The SLTC has participated in organizing several remarkable events since last fall. The 11th biannual IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) workshop was hosted in December 2009 in the historical Kurhaus Theatre in Merano, Italy. The TC was involved in coordinating the review for ICASSP 2010, with a total contribution of 308 published papers from the SLTC community. Two SLTC members received major IEEE SPS awards and recognitions. And the Spring 2010 issue of the SLTC eNewsletter is now available online.

The call for security is increasingly pervading our society, touching many diverse and fundamental facets of our life. Signal processing technology plays a fundamental role in many security-oriented applications. The Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee (IFS-TC) was established in recent years to promote this areas of research and technology development as well as community building. Two new initiatives are going to play a key role toward the establishment of an IFS community inside the SP Society, namely, the creation of affiliate membership in the Technical Committees of the SP Society and the annual WIFS workshop.

# US 7,702,408, “Extending digital rights management and authentication to audio speakers”; # US 7,702,405, "System and method for transferring non-compliant packetized and streaming data into and from a multimedia device coupled to a network across which compliant data is sent”; # US 7,698,009, "Control surface with a touchscreen for editing surround sound"; # US 7,698,008, "Content-based audio comparisons"; # US 7,696,426, "Recombinant music composition algorithm and method of using the same"; # US 7,693,289, "Method and apparatus for remote control of an audio source such as a wireless microphone system"; # US 7,689,303, "Data transfer in audio codec controllers"; # US 7,684,885, "Wireless digital audio system".

The Audio and Electroacoustics (AE) Technical Committee has a new name: it is now the Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing (AASP) Technical Committee. This name change reflects the expanding interests of the committee as evidenced by the recent integration of the music signal processing community.

The Signal Processing Society (SPS) has 13 technical committees that support a broad selection of signal processing related activities defined by the scope of the Society. Recent policy revisions were made to ensure that Technical Committees remain at the forefront of innovation and interdisciplinary research and foster renewal and openness. Technical Committees now have the opportunity to expand their membership base by adding Affiliate TC Members.

# US 7,684,643 “Mutual information regularized Bayesian framework for multiple image restoration”; # US 7,672,464 “Locating and correcting undesirable effects in signals that represent time-based media”.