February 2015

Overview The Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) has allocated $40,000 for Member-Driven Initiatives for the 2015 calendar year. The funding is open to all Signal Processing Society members, Chapters and Committees. However, all proposals must include the involvement of the local Chapter. Allocation of funds will be competitive. Access the application here.

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

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

Now IEEE SPS has built a streamlined mechanism for employers to add a job announcement by simply filling in a simple job opportunity submission Web form at the related TC section pages.

To submit job announcements for a particular Technical Committee, the submission form can be found by visiting the page below and clicking on a particular TC. A link for the form can be found in the sidebar menu of the TC pages. Jobs can also be viewed from its individual TC pages or a combined listing that includes all TC jobs.

Several elections took place in the Sensor Array and Multichannel (SAM) technical committee (TC). We congratulate Peter Willett and Martin Haardt for their election and assignment as new SAM TC Chair and Vice-Chair, respectively. We especially thank our past SAM TC Chair Dominic K.C. Ho who was chairing the SAM TC in the past two years for his excellent leadership and dedication.

Deep learning is becoming an important AI paradigm for pattern recognition, image/video processing and fraud detection applications in finance. The computational complexity of a deep learning network dictates need for a distributed realization. The big data lab at Impetus, led by Dr. Vijay Srinivas Agneeswaran, has built the first prototype of the distributed deep learning network over Apache Spark. They have parallelized the training phase of the network and consequently reduced training time.

The mission of the Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee (IFS TC http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/technical-committees/list/ifs-tc/) is to promote activities within the broad technical areas of information forensics and security.

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:

Three years after its launch, the AASP TC Challenges series has achieved its goal of stimulating ground-breaking approaches to hot topics in Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing. The challenges run so far have been great successes, leading to unprecedented participation, new publicly available datasets, and highly attended special sessions and workshops

K. J. Ray Liu
Chair, SPS Nominations and Appointments Committee

In accordance with the Bylaws of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, the membership will elect, by direct ballot, THREE Members-at-Large to the Board of Governors (BoG) for three-year terms commencing 1 January 2016 and ending 31 December 2018, as well as ONE Regional Director-at-Large each for the corresponding regions: Regions 7 & 9 (Canada and Latin America) and Region 10 (Asia and Pacific Rim) for two-year terms commencing 1 January 2016 and ending 31 December 2017.

The IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) invites nominations for the position of Editor-in-Chief for the following journal: IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (JSTSP) for a 3-year term starting 1 January 2016.

Nominations should be submitted to Thrasos Pappas, SPS Vice President-Publications, via pappas@eecs.northwestern.edu by 16 March 2015. Nominations must include: