The IEEE Signal Processing Society Chapter of the Year Award will be presented for the eighth time in 2019. The award will be presented annually to a Chapter that has provided their membership with the highest quality of programs, activities and services. The award will be presented annually in conjunction with the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) to the Chapter’s representative.

This past Star Wars Day (May the Fourth), fans had reason to celebrate. The new prequel, Solo: A Star Wars Story, was less than a week away from release, and more broadly, the entire franchise is undergoing a renaissance with new films more faithful in style and storyline to the beloved original trilogy. But beyond the actors and writers, Star Wars fans should be thanking the technology that makes such films possible: signal processing.

The IEEE Signal Processing Society continues to track emerging technical areas. As a result, the Society has decided to create two new SPS Technical Interest Profile (TIP) Code categories in the fields of Data Science and Autonomous Systems to keep pace with the expanding technical disciplines.

Technologies that at first seem like magic soon become so commonplace that we no longer even think about how amazing they are – or wonder how they operate. Our digital home assistants – Amazon’s Alexa, Google Home and their emerging rivals – have been with us long enough that we take for granted they can understand our unique voices, commands and questions, even with other noise occurring around them.

The SPS Awards Board is now accepting nominations for all Society level awards, from paper awards to the major society awards. Nominations are due by 1 September 2018. Nominators should take into consideration the need for representation of diversity in the award nomination slate, when submitting their nominations.

Will autonomous vehicles kill people? The answer is almost certainly yes. But, human drivers kill people too. In 2016 the U.S. had 37,461 deaths in 34,436 human-operated motor vehicle crashes, a staggering average of 102 per day, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. An additional 2,350,000 are injured or disabled. These figures are alarming, but there’s a solution on the horizon.

The deadline for the Regional Director-at-Large Regions 1-6 nominations noted in the below message has been extended to 20 April 2018.  The nomination period for the other noted positions is considered closed.  Submission details are noted below.