A Few Changes in the SPTM TC

by Kostas Slavakis (SPTM Liaison to eNews)

The Technical Committee on Signal Processing Theory and Methods (SPTM TC) has been very active over the last six months and a number of changes have been introduced. The first one was to change the procedure for the best paper award nominations, in order to make the process more transparent. The new procedures are summarized below and were applied for the first time for this year’s paper nominations.

Proposed Procedure for Selecting SPTM Nominees for Best Paper Award

1. Tabulate and distribute a list of all eligible papers for the best paper award.
2. The top five downloaded papers from IEEExplore are automatically nominated for consideration.
3. The top five cited papers are automatically nominated for consideration.
4. Additional nominations are sought from TC members and relevant AEs.
5. The Awards Subcommittee collects “external” reviews of the nominated papers.
6. The Awards Subcommittee uses all the information available to them to rank the nominated papers.
7. The Awards Subcommittee prepares a “nomination letter” for the top three ranked papers and forwards these nominations to the TC without revealing the subcommittee ranking for a vote of the members.
8. The TC chair will forward the nomination of the top paper, as voted by the TC, to the SPS Vice President‐Awards and Membership.

Proposed Procedure for Selecting SPTM Nominees for Young Author Best Paper Award

1. The pool of nominees for the Young Author Best Paper Award include all papers nominated for the Best Paper award whose first author was below thirty years old on the day of submission of the paper.
2. If there are less than three papers so identified in step 1, the Awards Subcommittee will call for additional nominations.
3. The remaining steps are identical to steps 5‐9 in the procedure for selecting the nominees for the best paper award.

New EDICS

Besides the change of the awards nomination procedure, the TC decided for a change in the related EDICS. New topics, such as signal processing over graphs, sparsity-aware learning, optimization, and signal processing over networks have been included alongside to the more standard and classical topics. The revised full set of EDICS is available online.