminded all the TC members that they are all invited to propose outreach initiatives and that it is possible to apply for funding.
12. Any other business
No other business needed discussion.
Applying the normal rotation to the officers position, after the election of the ISCAS 2014 track co-chairs, the officers for 2013-2014 are as follows:
Chair: Hiroo Sekiya
Past Chair: Francis Lau
Chair-Elect: Jinhu Lu
Secretary: Sergio Callegari
Track Chair for ISCAS 2013: Herbert Iu and Sergio Callegari
The meeting ended at 14:15 GMT+8