The IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal, awarded for outstanding achievements in signal processing, was presented to Louis L. Scharf "for pioneering and sustained contributions to statistical signal processing and its practice." The IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal, awarded for a career of outstanding contributions to education in the fields of interest of IEEE, was presented to Simon S.

Welcome to the Winter 2015 edition of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee's Newsletter! This issue of the newsletter includes 5 articles and announcements from 23 contributors, including SLTC own staff reporters and editors. Thank you all for your contributions!

Researchers at Texas A&M University have developed a wearable device prototype that can translate American Sign Language into English in real-time. This technology provides a solution to communication problems between deaf and hearing people.

Now IEEE SPS has built a streamlined mechanism for employers to add a job announcement by simply filling in a simple job opportunity submission Web form at the related TC section pages. To submit job announcements for a particular Technical Committee, the submission form can be found by visiting the page below and clicking on a particular TC. A link for the form can be found in the sidebar menu of the TC pages.

During the last couple of months a few new Signal Processing and Machine Learning contests were initiated. Some of the ongoing ones with a strong relation to Signal Processing include a contest for whale recognition and one for building an AI system.

For our December 2015 issue, we cover recent patents dealing with stereo vision hardware and algorithms.

The IEEE Signal Processing Society congratulates several SPS members who will receive the Society's prestigious awards during ICASSP 2016 in Shanghai, China.

Call for Papers IEEE Signal Processing Society IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks SPECIAL ISSUE ON INFERENCE AND LEARNING OVER NETWORKSNetworks are everywhere. They surround us at different levels and scales, whether we are dealing with communications networks, power grids, biological colonies, social networks, sensor networks, or distributed Big Data depositories.