October 2015

Although IEEE Collabratec has been freely available for over six months, the formal launch and marketing began on 21 September. You may have already started to see messaging within IEEE communication vehicles such as Society newsletters, membership emails, ieee.org, Spectrum advertising, and various online social mediums outside of IEEE.

You may have already had a chance to connect and collaborate with IEEE members and technology professionals on IEEE Collabratec and are aware of its benefits. Below are some highlights:

Nominations are due 31 January annually for the IEEE Technical Field Awards (TFAs). IEEE TFAs are awarded for contributions or leadership in a specific field of interest of the IEEE and are among the highest awards presented on behalf of the IEEE Board of Directors.

All IEEE members are encouraged to submit a nomination for a worthy candidate within their technical fields.

The IEEE Signal Processing Society Chapter of the Year Award will be presented for the fifth time in 2016. The award will be presented annually to a Chapter that has provided their membership with the highest quality of programs, activities and services. The award will be presented annually in conjunction with the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) to the Chapter’s representative. The award will consist of a certificate and a check in the amount of $1,000 to support local chapter activities.

In this series, we aim to introduce society members and other experts of the signal processing field. This month, we are happy to introduce Riccardo Lazzeretti, Post Doc from Information Engineering and Mathematics Department of the University of Siena. His research activity is mainly focused on privacy-preserving applications based on secure two-party computation tools.

For our October 2015 issue, we cover recent patents granted in the area of iris recognition. The section below covers patents granted recently for various iris recognition algorithms, iris image quality improvement, off-angle gaze correction, security improvements for iris recognition systems, designing a short distance iris camera, and combined face and iris recognition.

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 a Kaggle contest for predicting hand movements from EEG data and one on forecasting quote prices of tubes in construction engineering.

Researchers at the University of Tubingen, Germany, have developed a deep learning algorithm that can turn photos into any style from Van Gogh to Picasso. The system uses neural representations to separate and recombine content and style of arbitrary images, providing a neural algorithm for the creation of artistic images.

Welcome to the Fall 2015 edition of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee's Newsletter! This issue of the newsletter includes 5 articles and announcements from 11 contributors, including our own staff reporters and editors.

Three new Members-at-Large will take their seats on the Signal Processing Society Board of Governors beginning 1 January 2015 and will serve until 31 December 2018. The successful candidates are: Robert W. Heath Jr., Lina J. Karam and Min Wu.