Rabab Ward's career includes many firsts, particularly for women in engineering and signal processing, paving the way in three continents and spanning over four decades. This did not come as easy as we discovered.  After many years of perseverance, Ward became the first woman with a Ph.D. to be appointed as professor of electrical engineering in Canada in 1981. 

As a reminder for continuing chapter chairs and for incoming chapter chairs for 2019, we would like to highlight a valuable resource available to you. Launched last year was IEEE OU Analytics, a web-based business intelligence tool to deliver essential metrics on memberships or subscriptions to OUs, including Societies, Councils, Technical Communities, etc.

This year the Signal Processing Society identified 12 Chapters who exhibited excellence in many facets of chapter management, member recruitment, and activities.

In accordance with the Bylaws of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, I am writing to solicit nominations for the Awards Board and the Nominations and Appointments (N&A) Committee. This year, the Society will be filling THREE positions on the N&A Committee for the term 2020-21 and TWO positions on the Awards Board for the term 2020-2022.

Due to overwhelming interest in Member Driven Initiative funding, the IEEE Signal Processing Society has changed its process for submitting proposals through the program. This includes proposals for Forums, Regional Meetings, and Chapter Driven Initiatives.

New and improved monthly statistics reports are now available containing enriched visual analytics dashboards that can be used for monthly trending. These comprehensive dashboards improve efficiency by allowing OUs to quickly access data that is relevant to them by OU, Region, Section, Grade, Division, etc.

IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) President, Ali H. Sayed, is seeking nominations for the positions of Chair and Vice Chair of the IEEE SPS Fellow Evaluation Committee. The term of appointment for each position is one year, renewable (1 January 2020-31 December 2020). 

The SPS Awards Board is now accepting nominations for all Society level awards, from paper awards to the major society awards. Nominations are due by 1 September 2019.  Nominators should take into consideration the need for representation of diversity in the award nomination slate, when submitting their nominations.  

Recent years have witnessed the explosive growth of mobile data traffic, which has led to ever-increasing demand for high system throughput, massive user access, heterogeneous data traffic, high bandwidth efficiency, and ultra-low latency. 

The IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) is dedicated to providing webinars on technical and technological innovations (and their applications) in signal processing from top researchers and thought leaders in academia and industry on the SPS Resource Center.