Congratulations to the IEEE SP Cup Winners!

The IEEE Signal Processing Cup aims to provide undergraduate students with opportunities to form teams and work together to solve a challenging and interesting real-world problem using signal processing techniques. The final round of the 2016 SP Cup was held in March 2016 at the 2016 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in Shanghai, China. Three top teams from the preliminary round held before the conference were selected and invited to present their work at ICASSP 2016.

The 2016 SP Cup competition topic was related to a time-varying location-dependent signature of power grid, as it becomes intrinsically captured in media recordings due to direct or indirect influences from the respective power grid. The topic is at the intersection between signal processing and information security/forensics. Participants were expected to utilize a number of fundamental signal processing theories and techniques at the undergraduate level. The project also involved sensing circuit/hardware that is affordable and easy-to-built as well as algorithm design and software implementation.

The competition was proposed by a team led by Prof. Min Wu (University of Maryland, USA) and endorsed by the SPS Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee, under the supervision of the SPS Student Services Committee (chaired by Prof. Patrizio Campisi, Roma Tre University, Italy). This year, 52 teams (around 334 students) registered for the SP Cup and 33 submitted their work. Three teams have been selected to participate in the final competition at ICASSP 2016.

The final results are:
Grand Prize: Team “Resonance_1011”, Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology Supervisor: Mohammad Ariful Haque
Undergraduate students: Sayeed Shafayet Chowdhury, Md Billal Hossain, Jayanta Dey, Ashraful Islam, Rakib Hyder, Md. Samzid bin Hafiz, Ratul Khan, Munif Ishad Mujib, Tauhiduzzaman Khan Himel, Uday Saha

Second Prize with special mention on originality: Team “Hammer Down”, Purdue University
Supervisor: Stanley Chan
Graduate Mentor: Benjamin Vondersaar
Undergraduate students: Alexandria Moore, Xiangyu Qu, Samuel Sowell, Fangjia Zhu, Siqing Wei, Gregory Dykes, Christopher Chow

Third Prize: Team “Vidyut”, Multi-University Team (IISc, IIT-Madras, NITK)
Supervisor: Prasanta Kumar Ghosh (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore)
Graduate Mentor: Nisha Meenakshi (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore)
Undergraduate students: Priyadarshini Savan Roshan, Pradyumna Byappanahalli Suresha, Aditya Gaonkar P, Supriya Nagesh

Further details about this year's competition can be found at http://www.icassp2016.org/SPCup.asp and at http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/community/sp-cup/

Congratulations to the winners!