Edited by Garry A.

Online social networks and social media are displacing traditional centrally organized media. More significantly, social media now represent the largest area of new information technology (IT) investment in many industries. