As the date of ICCAS2020 (20 th Int. Conf. on Control, Automation & Systems, Oct.13~16) approaches, the organizing committee members have decided to hold it in the form of the “fully on-line” conference, considering the continuing COVID-19 pandemic all over the world. Indeed, we have delayed the decision until now, hoping that we could invite all the participants to the beautiful venue “Busan-city”. Unfortunately, it may not be possible this time but the operation committee is working for making the virtual conference give you more value!  Following the new decision, a few changes are necessary from the speakers and attendees.

1.   Due to the change of the conference style, we have discounted the registration fee to 200 USD or KRW 220,000 for all the participants. This is the same amount that we announced for online-only participation. If you registered as the online-only participation, you have nothing to do. But, if you registered with more than that (i.e., regular member or regular student), we will refund. The ICCAS organizing committee has the list of these registrations. We will cancel your registration if you registered for the regular member/students who paid more than 200 USD (or KRW 220,000). You will receive a cancelation email in a few days. After that, please register for the conference again as the online-only participation. We apologize for the inconvenience.

2. The ICCAS Program, including plenary session, special session, technical program, and workshop, is already announced. Please check them at the Program Section of http://2020.iccas.org. If you are the speaker, be sure to check your session, time, and format (oral or poster) at http://2020.iccas.org/?page_id=127.

3. The oral session is conducted by Zoom (https://zoom.us). The speaker can present live through Zoom, or upload pre-recorded video (so that our staff plays your video in the Zoom session room) and do the Q & A about your video in the Zoom session room. For details on how to prepare and upload your video, refer to http://2020.iccas.org/?page_id=145. Please note that we recommend to use pre-recorded video rather than live presentation because of possible interruptions in online communication. In addition, if we are not familiar with screen sharing of Zoom, please consider your presentation using pre-recorded video. Pre-recorded video should be uploaded before Oct. 6.

4. The poster session is conducted by Spatial.chat (https://spatial.chat) for active interactions between the presenter and the audience. In one spatial.chat room, up to six posters (in fact, one image file per each poster) will be displayed, and the audience control their virtual avatars to walk around the posters. The presenter should remain in the area of their posters in order to meet the audience. For this, the poster presenter should prepare a pdf file that contains one page of their poster, and upload it before Oct. 6. Please refer to http://2020.iccas.org/?page_id=147 regarding how to make your poster file and upload. On the other hand, this technology of spatial.chat is relatively new and so is not yet verified in many conferences. Therefore, we also recommend the poster presenters to make a short (2~3 min) video that briefly introduces their contribution, and upload it. In this case, we will post the video along with the presenter’s paper title and pdf so that the audience can also access it without limitation of session time and of internet communication.

5. Conference operation is going to be based on “Virtual Conference Center (VCC)” and “Online Program Book (OPB)”. VCC is a single web-page that contains all the necessary links for the sessions, and OPB is an online version of Program Book that contains all the programs with a schedule. In particular, OPB also includes the pre-recorded videos so that the audience can also access the video as well as the paper’s pdf file. We are also going to provide a downloadable zip file that contains all the paper’s pdfs (but not pre-recorded videos or poster images).

6. In order to encourage making quality videos, we are planning to make a new “Best Presentation Video Award” for those who submit pre-recorded videos. This also applies to the short videos for poster presenters. The detailed plan will be announced on the homepage, and the prize will be an iPad or equivalent.   Finally, we regret not having you in Busan, Korea, and thank you very much for your collaboration to overcome this difficult time together. We are looking forward to seeing you soon virtually.