Topological data analysis (TDA) is an emerging multi-discipline area of research spanning topology, statistics, machine learning, signal processing and computation geometry. In our video of the month, Gunnar Carlsson, Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Stanford University and co-founder of Ayasdi, offers a nice and concise introduction to TDA.

Computer scientists at Washington University in St. Louis’ School of Engineering & Applied Science analyzed a huge amount of data regarding an important protein and discovered its connection in human history as well as clues about its role in complex neurological diseases.

With the explosive growth of 5G wireless technology development, signal processing techniques are playing more and more important roles in many aspects. As an industry-oriented technical committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, Industry DSP Technology Standing Committee (IDSP-SC) is actively promoting 5G technology from a practice and industry perspective.

The AASP TC reports on elections, the latest IEEE SPM special issue on assisted listening, upcoming challenges and conferences.

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.