The Multimedia Signal Processing Technical Committee (MMSP TC) successfully organized the 2009 MMSP Workshop in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, marking a milestone for the first time one of the major IEEE Signal Processing Society events being held in Latin America. Planning is underway for MMSP 2010, which will be held in Saint-Malo, France. The TC also invites proposals to organize the 2011 MMSP Workshop. Another major effort in 2009 that the MMSP TC is actively engaged in was to revitalize the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME) jointly organized by four IEEE societies. The TC welcomes a new Chair and eight newly elected members in January 2010.

.

The ability to learn about a stochastic process from noisy observations is fundamental to many applications. In order to track a dynamic process, typical knowledge representation is the state space model such as a linear Gauss Markov model, where efficient algorithms exist to perform state estimation under many different model assumptions. However, for meta level tracking, we are not only interested in the state estimation, but also temporal and structural classification of the process.

Synthetic attendance--immersive communications with people in a meeting happening afar--has been one of mankind's elusive dreams. The Exploratory DSP column of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (November 2009) discusses critical questions in immersive communications that are still awaiting resolution.

Ph.D. and post-doc positions are available to work on fluorescence microscopy related projects in joint research group with University of Texas at Dallas and UT Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. The projects aim to develop novel imaging modalities, image processing and data analysis methods for fluorescence microscopy live cell experiments in particular single molecule detection.

.

Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (POLSAR) data is an important source for many operational remote sensing applications. Segmentation and classification of image data are important tasks for POLSAR data analysis and interpretation, which often requires human interaction. In this thesis, spectral graph partitioning methodology is used to exploit both the polarimetric attributes of pixels, and the visual aspect of the image data through visual cues.

Signal processing engineers usually use high level languages to develop advanced algorithms for new radars and to determine the optimal parameters for these algorithms. The long execution times due to computational complexity and/or very large data sets hinders an efficient engineering development workflow. Rapid prototyping tools such as parallel MATLAB can enable a software design workflow that helps the development of radar prototypes by providing interactivity and reducing the execution time of the algorithms under test.