Message from SPS President Ali H. Sayed: Elect your Society President by Direct Vote

Dear esteemed members of the IEEE Signal Processing Society:

Let me first wish you all a prosperous 2019 and great success in your endeavors. I am writing to share some important news with you.

The Signal Processing Society is striving to engage its members more directly and also more strongly in Society affairs and activities. Our Society is blessed with accomplished and thoughtful individuals like you. Your opinion is an asset and we value it.

Starting from the 2019 election cycle, you will now be able to vote and elect your Society President-Elect by direct vote, who automatically succeeds to President. To date, the practice in our Society has been for the Board of Governors (BoG) to elect the President-Elect of the Society. Moving forward, the BoG will finalize a slate of candidates and these candidates will be subsequently subjected to an open vote by the Society membership at-large to select the next President-Elect.  I encourage all of you to participate in this important activity when the voting cycle opens on 15 August 2019. As normal, you will be notified when the voting cycle opens.

Besides this important development, there have been many other initiatives put in place with the support of the Executive Committee, the Awards Board, and the Board of Governors of the Society. These efforts are meant to engage our members more directly, and to promote and position our Society more strategically. I will be announcing several of these accomplishments at my opening remarks at ICASSP 2019, including:

• A new logo for the Society has been selected. It has a more modern look and reflects the broad reach of our discipline across the globe and how we promote a convergence of methods and ideas to solve challenging problems.
• All Student and Graduate Student membership fees have been set to $1, annually. As well as, all student tutorial fees at IEEE Signal Processing Society fully-sponsored conferences have been capped at a nominal value of $25.
• Our major awards are now named after distinguished scholars or individuals. This is a useful step to promote the accomplishments of our discipline.  Other Society awards are currently under consideration for renaming.
• The Society is creating an App to promote interactions among SPS members and to keep you informed about our publications, conferences, and other activities. The App will also help us collect feedback and suggestions from you.
• The Society has launched regional meetings to enable local members across the globe to organize their own technical meetings under the sponsorship of the Society. Just like Summer Schools, financial support is available to assist you in promoting Signal Processing in your geographical areas.
• The Society is in the process of planning and launching an Open Access journal in the field of Signal Processing, with notable features, such as: allowing the upload of videos, software, and data and promoting reproducible research features.
• The Society is in the process of enriching our Resource Center and evolving it into an E-learning Center. Besides recorded seminars and tutorials, we are working on creating recorded short courses on topics of heightened interest. Volunteers and material are needed to support this activity.
• Our Society is helping promote new technical directions and creating communities around the data sciences, autonomous systems, and the Internet-of-Things. Our Society launched and organized the first IEEE Workshop on Data Science last summer in Lausanne, Switzerland, and the next is planned for June in Minnesota, USA.An Early Career Technical Achievement Award has been established to honor our younger researchers during the early years of their career.  A Best Ph.D. Dissertation Award is also currently under approval and will honor our exceptional graduating students.
• A Regional Distinguished Teacher Award is now established to honor the efforts of exceptional teachers of signal processing courses across the globe.
• Society Award recipients are now expected to deliver the Norbert Wiener plenary lecture at our flagship conference, ICASSP.
• The announcement of Best Paper Awards will be synchronized across our journals and published in writing in these journals to help promote our authors and their accomplishments among their technical communities.
• An arXiv entry dedicated to Signal Processing has been created, which is growing and helping promote the contributions of our authors.
• The Society is working on creating a more uniform taxonomy for its areas of interest and technical activities.
• The Society is planning a new model for events that would serve our industry members and their needs more directly.
• The Society has launched a Distinguished Industry Speaker Program, with prominent speakers from industry.
• The Society has always respected diversity, and we formalized that commitment in a policy statement: “The IEEE Signal Processing Society adheres to the IEEE Code of Conduct and is committed to providing equal opportunity to its members, regardless of ethnicity, race, nationality, disability, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, religion, gender, age, and/or personal identity. The Society is committed to a welcoming and inclusive environment that promotes diversity in the signal processing community.”

And the list goes on. There are opportunities for every member to benefit from the wide range of Society activities to build technical expertise, to network, and to foster one’s career.  Volunteers make all this possible, and I urge you to volunteer and assist the Society with its many ongoing initiatives.  Feel free to write to me or to any of our Society leaders. We are an inclusive Society and we are always eager to hear your suggestions and feedback.

Ali H. Sayed, President
IEEE Signal Processing Society
sps-president@ieee.org