A Proposal for Certification Programs in Signal Processing

by Béatrice Pesquet-Popescu and Fa-Long Luo
(Chair and Past-Chair of the IDSP-SC)

The Industry DSP Technology Standing Committee (IDSP-SC) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) has the following major functions and activities from an administrative point of view: (i) the organization of the Industry Technology Track (ITT) for each year’s ICASSP and participation in the newly launched conference series IEEE-ESPA (emerging signal processing applications), (ii) nomination of papers for all the IEEE SPS paper awards, (iii) nomination of individuals for IEEE SPS major awards and IEEE fellow, (iv) organization of special issues for SPS publications and special sessions for SPS flagship conferences. On the other hand, due to the fact that most members of IDSP-SC are selected from outstanding individuals in industry, its mission is mainly to promote emerging signal processing applications and industry technology and also to promote industry participation in the SPS and IEEE.

Engineering certification is now playing a more and more important role in recognizing professional abilities and advancing individual careers. Having realized this importance, IDSP-SC is now proposing to related SPS boards three optional certification programs, namely: Exam-Based Certification Program, Review-Based Certification Program and Sponsor-Based Certification Program so as to better serve signal processing related professionals and also to further promote SPS in the industry community. A brief introduction to these three optional programs is given below.

Exam-Based Certification Program:
An individual professional can be granted to “Certified Signal Processing Engineer” by SPS after the applicant pass “the Signal Processing Certification Exam” and meet other eligibility requirements. For this program, IDSP-SC will lead to make the exam specifications, provide the training services and choose the exam agents/representatives over world-wide.

Review-Based Certification Program:
A “Certified Signal Processing Engineer” certificate can be issued to an individual professional after a review panel assesses the applicant’s qualifications. The requirement to meet the qualifications could be the same level as that of an IEEE regular member. However, to issue such a certificate is the SPS level only and could be independent of IEEE membership. The review panel consists of IDSP-SC members and some other selected industry practitioners.

Sponsor-Based Certification Program:
Instead of the skills in having general signal processing fields, more specific skills in using tools, platforms or instruments such as DSP programming and DSP testing will be assessed and further a certificate with indicating these specific skills can be issued by SPS. The assessments (exam-based or review-based) could be made through the providers (sponsor companies) of these tools, platforms or instruments such as TI or NI. The major role of IDSP-SC is to identify these sponsor companies and oversee the operation of the program.

Comments and suggestions on the above initiatives and other activities of IDSP-SC are highly appreciated and please send them to the chair of IDSP-SC, Béatrice Pesquet-Popescu. At its meeting at ICASSP 2013 (taking place May 26–31, 2013, in Vancouver, Canada), the Standing Committee will discuss in more details this program, as well as the new proposed EDICS for our activities (currently under consideration by the Conference Board).

The IDSP-SC has the pleasure to announce five new elected members for this year: Umit Bature (TI, USA), Woon-Seng Gan (NTU, Singapore), Ivan Tashev (Microsoft, Inc, USA) , Emanuël Habets (International Audio Labs Erlangen, Germany) and Jungong Han ( Philips, The Netherlands) for the first three–years term (January 1, 2013 through Dec. 31, 2015). Congratulation to all of these new five members, and welcome to board!

The SC welcomes participation from all members of the SPS technical community interested in the IDSP areas. Affiliate membership within the TC is open to all, and you are encouraged to sign up. Affiliate members receive TC-related announcements, participate in TC nominations processes, and are welcome to attend the open portions of the TC meetings at ICIP and ICASSP. For additional information, please visit the SC website.