Women in Signal Processing Committee Highlights

Namrata Vaswani (Iowa State University)
Chair, Women in Signal Processing Committee (WISP)

Happy New Year!

First, I would like to request all women members reading this article to submit their information to the new Women in Signal Processing Directory. The WISP Directory aims to increase and promote visibility and recognition of women in signal processing fields, positioning them for awards, leadership roles, and more.

Starting in 2017, the Women in Signal Processing Subcommittee became a standing committee of the Membership Board, rather than a subcommittee of the Member Services Committee, meaning the WISP Chair now holds a seat on the Membership Board. Much has happened in 2017, and we look forward to an even more productive 2018. Most notably, we’re building a directory of all women in the signal processing fields, and we need your help in populating it.  

The Directory, powered by Google Forms, allows anyone to submit or access information about women in the field. The purpose of the directory is to collect information about all women, their career stages, IEEE membership status, research area and a link to their CVs. The goal is to position and identify more women for various awards and Distinguished Lecturer nominations, nominations for leadership roles at various level (ranging from Associate Editor or Technical Committee member to Editor-in-Chief or TC Chair), plenary and keynote speakers and more. The directory information will be shared with various TC chairs and other current officers within SPS very soon (by the end of January). The same information should also help recruiters and job-seekers alike. The WISP Directory isn’t only for SPS members, however – all women in the signal processing community are encouraged to add themselves to the list!

The WISP Committee has also been working on creating an email list of all WISP women, which will be used to directly reach out to all women when calls for various nominations are open or if people want to advertise open positions within their university or company.

The WISP Luncheons have continued and, at GlobalSIP 2017, we added a new career development panel on “How to Become an IEEE Fellow: Theory v/s Practice”. The panel was carefully selected to consist of current or former members of SPS’s Fellow Reference Committee and one individual from the IEEE-level Fellow committee. The panelists were Profs. Rabab Ward, Min Wu, Thrasos Pappas, Sergios Theodoridis, and Paulo Diniz. A similar panel will be repeated on a larger scale at ICASSP 2018 in Calgary. Some takeaways from the GlobalSIP panel and from other information shared by the Chair of SPS’s Fellow Reference Committee (Prof. Isabel Trancoso) include:

1. Endorsements are important and should be chosen carefully (endorsers’ letters are read by the Society’s Fellow Reference Committee);
2. A clear Google Scholar profile should be maintained;
3. Contributions and leadership within IEEE and the society are very important and should be clearly described in the nomination document;
4. Highlight one or two key contributions, not all;
5. Books and/or monographs are very valued;
6. There are four categories in which a candidate can be nominated – the industry leader category and educator category should be used more often;
7. Even for academics, patents and contributions to industry are very valued.

We look forward to a productive 2018 together!

WISP webpage: https://signalprocessingsociety.org/get-involved/women-signal-processing

WISP directory link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdFi0tKzdfnNaE1HNKZTD6p5HAnksqaWNpx_VBuF7E1Y1j22A/viewform?c=0&w=1