Announcing the winners of the 2016 Signal Processing Cup

Back in 2014, the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) has created an undergraduate competition, namely the Signal Processing Cup (SP Cup), which provides undergraduate students all over the world to team up and work together to solve a challenging and interesting real-world problem using signal-processing techniques and methods.

To join the competition, undergraduate students are required to form a team. Each team must be composed of one faculty member (to supervise the team members), one graduate student (to assist the supervisor), and at least three but no more than 10 undergraduate students. The teams can choose the programming language they prefer for the competition. Since its inception, the SP Cup has been sponsored by MathWorks and each team which registers for the SP Cup is provided with complimentary software, including MATLAB and some selected toolboxes. The three top teams are selected to participate in the final competition at ICASSP, where the prizes are awarded. The teams are awarded prizes of US$5,000, US$2,500, and US$1,500 for first, second, and third places, respectively. The three selected teams are also supported by the SPS with travel grants to attend the final competition at ICASSP. Furthermore, all these attending members are given a complimentary registration, so that they can also attend the conference, meet other researchers and professors, and gain a taste of the signal processing research world.

This year SP Cup competition was on “Exploring Power Signatures for Location Forensics of Media Recordings”, to determine the location-of-recording by exploring a time-varying location-dependent signature of power grid, as it becomes intrinsically captured in media recordings due to direct or indirect influences from the respective power grid. The topic is at the intersection between signal processing and information security/forensics.

The competition was proposed by a team led by Prof. Min Wu (University of Maryland, USA) and endorsed by the SPS Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee, under the supervision of the SPS Student Services Committee (chaired by Prof. Patrizio Campisi, Roma Tre University, Italy). This year, 52 teams (around 334 students) registered for the SP Cup and 33 submitted their work. Three teams have been selected to participate in the final competition at ICASSP 2016.

The final results are:

Grand Prize: Team “Resonance_1011”, Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology
Bangladesh

Supervisor: Mohammad Ariful Haque

Undergraduate students: Sayeed Shafayet Chowdhury, Md Billal Hossain, Jayanta Dey, Ashraful Islam, Rakib Hyder, Md. Samzid bin Hafiz, Ratul Khan, Munif Ishad Mujib, Tauhiduzzaman Khan Himel, Uday Saha

Second Prize with special mention on originality: Team “Hammer Down”, Purdue University, USA

Supervisor: Stanley Chan

Graduate Mentor: Benjamin Vondersaar

Undergraduate students: Alexandria Moore, Xiangyu Qu, Samuel Sowell, Fangjia Zhu, Siqing Wei, Gregory Dykes, Christopher Chow

Third Prize: Team “Vidyut”, Multi-University Team (IISc, IIT-Madras, NITK), India

Supervisor: Prasanta Kumar Ghosh (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore)

Graduate Mentor: Nisha Meenakshi (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore)

Undergraduate students: Priyadarshini Savan Roshan, Pradyumna Byappanahalli Suresha, Aditya Gaonkar P, Supriya Nagesh

Further details about this year competition can be found at http://www.icassp2016.org/SPCup.asp and at http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/community/sp-cup/

Group picture after the competition at ICASSP 2016 Shanghai, China

SP Cup Award ceremony at the Student Career Luncheon at ICASSP 2016 Shanghai, China Grand Prize Team “Resonance_1011”,

SP Cup Award ceremony at the Student Career Luncheon at ICASSP 2016 Shanghai, China Second Prize with special mention on originality: Team “Hammer Down”

SP Cup Award ceremony at the Student Career Luncheon at ICASSP 2016 Shanghai, China Third Prize: Team “Vidyut”