Jose' M. F. Moura, SPS Awards Board Chair SPS has changed its nominating process for all Society Awards from paper awards to the major society awards. We now call for nominations from any society individual member, society committee, or society board. Nominations from individual members can be supported by up to two endorsement letters from two other individual members. Full details on the nomination process are available on the Society website. The SPS Awards Board is now accepting nominations for the 2015 major SPS awards. Each year, SPS honors outstanding individuals who have made significant contributions related to signal processing through the Society Award, the Technical Achievement Award, the Education Award, and the Meritorious Service Award. The Society also recognizes outstanding publications in SPS journals and magazines through the Best Paper Award, Overview Paper Award, Sustained Impact Paper Award, Signal Processing Letters Best Paper Award, Signal Processing Magazine Best Column Award, Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award and the Young Author Best Paper Award. Nominations for the Best Paper Award and Young Author Best Paper Award should come from the below Society journals:

• IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (JSTSP)
• IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (T-ASLP)
• IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (T-IP)
• IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (T-IFS)
• IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (T-SP)

New Industry Awards The SPS Awards Board is now accepting nominations for the new IEEE SPS Industrial Leader Award and IEEE SPS Industrial Innovation Award. The IEEE SPS Industrial Leader Award recognizes an industry business or technical leader whose leadership has resulted in major and outstanding advances or new directions using signal processing technologies within the scope of the Society. Eligibility is based on an industry leader who played a major leadership role in research or development and introduction of systems, devices, applications or services that have significantly impacted society on a global basis or has substantially advanced the use of signal processing technologies in industry, commerce, or society. The candidate is not required to be an IEEE member. The award will consist of a plaque, certificate, and honorarium of $1,500. The IEEE SPS Industrial Innovation Award recognizes an individual or team at any level who were industry employees whose technical contributions have resulted in significant advances using signal processing technologies within the scope of the Society. The award is open to individuals at any level who were industry employees who played a significant role in the technical contribution at the time of the accomplishments being recognized. The candidate need not be an IEEE SPS member. However, it is preferred that recipients of the IEEE SPS Industrial Innovation Award be members of IEEE. The award will consist of $1500 per awardee (up to a maximum of $4500 per award) as well as a plaque and certificate. Nominations should be submitted to Theresa Argiropoulos (t.argiropoulos@ieee.org), who will collect the nominations on behalf of Jose' M. F. Moura, Awards Board Chair. The award nominations will be vetted by the Awards Board. Prospective nominators are encouraged to submit nominations well in advance of the deadline of 1 September 2015. Detailed information and nomination/endorsement forms for SPS awards can be found online.

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SPS Awards Procedural Changes Over the past few years, the Society approved some procedural changes to the SPS Awards program, including some new changes approved earlier this year. Please note that these changes are in effect for the 2015 nomination period. The changes are intended to provide an effective means to encourage award nominations in all categories from the Signal Processing Society community-at-large, including individuals, technical committees, editorial boards and other major Boards, except in the cases of conflict of interests. Technical committees and boards may pass on to the Awards Board one or multiple nominations that they receive for all awards. The paper awards nomination form now requests citation impact information. The Awards Board will continue to review the nominations and make selections on paper awards. For all major awards other than paper awards, the Awards Board will now be responsible for vetting the nominations and producing a short list of no more than three nominations per award. The Board of Governors will continue to vote on the selection of the major awards. A board or committee cannot nominate one of its current members for an award. However, the board/committee member can be nominated by another board or committee. Current elected members of a committee/board may participate as individual nominators for other members of the same board/committee. Individual nominations can have multiple co-nominators listed on the nomination form. In addition, individual nominations can include up to two endorsements to strengthen the nomination. All endorsements must be submitted via email to the specified address, which will provide the nomination with a date and time stamp. If more than two endorsements are submitted, only the first two received endorsements will be forwarded to the IEEE Signal Processing Society Awards Board for consideration. A nominator cannot serve as an endorser for a nomination he/she is submitting. If the Society policies state that a particular Board/Committee/Individual is not eligible to nominate for a particular award, then that same group of individuals is not eligible to be an endorser. Technical Committee and Special Interest Group Award Nomination Procedures have been approved with suggested Award nomination and voting procedures. For full details on each award, as well as the new Society and Technical Committee/Special Interest Group awards policies and endorsement form, please visit the Society’s website at http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/awards-fellows/awardspage/. If you have any questions regarding the process, please do not hesitate to contact Jose' M. F. Moura, Awards Board Chair at moura@ece.cmu.edu.