Activity Update from the SAM-TC

By Mats Viberg (SAM Liaison to E-Newsletter)

As the new chair of the Sensor Array and Multichannel (SAM) Technical Committee (TC) since Jan. 2011, I would like to start this activity report by thanking the previous chair, Kristine Bell, for her outstanding work in upgrading the procedures and activities of the TC during her term as chair. I feel privileged to take over such a well functioning organization.

The SAM TC addresses the areas of sensor array and multi-channel statistical signal processing.  The committee interests span the areas of signal detection and estimation, direction-of-arrival estimation, beamforming, blind source separation, source localization and tracking, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems and space-time coding, sensor networks, and multichannel signal processing. Our main application areas are focused on radar, sonar, wireless communications, microphone array processing, navigation, seismology, radio astronomy, and biomedicine. Visit the SAM TC website to learn more. Some details regarding many of the issues presented here are available in the SAM TC Newsletter.

Under the lead of Kristine Bell, the SAM TC has undergone some major updates during the past few years. One such change is that the work has been organized into nine subcommittees with specific duties. This has improved the functionality of the TC, and yet giving an easier job for me and the Vice Chair Dominic Ho. Another change is the procedure for nominating and selecting award candidates, which after some years of fine tuning has now started to bear fruit. This year we have successfully nominated candidates for the Technical Achievement Award (Moura), the Education Award (Baraniuk), the Best Paper Award (Malioutov, Cetin and Willsky), the Young Author Award (San Antonio, co-authored by Fuhrmann and Robey), and the SP Magazine Award (Zhao and Sadler). In addition, Rick Blum has been successfully nominated as a Distinguished Lecturer in the SAM area. Details regarding the awards are presented at the SPS Award Recipients page. I would also like to congratulate the SAM TC members that were elected to IEEE Fellows this year, namely Maria Sabrina Greco and Visa Koivunen.

In October 2010, the SAM TC sponsored the 6th IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Workshop (SAM 2010) in Israel, co-chaired by Hagit Messer-Yaron and Jeffrey Krolik. Technical Program Chairs Joseph Tabrikian and Amir Leshem put together an excellent technical program featuring six plenary talks and 70 papers organized into special sessions, regular sessions, and a student paper competition.

In December 2011, the SAM TC will be sponsoring the 4th International Workshop on Computational Advances in Multi-Sensor Adaptive Processing (CAMSAP 2011) in Puerto Rico, co-chaired by Aleksandar Dogandzic and Maria Sabrina Greco. Please note that special session proposals are due on March 18 and papers are due in July.

The next workshop event will be SAM 2012, to be held in the 2^nd half of 2012. Prospective organizers are encouraged to contact me as soon as possible.

In December 2010, Jean-Pierre Delmas, Antonio De Maio, Martin Haardt, Shawn Kraut, Pascal Larzabal, Christoph Mecklenbräuker, Ali Sayed, and Erchin Serpedin were elected as new members to the SAM TC. I would like to thank retiring members Dan Fuhrmann, Fulvio Gini, Jian Li, Murali Rangaswamy, Raghuveer Rao, Lang Tong, and Alle-Jan van der Veen for their many years of service.

During December 2010 and January 2011, the SAM TC members and affiliate members have all been busy with reviews for ICASSP 2011. We received a total of 217 papers in the SAM area, and all of them were reviewed by at least 3 persons (most of them 4). Out of these, 110 were accepted, yielding an approximate 50% acceptance rate. The papers have been divided into 4 lecture sessions (each 6 papers) and 8 posters (10 or 11 papers). One of the poster sessions (Relay Networks) is arranged jointly with the SPCOM TC, and one of the SPCOM poster sessions (Sensor Networks) is co-arranged with the SAM TC.