The EURASIP and the IEEE Signal Processing Society Greek Chapter jointly organized a full-day event in October 2009 at the University of Athens: the inaugural "Greek Signal Processing Jam''. The event was envisioned as an opportunity to bring this community together, attract new talent to signal processing, and expose all to some of the latest developments in the broad area.

An exclusive article by Alex Acero, the SPS's first Vice President-Technical Directions, on many society-wide initiatives on technical directions in recent years. These include the formation of the Technical Directions Board, review of Technical Committees, the creation of new TCs and TC-sponsored workshops, and the renaming of several TCs to better reflect their latest scope and interests.

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The ability to learn about a stochastic process from noisy observations is fundamental to many applications. In order to track a dynamic process, typical knowledge representation is the state space model such as a linear Gauss Markov model, where efficient algorithms exist to perform state estimation under many different model assumptions. However, for meta level tracking, we are not only interested in the state estimation, but also temporal and structural classification of the process.

Synthetic attendance--immersive communications with people in a meeting happening afar--has been one of mankind's elusive dreams. The Exploratory DSP column of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (November 2009) discusses critical questions in immersive communications that are still awaiting resolution.