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As reported by CNN in October 2009, the declaration of the H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic as a national emergency in the United States high lights the magnitude and continuing spread of the first pandemic flu outbreak in 40 years. The May 2010 “IN THE SPOTLIGHT” column of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine discussed how signal processing techniques can be used to analyze the information content of H1N1 genomic sequences.

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The submissions to the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (TSP) have increased dramatically in recent years. The TSP Editor-in-Chief, Athina Petropulu, is announcing a new review model to help handle the high submissions volume while making best use of valuable reviewer resources. All submitted manuscripts will be prescreened according to IEEE guidelines to determine whether they are comprehensible, fall within the scope of TSP, and meet a minimum criterion for technical substance established for the journal. The prescreening process will be coordinated by Area Editors and will be conducted within the editorial board.

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.

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