Introduction to the Special Issue on the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Circuits and Systems (AICAS 2020)

This issue of the IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems (JETCAS) includes the highlighted papers from the 2nd IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Circuits and Systems (AICAS 2020), which was originally planned to be held at the Centro Congressi Porto Antico in Genoa, Italy, on March 23–25, 2020. However, due to the difficult pandemic situation that the world was living during those days, the conference was postponed to August 31–September 4, 2020, and was finally held as a fully virtual event. Despite those difficulties, the conference was a great success in terms of participation which demonstrated the consolidation of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS) community interested in the research and advances of new circuits and systems paradigms and hardware platforms that can boost a new generation of more efficient Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems and may enlarge the AI application scenarios and performances. The AI revolution is promising to incorporate the AI computing power to all industrial and social sectors. To make this trend possible, new computing platforms suited to efficiently support AI emerging algorithms, systems, and applications in different scenarios (from cloud servers to edge and autonomous devices) should be developed at a parallel pace. The IEEE AICAS conference has appeared and it is being consolidated as an international forum to communicate state-of-the-art research, innovation, and development results and advances in AI circuits and systems. It is an ideal forum to join efforts and exchange experiences between different international communities from academia and industry boosting the progress of AI circuits and systems.