News from the SPCOM TC

By Roberto López-Valcarce (SPCOM TC Liaison to E-Newsletter)

The interests of the Signal Processing for Communications and Networking Technical Committee (SPCOM TC) span those areas situated at the crossroads of the IEEE Signal Processing (SPS), Communications (COMSOC), and Information Theory (IT) Societies, addressing signal processing challenges including coding and data compression, network-distributed signal processing, channel modeling, estimation and equalization, multiantenna, multiuser, multicarrier and multiaccess communication, antenna arrays for wireless communications, synchronization, cross-layer resource optimization, ad-hoc, sensor and smart grid networks, and cognitive radio and dynamic spectrum access systems.

All of these SPCOM TC technical areas of interest were covered in the 179 papers presented at the 20 SPCOM track sessions and a joint SAM/SPCOM session held at the ICASSP'11 conference. The SPCOM TC also organized an expert summary of current trends at ICASSP'11, moderated by TC Past Chair Geert Leus, in which TC members Shuguang Cui and Robert Heath presented their expert opinion on the most significant advances and identified trends within the SPCOM areas over the past year, fostering an inspiring discussion on such hot topics as cognitive networks, cooperative interference management, compressive sensing applications, localization issues, heterogeneous cellular networks, and non-traditional networks - smart grid, intelligent infrastructure, and social networks. The SPCOM TC will shortly start reviewing the papers that have been submitted to the SPCOM track of the ICASSP'12 conference.

In June 2011, the SPCOM TC sponsored the 12th IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC'11) in San Francisco, chaired by Hamid Sadjadpour. The workshop featured 5 plenary talks and 116 papers organized into 10 regular sessions. Along the years, the workshop scope has progressively expanded to cover networking and communications in general (not just wireless). The next edition of SPAWC will take place in Çesme, Turkey, in June 2012.

One of the TC tasks is the nomination of candidates to Best Paper as well as Young Author Best Paper Awards of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS). To this end, SPCOM TC members scanned a total of 262 papers in the SPCOM area. As a result of this first round of scan review, each of a total of 25 candidate papers underwent peer review by at least two TC members; in this way, over 20,000 words of review were generated. Based on this input a voting process was carried out, consisting of three voting rounds. A ballot containing the reviews and nomination statements was sent to eligible members of the TC, who each had 3 votes. The top 3 papers entered a run-off to select the TC's nominee. In the run-off, each eligible TC member had only 1 vote. Finally, a consensus vote was held for the nominees. Voting procedures were also carried out for the nomination of candidates to the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award as well as the Society and Technical Achievement Awards.

At the time of writing, SPCOM TC new member election is under way. Interest in our TC remains quite strong, as there are 20 nominees for this year’s 5 open slots. In addition to this, the TC is looking for affiliate members and encourages anyone with interest in the SPCOM TC to apply for affiliate membership. Candidates from industry are especially welcome, as one of the short-term goals of our TC is to strengthen ties with this sector.

The SPCOM TC has been recently reviewed by the IEEE SPS TC Review Committee, attesting to the overall good shape of our TC. As always, there is room for improvement and you can bet that the TC is working on it!

For further information, please visit the SPCOM TC webpage.