Highlights:

• Improved Financial Reporting in 2011
• Handling Non-Presented Papers
• Easing of U.S. Visa Procedures May Help Attract International Attendees
• Does Co-Locating Your Conference Make Sense?
• New Airline Fee Rules Clarify the Real Cost
• Reminder of Important Conference Changes

Nominations should be submitted to Mari Ostendorf, SPS Vice President-Publications, via mo@ee.washington.edu. Nominations must include a brief biography of no more than one page, along with a web address that contains the candidate’s CV (do not send a curriculum vitae with the nomination). Also include a statement of the candidate’s editorial experience if any. A statement of interest of up to 500 words should be included stating the nominee’s vision for the journal and special qualifications for the position. Nominations must be received no later than 4 March 2012. Full details can be found on the web at website.

To submit job announcements for a particular Technical Committee, the submission form can be found by visiting the page below and clicking on a particular TC. A link for the form can be found in the sidebar menu of the TC pages. Jobs can also be viewed from its individual TC pages or a combined listing that includes all TC jobs.

Visit the SPS Job Marketplace Page

• Meeting Report Form (L31)
• Officer Report Form
• 2011 Financial Report (L50)

The L50 financial reporting process should be completed within the new financial reporting tool, NetSuite. Additionally, units that maintain a local bank account (i.e., not an IEEE Concentration Bank Account) must also submit the Bank Account Disclosure Form.

Forms should be completed and submitted as soon as possible, but no later than 31 March 2012. A 10% rebate bonus will be made to units that complete the reporting requirements by 17 February 2012. Additional information on the 2012 Rebate Schedule is available. Please e-mail MGA Staff with questions.

Petition organizers should be aware of the primary process revisions for petitions to form Sections, Subsections, Chapters, or Affinity Groups. They are:

• The petition organizer is responsible for communicating their intent to begin the petition process with the geographic parent’s executive committee, prior to gathering signatures on a petition. Prior to submission of the completed petition to MGA staff, the organizer must obtain the signed endorsement on the new geographic unit petition form from a member of the geographic parent’s executive committee. This step ensures awareness of the organizer’s intent and their willingness to coordinate efforts with the geographic parent.
• The organizer shall complete a business plan summary sheet to indicate the planned meetings and activities for the initial six months of the proposed geographic unit. The business plan summary sheet is included on the revised petition form. The business plan form shall include the signature of a member of the geographic parent executive committee, which will indicate the geographic parent’s endorsement of the business plan.
• Petition signers must have been IEEE members for a minimum of six months.

If you have any questions, please contact the MGA staff at sec-chap-support@ieee.org or via phone at +1 732 562 5511 or +1 732 562 5512.

We are glad to announce a new mailing list dedicated to the hot topic of Machine Listening.

The list aims to attract members from diverse research communities united by an interest in building robust Machine Listening applications, be it for speech, music or environmental sounds. This includes researchers and engineers in the fields of Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing, Speech and Language Processing, Multichannel and Multimodal Signal Processing and Machine Learning for Signal Processing.

The list will serve as a place for announcing events (workshops, challenges, journal special issues, etc), publicizing opportunities (jobs, PhD places, etc) and we hope it will also serve as a valuable discussion forum for people working in the field.

We have decided to use Google Groups as the platform for the list. In order to subscribe, please follow the link below.

http://groups.google.com/group/machinelistening

Jon Barker, University of Sheffield
Emmanuel Vincent, INRIA

SPS Publications: February 2012 Content Gazette

Other SPS Sponsored Publications

As outlined in my presentation at one of the Expert Sessions at ICASSP 2011, the Industry DSP Technology Standing Committee (IDSP-SC) is now focusing on emerging signal processing applications and technologies from industry and practice perspectives. The following ten emerging applications describe our future emphasis on various activities such as publications, conferences, standardization and product development. But before listing these ten applications, it should be noted that the IEEE Signal Processing Society has now a flagship conference, the IEEE International Conference on Emerging Signal Processing Applications (IEEE ESPA) which is co-located with one of the largest annual events: the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) at Las Vegas at the beginning of each January. The first edition of ESPA was held 12-14 January 2012 with great success.

