This IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Chapter Certification program is now accepting applications for review in 2021. This is open to all Chapters who are not currently certified, or whose certification will end on 31 December 2021.

Did you know the Society offers funding under the Member Driven Initiatives program for events that encourage involvement by SPS membership, including local chapters, universities, industry members as well as individual members? 

In this issue, we interviewed Dr. Anubha Gupta. Anubha received her PhD. from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Delhi, India in 2006 in Electrical Engineering. She did her second Master's as a full-time student from the University of Maryland, College Park, the USA from 2008-2010 in Education with a concentration: Higher Education Leadership and Policy Studies.

This issue brings to you our interview with Dr. Behrooz Makki [M’19, SM’19]. Behrooz received his Ph.D. degree in Communication Engineering from Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. In 2013-2017, he was a Postdoc researcher at Chalmers University.

The IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) announces the 2021 Class of Distinguished Lecturers and Distinguished Industry Speakers for the term of 1 January 2021 to 31 December 2022, which are noted below.  The IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer (DL) Program provides a means for Chapters to have access to well-known educators and authors in the fields of signal processing to lecture at Chapter meetings. 

IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership of the IEEE. It honors members with an outstanding record of technical achievements, contributing importantly to the advancement or application of engineering, science and technology, and bringing significant value to society.

The potentials of using millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequency for future wireless cellular communication systems have motivated the study of large-scale antenna arrays for achieving highly directional beamforming. However, the conventional fully digital beamforming methods, which require one radio frequency (RF) chain per antenna element, are not viable for large-scale antenna arrays due to the high cost and high power consumption of RF chain components in high frequencies.

Each month, the Chapter Briefs Newsletter will feature an OU Analytics Tip that will be helpful to all who utilize the OU Analytics tool.  This month's Tip features obtaining Membership Verification.

A reminder that chapter events and officer reporting need to be updated in vTools <http://vtools.ieee.org&gt; throughout the year.  This will ensure that current data is on file and that your chapter activity is accurately recorded.  All units are encouraged to try to hold at least virtual meetings, if possible, to show that the unit is active.

The OU Analytics dashboards provide an intuitive interface to present data using tables and charts with the capability to customize using filtering options by OU, Region, Section, Grade, Gender, etc.  Counts provided can further link to the respective member contact details.