Activity Update from the DISPS TC

by Warren J. Gross and Jarmo Takala

(Vice Chair and Chair of the DISPS TC)

The Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems Technical Committee (DISP 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.

Elections

The Technical Committee has elected Zhiyuan Yan (Lehigh University, USA), as the Vice Chair for the next two-year term starting January 2014. The DISPS TC has also elected new members through a very competitive selection process for the next 3-year term starting January 2014. The new members are:

• Joseph Cavallaro, Rice University, USA (2’nd term)
• Tse-Wei Chen, Canon, JP
• Shao-Yi Chien, National Taiwan University, TW (2’nd term)
• Johan Eker, Ericsson, SE
• Jorn W. Janneck, Lund University, SE
• Sridhar Rajagopal, Samsung, USA
• Vivienne Sze, MIT, USA
• Naveen Verma, Princeton University, US (2’nd term)
• Lei Wang, University of Connecticut, US (2’nd term)
• Zhongfeng Wang, Broadcom, US (2’nd term)

Congratulations to the new members. The DISPS TC will have 31 members in 2014 and 29% of the members are from industry.

Conferences

The DISPS TC is involved in organizing the IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (SiPS) and this year the Workshop was held in Taipei, Taiwan from October 16-18, 2013. The workshop received 137 submissions and the program committee selected 37 papers to be presented in lectures and 36 posters. The workshop attracted 121 participants who enjoyed three keynotes: “A Time-Reversal Paradigm for Green Internet of Things” by Prof. K. J. Ray Liu, University of Maryland, President of IEEE Signal Processing Society, “Where can Signal Processing and Machine Learning Algorithms help Automate Diagnostic Procedures in Medical Imaging?” by Prof. Matthew O'Donnell, University of Washington, and “Self-Aware Communication and Signal Processing Systems: Real-Time Adaptation to Power, Error Resilience and Workload Demands” by Prof. Abhijit Chatterjee, Georgia Tech. IEEE SiPS hosts the Bob Owens Best Student Paper Award and this year the winners were M. Beermann, E. Monzó, L. Schmalen, and P. Vary for the paper “High Speed Decoding of Non-Binary Irregular LDPC Codes Using GPUs” and J. Choi, E. P. Kim, R. A. Rutenbar, and N. Shanbhag for the paper “Error Resilient MRF Message Passing Architecture for Stereo Matching”. The DISPS TC meeting was held during the SiPS workshop in Wistaria Tea House, a Taipei historical heritage site. The next SiPS will be organized in Belfast, UK from October 19-22, 2014.

The DIPS TC is also involved in the new flagship conference of the SPS, the IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP). DISPS members are organizing the Symposium on Software Defined and Cognitive Radios, which will have 38 poster presentations and three keynotes: Alan Gatherer, Huawei Technologies, USA, “Bridging the gap from SDR to Heterogeneous Baseband SoC”, Fred Harris, San Diego State University, “The Physical Layer: The Neglected Stepchild in the Communication System”, and Xiaolin Lu, Texas Instruments, USA, “Software Defined Radio for Smart Utility Networks”.

DISPS TC is involved in organizing a special session in ICASSP 2014: "Joint Optimization of RF Devices and Resource Allocation in Wireless Networks".

Honors

DISPS Associate Member Shuvra Bhattacharyya, Advisory Board Member Ed Deprettere, and Member and Chair Jarmo Takala are editors along with Rainer Leupers of the second edition of the Handbook of Signal Processing Systems, which was recently published:
S. S. Bhattacharyya, E. Deprettere, R. Leupers, and J. Takala, editors. "Handbook of Signal Processing Systems". Springer, second edition, 2013. ISBN: 978-1-4614-6858-5 (Print); 978-1-4614-6859-2 (Online).

DISPS Member of the Advisory Board Nam Ling was also active in organizing international conferences related to DISPS topics. He was the General Chair of the 2013 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), San Jose, California, USA, July 15–19, 2013, the Technical Program Co-Chair of the 2013 IEEE Visual Communications and Image Processing Conference (VCIP), Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia, November 17-20, 2013, and the General Co-Chair, 2nd International Workshop on Video Coding and Video Processing (VCVP), Shenzhen, China, January 21–23.

Nam Ling also co-edited a special issue for the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (Special Issue on Video Coding: HEVC and Beyond). Publication is expected in December 2013.

DISPS Advisory Board Member Myung H. Sunwoo was re-elected to the Board of Govenors of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society for 2014-2016.

Prof. Andy (An-Yeu) Wu provides a status update on IEEE SiPS 2013 during the DISPS TC meeting on October 17 2013 in the Wistaria Tea House, a Taipei historical heritage site.