May 2015

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.

Jose' M. F. Moura, SPS Awards Board Chair

SPS has changed its nominating process for all Society Awards from paper awards to the major society awards. We now call for nominations from any society individual member, society committee, or society board. Nominations from individual members can be supported by up to two endorsement letters from two other individual members. Full details on the nomination process are available on the Society website.

The Board of Governors of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) elected two new officers who will start their terms on 1 January 2016: Ali H. Sayed (University of California) will serve as 2016-2017 SPS President-Elect and Walter Kellermann (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg) will serve as 2016-2018 SPS Vice President-Technical Directions.

The IEEE Signal Processing Cup (SP Cup) is a competition that provides undergraduate students with the opportunity to form teams and work together to solve a challenging and interesting real-world problem using signal-processing techniques and methods. Three teams are selected to present their work, and prizes will be awarded at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP).

The latest IEEE Biometrics Council (BMC) newsletter reports a welcome message from Venu Govindaraju, the new president of the IEEE BMC, latest datasets for fingerprint algorithm evaluation and a large biometrics-based human identification initiative in India.

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:

Miller, Cory Ignatius, University of Delaware (2015) “Estimation and control with censored data”,Advisor: Zurakowski, Ryan M.

How fast is online learning evolving? Are wind turbines a promising investment? And how long before a cheap hoverboard makes it to market? Attempting to answer such questions requires knowing something about the rate at which a technology is improving. Now engineers at MIT have devised a formula for estimating how fast a technology is advancing, based on information gleaned from relevant patents.

In our "What should we learn from... " series we report on a special issue from IEEE Potentials in March/April 2015. It gave some interesting comments on Biomimicry or Bioinspiration covering fields such as sensors networks, vision systems, health care and robot design which we believe are very relevant to the signal processing community.