Nominations Open for 2018 SPS Awards

Bjorn Ottersten
SPS Awards Board Chair

The SPS Awards Board is now accepting nominations for all Society level awards, from paper awards to the major society awards. Nominations are due by 1 September 2018. Nominators should take into consideration the need for representation of diversity in the award nomination slate, when submitting their nominations. Detailed information on the nomination process, as well as the endorsement forms for SPS awards can be found online. 

PLEASE NOTE: This year, the Society will be using a new online software to submit awards, so ALL award nominations must now be submitted online through this link. No awards will be accepted through the manual paper process. Submission questions can be directed to Theresa Argiropoulos (t.argiropoulos@ieee.org).

Who can nominate: Nominations are accepted from any society individual member, society committee, or society board. Nominations from individual members can be supported by up to two endorsement forms from two other individual members. 

Which 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 Industrial Leader Award, the Industrial Innovation Award, the Education Award, the Meritorious Service Award, and the Meritorious Chapter/Regional Service Award. The Society also recognizes outstanding publications in SPS journals and magazines through the Best Paper Award, Donald G. Fink 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 refer to the papers published in the following Society journals:

• IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (JSTSP)
• IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (T-ASLP)
• IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging (T-CI)
• IEEE Transactions on Image Processing (T-IP)
• IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (T-IFS)
• IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks (T-SIPN)
• IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (T-SP)

SPS Awards Changes

Over the past few years, the Society approved some procedural changes to the SPS Awards program, including some new changes approved more recently. Please note that these changes are in effect for the 2018 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 cases of conflicts of interest. Technical committees and boards may pass on to the Awards Board one or multiple nominations that they receive for all awards.

Starting this year, the Best Paper Award, the Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award, and the Young Author Best Paper Award can now include papers published in these two journals: the IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging and the IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks. Please refer to each award’s criteria for full details.

Last year, the Society created a new award called the Meritorious Regional/Chapter Service Award. This award focusses on outstanding contributions of any member of the Society to regional activities of the Signal Processing Society. As a result of the creation of this award, the judging criteria for the Meritorious Service Award were redefined - the judging is based on recognizing outstanding efforts and contributions aimed at promoting the technical and educational activities of the entire Signal Processing Society, i.e. that benefit the membership of the SPS at-large.

Last year, the Overview Paper Award was renamed to the Donald G. Fink Overview Paper Award. The award description remains unchanged. The renaming of some other awards is underway and will be announced later this year.

Last year, the Society Award was modified to include an ICASSP plenary lecture, which is called the “Norbert Wiener Lecture”. Each Society Award recipient is expected to present a Norbert Wiener Lecture at the upcoming IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

As a reminder, for the Best Paper Awards a board or committee cannot nominate one of its members for the award. Please note: For the Young Author Best Paper Award, this includes nominating an author of a paper where a member of a nominating board or committee is also an author on the paper, even though this member is not the “young author” being considered for the award. 

The paper awards nomination form requests citation impact information, so please provide this valuable 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 is 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. In the case of major award nominations, please note: boards or committees who submit nominations, but have voting Board of Governors members sitting on their boards or committees, must ensure that Board of Governors voting members do not participate in the board/committee award nomination or selection process.

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 from two other individual members. Nominations supported by committee/boards cannot be accompanied by endorsements. IEEE/SPS membership is no longer required for endorsements. All endorsements must be submitted via the online nomination tool. 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 members of that same group of individuals are not eligible to be endorsers.

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.

If you have any questions regarding the process, please do not hesitate to contact me at bjorn.ottersten@uni.lu or Theresa Argiropoulos at t.argiropoulos@ieee.org.