Activity Report from the DISPS TC

By Jarmo Takala (DISPS Liaison to E-Newsletter)

The Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems Technical Committee (DISPS TC) promotes and supports activities of SPS in the several areas including (i) design, development and implementation of signal processing systems, (ii) design of algorithms with implementation in mind, and (iii) design of software tools and methodologies to support the design of signal processing systems.

In Fall 2011, DISPS TC was seeking for new members and the TC members elected five new members from the nominations received before the deadline Sept. 15 2011. The new members for a 3-year term starting at 2012 are:

• Woon Seng Gan (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore),
• Manish Goel (Texas Instruments, USA),
• Markus Püschel (ETHZ, Switzerland),
• Mickaël Raulet (IETR/INSA Rennes, France), and
• Zhengya Zhang (University of Michigan, USA).

In addition, Xinmiao Zhang (Case Western Reserve University, USA) and Ching-Te Chiu (National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan) were elected for their second term. The DISPS TC will have 36 members starting at 2012.

Nominations for new members for 2013 will be collected in September 2012. More information will be provided on the DISPS TC membership web page. The DISPS TC has also accepted affiliate and student affiliate members. The list of current affiliates is available here.

The DISPS TC sponsors the IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (SiPS) and this year the Workshop was held in Beirut, Lebanon in October 4-7. The General Chairs Magdy Bayoumi (Univ. Louisiana, Lafayette, USA) and Ibrahim Hajj (American Univ. Beirut, Lebanon) and Technical Program Chairs Mohammad Mansour (American Univ. Beirut, Lebanon) and Brian Evans (Univ. Texas, Austin, USA) created a successful event: 67 papers were accepted from 102 submissions and the conference attracted about 70 participants. The technical program contained two interesting keynotes: “Brain-Machine Interfaces - the New Frontier to Extreme Miniaturization” by Jan Rabaey (Univ. California, Berkeley) and “Sparseness, Compressed Sensing and Multi-Channel Analog-to-Digital Conversion” by Ahmed Tewfik (Univ. Texas, Austin). The conference was organized in Bechtel Engineering Building in the campus of the American University of Beirut. The campus provided a beautiful environment for the workshop with a view over to Mediterranean Sea. IEEE SiPS has tradition of awarding the best student paper with Bob Owens Memorial Paper Award. This year the award was given to paper “Design and Implementation of a High Data Rate MICS Digital Baseband Transmitter” by Junha Im, Sangmin Lee, and Jaeseok Kim from Yonsei University, South Korea.