IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q4 2021 - 49

IEEE Joint Chapter Signal Processing/Circuits and Systems
(SP-01/CAS-04) of the IEEE Section of Serbia and Montenegro
1. Activities of the Chapter
F
rom the beginning of the IEEE Yugoslav Section (in
1971), the first and thus the oldest chapter was the
IEEE Joint Chapter Signal Processing/Circuits and
Systems (SP-01/CAS-04), founded in 1988. Today, the SP/
CAS Chapter of the IEEE Serbia and Montenegro Section
has 85 active members as follows: 1 Fellow, 2 Life Senior,
9 Senior Members, 62 Members and 11 Student Members.
The SP/CAS Chapter has been very active. Besides promoting
IEEE, motivating young researchers to become
IEEE members, and organizing annual chapter meetings,
the chapter initiated many other events as tutorials and
excellent talks (among the speakers were Leon Chua,
Sanjit Mitra, Jacek Zurada, Jun Wang, Jelena Kovacevic,
Ljiljana Trajkovic, Martin Vetterli, Petar Djuric, Zoran
Obradovic, ...). Also, the chapter successfully organized
a number of conferences, probably the most prominent
being NEUREL (Symposium of Neural Networks and Applications).
The NEUREL symposia started in 1990, just
before the breakup of former Yugoslavia, as the enthusiastic
work of Professors Mirko Milic (1932-1993) and Rajko
Tomovic (1919-2001) from the University of Belgrade.
Unfortunately, after the first NEUREL, the Civil War in the
former Yugoslavia stopped many intellectual, cultural,
and scientific activities. Surprisingly, NEUREL events survived
despite the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia:
the second NEUREL was held in the winter of 1992/93,
under the enormous inflation in Serbia, as a weekend lecture
series directed by Professor Mirko Milic´. Fortunately,
the situation in this region improved after 1994 and the
third NEUREL, organized by Professor Branimir Reljin
(SM, LM), was held in 1995 under (almost) normal conditions.
Since that time, the NEUREL symposia have been
a biennial scientific meetings dealing with all aspects of
artificial neural networks and fuzzy systems, from their
theoretical foundations to realizations and applications.
After 1997, NEURELs were technically co-sponsored by
several IEEE societies and by IEEE Region 8. Unfortunately,
in 2020, the 15th NEUREL was canceled due to COVID -19.
In some sense, NEUREL is the continuation of the very
prominent symposia ISYNT (International Symposium
of Network Theory) organized by Professor Horvat from
1968 to 1989. The ISYNT symposia were attended by the
best-known scientists in this field including J. Aggarwal,
T. Bickart, H. Carlin, L. Chua, P. Civalleri, A. Davies,
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCAS.2021.3118486
Date of current version: 12 November 2021
FOURTH QUARTER 2021
Founders of Circuit Theory in Former Yugoslavia: Professors
Radoslav Horvat and Mirko Milic´.
T. Deliyannis, C. Desoer, S. Dutta Roy, J. Fidler, A. Fettweis,
M. Ghausi, E. Kuh, E. Laker, E. Lindberg, G. Martinelli, S.
Mitra, G. Moschytz, J. Neirynck, R. Newcomb, A. Petrenko,
T. Roska, R. Saal, J. Scanlan, G. Temes, Y. Tokad, M. Van
Valkenburg, A. N. Willson, Jr., V. Zima, among others.
Conferences where SP/CAS chapters actively organize
special sessions are ET(R)AN, IcETRAN, TELFOR
and MECO.
ET(R)AN is the oldest, largest, and most prestigious
Serbian conference in the field of (electrical) engineering.
The conferences started in 1955, organized by the
Yugoslav Association for ETAN (Electronics, Telecommunications,
Automatics and Nuclear Engineering).
After the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia, the
Serbian ETRAN Society, as the legitimate successor of
ETAN, continued to organize these conferences. From
2014, the Society ETRAN started the international
conference IcETRAN, dedicated to the same topics as
ETRAN, technically co-sponsored by IEEE.
The TELFOR (Telecommunications Forum) conferences
are international annual meetings of professionals
working in the broad areas of telecommunications
and information technologies.
The Mediterranean Conference on Embedded Computing
(MECO) was launched in 2012 and covers various
areas of computer science and electrical engineering in
general. The 9th MECO (2020) was held online due to
Report was prepared by Budimir Lutovac, CAS-SP Chapter Chair of the IEEE Section
of Serbia and Montenegro, and Branimir Reljin, Chapter Past Chair. Budimir
Lutovac is a professor with the University of Montenegro, Faculty of Electrical
Engineering (budo@ac.me). Branimir Reljin is a professor with the University of
Belgrade, Serbia, School of Electrical Engineering (reljinb@etf.bg.ac.rs).
IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE
49
IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q4 2021

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