Minutes of the IFIP Working Group Meeting

Minutes of the IFIP Working Group Meeting

Pirenópolis, Brazil, September 10^th, 2001

Present: F.Wagner, N.Dutt, F.Rammig, M.Fujita, R.Hartenstein

Apologies: J.Damore, S.Johnson, K.Choi, L.Claesen, K.Müller-Glaeser, E.Aas, E.Villar, P.Schwarz, A.Jerraya, C.Delgado Kloos, J.Darringer, M.Barbacci, A.Pawlak, G.Hellestrand, J.-Y.Joo, A.Stempkovski, K.-H.Diener, M.Robert, P.Ivey, M.Imai, A.Yamada, R.Reis, J.Mermet, D.Borrione

F.Wagner presented the current status and activities of the WG, based on a report he made at the TC10 meeting on this same day. This report is appended to these minutes. It shows that the WG has a low degree of activity, sponsoring few events and having almost no new initiatives and many members that are not active.
The role of WG 10.5 has been discussed, considering the current situation where other societies organize many successful conferences in our field. It has been concluded that the WG may still have an important role:

by coordinating national initiatives and stimulating international cooperation, without competing with national societies that are members of IFIP;
by organizing activities in niches where there is no competition with other societies (examples are the DIPES and CHARME conferences);
by organizing workshops on hot and speculative topics, that are not covered by other events. These workshops should constitute the main goal of the WG meetings. They could result in books, showing the view of the WG experts on subjects that are relevant for future research and industry development; and
by organizing new types of activities on an international basis. Examples could be a forum for PhD students in our field, as well as tutorials from experts and summer schools, eventually organized in different regions of the world.

A "call for proposals" of new initiatives (to be called "programs") will be circulated among all WG members. A proposal should state the goals of the program and identify a "program director", someone who would organize it. This person does not need to be a current member of the WG. The recruitment of young researchers would be encouraged, because they can bring the needed enthusiasm and perceive personal benefits from this activity.

Funds for these programs may be raised from TC10 and from IFIP. IFIP has money for travel grants for students and for tutorials in developing countries, for instance. TC10 has a budget of 56,000 Euro for 2002. Good proposals from our WG can compete for this money.
A workshop for discussing and elaborating an "IFIP roadmap in design technologies" has been proposed as another initiative. This roadmap would result in a document that would be widely distributed as our contribution to the field. This workshop could be held in conjunction with the IFIP World Congress in Montreal in 2002. We need to identify immediately a responsible for proposing the format and contents of this workshop. This proposal would be discussed, refined, and approved at our next meeting in Montpellier. F.Rammig volunteered to identify this person.
R.Hartenstein suggested, as another initiative, a workshop for discussing Education. He emphasized that Computer Science curricula should be influenced by new computing paradigms that arise from our field, such as reconfigurable computing.
A new model of managing the WG has been discussed. We have 64 members, and many of them, although senior experts in the field, don't have an active participation in the WG activities. This lack of interest may be due to the facts that the WG has had very few new initiatives in recent years, organize few events, and has meetings where only administrative issues are discussed. The WG should still remain a gathering of experts, but meetings should be devoted to technical discussions and workshops. Administrative issues could be managed by a small "steering committee", consisting of people with concrete commitments. This committee would be enlarged by other people that is temporarily responsible for specific activities: "program directors" (see agenda item 3) and SIG chairs. If the WG has such a "kernel" of members with concrete and specific duties, it may afford to have a large number of members that, although not active, provide expertise in our field and are available for participating at our events and workshops.
The procedure for admission of new members has been discussed. New members should not be invited because of personal relationships to current members. Instead, it has been proposed that new members should be admitted only in one of the following situations: a) when the WG needs to expand its expertise to relevant or new subjects that are poorly covered by the current membership; b) when the WG needs to expand its membership in certain geographical regions; c) to replace members that are leaving the group, when our coverage of a certain subject or region must be maintained. The WG should actively identify and attract new members, especially among young researchers, when it feels that we are not covering certain subjects and/or regions.
The identification of the research interests of the members should be pursued. Only 19 out of 64 members responded the message from the chair, asking for their research interests. It was decided that we should utilize another approach for this survey. A list of topics, probably organized in a two-level hierarchy, will be sent through our mailing list. This list may be organized from similar lists taken from the call for papers of large conferences, such as DAC and DATE. Each member will respond by stating his/her interest regarding each topic our sub-topic, according to three possible levels: (1) I would not attend a conference on this topic; (2) I could attend a conference on this topic; (3) I would definitely attend a conference on this topic. The results of this survey will be presented and discussed at our next meeting in Montpellier. From them, we should be able to define the scope of our WG, since this has not been done since its creation in 1994.
The current situation of the SIGs has been briefly assessed. SIG-ES has been created in 2000 but does not show impetus. SIG-CHARME will be proposed officially soon. SIG-CODES has been discontinued. SIG-VHDL had no activity, and its relaunching as SIG-DL is being considered by a group of WG members.
The following agenda is proposed for our next meeting in Montpellier:

survey of research interests and scope (see item 9 above);
the current status of the SIGs (see item 10 above);
the workshop for the definition of our roadmap (see item 5 above);
a new strategy for the WG, including the definition of our role (see item 2), new activities (see items 2 thru 6), model of management (see item 7), and membership (see item 8).

After Montpellier, a next meeting could be held in Montreal, during the IFIP World Congress. DIPES will run as a track of the Congress, and we will also try to hold there the workshop for discussing a roadmap on Design Technologies. The opportunity of helding another meeting, between Montpellier and Montreal, will be discussed in Montpellier.

REPORT ON THE ACTIVITIES OF WG 10.5

AUGUST 2000 - SEPTEMBER 2001

Presented at the TC 10 Meeting, Pirenópolis, Brazil, September 10^th 2001

1. MEETINGS

1.1 Regular meetings since August 2000

August 23rd, 2000 - Beijing, China

March 12th, 2001 - Munich, Germany

The corresponding minutes can be found at our site:

http://www.inf.ufrgs.br/ifip10-5/real-index.html

1.2 Informal meetings

June 20th, 2001 - Las Vegas, USA

1.3 Next meetings

September 10th, 2001 - Pirenópolis, Brazil

December 5th, 2001 - Montpellier, France

2. EVENTS

APChDL'2000 - Asia-Pacific Chip Design Language Conference

Beijing, China, August 2000