Awards & Recognitions Overview

The IEEE Circuits and Systems Society’s annual awards program recognizes member achievement in education, industry, technological innovation and service.

Awards Activities
Awards Subcommittees
The ACC recommends, for appointment by the President, the subcommittee Chairs for each of the Society awards. In order to meet the stringent timing of the award selection process, the President appoints the new subcommittee Chairs in the first week of the year. The Darlington and Guillemin-Cauer awards should be considered as a joint effort and only one subcommittee chair is to be appointed. Typically, subcommittee Chairs should be selected as follows:
  • Society and Achievement Awards: past recipients of the respective award or past members of award subcommittee.
  • Best Paper Awards: present and/or past EICs recommended by the VP – Publications who serves as CASS Best Paper Awards Chair.
  • Chapter Awards: VP – Regional Activities and Membership who serves as CASS Chapter Awards Chair. 
The subcommittee Chairs will assemble and recommend members to serve in their award subcommittees. A subcommittee shall consist of a Chair and at least 4 additional CASS members, and should be diverse in terms of technical expertise, geographical distribution and gender. No member shall serve on the same committee for more than two consecutive years. For Best Paper Awards subcommittees, members may be drawn from the current or past editors or associate editors of the relevant Transactions or related publications. For Chapter Awards, it is recommendable that members are composed by the Regional Representatives of the BoG. Once members have agreed to serve on the subcommittee, the Chair of the subcommittee shall share the list of members with the ACC for approval after validating that no Conflict of Interest (CoI) exists under the terms expressed in Sec.5.2.2. The President shall take the recommended compositions into account when appointing subcommittee members. The appointments shall be made before the deadline for submission of awards nominations.
 
Nominations
A call for nominations for all the CASS Awards will be issued to the CASS membership every year by November 15. The CASS Executive Office shall arrange for a web-based system for the submission of awards nominations. The ACC and the Executive Committee will coordinate their efforts to ensure that at least two high quality nominations are received each year for each award. Nominations for Best Paper Awards will also be solicited from the editorial boards of the publications. Self-nominations will be excluded. A nominator cannot submit multiple nominations of the same candidacy to different CASS Society and Achievement Awards; only one nomination is allowed in this category.

The deadline for nomination submissions will be February 15 of the following year at midnight at the Executive Office. Nominations will not be accepted after the deadline and the web-based system will be closed. During the submission period, the received nominations will be kept confidential and under the sole control of the CASS Executive Office.

Nominators of nominations deemed acceptable for an award but not successful in winning will be contacted in time the following year by the CASS Executive Office and asked if they intend to put the nomination forward again for consideration for the same award. While a new nomination form and reference letters is not required, they may be updated at the nominator’s choice. For a candidate nominated for two or more awards and winning one of those awards, the unsuccessful submissions for the other parallel nomination(s) will not be forwarded.

Conflict of Interest
Under no circumstances shall members of an award subcommittee be in a conflict of interest situation as defined in I-300.2 of the IEEE Bylaws. In particular, members of an award subcommittee may not author, nominate, or endorse any nominations for the award subcommittee on which they serve (e.g., a member of the VLSI Transactions Best Paper Award subcommittee may not nominate, endorse, or author any nominations for the VLSI Transactions Best Paper Award). Should such a circumstance arise, the award subcommittee member(s) in question must recuse themselves from serving on that award subcommittee. This does not preclude members of an award subcommittee from nominating, endorsing, or being a nominee for awards other than the one for which they serve as an evaluator. Each award subcommittee will act independent of one another with no visibility or influence in the decision-making process for other awards. Any interactions between award subcommittees must include the ACC in correspondence to ensure there is no conflict of interest.


Evaluation
Shortly after the deadline, each subcommittee Chair shall receive the complete nomination materials (including references/endorsements as well as unsuccessful nominations in previous year that were recommended for re-evaluation, if applicable) for the corresponding award. Prior to distributing the nomination package for evaluation to the award subcommittee members, the award subcommittee Chair shall review the nominations received to confirm that: (i) there is no conflict of interest between the award subcommittee members and the nominations received, and (ii) the package contains all the references/endorsements listed in the nomination (if applicable). Regarding (i), if a conflict of interest is detected, the award subcommittee Chair shall inform the ACC and recommend a replacement in the shortest possible time. Regarding (ii), if the nomination package lacks references/endorsements, the subcommittee Chair shall ask the referees indicated on the nomination to submit their reference letter. Nomination forms shall not have more than 5 references.

Once the nomination package has been distributed among the subcommittee members for evaluation, all the subcommittee members shall confirm the subcommittee Chair they are not and will not be in a conflict of interest situation. If any claim to be in COI, they should recuse themselves from the subcommittee. The award subcommittee Chair shall inform the ACC of these circumstances and recommend alternative member(s) as soon as possible.

If only one nomination for an award is received in a given year, the corresponding award subcommittee and the ACC must agree in unanimous consent to be able to give the award that year. If a subcommittee feels that none of the received nominations meets the high standards necessary for a given award, an award may not be given in that year.

Additionally, Society Awards are subject to the following restrictions:

  • No nominee can be awarded two or more Society awards in the same year. If a nominee is nominated for two or more Awards (e.g., a Society and Achievement Award and a Best Paper Award), the appropriate subcommittees must confer with each other, the nominators, and the ACC to assure that the nominee only receives one award that year.

  • Previous winners of a Technical Achievement Award of the CAS society (Mac Van Valkenburg, Charles A. Desoer Technical Achievement, and Vitold Belevitch CAS awards) are not eligible candidates for consideration of another technical achievement award for the same work. 

  • Previous winners of the John Choma Education, Meritorious Service, or Industrial Pioneer awards are not eligible for the same award. 

  • Previous winners of Chapter-of-the-Year, Regional Chapter-of-the-Year, Student-Branch-Chapter-of-the-Year, and Regional Student-Branch-Chapter-of-the-Year Awards are not eligible for the same award within 3 years from the receiving the last award.

The decision of each award subcommittee must be duly submitted in written form by the subcommittee Chair to the ACC within at most 30 days after receipt of the nomination package. Once the subcommittee reports are received, the ACC shall forward the final award decisions to the BoG for endorsement. If so, the President shall inform the awardees and announce the results to the BoG and the CASS membership. 

Society Awards: