Plenary Lectures





September 15, 2008





Lecture Title: Natural Language Technologies for the Enterprise of the Future

Author: Dr Ellen Yoffa
Affiliation: IBM T.J. Watson Research


Author information:



As director of Next Generation Web at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, New York, Yoffa leads research activities in advanced technologies for pervasive, client, and web software infrastructure, including sensors and actuators, distributed messaging, and web service architectures. Her responsibilities also include technologies for accessibility and healthcare. Prior to her current position, Yoffa served as director of emerging system technologies at IBM, leading research activities in computer system hardware and software ranging from handheld devices to large scale-out systems. She has also held numerous technical and management positions in design automation in IBM's research and development organizations.
Ellen Yoffa is 2006 president of the IEEE circuits and systems society, the first society to endorse the recently formed IEEE council on electronic design automation (CEDA).
She is a member of the external advisory boards of the University of Southern California electrical engineering department and the University of Massachusetts electrical and computer engineering department. She has also served on the editorial advisory board of IEEE Spectrum magazine.
Yoffa received a B.S. and a Ph.D. in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where her area of study was theoretical solid state physics. She is a fellow of the IEEE and a member of ACM, Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi.





Lecture Title: Designing Micro/Nano Systems for a Healthier and Safer Tomorrow

Author: prof. Giovanni De Micheli
Affiliation: Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland


Author information:



Giovanni De Micheli is Professor and Director of the Institute of Electrical Engineering and of the Integrated Systems Centre at EPF Lausanne, Switzerland. He also chairs the Scientific Committee of CSEM, Neuchatel, Switzerland. Previously, he was Professor of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. He holds a Nuclear Engineer degree (Politecnico di Milano, 1979), a M.S. and a Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (University of California at Berkeley, 1980 and 1983.
His research interests include several aspects of design technologies for integrated circuits and systems, such as synthesis, hw/sw codesign and low-power design, as well as systems on heterogeneous platforms including electrical, optical, micromechanical and biological components. He is author of: Synthesis and Optimization of Digital Circuits, McGraw-Hill, 1994, co-author and/or co-editor of six other books and of over 300 technical articles . He is, or has been, member of the technical advisory board of several companies, including Magma Design Automation, Certess, Coware and STMicroelectronics.
Prof. De Micheli is the recipient of the 2003 IEEE Emanuel Piore Award for contributions to computer-aided synthesis of digital systems. He is a Fellow of ACM and IEEE. He received the Golden Jubilee Medal for outstanding contributions to the IEEE CAS Society in 2000. He received the 1987 D. Pederson Award for the best paper on the IEEE Transactions on CAD/ICAS, two Best Paper Awards at the Design Automation Conference, in 1983 and in 1993, and a Best Paper Award at the DATE Conference in 2005.
He has been serving IEEE in several capacities, namely: Division 1 Director (2008-9), co-founder and President Elect of the IEEE Council on EDA (2005-7), President of the IEEE CAS Society (2003), Editor in Chief of the IEEE Transactions on CAD/ICAS (1987-2001). He was Program Chair of the pHealth and VLSI SOC conferences in 2006. He was the Program and General Chair of the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in 1996-1997 and 2000 respectively. He was the Program and General Chair of the International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD) in 1988 and 1989 respectively. He is a founding member of the ALaRI institute at Universita' della Svizzera Italiana (USI), in Lugano, Switzerland, where he is currently scientific counselor.




September 16, 2008




Lecture Title: Software Defined Radio

Author: prof. Frederick Harris
Affiliation: San Diego State University, San Diego, California, USA


Author information:



Frederick J Harris holds the CUBIC Signal Processing Chair of the Communication Systems and Signal Processing Institute at San Diego State University where since 1967 he has taught courses in Digital Signal Processing and Communication Systems. He has extensive practical experience in communication systems, high performance modems, sonar and advanced radar systems and high performance laboratory instrumentation. He holds a number of patents on digital receiver and DSP technology and lectures throughout the world on DSP applications. He consults for organizations requiring high performance, cost effective DSP solutions.
His special areas of concentration are Signal Processing Algorithms, and in particular Multirate Signal Processing, Modem Design, Synchronization Techniques, and Fast Algorithms.
He is the author of the book "Multirate Signal Processing for Communication Systems" and has contributed to a number of other books and encyclopedia articles on various DSP techniques.
In 1990 and 1991 he was the Technical and then the General Chair of the Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers and was Technical Chair of the 2003 Software Defined Radio Conference and the Technical Chair of the 2006 Wireless Personal Multimedia Conference. He became a Fellow of the IEEE in 2003, cited for contributions of DSP to communications systems and has been awarded the 2006 Lifetime Achievement award by the Software Defined Radio Forum.





Lecture Title: Embedded Deterministic Test

Author: prof. Janusz Rajski
Affiliation: Mentor Graphics Corporation, USA


Author information:



Janusz Rajski received the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Poznań University of Technology, Poland, in 1982.
He is a chief scientist and the director of engineering for the Design-for-Test products group at Mentor Graphics.
He has published more than 150 research papers in these areas and is co-inventor of 22 US and international patents. He is also the principal inventor of Embedded Deterministic Test (EDT™) technology used in the first commercial test compression product TestKompress®.
He is co-author of Arithmetic Built-In Self-Test for Embedded Systems published by Prentice Hall in 1997. He was co-recipient of the 1993 Best Paper Award for the paper on logic synthesis published in the IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems,co-recipient of the 1995 and 1998 Best Paper Awards at the IEEE VLSI Test Symposium, co-recipient of the 1999 and 2003 Honorable Mention Awards at the IEEE International Test Conference, as well as co-recipient of the 2006 IEEE Circuits and Systems Society Donald O. Pederson Outstanding Paper Award recognizing the paper on embedded deterministic test published in the IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems. In 2003 the President of Poland awarded the title of Professor of Sciences. He has served on technical program committees of various conferences. He is Program Chair of the 2007 IEEE International Test Conference.



September 17, 2008






Lecture Title: Silicon Detectors: from the dawn of the Universe to BioMedical applications and beyond

Author: prof. Massimo Caccia
Affiliation: Universita degli Studi dell' Insubria, Como, Italy


Author information: