The PhysioNet/Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2015 is now open! This year's challenge is 'Reducing False Arrhythmia Alarms in the ICU'. False alarms in the ICU can lead to a disruption of care, impacting both the patient and the clinical staff through noise disturbances, desensitization to warnings and slowing of response times, leading to decreased quality of care. False alarm rates can be as high as 90% or more. To address this issue we have developed an expert-labelled data set of 1250 life-threatening arrhythmia alarms with five minutes of electrophysiological and pulsatile waveform data leading up to each alarm event. Competitors are challenged to devise a method of processing all the available data to reduce false alarms with minimal or no effect on true (vital) alarms.

Several elections took place in the Sensor Array and Multichannel (SAM) technical committee (TC). We congratulate Peter Willett and Martin Haardt for their election and assignment as new SAM TC Chair and Vice-Chair, respectively. We especially thank our past SAM TC Chair Dominic K.C. Ho who was chairing the SAM TC in the past two years for his excellent leadership and dedication.

Deep learning is becoming an important AI paradigm for pattern recognition, image/video processing and fraud detection applications in finance. The computational complexity of a deep learning network dictates need for a distributed realization. The big data lab at Impetus, led by Dr. Vijay Srinivas Agneeswaran, has built the first prototype of the distributed deep learning network over Apache Spark. They have parallelized the training phase of the network and consequently reduced training time.

The mission of the Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee (IFS TC http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/technical-committees/list/ifs-tc/) is to promote activities within the broad technical areas of information forensics and security.

Three years after its launch, the AASP TC Challenges series has achieved its goal of stimulating ground-breaking approaches to hot topics in Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing. The challenges run so far have been great successes, leading to unprecedented participation, new publicly available datasets, and highly attended special sessions and workshops

Software defined radio (SDR) is an architecture for designing more flexibility and generalized hardware for communication systems, radar, sonar or remote sensing systems making more intelligent and multi-function radio systems possible. In the January 2015 issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE , two articles present surveys in the fields of software defined networking (SDN) and the spectrum management for radar systems which is one of the key techniques for radar and wireless communication.

The December edition of the IEEE Smart Grid Newsletter is live and covers a microgrid experience in Tianjin, building management systems, smart substations, and a look at what the IEEE Smart Grid Initiative is planning for 2015.

Welcome to the Winter 2014 edition of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee's Newsletter! This issue of the newsletter includes 8 articles and announcements from 10 contributors, including our own staff reporters and editors. Thank you all for your contributions! This issue includes news about IEEE journals and recent workshops, SLTC call for nominations, and individual contributions.