# US 7,640,069 "Editing audio directly in frequency space"; # US 7,555,432 "Audio steganography method and apparatus using cepstrum modification"; # US 7,522,773 "Using time in recognizing persons in images".

The Multimedia Signal Processing Technical Committee (MMSP TC) successfully organized the 2009 MMSP Workshop in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, marking a milestone for the first time one of the major IEEE Signal Processing Society events being held in Latin America. Planning is underway for MMSP 2010, which will be held in Saint-Malo, France. The TC also invites proposals to organize the 2011 MMSP Workshop. Another major effort in 2009 that the MMSP TC is actively engaged in was to revitalize the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME) jointly organized by four IEEE societies. The TC welcomes a new Chair and eight newly elected members in January 2010.

Recently DISPS TC members organized the first special issue devoted to the important emerging topic of multicore design and implementation of signal processing systems on IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. The TC sponsors Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (SiPS) -- the 2009 edition was successfully held in Tampere, Finland, and the 2010 edition is calling for papers and participation.

In September 2009, USA Today and other media outlets have reported a successful servicing mission to the Hubble Space telescope. The In-the-Spotlight column in the January 2010 issue of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine provided a closer look at the imaging sensors and the associated processing and control mechanisms in the Hubble and its successor.

An exclusive article by Alex Acero, the SPS's first Vice President-Technical Directions, on many society-wide initiatives on technical directions in recent years. These include the formation of the Technical Directions Board, review of Technical Committees, the creation of new TCs and TC-sponsored workshops, and the renaming of several TCs to better reflect their latest scope and interests.

Synthetic attendance--immersive communications with people in a meeting happening afar--has been one of mankind's elusive dreams. The Exploratory DSP column of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (November 2009) discusses critical questions in immersive communications that are still awaiting resolution.

The Machine Learning for Signal Processing Technical Committee (MLSP TC) is at the interface between theory and application, developing novel theoretically-inspired methodologies targeting both longstanding and emergent signal processing applications. A main TC-sponsored annual event is the IEEE Workshop on Machine Learning for Signal Processing. The Nineteenth MLSP Workshop was successfully held in September 2009 in the city of Grenoble, France, with picturesque views of mountains leading up to the Alps.