Dear colleagues,

sadly, we have to inform you that we will not be allowed to run the “physical” component of the IEEE RadarConf20 in Florence, due to many circumstances that are currently still very uncertain.

Despite the fact that now in Italy the sanitary condition has significantly improved (today in all Tuscany there are only 18 Covid patients hospitalized and none in intensive care), some restrictions are still in place.

The new Prime Minister Decree that should establish the possibility of organizing again congresses in Italy has not been issued yet. Last decree set July 14th as the official date for conferences re-opening, but this deadline has been postponed several times and at the moment it is still not possible to organize a conference physically. The new decree should come out on August 9, but more likely on August 15, and still we cannot be sure that it will be possible to hold conferences from that moment on.

In addition to this, many European Universities/Companies are not yet authorizing participation to conferences and business trips. Nowadays, Italian universities do not allow conference attendance, not even within Italy.

All these restrictions have clearly affected the number of colleagues who are allowed to travel to Florence to attend the conference, despite the number of paper submissions was much higher than expected.

Since we do not trust that these restrictions will be removed soon, we decided to cancel the physical component of the event in Florence. The 2020 IEEE Radar Conference will be a fully virtual event.

We are very sorry for any trouble we may cause but, please, understand that this was a very painful decision, after 4 years of hard work on the organization of this conference.

Of course, we will revert the few physical author registrations into virtual author registrations and we will refund the difference of the registration fee.

We remain at your disposal for any information needed.

Fulvio Gini & Maria Sabrina Greco
General co-Chairs of the 2020 IEEE Radar Conference