September 2016

The IEEE MGA vTools team is excited to announce the release of a new version of vTools.Meetings. This new version is re-branded vTools.Events to better identify with the meetings and activities that are included. vTools.Events is more than just a place to report past meeting activity.

IEEE Collabratec™ is an integrated online community where technology professionals can network, collaborate, and discover career opportunities. Log into IEEE Collabratec to get started with the Opportunities features:

Your vote is important! On 15 August 2016, the election of Regional Directors-at-Large for Regions 1-6 and Region 8 (term 1 January 2017 through 31 December 2018) and Members-at-Large (term 1 January 2017 through 31 December 2019) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Board of Governors will open.

This year, the Society will be filling TWO positions on the N&A Committee and TWO positions on the Awards Board. Nominations must be received no later than Friday, 30 September 2016.

IEEE Day 2016 is going to be held on Tuesday, 4 October. This will be the seventh anniversary of IEEE members celebrating the anniversary of the first time IEEE members gathered to share their technical ideas in 1884. Since the first IEEE Day event in 2010, the number of events worldwide has grown over 600% from 80 to over 600. The IEEE Day team needs you to help grow this annual event even larger. IEEE Day is a great opportunity for you to connect your members to IEEE on a local and global scale.

Read about 6.341x: Discrete-Time Signal Processing which is a free open access self-paced graduate level MOOC (massive open online course). It is based on the residential MIT introductory graduate-level signal processing course that has been taught and continually updated at MIT for over four decades.

During the last couple of months a number of machine learning and signal processing contests have been initiated. Some of those recent ones include a Bosch contest on internal failure prediction and TalkingData aiming at predicting users' demographic characteristics.

For our August 2016 issue, we cover recent patents dealing with hardware and algorithmic issues of image registration. The section below covers patents granted recently for rigid and elastic image registration, patch matching, image alignment under low contrast or illumination, and specific devices constructed for the task.

Memory is one of the three key factors for cognitive dynamic systems. A paper titled A Comprehensive Study of the Past, Present, and Future of Data Deduplication, published in the Proceedings of the IEEE Sep. 2016, provides a comprehensive survey of the state of the art in data deduplication technologies for storage systems, covering key technologies, main applications, open problems, and future research directions.