October 2014

For the first time two teams jointly won the SAUC-E competition, the Student Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Challenge - Europe. The ENSTA Bretagne team, with the robot SAUC-ISSE, and the DFKI GmbH-University of Bremen team, with the robot Avalon, triumphed over four other teams at the 9th edition. The 2nd prize went jointly to the ENSTA Bretagne team, with the robot CISSAU, and to University of Applied Sciences Kiel, with the robot TomKyle, which was awarded as well for the “Best Journal Paper”.

For our October 2014 issue, we cover recent patents granted in the area of speaker recognition. The section below covers patents granted recently for systems or methods which propose either new speaker recognition apporaches or utilize existing speaker recognition modules in key roles for obtaining added values for their services.

Nominations are due 31 January annually for the IEEE Technical Field Awards (TFAs). IEEE TFAs are awarded for contributions or leadership in a specific field of interest of the IEEE and are among the highest awards presented on behalf of the IEEE Board of Directors.

All IEEE members are encouraged to submit a nomination for a worthy candidate within their technical fields.

The Fellow Reference Committee is seeking nominations for three new members of the 2015 Fellow Reference Committee. The term of appointment is three years, non-renewable (1 January 2015-31 December 2017). The position is responsible for evaluating nominations for IEEE Fellow that are referred for review by the IEEE Fellow Committee. Candidates must hold the grade of IEEE Fellow and must be an SPS Member.

During the last couple of months, a few new Signal Processing and Machine Learning contests were initiated. Some of the ongoing ones with a strong relation to Signal Processing include:

The IEEE Signal Processing Society Chapter of the Year Award will be presented for the fourth time in 2015. The award will be presented annually to a Chapter that has provided their membership with the highest quality of programs, activities and services. The award will be presented annually in conjunction with the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) to the Chapter’s representative. The award will consist of a certificate and a check in the amount of $1,000 to support local chapter activities. The winning Chapter will also be invited to publish an article in the IEEE Inside Signal Processing eNewsletter.

Section Officers can spread the word that members can take advantage of special deals going on right now for back-to-school shopping. Each of IEEE’s hardware discount providers has its own promotions and offers worth looking into: Dell (with international programs), Lenovo (US), and HP (US). Compare pricing and save on laptops, PCs, tablets, workstations, electronics, accessories, and more.

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IEEE Medal and Recognition recipients accepted their awards on Saturday, 23 August, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The 2014 IEEE Honors Ceremony was held in conjunction with IEEE Sections Congress and hosted by IEEE President Roberto de Marca and IEEE President-Elect Howard E. Michel.

In this section we present the latest signal processing-related books

Compressive Sensing for Urban Radar
(Moeness Amin), published at CRC Press, details here

Adaptive Filtering: Fundamentals of Least Mean Squares with MATLAB
(Alexander D. Poularikas), published at CRC Press, details here