August 2015

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

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.

From 12-18 July 2015, SPS President-Elect Rabab Ward visited China to provide support and expand outreach efforts to our quickly-expanding Region 10 membership base. In particular, Dr. Ward engaged with SPS’ newest conference, ChinaSIP, as well as connected with SPS Chapters in Beijing and Chengdu to discuss membership development, member services, and explore better ways to better serve SPS members and Chapters.From 12-18 July 2015, SPS President-Elect Rabab Ward visited China to provide support and expand outreach efforts to our quickly-expanding Region 10 membership base.

In our “What should we learn from… ” series we report a special issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE in August, Memories in the Future of Information Processing aiming to explore memories and information processing multidimensionally. It covers the subject of memory in its multitudinous forms in circuits and systems.

John Leonard’s group in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering specializes in SLAM, or simultaneous localization and mapping, the technique whereby mobile autonomous robots map their environments and determine their locations.

During the last couple of months, a number of machine learning and signal processing contests have recently finished and the final rankings have been announced. Some of those recently concluded ones include:

For our August 2015 issue, we cover recent patents dealing with various applications of fingerprint analysis and recognition. The section below covers patents granted recently for server and client side performance enhancement in fingerprint ACR systems, fingerprint matching methods, high speed fingerprint recognition systems, fingerprint preview quality enhancement, and finger print based authentication issues.

The IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee reports on past and future workshops, speech databases and various call for proposals.

On July 6 a technical study titled: Keys Under Doormats: Mandating Insecurity by Requiring Government Access to All Data and Communications has been published. The scientists behind this work are more than domain experts. Among the others: Steven M. Bellovin known for his work in the encrypted keys exchange; Josh Benaloh who invented the Benaloh cryptosystem; Matt Blaze who worked on cryptographic files systems; Whitfield Diffie universally known as one the pioneers of public key cryptography; Peter G. Neumann who worked on Provably Secure Operative Systems; Ronald L. Rivest who is “R” in RSA; Jeffrey I. Schiller known for being one of the creator of Kerberos and Bruce Schneier one the biggest expert in security and cryptography.

The general themes of the conference include speaker and
language recognition and characterization.