1. M2M Signal Processing: Machine to Machine (also referred to as “Internet of things”) will make many kinds of devices and places be universally IP-enabled and make them become an integral part of the internet. Smart grid is an excellent representative case of M2M in practice. Signal processing will play a very important role in embedded and connected technology such as information capturing, data sensing, and signal transmission of M2M infrastructure.
2. Display Signal Processing: New display technology for consumer electronics such as OLED (organic light-emitting diode) offers many advantages over traditional ones and will greatly increase the use of signal processing in related areas such as color processing, signal sampling, and high-speed implementation.
3. Social Signal Processing: The related topics in this new application area include, but are not limited to, social networking, E-health, E-learning, telemedicine, social intelligence, social cognition, behavior modeling and analysis, security and forensics, privacy, and trust.
4. Green Signal Processing: Power-efficiency is becoming the first priority of many practical applications from broadband wireless to LCD based lighting devices. To achieve this goal, research and development of new signal processing algorithms, processing platforms, and system integration are highly desirable.
5. Smart Signal Processing: In additional to machine-learning based intelligent processing, smart signal processing involves multi-layer, multi-mode, multi-application and multi-band for the entire system in both software and hardware. With smart signal processing, smart phones, smart TV, smart appliances, smart home, smart school, and smart city are gradually becoming real.
6. Cloud Signal Processing: Cloud and service computing remain the top applications of signal processing with algorithms and real-time implementations for compression, coding, storage, security, privacy and IP management, communication and streaming (ultrahigh bandwidth), modeling, and evaluation for quality of service and experience.
7. 3D Signal Processing: In addition to 3D video, 3D audio and 3D TV, 3D signal processing will also bring new 3D technologies and applications to practice such as 3D circuits, 3D printing, 3D holographic projections, and imaging.
8. Mobile Signal Processing: This area deals with not only with handheld devices but also with vehicle and transportation applications. The new topics related to signal processing include mobile broadcasting, mobile broadband Internet, 4G and beyond, mobile cloud, navigation, location based services (LBS), and safety altering services.
9. Digital RF Processing: One of the biggest technology trends in wireless broadband, radar, sonar, and broadcasting systems is digital and software radio frequency (RF) processing. This application area covers a broad range of topics from signal processing algorithms to system integration including digital up/down conversion, high-frequency (RF range) conversion between analog and digital signals, and numerical controlled oscillators.
10. Terahertz Signal Processing: Targeting the frequency range from 300GHz to 10 THz, Terahertz technology will greatly change the landscape of signal processing applications and pose big challenges for the signal processing community from algorithm development, real-time implementation, and system integration.

To better promote these applications and bring them to practice, IDSP-SC has recently formed six sub-committees from various aspects and different functions. To anyone who is interested in becoming involved with or contributing to these sub-committees, please contact the current chairman of IDSP-SC via email.

The Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee (AASP TC) had its second annual TC meeting on Tuesday, October 18, at Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, NY, USA, where the IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA) 2011 was held. We had 18 members present and discussed subcommittee establishment for EDICS, ICASSP reviews, awards, news letter, fellow nomination, webpage, nominations and elections, and AASP Challenges, as well as the next WASPAA in 2013.

WASPAA 2011 was over with a great success. Because of too much popularity and a limited capacity of the venue, the WASPAA committee chaired by Dan Ellis of Columbia University had to decline some registrations. The committee selected 88 papers for presentation from 214 submissions in total. The participants enjoyed beautiful autumn leaves and a historical hotel building in addition to presentations of state-of-the-art technology in the field and hot discussions. WASPAA2013 will be co-chaired by Sharon Gannot of Bar-Ilan University and Emanuel Habets of University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and take place at the same venue.

