Activity Update from the DISPS Technical Committee

Published in TC News on 1 November 2014

by Zhiyuan Yan and Warren J. Gross (Vice-Chair and Chair of the DISPS TC)

The Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems Technical Committee (DISPS TC) has the mission to promote and support activities of the IEEE Signal Processing Society in the areas of: i) design, development and implementation of signal processing systems; ii) design of algorithms with implementation in mind and iii) design of software tools and methodologies to support the design of signal processing systems.

The TC holds biannual meetings. The spring meeting is held at the IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), which is the flagship conference of the Signal Processing Society. The fall meeting is held at the TC’s annual IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (SiPS). The TC is responsible for organizing the SiPS workshop as well as reviews of papers for both SiPS and the Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems (DISPS) track of ICASSP.

The technical committee currently has 31 Members, an Advisory Board, and Affiliate Members. New members for the TC will be selected in the Fall for the next 3-year term starting in January 2015.

Conferences

The DISPS TC’s flagship event for this year, the 2014 IEEE Workshop on Signal Processing Systems (SiPS 2014) was recently held in Belfast, United Kingdom from Oct. 20-22, 2014. The workshop received 68 regular submissions and the program committee selected 39 papers to be presented in lectures and 14 posters. The technical program consists of four special sessions: "Application Specific Instruction Set Processors" organized by Jarmo Takala (TC's past chair), "Acceleration and Optimization for Visual Signal Processing" organized by Tse-Wei Chen (TC member), "Hardware Architectures for Visual Analytics" organized by Vijay Narayanan, and "Dataflow Modelling & Synthesis" organized by Maxime Pelcat, and features two keynotes: “Massive MIMO: Opportunities and Challenges" by Prof. Erik G. Larsson, Linköpings University, and "Computing with Private Data: When Cryptography Meets Signal Processing" by Prof. Mauro Barni, Università di Siena. This year's Bob Owens Best Student Paper Award, sponsored by Springer, was presented by Courtney Clark to Li-Hong Huang, Kai-Ting Shr, Ming-Hung Lin, Yuan-Hao Huang for their paper "Design and Implementation of A Convex-Optimized Positioning System on Wireless RF/FPGA Platform".

Next year's SiPS will be held in Hangzhou, China on October 14-16, 2015, and the General Chairs will be Chaitali Chakrabarti (Arizona State University, US) and Nam Ling (Santa Clara University, US) and the Program Chairs Zhiyuan Yan (Lehigh University, US) and Min Li (NXP Semiconductor, Belgium). All of them are current or past DISPS members. More details about SiPS 2015 can be found at the conference's website (www.sips2015.org).

The DISPS TC is involved in organizing a symposium on data flow algorithms and architecture for signal processing systems in the second edition of the new SPS flagship event, the IEEE Global Conference on Signal and Information Processing (GlobalSIP). This year’s GlobalSIP will be held in Atlanta, GA Dec. 3-5 2014. The symposium will consist of four lectures, 16 posters, and three keynotes: Shuvra S. Bhattacharyya, University of Maryland, "Dataflow Scheduling Techniques for Multicore Digital Signal Processors", Lee Barford, Keysight Technologies, USA, "Data flow algorithms for processors with vector extensions: handling actors with internal state", Jacob Kornerup, National Instruments, USA "From Algorithm to Hardware using Data Flow". The General Chairs of the symposium are Warren Gross (McGill University, Canada) and Jorn Janneck (Lund University, Sweden), and the Technical Program Chairs are Joseph Cavallaro (Rice University, US) and Zhiyuan Yan (Lehigh University, US).

Honors

DISPS member Xinmiao Zhang has served as the chair for the Seasonal Schools Subcommittee in Signal Processing Program of the IEEE Signal Processing Society since January 2013, and she also serves on the Membership Services Committee. She received a Best Associate Editor Award for IEEE Trans. on Circuits and Systems-I in 2013.

DISPS member John McAllister is serving as the Chief Editor of the SigView Editor Board of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.

DISPS member Joseph Cavallaro has been active in organizing organizing international conferences related to DISPS topics as well as IEEE services. He was the General Co-Chair of the 2014 Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI (GLSVLSI 2014) held in Houston, TX, in May 2014, and the Student Paper Contest Chair of the Asilomar Conference on Signals Systems and Computers in Nov. 2014, and will be the Track Co-Chair for Circuits and Systems for Communications (CASCOM) TC of ISCAS 2005, Lisbon, May 2015. He was a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE CAS Society during 2014, and will serve as the Secretary of the CASCOM TC of the IEEE CAS Society for the next two years.

DISPS member Vivienne Sze along with Madhukar Budagavi and Gary J. Sullivan recently completed an edited book on the latest video coding standard HEVC, comprised of contributed chapters from some of the key video experts who have been directly involved in developing and deploying the standard:
V. Sze, M. Budagavi, G. J. Sullivan, Editors, "High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC): Algorithms and Architectures," Springer, 2014. ISBN-13: 978-3319068947

DISPS Advisory Board member Francky Catthoor, along with his co-authors, has published three books recently:

•  D.Atienza, S.Mamagkakis, F.Catthoor, D.Soudris, C.Poucet, A.Bartzas, C.Baloukas, M.Peon, J.M.Mendias, "Dynamic memory management for embedded programmable platforms: systematic methodology and practice", ISBN 978-3-319-10571-0, Springer, October 2014.
• A.Kritikakou, F.Catthoor, C.Goutis,``Scalable and Near-Optimal Design Space Exploration for Embedded Systems'', ISBN 978-3-319-04941-0 Springer, May 2014.
• R.Fasthuber, F.Catthoor, R.Raghavan, F.Naessens, ``Energy-Efficient Communication Processors'', ISBN 978-1-4614-4992-8, Springer, June 2013.

A group photo of current and former DISPS TC members at the conference banquet.