IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q4 2020 - 78

CAS Society News
Ricardo Reis, Senior Member, IEEE, Raphael Brum, Member, IEEE,
and JosÃ© Azambuja, Senior Member, IEEE

How CASS-RS Transformed Local Face-to-Face
Seminars into Global Webinars
Abstract
The IEEE CASS Rio Grande do Sul Chapter is organizing webinars with talks from prominent speakers in the Circuits and
Systems Society. This article shows how these activities transformed local face-to-face seminars into a set of webinars accessible to hundreds of attendees from all around the globe. It also
presents the collection of webinars organized this year and how
they were generated and broadcast via YouTube.

I. Introduction
n 2013, the Graduate Program on Microelectronics (PGMICRO) of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do
Sul (UFRGS) started organizing weekly seminars at an
auditorium of the Institute of Informatics. The main goal
was to provide an overview of state-of-the-art microelectronic topics for graduate and undergraduate students, researchers, and industry professionals. Each week, a professor affiliated with the program would present a talk on
his/her research topic to students and researchers. Other
Brazilian and international researchers were soon invited
to participate as speakers, and our audience expanded to
outside of the University campus. With support from the
IEEE CASS Rio Grande do Sul Chapter, the seminars became open to the general public, free of registration, and
widely announced for academia and industry.
In the first year, we organized 52 seminars in double
sessions, with two talks per week, 28 in the first semester (March-July) and 24 in the second one (August-December). The format was later reduced to a single talk
per week, decreasing the number of CASS Talks per year
to an average of 32 talks. When being a local face-to-face
seminar, our audience was about 60 attendees, fluctuating according to dates and speakers. See Figure 1 for a
glimpse of one of these seminars. Several of the invited
speakers were well-known researchers from academia
and industry. Some of the invited researchers that organized talks in the first year were:
Susmita Sur-Kolay (Advanced Computing and Microelectronics Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute,
Calcutta, India);

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCAS.2020.3027224
Date of current version: 12 November 2020

78â

Mircea Stan (University of Virginia, USA) (IEEE
CASS DL);
Cliff Sze (IBM, Austin, USA)
JÃ¼rgen Becker (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology KIT, Germany);
Matteo Sonza Reorda (Politecnico di Torino, Italy)
Achim Rettberg (Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Germany);
Wouter Anton Serdjin (TUDelft, Netherlands) (IEEE
CASS DL);
Mustafa Ozdal (INTEL, USA);
Fernando Silveira (Universidad de La RepÃºblica,
Uruguay);
Franz Rammig (Paderborn University, Germany).
From its first year to 2019, the CASS Talks format remained unchanged, with a mix of national and international speakers targeting an average audience of 60 attendees from academia and the industry. Other chapter
events, such as the Regional School of Microelectronics
(EMicro), CASS Workshop (CASSW-RS), CASS Meeting,
and Seasonal School, grew in numbers, helping solidify
the CASS Talks as an all-year series of technical talks.
Table I shows international speakers that participated in
the CASS Talks between 2014 and 2019. We did not include
the list of national speakers, as it has over 100 names.
II. Moving from Local Seminars to Global Webinars
The year 2020 started with two face-to-face seminars given by Tiago Balen, head of PGMICRO, and Ricardo Reis,
in early March. The following talk, scheduled for March
20 was immediately switched to virtual, as the -University

Figure 1. A CASS Talk at UFRGS.

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