IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q4 2020 - 81

As our audience went global, we started streaming
the talks on the IEEE CASS-RS YouTube channel (https://
www.youtube.com/cassriograndedosul), keeping Mconf
as our central videoconference platform, now exclusively
for organizers. The YouTube channel had been recently
created for the virtual edition of EMicro'20 and started
growing up to 1,100+ subscribers, 25,400+ views, and
13,000+ viewed hours, as of October 2020.
Targeting our speakers, we changed the local/international mix of speakers in favor of a majority of international ones. We did so to diversify and expand research topics, targeting a new global audience, therefore providing
broader subjects on circuits and systems. The first speakers during our first phase were Ricardo Reis (UFRGS, Brazil), Renato Hentschke (Intel, USA), Gustavo Wilke (Synopsys, USA), and Gracieli Posser (Cadence, USA). Figure 2
shows the flyers of the first webinars using Mconf.
The second phase, using a new format, with streaming
by YouTube, went online on May 8, with a CASS Talk by Samuel Pagliarini (University of Tallinn, Estonia) entitled " Can
we build a Trustworthy Billion Transistor Chip?. " Samuel's
stream received 261 views during his presentation, plus 342
views, to this date, in his later edited and uploaded video. The
total of 603 views achieved a far larger and broader audience
than our previous local talks, showing that our new format
was a success. Figure 3 shows the flyer of the first CASS Talk
webinar, streamed by YouTube. The announcement of the
talks is done using several email lists (local and international
ones) and social medias, but it is also great to have the flyers
of talks include the IEEE CASS webpage located in USA.

The audience increased in numbers and expanded
worldwide steadily, reaching at least 25 countries. Raphael Brum, the vice-chair of the CASS-RS Chapter, became responsible for the technical set up for the webinars, while Ricardo Reis, past-chair, was responsible for
the program, inviting the speakers. The technical infrastructure runs on top of the Amazon AWS cloud [3] to ensure its reliability. It includes a GPU-capable g4dn.xlarge
instance running the Open Broadcast System (OBS) [4],
an open-source tool dedicated to live streaming, and
Mconf servers hosted on the UFRGS Data Center [5]. This
structure is depicted in Figure 4.
Our latest webinar (to the date we wrote this article)
went online on September 18, with the CASS Talk by Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli entitled " From Transistors to
Systems: The Role of EDA in an Evolving World " (Fig--ure 5). It
reached a peak of 140 unique viewers and reached a total
of 627 views during the stream. A recorded version will
soon be available at the CASS Rio Grande do Sul YouTube
channel, further increasing the number of views.

Videoconference
System

Video-Mixing
Platform

Streaming
Platform

Figure 4. Key elements of CASS Talks streaming platform.

Figure 5. Prof. Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli (UC Berkeley, USA), doing his lecture on CASS Talks. Live on YouTube on
-September 18, 2020.

FOURTH QUARTER 2020

IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE

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IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q4 2020

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