by
... This biennial conference, sponsored by
ECS, was held in Istanbul,
Turkey on 27-31 August 1995. For those who do not have a clear view about the
geography, the city of Istanbul is a large but old historic city with a
European and an Asian part, thereby bridging the two continents. Of course
ECCTD was held in the European part. This city is beautifully located on
both sides of the Bosphorus and has an extremely rich collection of
palaces, and the famous Hagia Sophia dating back to the time when the town
was called Constantinople. Together with the organizers we feel that the
series of European Conferences on Circuit Theory and Design, while being a
platform for the exchange of scientific ideas and discoveries, has enhanced
the solidarity among scientists, and through their influence, the
solidarity among people who feel they are European. Regrettably, it was the
first ECCTD without the presence of our good friend Professor
,
an excellent scientist but above all a man with no errors. During this
conference, we devoted one session every day to his invaluable memory.
The conference began on Sunday with four parallel tutorials on topics of
recent interest. Each tutorial session lasted 6 hours during which experts
delivered lectures in their fields. One could learn a single new topic in
five days and also exchange ideas and opinions in his/her field of interest
and keep up with recent developments.
The tutorials were on :
Digital Image / Video / Audio Coding : International Standards
by Prof. K.R. Rao, University of Texas at Arlington
Fractal Image Compression Revealed
by Prof. D.M. Monro, University of Bath
Digital Signal Processing in Telecommunications
by Prof. M. Bellanger, CNAM
Capacitive VLSI Techniques in Engineered Intelligence
by Profs. U. Cilingiroglu and Y. Leblebici, ITU
On Monday after the opening ceremony and the European Circuit Society
meeting, chaired by Prof. J.O. Scanlan, Prof. L.O. Chua presented an
Opening Lecture on How Universal is the CNN Paradigm ?. His lecture
illustrated and demonstrated the universality of Cellular Neural Networks
as a unifying paradigm for simulating many distributed non-linear phenomena
from biology and ecology to material science and physics. On the last day,
in the afternoon several key researchers gave reminiscent lectures about
their research experiences. Throughout the remaining days, participants
presented 306 papers in 60 sessions in 6 parallel tracks. The technical
program during this week was interlaced with a variety of social
activities, such as a city tour, a Bosphorus tour by boat, two cocktails
and the Conference Banquet which took place in a famous palace converted
into a majestic hotel on Bosphorous. It is fair to say that this conference
was excellently organised, it also gave our circuit theory and design
community the remarkable historic environment for many scientific
discussions during the excellent social program. It is then more than just
to thank
and his crew for their efforts and organization talent.
We all have good memories about ECCTD'95 and Istanbul.
Best Paper Award ECCTD'95
European Circuit Society conferred the Best Paper Award to S. Espejo, A.
Rodriguez-Vazquez and R.D. Castro for the paper "A 1µm CMOS Cellular Neural
Network Universal machine". The award consisted of one year subscription
of the International Journal on Circuit Theory and Applications and a
champagne magnum offered by ECCTD'95 organizers.
