IEEE Fellow is the highest grade of membership of the IEEE. It honors members with an outstanding record of technical achievements, contributing importantly to the advancement or application of engineering, science and technology, and bringing significant value to society. Anyone can be a nominator (no need to be an IEEE Fellow, or even an IEEE member). The nomination deadline is 1 March, and all required information is obtained from www.ieee.org/fellows.

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Activity Update from the SAM TC: Upcoming Workshops; Distinguished Lecturer Award; and Members Election.

The Winter 2013-2014 edition of the IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee’s Newsletter is now online. It includes a number of announcements from the TC chair, as well as a number of articles collated by the editorial boarded.

Sha Wang (University of Ottawa), “Digital Watermarking Based Image and Video Quality Evaluation”, Advisor: Prof. Jiying Zhao (2013) Image and video quality evaluation is very important. In applications involving signal transmission, the Reduced- or No-Reference quality metrics are generally more practical than the Full-Reference metrics. Digital watermarking based quality evaluation emerges as a potential Reduced- or No-Reference quality metric, which estimates signal quality by assessing the degradation of the embedded watermark.

2014 IEEE Signal Processing Cup The IEEE SP 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. Three teams will be selected to present their work, and prizes will be awarded at ICASSP 2014.