During the last couple of months a number of machine learning and signal processing contests have been initiated. Some of those recent ones include a Bosch contest on internal failure prediction and TalkingData aiming at predicting users' demographic characteristics.

Research in artificial intelligence (AI) has made great progress in recent years including Google's Go-playing AI AlphaGo beating world-class player Lee Se-dol in a 4-1 victory. While AI surpasses human intelligence in many tasks, the way it works is very different from the human brain. Dr. Dhruv Batra from Virginia Tech gave a presentation on whether humans and AI look at the same regions when answering visual questions, at Data Science Summit 2016, in San Francisco, CA. https://www.arxiv-vanity.com/papers/1606.03556/

Please visit the Conferences and Events page on the IEEE Signal Processing Society website for upcoming Lectures by Distinguished Lecturers.

You may have received an email from Howard E. Michel, IEEE 2015 President and CEO, instructing you to vote FOR the IEEE Constitutional Amendment on this year’s member ballot. As you know, the Board of Governors of our Signal Processing Society has unanimously voted against the amendment. Actually, the governing bodies of the majority of IEEE societies are against it, including the largest ones such as Computer, Communications, and Power and Engineering.