Nonlinear Circuits and Systems Technical Committee (NCAS) – ISCAS’98 Minutes (June 1998)

Monday, June 1st, 1998
12:30-14:00 PM
Doubletree Hotel
ISCAS’98 Monterey, CA

List of attendees:
Seth Chaiken, Rui J. P. de Figueiredo, Robert M. Fox, Douglas R. Frey, Michael Green, Martin Hasler, Peter Kennedy (Chair-elect), Shinsaku Mori, Tetsuo Nishi (Secretary), Yoshifumi Nishio, Maciej Ogorzalek, Stefano Pastore, Toshimichi Saito, Irwin Sandberg, Ljiljana Trajkovic (Chair), Joos Vandewalle, Laurens Weiss, and Alan Willson.

AGENDA:

REPORTS:

1. Chair’s report on the past year’s activities of the Technical Committee:

Ljiljana Trajkovic gave a short report on the past year’s and the future activities of the Technical Committee:

2. Chair’s reports from the meeting of the CAS TC chairs held in Monterey on May 30, 1998:

  • (a) Participation of TC’s in activities of the Society (scientific committees at conferences and peer reviewing)
  • (b) Changes in organization of technical committees (common bylaws, membership rules, restrictions, and active members)
  • (c) Three new TC’s proposed: Microsensors, Communications, Chaos (see item 5.4)
  • (d) Short courses: 22 short courses were announced for 1998. Proposals for 1999 should be forwarded to Chris Toumazou.
  • (e) We were supposed to write a “White Paper”… the closest approximation we have is our informal survey at NDES’98, G. Kolumban and M.P. Kennedy, “NDES’98 explores attendees’ views on research issues,” IEEE Circuits and Systems Newsletter, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 4-5, 23-24, September 1998.

3. Forthcoming special issues of journals:

  • (a) IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, Part II, Special issue on “Advances in nonlinear electronic circuits,” Guest Editors: M. P. Kennedy and A. Rodriguez-Vazquez, March 1999.
  • (b) Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing Special issue on “DC operating points of electrical circuits,” Guest Editor: Lj. Trajkovic, issue expected by the end of 1999.
  • (c) IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, Part I, Special issue to honor the memory of Sidney Darlington, Guest Editors: Ernest Kuh and Irwin Sandberg, January 1999 (vol. CAS-46, no. 1).
  • (d) IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals, Special issue on Nonlinear Theory and its Applications (NOLTA’97) (devoted, but not restricted, to papers presented at NOLTA’97), Guest Editors: Mitsunori Makino and Toshimichi Saito, September 1998.
  • (e) IEICE Transactions on Fundamentals, Special issue on Nonlinear Theory and its Applications (NOLTA’98) (devoted, but not restricted, to papers presented at NOLTA’98), Guest Editor: Tohru Kohda, to appear in September 1999.
  • (f) Special issue of the International Journal of Circuit Theory and Applications on “Chaos Synchronization,” Guest Editors: Martin Hasler and Joos Vandewalle. (deadline extended to 15 September 1998).

4. Information:

5. Discussion:

  • The future of NCAS TC: Should we exist and if yes, what should we do to play a more prominent role in the CAS society (see items 5.3 and 5.4)?
  • The NCAS TC bylaws proposed by Prof. Alan Willson were formally adopted. (Please see the NCAS TC WWW page: http://diva.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ljilja/tcncas for the current version.) It was suggested at the latest TC Chairs meeting to limits the number of a technical committee members to 25. The opinion of this committee was that we would not like to impose such a limit.
  • At one of the previous NCAS TC meetings, Prof. R-W Liu proposed to change the name of our committee in order to expand its scope into image signal processing and communications. The result of the discussion was to leave the name as is: TC on Nonlinear Circuits and Systems.
  • Concerning newly proposed TC on Chaos, proposed by the CAS President, Rui J. P. de Figueiredo, the committee members voted against forming a separate TC on Chaos, because the committee members felt that Chaos is one of the current core activities of present NCAS Technical Committee.

6. Election of the officers (term ending at ISCAS 1999): 
We invited Prof. Ron Chen to join us as the new Secretary of NCAS TC.

Current officers:
Chair: Peter Kennedy
Chair-elect: Tetsuo Nishi
Secretary: Ron Chen.

Prepared by: T. Nishi, P. Kennedy, and Lj. Trajkovic.