Activity Update from the SPTM TC

by Xiaoli Ma (SPTM Liaison to E-Newsletter)

I am pleased to announce that eleven newly elected members will serve the Signal Processing Theory and Methods Technical Committee (SPTM TC) starting from January 2013: Alle-Jan van der Veen, Prakash Ishwar, Ami Wiesel, Qing Zhao, Gerald Matz, Scott C. Douglas, Paulo Diniz, Jean-Yves Tourneret, Pier Luigi Dragotti, Suleyman Serdar Kozat, and Tulay Adali.

Honors

In this new year, several SPTM TC members have received different honors.

1. Our members Prof. Danilo Mandic and Prof. Erchin Serpedin were elevated to the rank of IEEE Fellow;
2. Our member Prof. Bjorn Ottersten received the IEEE SPS Technical Achievement Award and was elected member of the IEEE SPS Society BOG, for the period 2013-2016;
3. Our members Prof. John Mathews and Prof. Tulay Adali became IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturers.

The SPTM TC also had the following successful award nominations from IEEE.

1. José Moura has received the IEEE SPS Society Award;
2. Ali Sayed has received the IEEE SPS Technical Achievement Award;
3. The Paper: D. P. Wipf and B. D. Rao, "An Empirical Bayesian Strategy for Solving the Simultaneous Sparse Approximation Problem," IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, vol. 55, no. 7, pp. 3704-3716, 2007, has received the Best Paper Award.

Statistical Signal Processing Workshop

A very successful Statistical Signal Processing (SSP) workshop was held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA from Aug 5-8 2012. There were a total of 297 registrants from all over the world. The technical program of the workshop consisted of 6 plenary sessions, 39 poster sessions, and a Government Panel session organized by Liyi Dai of the Army Research Office. Our distinguished plenary speakers presented hour-long talks on a range of timely topics in statistical signal processing including: "Xampling at the Rate of Innovation" (Yonina Eldar), "Topological Signal Processing" (Robert Ghrist), "Adaptive Sensing and Active Learning" (Robert Nowak), "Adding Numbers and Determinental Point Processes" (Persi Diaconis), "The Invention of Compressive Sensing and Recent Results" (Yoram Bresler), and "Radar Signal Processing" (Randy Moses). 

There were 11 special poster sessions, each devoted to a particular topic of interest and organized by leaders in the field, comprising a total of 66 invited papers. The 28 regular poster sessions cover a wide variety of topics, some traditional and some quite new. In these regular sessions, there were 168 contributed papers selected from 253 submissions (acceptance ratio 66%). In keeping with the international tradition of the SSP Workshop, the technical program includes authors and presenters coming from 34 different countries. All of the papers in the special and regular sessions went through a rigorous peer review process involving the considerable efforts of the 119 members of the SSP 2012 Technical Committee, writing a total of 720 reviews.

Digital Signal Processing & Signal Processing Education Workshops

The 2013 IEEE Digital Signal Processing (DSP) Workshop and IEEE Signal Processing Education (SPE) Workshop will be held jointly in Napa, California. The venue in one of California's most famous wine regions also offers access to bicycling, rafting and other outdoor summer activities. In addition, the Sierra Nevada mountains and the Pacific Ocean can be reached in less than two hours and one hour respectively. The workshops will feature prominent plenary speakers from Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, technical sessions for presentation of contributed papers, and tutorials. The goal of the two workshops is to bring together leading engineers, researchers, and educators in signal processing from around the world to discuss 1) novel signal processing theories, methods, applications, and implementation technique, as well as 2) the best methods to educate both specialists and a growing population of those who need to use signal processing techniques in their work. Please visit the conference website for further details.