Due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the organizing committees for the Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE) Conference have decided that they are unable to host a face-to-face event in 2021.
That is the bad news. But the good news is this: Those who might not be able to spend the first week of February in Grenoble, France, can now attend virtually.
DATE 2021 will be the 24th edition of an event that brings together designers and design automation users, researchers and vendors, as well as specialists in the design, test and manufacturing of electronic circuits and systems hardware and software. The conference will feature keynote speakers from academia and industry, research paper presentations and a special initiative on autonomous systems design. Also on the docket are events with a specific focus on cyber-physical systems for Industry 4.0 and smart industrial processes, and on sustainable high-performance computing. An accompanying exhibition will focus on the latest trends in the field.
This is the second time the annual conference has been moved to a virtual environment due to the pandemic. According to IEEE Xplore, more than 1,300 participants had already registered for the 2020 event when a format change was deemed necessary. DATE 2020, which had been scheduled for early March, was among the first conferences to opt for a virtual conversion; nearly the whole program was ported, including more than 450 recorded video presentations.
IEEE also points out that the virtual format enabled participants to attend more talks, without the problem of overlapping sessions. The virtual conference was available for a period of nearly six weeks, and logged participation from 83 different countries around the world.
The upcoming conference runs February 1-5, 2021. A full program of events will be available by the end of November 2020. More information is available on the DATE 2021 website.
