During the last couple of months, a few new Signal Processing and Machine Learning contests were initiated. Some of the ongoing ones with a strong relation to Signal Processing include: The 2015 IEEE Signal Processing Cup, is a competition that provides undergraduate students with the opportunity to form teams and work together to solve a challenging and interesting real-world problem using signal-processing techniques and methods. Three teams will be selected to present their work, and prizes will be awarded at ICASSP 2015. The competition title this year is: “Heart Rate Monitoring During Physical Exercise Using Wrist-Type Photoplethysmographic (PPG) Signals”. This competition is proposed by the Bio Imaging and Signal Processing Technical Committee and the data are available at http://www.zhilinzhang.com/spcup2015/. From the domain of Signal Processing in Remote Sensing, the Africa Soil Information Service is sponsoring a Kaggle contest entitled: “Africa Soil Property Prediction Challenge”. The goal of the competition is to predict 5 target soil functional properties from diffuse reflectance infrared spectroscopy measurements.