We’re excited to announce that beginning in the 2019 membership year, IEEE students and graduate student members will be able to join the IEEE Signal Processing Society for just one dollar!

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.

Critical infrastructures such as the smart electric power grid, gas and water utility networks, transportation networks, and communication networks are crucially supporting quality of life and economic growth. Future critical infrastructures are envisioned to integrate sensory data acquisition, communication and computation technologies, and signal processing to offer improved services to their end-users.

The problem of pervasive indoor localization still remains largely unsolved due to the difficult propagation conditions. Some IoT applications will require real-time localization with submeter accuracy in GNSS-challenged environments.

Computer and communication systems are subject to repeated security attacks. Given the variety of new vulnerabilities discovered every day, the introduction of new attack schemes, and the ever-expanding use of the Internet, it is not surprising that the field of computer and network security has grown and evolved significantly in recent years.

Biometrics and multimedia forensics technologies are rapidly becoming an integral part of forensics sciences. This is evident by the increasing number of security applications such as computer and physical access control, digital rights management, homeland security, surveillance, and defence. 

Big data is becoming an increasingly decisive resource in modern societies, economies, and governmental organizations. Big Data is an emerging paradigm encompassing various kinds of complex and large scale information beyond the processing capability of conventional software and databases. Various technologies are being discussed

IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer, Dr. Wing-Kin (Ken) Ma, gave a talk on “Hyperspectral Unmixing in Remote Sensing: Insights and Beyond.” The lecture, which included Machine Learning, was held on 14 June 2018 for the SPS German Chapter at Technischen Universität Darmstadt. The talk was hosted and moderated by Marius Pesavento and Gerald Enzner.

For our August 2018 issue, we cover recent patents granted in the area of Lidar based scene analysis. Patent no. 10,031,231 presents an object-detection system suitable for an automated vehicle which includes a lidar and a controller. The lidar is used to detect a point-cloud that is organized into a plurality of scan-lines. 

Your vote is important! On 15 August, the election of Regional Directors-at-Large for Regions 1-6 and 8 (the term is 1 January 2019 through 31 December 2020) and Members-at-Large (term 1 January 2019 through 31 December 2021) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Board of Governors (BoG) will be open.