IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q1 2021 - 5

President's
Message
Amara Amara
President, IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (2020-2021))

Dear colleagues and friends,
e are at the end of a year which has been
and still is terrible, but which has opened
doors to many opportunities. Nothing will
be the same when we overcome this pandemic.
I would like to express my sympathy and compassion
to all those who have suffered directly or indirectly from
this disease.
Despite the pandemic, it is our duty as leaders of our
Society to be agile so that the activities can continue
and the service to our members is provided without
interruption.
From March 2020, and after my hasty return from
Lima, we held extraordinary ExCom meetings to make
important decisions for our Society:
1) All face-to-face meetings must be virtual.
2) All the conferences in which CASS has a financial
commitment greater than 50% must be held in virtual or hybrid format. Others are encouraged to
follow the same recommendation; this is how we
managed to keep our conferences active and these
new formats allowed us to reach a much larger audience. I would like to express my gratitude to our
conference organizers for respecting our recommendations.
3) Move our Distinguished and Industry Distinguished
lectures to a virtual format (VDL).
Faced with the choice of canceling our DL and iDLP
or transforming them into a virtual format, we opted for
the second choice. This is how we grouped our lectures
into three clusters with a total of ten excellent-quality
webinars that are made available to all for free in our
Resource Center. The result was extraordinary with a
significant online participation and an offline participation on Facebook that far exceeded our expectations.
I would like to express my gratitude to all those who
have contributed to this rich and exciting adventure and
especially to the chairs of the DL and iDLP programs as
well as Fakhrul Zaman Rokhani, Chair of the CASS Education Committee.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCAS.2020.3046387
Date of current version: 11 February 2021

FIRST QUARTER 2021

At the same time, we have launched new initiatives
that have engaged many of our volunteers:
1) Africa Initiative:
a) An AdHoc committee has done an excellent job by
organizing with African universities several webinars with experiments on CASS themes. These webinars are available in our Resource Center. I would
like to express my gratitude to José Silva-Martinez
for leading this initiative with professionalism.
b) In partnership with In-Zone (inter-faculty humanitarian center of Geneva University), the IEEE Kenya Section, Kenyata University, the fablab foundation and with the support of UNHCR and the
Kenyan Red Cross we launched a humanitarian
project within Kakuma, the largest refugee camp
in the world. The aim is to help develop skills that
allow refugees to either set up their own business
or acquire credits that will enable them to pursue
university studies.
2) Faced with the pandemic, we have launched competitions for students and entrepreneurs. The results are great, and I invite you to check them out
on our website.
3) We also launched a new education program called
Microlearning. Fakhrul and his team are doing a
great job and very soon we will see the results,
hopefully before the end of the year.
What are the perspectives for the year 2021?
Among the priority initiatives that we intend to
launch I would like to mention few of them:
1) Revision and update of our website with new technologies and provision of a Progressive Web App (WPA),
2) With the perspective to helping our flagship conferences to cope with the new epidemiological
context, we have decided to provide them with a
platform that will allow them to organize our conferences either in virtual mode or in hybrid mode
without any financial commitment from their side,
3) Completely review and redesign our Resource
Center so that it can facilitate navigation and easy
search for content with the help of a chat bot,
(continued on page 87)
IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE

IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q1 2021

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