IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine - Q1 2023 - 6

members of the Society, to provide simple mechanisms
for advertising, or even to normalize the participation of
industry members in educational events. All these initiatives
will be progressively implemented over the next
two years and I expect that, after a period of consolidation,
this Committee will become the seed of a new CASS
Division specifically focused on Industry.
In addition to these actions, CASS has continued its
CAS Industry Forums (CASIF) program on emerging and
interdisciplinary topics related to real-world challenges
and their possible technological solutions. Specifically,
our Society funded eight CASIFs during 2022, distributed
around the world and covering very diverse topics,
from wearable devices to automotive, exascale computing
to agri-food electronics. Last but not least, we held,
in October 2022, the fifth edition of the IBM CAS EDS
- AI Compute Symposium, with the theme " scalable to
sustainable. " This Symposium brings together dreamers,
thinkers, and innovators of cutting-edge research
in a two-day forum to explore AI Compute challenges
and future research directions... and it's free of charge.
CASS Chapters: Creation, Rejuvenation, and
Expansion
In 2022, three new chapters were formed and two more
are underway. Special mention should be made of our
new chapters in Kenya and Uganda, which, despite their
youth, are already organizing very successful activities,
including joint events with local industry. However, it
is not all good news. Probably as a consequence of the
pandemic years, some of our chapters show little or no
activity. Chapters are essential agents for the retention
and enrollment of new members as well as for stimulating
a sense of belonging to our Society and it is essential
to recover pre-pandemic activity. To combat the situation,
we significantly increased the budget for outreach
proposals, and some 50 initiatives were approved and
funded, we stimulated with some extra funding those
chapters that submitted the mandatory 2021 reports,
and we created the figure of CASS Ambassadors (five in
total). They are Society representatives of recognized
prestige in their respective geographic areas who work
for the creation, rejuvenation, and expansion of CASS
membership in those regions, as well as to cultivate and
grow local talent into leaders of the Society. The CASS
Ambassadors have proven to be a useful tool for expansion,
as many of the new chapters and student branches
were driven by them.
Member Recognition
In 2022, a total of 21 CASS members were elevated to
IEEE Fellows (eight of them evaluated by CASS and 13
by other Organizational Units). Congratulations to all
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IEEE CIRCUITS AND SYSTEMS MAGAZINE
of them! I also extend my congratulations to those who
earned a CASS Award last year.
A new JETCAS Best Paper Award has been created
to recognize the best papers submitted to this journal
with more than 10 years of history. However, there is
still work to be done to clarify some of the descriptions
of the Society and Achievement Awards and their basis
for evaluation. This work is ongoing and I expect it to
be completed (and approved by IEEE TABARC) in the
course of 2023.
Publications
Our publications are probably the most representative
indicator of the CASS technical strength and I am
pleased to report that all the Transactions fully sponsored
by the Society (six in total) achieved, according
to the 2021 Journal Citation Report published by Clarivate,
their best performance in terms of Impact Factor,
Eigen-factor Score, and Article Influence Score, following
a steadily increasing progression since 2016. Further,
we have continued our backlog reduction strategy
(in particular for TCAS-II and TCSVT) with significant
investments in page budgets to shorten the time from
submission to printed publication. As an example, over
6.000 pages have been allocated for TCSVT in 2023. Additionally,
our Editorial Boards are making a major effort
to speed up the review process and final decisions
on articles are made in less than two months on average
across all our publications.
Two new Periodicals, financially co-sponsored with
other IEEE Societies, have been added to our portfolio
under this category (10 in total). These are the IEEE
Journal on FlExIblE ElEctronIcs, J-FLEX (co-sponsored
with EDS, and the Sensors Council) and the IEEE transactIons
on agrIFood ElEctronIcs, TAFE (co-sponsored
with the Sensors Council, IMS, and the RFID Council).
Special mention should be made of the latter, in
which CASS has a 57% participation and which deals
with circuits and systems applied to the agrifood value
chain, including technologies for food production, processing,
quality control along the distribution chain,
and preservation. Not long ago, these topics were
mainly covered in satellite workshops (FoodCAS) held
together with ISCAS and now we are about to see the
first issue of TAFE released. My appreciation goes to
the Editor-in-Chief of TAFE and to all those who initiated
this project.
Finally, I would like to inform that we are working
on the launch of a new periodical on AI hardware
which aims to focus on the electronic design (including
hardware-software co-design),
implementation,
and demonstration of machine learning and artificial
intelligence circuits and systems. We consider that
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