Technical Committee News

The human brain is organized into a collection of interacting networks with specialized functions to support various cognitive functions. At the micro level, the brain elements consist of single neurons, the amount of which often treads the realm of hundreds of billions, and possible connections between them numbering in the order of 10¹⁵. At a more macro level, the brain is parcellated into a number of regions, where each region accounts for the activity and coactivity of a population of neurons.

The Sensor Array and Multichannel (SAM) Technical Committee (TC) addresses the areas of sensor array and multi-channel statistical signal processing. The committee interests span the areas of signal detection and estimation, direction-of-arrival estimation, beamforming, blind source separation, source localization and tracking, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems and space-time coding, sensor networks, and multichannel signal processing. Our main application areas are focused on radar, sonar, wireless communications, microphone array processing, navigation, seismology, radio astronomy, and biomedicine.

You would be hard pressed to find a consumer electronic product that does not require digital signal processing. Consumer electronics is a big market—about US$165 billion this year, and the requirement for digital signal processors (DSPs) just keeps growing with the introduction of new, innovative products.

Learn about how DSPs evolve in consumer electronics applications through the Special Report by Ron Schneiderman in the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (May 2010).

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.