Work in progress — The organization of a symposium that supports faculty development in the embedded-systems field

With the aim of stimulating an interest in embedded systems among engineering students and young professionals, spreading the latest advances in embedded systems, and encouraging collaboration between industry and academia, the second edition of the Simposio Argentino de Sistemas Embebidos, SASE, (i.e. Argentinean Symposium of Embedded Systems) was organized in Buenos Aires, Argentina. SASE is one of the biggest South American meetings on embedded systems, having about four hundred attendees, the sponsorship of fifty universities, fifteen institutions and thirty companies, and offering 120 ninety-minute tutorials, 17 three-hour hands-on workshops, a scientific meeting with paper and poster presentations, six plenary sessions, a student-projects contest, an entrepreneurship contest, a university-equipment donation program, and a travel and accommodation grant program; all under the scope of a low fee event. In this paper we present a brief summary on how SASE was conceived, how professors from different universities and people from industry worked together to organize this event, and the obtained results.