January 2018

In accordance with the provision of Bylaw 303, the Nominations and Appointments Committee hereby solicits your nominations for the following position: Vice President-Technical Directions.  Please send your nominations to Theresa Argiropoulos, SPS Senior Manager, Operations, via t.argiropoulos@ieee.org. 

Researchers from Facebook AI Research have won the Best Paper Award (Marr Prize) at the 16th International Conference on Computer vision (ICCV) 2017, held in Venice, Italy. The work, named "Mask R-CNN", addresses the problem of instance segmentation, which combines tasks of object detection and semantic segmentation. Below is the presentation given by the first author Kaiming He at the conference.

Cyber security is an increasing worry on many fronts, but typical discussions and headlines focus on very different types of threats than those experienced by aviation and space systems. Cyber security vulnerabilities compromise the control, traffic, navigation, and integrity of these systems. Countermeasures involve not only specialized systems and architectures, but often international cooperation, as the need for awareness extends well beyond the boundaries of a single aircraft. 

Sponsored from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, there is a Kaggle contest focusing on identifying the camera that took

an image. Finding footage of a crime caught on tape is an investigator's dream. But even with crystal clear, damning evidence,

one critical question always remains–is the footage real? Today, one way to help authenticate footage is to identify the camera

that the image was taken with.

Advisor: Caylor, Kelly K.

Smallholder farms dominate in many parts of the world, including Sub-Saharan Africa. These systems are characterized by small, heterogeneous, and often indistinct field patterns, requiring a specialized methodology to map agricultural landcover. In this thesis, they developed a benchmark labeled data set of high-resolution satellite imagery of agricultural fields in South Africa. 

Non-invasive side-channel attacks (SCA) are powerful attacks which can be used to obtain the secret key in a cryptographic circuit in feasible time without the need for expensive measurement equipment. Power analysis attacks (PAA) are a type of SCA that exploit the correlation between the leaked power consumption information and processed/stored data. Differential power analysis (DPA) and leakage power analysis (LPA) attacks are two types of PAA that exploit different characteristics of the side-channel leakage profile.