IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q1 2021 - 81

Manuel Delgado-Restituto, Eduard Alarcón, Ángel Rodríguez-Vázquez,
General co-Chairs for the 52th IEEE International Symposium on Circuits
and Systems (ISCAS)
Emails: mandel@imse-cnm.csic.es, eduard.alarcon@upc.edu,
arodri-vazquez@us.es

On the Virtualization of ISCAS
2020 Seville: For Real
Abstract
After the celebration of the first-ever virtual ISCAS, a general
assessment of the experience and results is herein reported,
sharing best practices and pointing out to approaches that could
improve future similar events.

I. Introduction
ittle did the IEEE ISCAS 2020 organizers know four
years ago, when we were honored to articulate
the conference in Seville and soon agreed on the
lemma " Deploying CASS knowledge into Society Grand
Challenges " , that, in fact, a grand challenge for Society
in the form of a pandemic would influence so much the
way CAS knowledge was to be disclosed, discussed and
exchanged in ISCAS 2020.
Despite the fact that the conference has been finally
designed and implemented quite differently to what we
envisioned and had originally planned, the mission of
serving the community by organizing an event with high
scientific value for professional exchange has remained
intact throughout this endeavor. The format change to
a virtual environment, a first-ever case in our IEEE CAS
Society and one of the first ones for a large flagship conference within IEEE, has notably influenced both the operation and the outcome.
It is the aim of this paper to truly close the conference
by sharing with the community an in-depth bona fide assessment of ISCAS 2020 in virtual format, with the ultimate
purpose of diagnosing and learn lessons for future events.

L

II. Conference Highlights For Virtual Operation
With virtualization, the technical content for the conference did not change and all the events originally planned
were preserved, namely, the 3 keynotes, the 15 overview
lectures, the 12 tutorials, the 8 mini-tutorials, the driving
conference themes, the special events for YP and WiCAS,
as well as the student and entrepreneurship contests, on
top of the 910 accepted technical contributions submitted by the authors.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCAS.2020.3046391
Date of current version: 11 February 2021

FIRST QUARTER 2021

However, a new floorplan to unfold the technical
program was indispensable to cope with different time
zones. In-person conferences intrinsically gather the attending community in space and time, while virtualization comes with the inherent need to compress the daily
program in a few hours per day. This required, following
IEEE recommendations [1], to extending the conference
to a 12-day schedule. Instead of a community space-time
collimation, the approach was more a lighthouse sparking ISCAS activities worldwide.
Not only the timeline, also the format of some activities, typically celebrated in large lounges with ad-hoc
encounters between delegates, had to be changed. In
particular, the change affected poster sessions and live
demonstrations, which had to be clustered into small
groups for oral presentation. This was the only feasible
solution to give all poster and demo participants the
chance to expose their works as well as to not drastically increase the number of on-line sessions. Unfortunately, the liveliness factor was, to some extent, compromised. With this re-organization of poster and demos,
the technical slots of the conference program, also including lecture presentations, were definitively binned
into 164 sessions.
There were other aspects for which virtualization
affected the deployment of the technical program. Remarkably, authors were requested as a requisite for
participation to pre-record and upload a video version
of their presentations before the conference, not to
substiture the due live presentation in the conference,
but to circumvent any potential problem motivated by
real-time connection quality issues as well as for archival purposes. This demand was well understood by
authors and, in fact, all of them submitted their videos,
despite the struggle with the stringent timeline and the
new format. The pre-recorded presentations could be
visualized on-demand during the conference facilitating
time shifting and they remain archived and accessible in
IEEE Xplore® [2]. We expect the extra effort demanded
to authors (very much appreciated by the organizers)
is somehow compensated by the increased visibility of
their technical contributions.
IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE

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IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q1 2021

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