For our February 2017 issue, we cover recent patents granted in the area of the analysis and application of active contours.

University of Washington researchers have created the first publicly available dataset of labeled classical music, named MusicNet. MusicNet is a collection of 330 freely-licensed classical music recordings, together with over 1 million annotated labels indicating the precise time of each note in every recording, the instrument that plays each note, and the note's position in the metrical structure of the composition

For our January 2017 issue, we cover recent patents granted in the area of emotion recognition. The below patents deal with hardware and software components of up-to-date emotion analysis systems, and various applications of the latest technological developments.

Several interesting machine learning and signal processing contests have are currently active, including among others the a nature conservancy challenge aimed at monitoring of fisheries and a challenge focusing on satellite imagery feature detection.

For our December 2016 issue, we cover recent patents dealing with point cloud processing, including point cloud segmentation, mesh generation, point cloud registration and object separation.

The SAM technical committee reports on past and upcoming conferences and workshops and welcomes new TC members

The Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems Technical Committee (DISPS TC) reports on upcoming conferences and workshops.

The IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee reports on the Interspeech conference and an interview with Geoffery Zweig.

Researchers from Disney Research have built a cordless one-legged hopping robot that can bounce up to 7 seconds/19 times without falling over. They employed a linear elastic actuator in parallel (LEAP), which placed a voice coil actuator (VCA) in parallel with compression springs, to act as the primary weight-bearing actuator for the one-legged hopping robot.