IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q1 2021 - 84

100
90

Average Attendance

Tutorial Day

80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0

10-oct-20 11-oct-20 12-oct-20 13-oct-20 14-oct-20 15-oct-20 16-oct-20 17-oct-20 18-oct-20 19-oct-20 20-oct-20 21-oct-20
10-oct-20 11-oct-20 12-oct-20 13-oct-20 14-oct-20 15-oct-20 16-oct-20 17-oct-20 18-oct-20 19-oct-20 20-oct-20 21-oct-20
Average On‐Line Attendance
Per Session

15.2

33.1

20.9

23.5

20.9

23.1

15.8

16.5

18.3

66.3

Same, Only for the Main Track

26.4

18.9

17.5

16.1

16.3

15.2

18.2

Figure 2. Average on-line attendance.

A conjecture could be that spreading the conference
over 12 days, which was deemed indispensable since
the community could not share space and time during
three days in a venue and city, might have resulted in fatigue for the participation on-line. Numbers do not provide evidence for that since, although there is indeed a
reduction in participation along time, other factors that
were not upfront anticipated as being likely could become dominant, namely, the low ratio of live participation versus registered participation, and the low ratio of
registered participation versus potential participants.
Examining the IEEE Xplore® data usage for ISCAS
2020 during the Open Preview period from September
28th to October 22nd allowed us to assess that there
was a similar number of open previews compared to
Conflux views. This fact inclines us to think that the
Open Preview access could eventually discourage the
participation in on-line sessions.

that the ISCAS participation landscape was affected
by archipelagization.
Open questions are whether this fragmentation is
intrinsically due to the very structure and function of
virtual participation, and whether the impact is intrinsically more severe in large conferences with wide technical breadth. Hence the CASS community, and IEEE at
large, might reflect on whether a single-track technicallyfocused medium-sized symposium might be more suitable
to virtual participation, in whichever future time frame
virtual participation will be considered. This was anyhow a natural trend hitherto for CAS conferences, such
as AICAS, BioCAS or the IBM-CAS-EDS Symposium. It
escapes the scope of this report whether virtual conferences will be considered only upon strict need, or
whether the virtuous aspects of them dominate over the
vicious ones, or vice versa.
The -virtual- floor for discussion is open, for real.

VI. Forward-Looking Final Reflections
In our opinion, making available valuable material
offline was to the detriment of live content and participation, and hence interactions. There occurred
fragmentation of the community in smaller groups, so

[1] Introduction to IEEE Virtual Events. [Online]. Available: https://
ieeemce.org/introduction-to-ieee-virtual-events/
[2] Proceedings of the 2020 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits
and Systems (ISCAS). [Online]. Available: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/
servlet/opac?punumber=9179985

IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE

References

FIRST QUARTER 2021

https://www.ieeemce.org/introduction-to-ieee-virtual-events/ https://www.ieeemce.org/introduction-to-ieee-virtual-events/ https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/servlet/opac?punumber=9179985 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/servlet/opac?punumber=9179985

IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q1 2021

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