The 9th annual Student Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Challenge–Europe (SAUC-E) will be held at the Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE), from 20 September to 26 September 2014. Held since 2006, SAUC-E challenges the next generation of engineers to design and build an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) capable of performing realistic missions.

Smart cities have been around for some time now, but the IEEE has gotten involved in the creation and upkeep of smart cities very recently through its Future Directions Committee. Roberto Saracco, an important volunteer of the IEEE Future Directions Committee, explains what a smart city is, how a city can become a smart city, why smart cities are so important today, and how the IEEE is working to create more smart cities in all of its ten regions.

For our September 2014 issue, we cover recent patents granted in the area of compressed sensing. The section below covers patents granted recently for contributions to image enhancement, tomography, image and video compressing & decompressing, signal reconstruction and augmented reality gaming.

The annual election ballots were sent to all eligible voting members via postal mail on 15 August. You can access and return your ballot electronically or use the postage-paid reply envelope included in your ballot package. Ballots must be received by 12 noon CST (17:00 UTC) on 1 October.

Welcome to the Fall 2014 edition of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee's Newsletter! This issue of the newsletter includes 7 articles and announcements from 13 contributors, including our own staff reporters and editors. Thank you all for your contributions! This issue includes news about IEEE journals and recent workshops, SLTC call for nominations, and individual contributions.

Zaher (Zak) Kassas (The University of Texas at Austin), Analysis and Synthesis of Collaborative Opportunistic Navigation Systems, Advisor: Prof. Todd E. Humphreys and Prof. Ari Arapostathis Global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) are insufficient for reliable anytime, anywhere navigation, particularly indoors, in deep urban canyons, and in environments under malicious attacks (e.g., jamming and spoofing).

The IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) invites nominations for the position of Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Transactions on Signal and Information Processing over Networks (TSIPN) for a 3-year term starting 1 January 2015. TSIPN is a new journal co-sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society, Communications Society and Computer Society, launching in 2015, and the EIC is expected to play a major role in the start up.

The Signal Processing Society has added a new journal to its portfolio: The IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging. This new, online-only, Transactions will publish original research results where computation plays an integral role in the image formation process. Original research will be published on all areas of computational imaging ranging from the principles and theory of computational imaging, to modeling paradigms for computational imaging, to image formation methods, to the latest innovative computational imaging system designs.

The Signal Processing for Communications and Navigation Group (SPCOMNAV), Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, seeks a post doctoral researcher to contribute to the activities of the group related to GNSS (GPS, Galileo) signal processing.