2015 Signal Processing / Signal Processing Education Workshop

The conference formerly known as the “Digital Signal Processing Workshop” (DSP Workshop) is now known as the “Signal Processing Workshop”.  This name evolution is a reflection of the ever-expanding reach of signal processing --- to processing on graphs, or xampled processing of continuous time signals, or plenoptic sensors, or financial analysis, to name a few.  The conference continues to partner with the SPS Education Committee, and is a premier outlet for signal processing education.  The Website is spw2015.coe.utah.edu.

The conference will be held August 9 – 12, 2015, at the Snowbird Resort.  Snowbird offers easy access to the Salt Lake City International Airport, and is nestled in the beautiful Wasatch Mountains.  Snowbird may be familiar to many in the Signal Processing Community as it is the site of the annual Data Compression Conference (DCC).  However, Snowbird in the winter or early spring is not the same as Snowbird in the summer at the height of its alpine splendor.  Hiking, alpine slide, tram rides, mountain biking, and other activities are available.  This would be a great conference to bring your families to!

Unlike many workshops that have a tight technical focus, the SP Workshop continues to accept a papers in a broad range of areas.  The intent is to provide a rich technical setting, like you might see in a large technical conference like ICASSP, but in a smaller setting where it is easy to interact with the researchers and presenters.  Except for plenaries, papers are presented in a poster format, encouraging discussion and interaction.  And, of course, being an IEEE conference, papers accepted after full peer review will be archived at IEEE Xplore.

The organizers have pushed for a balance between theoretical/academic, industrial/applied, and educational topics.  An exciting set of plenaries has been put together.  Yonina Eldar of Technion University will be presenting an opening plenary Sunday.  Other plenary speakers include Al Hero of the University of Michigan; Ryan Thomas, Principle Research Scientist for Amazon Research, Andrew Lo of MIT (on signal processing for finance); Chris Dick of Xilinx (on FPGAs for signal processing); V.J. Mathews of the University of Utah (on signal processing for neural prosthetics); and Sid Burrus on education.

The tutorials have been selected to provide enabling technological tools for practitioners and educators.  There is a tutorial on using the Python language for signal processing by Travis Oliphant, developer of the NumPy library.  Python has made great inroads in signal processing development, and is widely used in many industrial and government labs.  It has the virtue of being a fully developed language like Matlab, but is available at no cost.  Another tutorial will discuss using Aduinos for signal processing and throughout the curriculum, and GPU processing using the CUDA architecture.  The tutorial schedule is designed so that attendees can take in all tutorials, if they choose.

Paper submissions are the usual 4-page papers (with a fifth page if necessary for references).

The conference promises to be a technically rewarding, exciting event in a beautiful and relaxing setting.  Mark your calendars, write your papers, and join us!