News from the SPCOM-TC

Contributed by Roberto López-Valcarce
(SPCOM TC Newsletter Subcommittee chair)

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, multi-antenna, mult-iuser, multi-carrier and multi-access 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.

Conference Activities

All of these SPCOM TC technical areas of interest were covered in the 206 papers (selected from a total of 386 submissions) presented at the 19 SPCOM track sessions held at the ICASSP 2013 conference in Vancouver, Canada, last May. The SPCOM TC will in turn review those papers that will be submitted to the SPCOM track of the ICASSP 2014 conference in Florence.

Last June the SPCOM TC sponsored the 14th IEEE International Workshop on Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC 2013) in Darmstadt, Germany, co-chaired by Abdelhak Zoubir and Slawomir Stanczak. Over the years, the scope of SPAWC has significantly expanded, covering not just wireless but also other aspects of communications and networking in which signal processing plays a role. The workshop featured 5 plenary talks and 3 tutorials, together with 154 papers (selected from a total of 241 submissions) organized into 20 regular sessions. The next SPAWC workshop will take place in Toronto, Canada, 22-25 June 2014.

SPS Awards

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 313 papers in the SPCOM area. As a result of this first round of scan review, each of a total of 19 candidate papers underwent peer review by at least two TC members; in this way, over 29,000 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 (for BPA) and 2 papers (for YABPA) entered a run-off to select the TC's nominee. In the run-off, each eligible TC member had a single vote. Finally, a consensus vote was held for the nominees. Voting procedures were also carried out for the nomination of candidates for the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award as well as the IEEE Signal Processing Letters Award.

TC Life

The SPCOM TC currently has 30 members and is seeking new committee members for a three-year term starting in January 2014; elections will be held shortly in order to fill 15 vacant positions. We are looking for technically solid, broad, and experienced candidates, who are willing to actively participate in TC activities, including award nominations and paper reviews. We encourage worthy and willing SPS members, especially those from underrepresented groups, to consider submitting their nomination. For more info, please check our nomination page.

The TC is also looking for affiliate members, and encourages anyone with interest in the SPCOM TC to apply for affiliate membership. One of the goals of our TC is to strengthen ties with industry, and thus candidates from this sector are especially welcome.

For further information, please visit the SPCOM TC webpage.