IEEE Signal Processing Society 2014 Accomplishments

In 2014, the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) volunteers and staff proactively worked to ensure that the Society support its members, products, and services with speed and efficiency.

The work paid off, though, and it is apparent through a host of accomplishments we made throughout 2014. In June, SPS had its five-year Society Review with the Technical Activities Board (TAB) Society Review Committee. The review went extremely well, and the Committee praised and highlighted many areas in membership, publications, conferences, and operations.

SPS ended 2014 with more than 17,500 members, making it IEEE’s fourth-largest society, as it has been for several decades. While SPS membership has impressive global reach and more than 140 technical Chapters worldwide, there are demographics that remain underrepresented. For example, less than a quarter of SPS members identify as women, while only 3.5% are undergraduate students. Even though our number of graduate student members has steadily declined throughout 2014, we ended the year at 10.7%  – still higher than most other IEEE societies. To address these areas, we’ve created two new subcommittees – Women in Signal Processing and Young Professionals in Signal Processing.

We are also working towards expanding the role of the Industrial Relations Committee and Industrial Ambassadors Program to increase SPS visibility among companies. This year, we co-sponsored two industry events in the United States. In October, we were proud to be gold sponsors of the 2014 Annual Conference of the Chinese American Semiconductor Professional Association (CASPA). Also in October, we were asked to help choose the speakers for an industrial event with the Bay Area Multimedia Forum, located at the YouTube headquarters. Finally, we created three new awards geared toward industry members – the Industrial Leader Award, the Industrial Innovation Award, and the Conference Best Paper Award for Industry. These are only beginning steps in better serving our diverse membership base and tailoring our offerings and activities to the greater signal processing community.

We’ve made headway in other membership areas, as well, and seen continued successes with some activities and services we implemented in 2013. ICASSP 2014 in Florence was host to the inaugural Signal Processing Cup (SP Cup) student competition on Image Restoration/Super-Resolution for Single Particle Analysis, in which the team EPOCH from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology took home the $5,000 grand prize. ICASSP 2014 also marked the second annual SPS Student Career Luncheon, attended by more than 180 students who met with representatives from more than 16 worldwide companies. We’ve continued to populate SigView, our online portal of video tutorials, with valuable educational content and intend to expand the service to support multiple languages. Finally, the highly-anticipated SigPort has entered the user trial phase with favorable results. Once complete and released, SigPort will be the newest SPS member benefit – an online archive of manuscripts, reports, theses, and supporting materials where individuals can obtain early exposure and feedback on work that is in progress or unintended or ineligible for publication.

In a continued effort to engage SPS members at the local level, SPS Chapter Review Committee has assembled a SPS Chapters best practices document. This document is intended to act as a guideline for Chapter Chairs to increase engagement and involvement and encourage Chapter growth through organization, promotion, and membership development. To that end, we also enacted the Member-Driven Initiative, a program designed to support Chapter activities that aim to fulfill SPS membership missions, such as increasing Student membership, increasing female membership, and increasing industry involvement. The Chapter Certification Program has been quite successful, as well, with facilitating Chapter and member activity. The Chapter of the Year Award is also a success, and we’d like to extend our congratulations to the SPS Malaysia Chapter as the 2014 award recipient. SPS will continue working more closely and collaboratively with Chapters to identify areas of weakness, reward well-performing Chapters, and promote overall membership and Chapter activity, with a special focus on Student Branch Chapters.

On the publications side, we published about 20,000 pages in 2014 in the eight periodicals that we manage. We handled over 7,000 article submissions from authors eager to publish with us. We also co-sponsored four more journals. We are launching two new publications for 2015 – IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing Over Networks and IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging. Both are now open for submissions and subscriptions. We also finalized our merger with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to co-sponsor the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing. In 2014, all SPS publications underwent the five-year review process administered by the TAB Periodicals Review and Advisory Committee. SPS publications staff and volunteers worked tirelessly and, ultimately, received excellent feedback from the Committee, indicating great health among all of our publications – both in quality and in management.

SPS conferences were also successful this year. We supported 30 conferences/workshops.  Our flagships, ICASSP, ICIP, and GlobalSIP all performed well with good attendance and feedback, and sufficient financial surplus to support our member activities. ICASSP 2015 will be held 19-24 April in Brisbane, Australia; ChinaSIP will be held 12-15 July in Chengdu, China; ICIP will be held 27-30 September in Quebec City, Canada; and GlobalSIP will be held 14-16 December in Orlando, Florida, USA.

SPS continues to support a number of workshops and seasonal schools worldwide. We signed two Sister Society agreements with the European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP) and the Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA), which will allow SPS to technically co-sponsor EUSIPCO and APSIPA conferences, making their proceedings eligible for availability through IEEE Xplore; allow them to financially co-sponsor SPS seasonal schools in Europe and Asia, respectively; and provide them with access to the Society-appointed Distinguished Lecturers.

In an ongoing effort to increase visibility among the general public, students, and those in industry, SPS has entered the beginning stages of enlisting the assistance of a public relations firm. After conducting extensive research about these target audiences, in November, SPS volunteers and staff attended an SPS visibility workshop to brainstorm messaging strategies and tactics to attract these audiences. We are excited about the future of SPS and look forward to sharing it with you!

While it is difficult to count the total number of volunteers we have supporting SPS periodicals, conferences and membership activities, but we estimate it is well over 1,000.  We thank all of our volunteers for spearheading many of 2014’s accomplishments and all of our continued success!