Nominations Due: 5 February 2018

In accordance with the provision of IEEE Bylaw 307, the Division IX Nominating Committee hereby solicits your nominations for the position of Division IX Director-Elect.  Please send your nominations to Theresa Argiropoulos, SPS Senior Manager, Operations, via t.argiropoulos@ieee.org, as she will be collecting the nominations on my behalf.

First, I would like to request all women members reading this article to submit their information to the new Women in Signal Processing Directory. The WISP Directory aims to increase and promote visibility and recognition of women in signal processing fields, positioning them for awards, leadership roles, and more.

Starting in 2017, the Women in Signal Processing Subcommittee became a standing committee of the Membership Board, rather than a subcommittee of the Member Services Committee, meaning the WISP Chair now holds a seat on the Membership Board.  Much has happened in 2017, and we look forward to an even more productive 2018.

BÖRN OTTERSTEN (KTH Royal Institute of Technolog) will serve as the 2018 SPS Awards Board Chair. He succeeds H. Vincent Poor from Princeton University

We are very pleased to announce that the 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Wireless Communications and Networking in Extreme Environments (IEEE WCNEE) will be held on April 16, 2018, in Honolulu, HI, USA (with IEEE INFOCOM 2018). The workshop website is available at http://wcnee.eng.buffalo.edu/.

Recently, leveraging technological advances and using Big Data approaches for information management and processing in extreme events (e.g., Natural Disasters, Extreme Weather, Emergency Events, Diseases and etc.) have attracted much research attention. Multimedia is increasingly becoming the most important and valuable source for insights and information in extreme events.

The IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) invites nominations for the position of Editor-in-Chief for the following journals: IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, and IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks for a 3-year term starting 1 January 2019.

Engineering safety and computer security have traditionally been viewed as separate fields: safety concentrates on the avoidance of physical harm; security protects information and privacy. When computers and physical plants did not interoperate, separation of safety and security was both reasonable and prudent. Given the advent of CPSs, we can no longer consider these problems as separate.

Cyber security is an increasing worry on many fronts, but typical discussions and headlines focus on very different types of threats than those experienced by aviation and space systems. Cyber security vulnerabilities compromise the control, traffic, navigation, and integrity of these systems. Countermeasures involve not only specialized systems and architectures, but often international cooperation, as the need for awareness extends well beyond the boundaries of a single aircraft. 

Sponsored from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, there is a Kaggle contest focusing on identifying the camera that took

an image. Finding footage of a crime caught on tape is an investigator's dream. But even with crystal clear, damning evidence,

one critical question always remains–is the footage real? Today, one way to help authenticate footage is to identify the camera

that the image was taken with.

For our January 2018 issue, we cover recent patents granted in the area of applications of medical MR or CT data segmentation.

The invention no. 9,659,370 relates to a method for segmenting MR Dixon image data. A processor and a computer program product are also disclosed for use in connection with the method. The invention finds application in the MR imaging field in general and more specifically may be used in the generation of an attenuation map to correct for attenuation by cortical bone during the reconstruction of PET images.