DISPS TC News

By Warren Gross and Jarmo Takala

The Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems Technical Committee (DISPS TC) has the mission to promote and support activities of the IEEE Signal Processing Society in the areas of: i) Design, development and implementation of signal processing systems; ii) Design of algorithms with implementation in mind and iii) the Design of software tools and methodologies to support the design of signal processing systems.

The TC holds two meetings a year: one held in the spring at the flagship conference of the Signal Processing Society: the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (IEEE ICASSP), and one held in the autumn at the TC’s Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (IEEE SiPS). The TC organizes the annual SiPS workshop, as well as the reviews of papers for both SiPS and the DISPS tracks of ICASSP.

The technical committee has currently 36 Members, an Advisory Board, and Affiliate Members. Members of the TC are expected to attend TC meetings and participate in paper reviews. More information about the requirements for membership and the procedures for nomination are available on the TC’s membership webpage.

The TC has recently held elections to select members for the next 3-year term starting Jan. 1 2013. The deadline for nominations was on Sept. 15, 2012 and the TC selected 12 members from the nominated candidates. Five of the selected members will begin their 2nd term. The new members are listed in the DISPS web pages. In 2013, the DISPS TC will have 35 members. We welcome the new members!

Bob Owens Best Student Paper Award

The TC’s Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (IEEE SiPS 2012) was held in Quebec City, Canada, from October 16-19. The conference venue, Hôtel Château Laurier, is steps away from the Historic District, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The organization committee included Paul Fortier, Laval Univ. and Emmanuel Boutillon, Univ. de Bretagne Sud as General Chairs, Warren Gross, McGill Univ., Tong Zhang, RPI as Technical Program Committee Chairs, and Zhiyuan Yan, Lehigh Univ. as Finance Chair. The Workshop received 126 submissions and the program committee selected 40 papers to be presented in lectures and 15 posters. The workshop attracted 74 participants who enjoyed three keynotes: Jean-Philipe Diguet, LAB-STICC, Université de Bretagne-Sud: "Cyber-Physical Systems in Competition Sailboats: A Challenging Case Study for a Wide Range of Future Applications", Radu Marculescu, Carnegie Mellon Univ.: "Design of Future Integrated Systems: A Cyber-physical Systems Approach", and Nikil Dutt, Univ. California, Irvine: "Taming and Exploiting Unreliable Embedded Memories". SiPS has the tradition of awarding the best student paper with the Bob Owens Memorial Paper Award and this year the winner was the paper "Real-Time FPGA Implementation of Linear Blending Vision Reconstruction Algorithm using a Spherical Light Field Camera" by Hossein Afshari, Abdulkadir Akin, Vladan Popovic, Alexandre Schmid, and Yusuf Leblebici. The DISPS TC meeting was held during the SiPS Workshop and 23 persons were present discussing the future of DISPS activities. The next SiPS Workshopwill be held on Oct. 16-18 2013 in Taipei, Taiwan.

IEEE SPS Summer School in Taiwan

DISPS TC members have been active in organizing IEEE SPS Seasonal Schools. The IEEE Signal Processing Society Summer School on "Compressive Sensing and MIMO Signal Processing Systems" was held at National Tsing Hua University (NTHU), Hsinchu, Taiwan, on July 2 - 6, 2012. The summer school was organized by Prof. Yuan-Hao Huang, Prof. Ching-Te Chiu, and Prof. Yao-Win Hong of NTHU. Nine internationally recognized experts, including Prof. Mark Davenport, Prof. Zhi Tian, Prof. Yonina Eldar, Prof. Syed Ali Jafar, Prof Ken Ma, Prof. Rui Zhang, Prof. Gerd Ascheid, Prof. Sebastian Hoyos, and Prof. Andreas Burg, contributed to tutorials. The topics included compressive sensing, advanced MIMO signal processing, and design and implementation of signal processing systems. The summer school attracted 179 participants including 27 international students/scholars from 10 different countries in Asia and Europe.

IEEE SPS Summer School in Belfast

Prof. Roger Woods organized a SPS summer school at Queen's University Belfast entitled "High Performance DSP and FPGA implementation of Signal Processing Systems" held from 20-25th August. Core topics covered included SoC challenges, DSP and FPGA implementation, programming models and languages, low power optimization and detailed design example in communications and finance. The school was opened by Prof. Mike Flynn from Stanford University who gave an in-depth overview of the challenges and there were contributions from Chris Bleakley (Univ. College Dublin, Ireland), Joe Cavallaro (Rice Univ., TX), Joerg Janneck (Lund Univ., Sweden), Juanjo Noguera (Xilinx, Ireland), Jarmo Takala (Tampere Univ. Tech., Finland), David Thomas (Imperial College Dublin, UK), and Roger Woods (Queen's Univ. Belfast, UK). The school hosted 39 students from various European countries.