Welcome to the Fall 2014 edition of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee's Newsletter! This issue of the newsletter includes 7 articles and announcements from 13 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.

The Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing (AASP) Technical Committee promotes the advancement of technologies and applications in audio and acoustic signal processing and enhances interaction with similar organizations within IEEE and throughout the world.

Last year, the SPS Board of Governors approved the creation of Special Interest Groups. Special Interest Groups are provisional groups that are created to quickly address emerging technical areas.

Samsung recently revealed its Samsung Digital Health Initiative to accelerate innovations in preventive health technology. The Samsung Digital Health Initiative features new hardware and software platforms and a $50 million investment fund.

For our August 2014 issue, we cover recent patents granted in the area of passive radar systems. The section below covers patents granted recently for passive radar related signal processing methods focusing on activity detection, sport monitoring, radar based surveillance, object detection and tracking.

The Nominations and Appointments Subcommittee for each Technical Committee is currently seeking nominations for new Members, as well as the Vice Chair position for some Technical Committees.

The Signal Processing Society (SPS) has 12 technical committees and two Special Interest Groups (SIGs) that support a broad selection of signal processing related activities defined by the scope of the Society. Technical Committees and SIGs are actively involved in awards, conferences, publications, and educational activities, and provide technical advice to the Society’s leadership.

The mission of the Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee (IFS TC) is to promote activities within the broad technical areas of information forensics and security. The main activities addressed this year were the outcomes of the first IEEE Image Forensics Challenge, the organization and future organization of the two IFS workshops WIFS’14 and WIFS’15, and the nomination of the next IEEE TIFS Editor in Chief.

For our July 2014 issue, we cover recent patents granted in the area of Lidar based environment perception and modeling. The section below covers patents granted recently for Lidar related signal processing methods focusing on road traffic safety, robotics, radio service availability assessment or image based positioning.