Enhancing the Experience and Support for SPS Conferences

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V John Mathews
SPS Vice President – Conferences
mathews@ece.utah.edu

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The IEEE Signal Processing Society organizes approximately twenty conferences, symposia and workshops each year. The Society’s vision for its conferences can be summarized in three words – Quality, Access and Services. The Conference Board of the Society, which I chair, oversees all aspects of the conferences, and is currently engaged in an in-depth study of how to best enhance each of these attributes. Among the topics slated for discussion in its March meeting to be held during ICASSP 2010 in Dallas are: How to improve the quality of the paper review process for our conferences, how to make our conferences more industry-friendly, how to enhance the experiences of students at our conferences, and how to enhance the infrastructure support given by the Society to volunteers who organize the conferences. I will report on the action items that come out of these discussions in a future article. Here I would like to bring to your attention a new event the Society is organizing in March in conjunction with the Society's flagship conference of ICASSP 2010, and a new policy that adds value to your Society membership.

IEEE Thematic Meetings in Signal Processing (IEEE-THEMES) is a new series of one-day meetings that is being organized jointly by the Conference Board and the Publication Board of the Society. The goal of each meeting in the series is to present in a one-day event the highest quality papers in one focus area. The selected papers are based on rigorous reviews of papers submitted for presentation at the meeting and publication in the IEEE Journal of Special Topics in Signal Processing. The presentations are about half an hour long, and we have asked experienced authors to present their papers. Because of the rigor of the review process and the potential for in-depth presentations by people who understand the big picture, we anticipate an excellent learning experience for attendees.  The first meeting in this series will be on March 15, 2010 in Dallas, just before the formal technical program of ICASSP 2010.  The theme of this inaugural THEMES meeting is Signal and Information Processing for Social Networking.  On behalf of the Conference and Publications Boards of the Society, I extend to you a warm invitation to attend the first THEMES.  I am particularly pleased to announce that Professor Vwani Roychaudhury from UCLA will give a keynote speech at the meeting on “The Science of Social Networking:  Mining, Modeling, and Monetizing the Social Media Revolution.” This exciting talk will surely add value to your registration for the meeting.  The full program and other details can be found at the meeting web site.

Discounted Conference Registration for Society Members – The Society’s executive committee recently voted to mandate a “substantial” discount in registration fees for all Society conferences to Signal Processing Society members. We have already started implementing this new policy. For example, both ICASSP 2010 and THEMES provide at least a $100 discount to Signal Processing Society members over the discount available to IEEE members. The Society has introduced several initiatives in recent years to add values to the Society membership on top of what is available to a general IEEE membership. You may have seen from the messages by Past President Jose Moura and Vice President for Publication Ali Sayed about free electronic access of the Society periodicals to all Society members.  Making conference discounts substantially larger than the cost of Society membership itself is a new addition along in this direction. I sincerely invite you to attend a signal processing conference in the near future and to help encourage your colleagues to become members of the Signal Processing Society.

I would love to hear about your conference experiences and ideas for improving the Society conferences. Together, we can make this important segment of the Society’s activities serve the needs of its members in the best possible manner.