January 2015

This past November, longtime IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) member and IEEE Fellow Dr. Thomas Kailath received the National Medal of Science in Washington, DC. U.S. President Barack Obama presented the award to Dr. Kailath "for transformative contributions to the fields of information and system science, for distinctive and sustained mentoring of young scholars, and for translation of scientific ideas into entrepreneurial ventures that have had a significant impact on industry."

IEEE has announced the recipients of the 2015 IEEE medals. Three Signal Processing Society members were awarded with IEEE medals for 2015: James Julius Spilker (IEEE Edison Medal), Harry L. Van Trees (IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal) and Richard Gordon Baranuik (IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal).

Welcome to the Winter 2014 edition of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee's Newsletter! This issue of the newsletter includes 8 articles and announcements from 10 contributors, including our own staff reporters and editors. Thank you all for your contributions! This issue includes news about IEEE journals and recent workshops, SLTC call for nominations, and individual contributions.

There have been reports that the entire US power grid can suffer a major blackout nationwide by an attack on merely 9 of its 55,000 substations, if planned intentionally. This may sound suspicious, but on a smaller scale, how vulnerable is a regional electrical power grid, say the San Francisco Bay area, the heart of high-tech industry, under major outage or malicious penetrations?

For our January 2015 issue, we cover recent patents granted in the area of audio coding. The section below covers patents granted recently for various new audio coding methods, tonal artifact avoidance, and a novel MP3 encoder.

The IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP) is a recently launched flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. GlobalSIP' 15 will be held in Orlando, Florida, USA, December 14 - 16, 2015. The conference will focus broadly on signal and information processing with an emphasis on up-and-coming signal processing themes.

Please refer to the following webpage for the latest updates on upcoming conferences in Signal Processing.

http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/conferences/upcoming-conferences/

The following SPS Distinguished lectures will be held in the upcoming months

Oymak, SametView (California Institute of Technology) “Convex relaxation for low-dimensional representation: Phase transitions and limitations” (2015), Advisor: Hassibi, Babak