The IEEE MGA vTools team is happy to announce successful new releases for the following vTools applications:

• Meetings 5.0
• WebInABox 3.0
• Student Branch Reporting 1.4
• Surveys 1.3

These applications have been updated to a newer software version. In addition, each application now utilizes the new IEEE Style Sheet in order to comply with the IEEE Web site requirements and style guide.

Know a classmate or student who may benefit from a Student membership to the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS)? We are pleased to announce that SPS is offering FREE Student membership to IEEE Student and Graduate Student members for the 2015 membership year! Now through 15 August 2015, IEEE Student and Graduate Student members can take advantage of SPS Student conference discounts; travel grants to ICASSP, ICIP, and GlobalSIP; access to job and networking opportunities, and much more - at no cost!

Register now for the IEEE Women in Engineering International Leadership Conference (2015 WIE-ILC), to be held 23-25 April 2015, in San Jose, CA, USA. With a theme of "Lead Beyond: Accelerating Innovative Women Who Change the World," the conference focuses on leadership, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Attendees will have the opportunity to create communities that fuel innovation, facilitate knowledge sharing, and provide support through highly interactive sessions designed to foster discussion and collaboration.

Please refer to the following webpage for the latest updates on upcoming conferences in Signal Processing. http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/conferences/upcoming-conferences/

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.

Several elections took place in the Sensor Array and Multichannel (SAM) technical committee (TC). We congratulate Peter Willett and Martin Haardt for their election and assignment as new SAM TC Chair and Vice-Chair, respectively. We especially thank our past SAM TC Chair Dominic K.C. Ho who was chairing the SAM TC in the past two years for his excellent leadership and dedication.

Deep learning is becoming an important AI paradigm for pattern recognition, image/video processing and fraud detection applications in finance. The computational complexity of a deep learning network dictates need for a distributed realization. The big data lab at Impetus, led by Dr. Vijay Srinivas Agneeswaran, has built the first prototype of the distributed deep learning network over Apache Spark. They have parallelized the training phase of the network and consequently reduced training time.

The mission of the Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee (IFS TC http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/technical-committees/list/ifs-tc/) is to promote activities within the broad technical areas of information forensics and security.

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: From the domain of smart agriculture, there is a Kaggle contest asking to predict rainfall using remote sensing instruments such as polarimetric radar.  The competition provides polarimetric radar values and derived quantities at a location over the period of one hour.