Just before closing of 2011, AASP TC had an annual election of new members. The following nine new members were successfully elected: Israel Cohen (Technion – Israel Institute of Technology), John Hershey (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Craig Jin (The University of Sydney), Vinay Melkote (Dolby Laboratories, Inc.), Gautham Mysore (Adobe Systems Inc.), Sven Nordholm (Curtin University), Augusto Sarti (Politecnico di Milano), Sascha Spors (Deutsche Telekom Laboratories), Emmanuel Vincent (INRIA: French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control)
We also have three re-elected members as follows: Walter Kellermann (University of Erlangen- Nürnberg), Tomohiro Nakatani (NTT), Ivan Tashev (Microsoft Research). On the other hand, we are sad to see the following important members leaving the AASP TC, in order to comply with the rules of the IEEE Signal Processing Society: Marina Bosi (Stanford University), Karlheinz Brandenburg (Fraunhofer Institute), Ramani Duraiswami (University of Maryland), Gary Elko (mh acoustics), Michael Goodwin (Audience, Inc.), Yoichi Haneda (NTT), Yiteng (Arden) Huang (WeVoice, Inc.), Osamu Hoshuyama (NEC), Rainer Martin (University of Bochum)

Gary Elko and Michael Goodwin were both former chairs of this TC when it was still called Audio and Electroacoustics TC. I would like to thank all of these outgoing members for their contributions. Most of them, however, will stay in the AASP TC as associate members for their wisdom and future contributions. The whole process of this election was efficiently managed by Paris Smaragdis, Chair of Nominations and Elections Subcommittee.

The emphasis of the AASP TC activities in these months has been placed on preparation of ICASSP 2012. ICASSP is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications with world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and over 120 lecture and poster sessions. Malcolm Slaney, the review subcommittee chair, has devoted himself to review coordination of 282 submissions in a short time, not to mention the contributions by AASP TC members. Michael Brandstein, Simon Doclo, Tomas Gänsler, Jürgen Herre, Shoji Makino, Tomohiro Nakatani, Gäel Richard, Hiroshi Sawada, and Paris Smagradis helped Malcolm assign reviewers as area chairs who are responsible for their fields of expertise. AASP TC finally accepted 137 papers for presentation at poster and lecture sessions. The AASP TC Chair, Akihiko (Ken) Sugiyama, has been playing an unrivaled role as a Technical Program Co-chair for ICASSP2012.

The AASP TC is also deeply involved in the International Conference on Emerging Signal Processing Applications (ESPA), which was held from January 12 through 14 at Caesar’s Palace Hotel in Las Vegas, NV, USA for its first series. It is newly started to serve practicing engineers and will have a strong emphasis on applications and cutting edge practical signal processing. It is co-located with and follows the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to enable attendees to attend both CES and ESPA and learn about the technology in the latest products announced in CES, as well as the technologies that may help create future CES products. Attendees will learn about the current technologies from the major industry and academic players in the field, and about the future directions from visionary keynote speakers. The AASP TC has two invited speakers: Ivan Tashev of Microsoft Research and Malcolm Slaney of Yahoo! Research. Ivan talked about audio signal processing in Kinect that was one of the most popular booths at CES. Malcolm’s talk was entitled “Web Scale Multimedia Processing” and covered how to make it easier for people to find the multimedia content they want. The AASP TC was also represented by two Tutorial speakers, Ivan Tashev of Microsoft Research and Akihiko (Ken) Sugiyama of NEC Corporation. Ivan presented the whole and detailed aspects of how one can optimize a signal processing application with Kinect as an example in a tutorial session. Ken talked about applications and implementation of adaptive filters with a series of exciting demonstrations as another tutorial with its theoretical aspects covered by Prof. V. John Mathews of University of Utah. He also served as ESPA’s Tutorial Chair and coordinated all tutorials. ESPA will be held in the same city, in the same season in 2013.

An EDICS Subcommittee has been established with Sharon Gannot as its chair and the following members: Emanuel Habets (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg), James D. Johnston (Independent Consultant), Vesa Valimaki (Aalto University). The EDICS Subcommittee has started its discussions on updated EDICS for IEEE Journals such as Transactions on Signal Processing, Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, Signal Processing Letters and some others.

We should not forget our new activity called AASP Challenges. It is to introduce a sequence of ‘challenges’ in order to encourage research and development with comparable and repeatable results, and to stimulate new ground‐breaking approaches to specific problems in our technical scope. AASP TC has a dedicated Subcommittee for this specific purpose chaired by Patrick A. Naylor of Imperial College, London. More details, including the schedule of the challenges, will be available at AASP TC website shortly. So, stay tuned for it.

A job market page has been popular with many visitors in the AASP TC website. If there is any information about job openings, please direct it by email to the AASP webmaster, Patrick Naylor.