Awards & Recognitions Overview

Society awards are: Mac Van Valkenburg, Charles A. Desoer Technical Achievement, John Choma Education, Meritorious Service, Industrial Pioneer, Vitold Belevitch CAS (alternate years), Chapter-of-the-Year, and Regional Chapter-of-the-Year (R1-7, R8, R9, and R10). Prize paper awards are: Darlington, Guillemin-Cauer, Outstanding Young Author, TCSVT, TVLSI, TBioCAS, and ISCAS Student Best Paper (4 awards).

Procedure
The ACC recommends, for appointment by the President, the subcommittee chairs for each of the society awards and prize paper 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 his/her term. 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:

Nominations
A call for nominations for all the CASS awards is issued to the CASS membership every year by 15 November (*Amendment for the 2024 call for award nominations: start on 20 November 2023). Nominations for prize paper awards are also solicited from the editorial boards of the publications. The deadline for nomination submissions (the nomination form and no more than 5 references) is 15 February of the following year at midnight at the Operations Office. The subcommittee Chairs shall recommend at least 4 persons as members of their subcommittee. The Society President will consider these recommendations in appointing the membership of these subcommittees. For prize papers, members should be chosen among the present/past editors or associate editors of the corresponding transactions or related publications. This list shall be submitted for approval to the ACC before the submission deadline.

Each subcommittee shall receive the complete nomination material (and references/endorsements, if applicable) of the related award and decide on the recipient within at most 30 days. If a nomination does not contain all reference letters, then the subcommittee Chair shall ask the referees indicated on the nomination to submit their reference letter. The decision of each subcommittee must be duly submitted in written form by the subcommittee Chair to the ACC. As a best practice, the ACC and the ExCom will coordinate the efforts of the Society to ensure that at least two (2) high-quality nominations are received for each award each year. 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. Self-nominations are excluded. 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. This decision must be noted in written form to the ACC. The ACC will forward the final award decisions to BoG for endorsement. The President who is responsible for informing the awardees and announcing the results to the BoG and the CASS membership.

In the event that a person is nominated for two or more Society awards, the appropriate subcommittees must confer with each other, the nominator(s), and the ACC to assure that no one is awarded two or more Society awards in the same year.

Previous winners of a technical achievement award of CASS 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 other CAS society awards (John Choma, Education, Meritorious Service, Industrial Pioneer awards) are not eligible for the same award.

Previous winners of Chapter-of-the-Year and Regional Chapter-of-the-Year awards are not eligible for the same award within 3 years from receiving the last award.

Nominators of nominations deemed acceptable for an award but not successful in winning will be contacted in time the following year by the CASS Operations 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
Members of each subcommittee cannot nominate nor endorse nominations for the award category they belong to (e.g., a member of the VLSI Transactions Best Paper Award, cannot nominate or endorse any proposal for a prize paper), nor can one of their papers be nominated for any awards of the same category.

Procedure
The ACC and the CASS Operations Office will receive all nominations. Both will keep the nominations confidential. Nominations will not be accepted after the deadline. Preferably, the awards nomination procedure should be done using a web-based system. If so, the nomination web-system will be shut down after the deadline.