Activity Report from the SPTM-TC

Published in TC News on 1 July 2015

by Caroline Chaux, Todd Moon and V. John Mathews

2015 Signal Processing / Signal Processing Education Workshop

The Signal Processing / Signal Processing Education Workshop (swp2015.coe.utah.edu) is shaping up to be an exciting and intellectually stimulating conference set in a beautiful mountain venue.  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.  Hiking, alpine slide, tram rides, mountain biking, and other activities are available at the conference venue.  This would be a great conference to bring your families to, combining work and a pleasurable vacation!  As a highlight, one of our lunches will be on a mountain top, reached by a stunning tram ride.  The conference program is designed to leave some time for wandering in this great location.

This conference has been known in the past as the “Digital Signal Processing Workshop” (DSP 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 Signal Processing Education component of the Workshop is a premier outlet for techniques related to education related to signal processing, a great way to get ideas to enrich and freshen your curriculum.

The goal of the conference is to provide a rich technical environment, like you might see in a large technical conference like ICASSP, but in a smaller setting where it is easy to interact with 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 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, including Yonina Eldar (Technion University), Al Hero (University of Michigan), Ryan Thomas (Amazon Research), Andrew Lo (MIT Dept. of Finance), Chris Dick (Xilinx), V John Mathews (U of Utah) and Sid Burrus (dean emeritus of Rice University College of Engineering).

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.  Another tutorial will discuss using Arduinos for signal processing and throughout the curriculum, and GPU processing using the CUDA architecture.

New TC Members

Last November, the election for new SPTM members took place. The following new members joined the SPTM TC in January 2015:

• Kostas Berberidis, University of Patras, Greece
• Alberto Carini, University of Urbino, Italy
• Caroline Chaux, Aix Marseille Université, France
• Romain Couillet, SUPÉLEC, France
• Rodrigo C. de Lamare, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Mark Plumbley, Queen Mary University of London, UK
• Dirk Slock, EURECOM, France
• Kush R. Varshney, IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, U.S.A.

Affiliate SPTM TC Members

One of the best ways to get involved with the SPTM TC is to become an affiliate member. Becoming an affiliate member is easy; just fill out the form available at http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/technical-committees/tcaffiliate/, and submit it online. We have approximately 200 affiliate members at this time. As an affiliate member, you will be notified of upcoming elections and meetings, as well as other activities of the TC. In addition, you will get a chance to review papers for ICASSPs and other conferences and workshops organized by the SPTM TC. If you need more information, please contact your Regional Officers of the TC – Prakash Ishwar (pi@bu.edu) for regions 1-6, Paulo Diniz (diniz@lps.ufrj.br), Kostas Berberidis (berberid@ceid.upatras.gr) for region 8, and Kutluyil Dogancay (Kutluyil.Dogancay@unisa.edu.au) for region 10 – or the TC chair, V. John Mathews (mathews@ece.utah.edu.)