Celebrating the 75th Anniversary of IEEE SPS in 2023!

Greetings to everyone as we prepare to celebrate the 75^th anniversary of SPS during 2023!

Membership of SPS, or any group, is based on the relationships, built between members. The IEEE Signal Processing Society has observed that sustained relationships lead to sustained membership growth. In its efforts to build a large and strong base of membership, SPS has spent the past few years focusing its attention on Student Members. The introduction of $1 Student membership fee spurred a rapid growth of student membership, especially in Region 10. This growth was due to sustained efforts of SPS leadership interacting with Chapter leadership, which multiplied the efforts significantly by encouraging IEEE Student Branches to start SPS Student Branch Chapters and Joint Student Branch Chapters and sharing the information about SPS member benefits. Currently, we have close to 140 SPS Student Branch Chapters across the globe, with more than 100 of them in India. The membership growth in R10 has been growing with a positive slope and we hope to touch the 20,000 mark by end of 2022, which we have not reached since 1995!

The leadership of SPS planned to travel and meet SPS volunteers across the globe, which was thwarted by the pandemic. An alternate plan of holding webinars on membership benefits was put in place during the pandemic. It held events across all regions and supported activities in Zimbabwe, Tunisia, Kenya, India, USA and other places. A notable event that SPS supported was the 2020 Africa Science Buskers Festival held in Zimbabwe, where a lecture on Signal Processing was delivered online by the SPS leadership. 5000 high school students attended this online event with volunteers, using 27 WhatsApp groups with an average of 200 students, posted the content as it was delivered online. This event also attracted rural schools in Malawi and Zambia which opened school halls for children and parents to gather and attend. Another example of an outreach program with the theme “Training Teachers: School Science for Signal Processing” was conducted by SPS volunteers, where 25 Teachers along with 30 Students, a good percentage of girls,at a school in Bangalore,  participated in building simple signal processing systems using components. The idea of training teachers was to leverage the multiplier effect they would have in coming years where multiple batches of students will benefit from their training.

The leadership travel after the ease of restrictions to US, Europe, South-East Asia, and India provided an understanding of the different specific needs of SPS members in each region. SPS members highly appreciate visits of SPS leadership to their Chapters to understand the local needs. Members of a certain region look for reduced registration fee to attend SPS flagship conferences while members of another region look to interact with distinguished speakers, get access to good quality educational content and organize SPS events.

The existing member benefits of supporting SPS activities at Chapter and Student Branch Chapter level through partial financial support, travel grants to Certified Chapters and to authors of accepted papers to flagship conferences, supporting visits of Distinguished Lecturers and Distinguished Industry Speakers were revisited. SPS has now expanded the benefits to include instituting awards to recognize Young Professionals, provide a globally competitive student scholarship program and a program to support K-12 outreach activities. These new initiatives, we hope, will spur the membership growth, and strengthen our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

New York University

2020 Science Buskers Festival, Zimbabwe

Training for Teachers: Science for Signal processing

UNT Denton