For our October 2014 issue, we cover recent patents granted in the area of speaker recognition.

Nominations are due 31 January annually for the IEEE Technical Field Awards (TFAs).

The Fellow Reference Committee is seeking nominations for three new members of the 2015 Fellow Reference Committee. The term of appointment is three years, non-renewable (1 January 2015-31 December 2017). The position is responsible for evaluating nominations for IEEE Fellow that are referred for review by the IEEE Fellow Committee.

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: The 2015 IEEE Signal Processing Cup, is a competition that provides undergraduate students with the opportunity to form teams and work together to solve a challenging and interesting real-world problem using signal-processing techniques and methods.

The IEEE Signal Processing Society Chapter of the Year Award will be presented for the fourth time in 2015. The award will be presented annually to a Chapter that has provided their membership with the highest quality of programs, activities and services. The award will be presented annually in conjunction with the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) to the Chapter’s representative. The award will consist of a certificate and a check in the amount of $1,000 to support local chapter activities. The winning Chapter will also be invited to publish an article in the IEEE Inside Signal Processing eNewsletter.

Section Officers can spread the word that members can take advantage of special deals going on right now for back-to-school shopping. Each of IEEE’s hardware discount providers has its own promotions and offers worth looking into: Dell (with international programs), Lenovo (US), and HP (US). Compare pricing and save on laptops, PCs, tablets, workstations, electronics, accessories, and more. Visit IEEE Technology Discounts for access to current hardware promotions

IEEE Medal and Recognition recipients accepted their awards on Saturday, 23 August, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The 2014 IEEE Honors Ceremony was held in conjunction with IEEE Sections Congress and hosted by IEEE President Roberto de Marca and IEEE President-Elect Howard E. Michel.

In this section we present the latest signal processing-related books Compressive Sensing for Urban Radar (Moeness Amin), published at CRC Press, details here Adaptive Filtering: Fundamentals of Least Mean Squares with MATLAB (Alexander D. Poularikas), published at CRC Press, details here Hierarchical Modeling and Analysis for Spatial Data, Second Edition (Sudipto Banerjee, Bradley P. Carlin, Alan E.

The Signal Processing for Communications and Networking Technical Committee (SPCOM TC) promotes activities that illuminate and explore signal processing challenges in communications and networking. These activities take place at the interfaces between the IEEE Signal Processing (SPS), Communications (COMSOC), and Information Theory (IT) Societies.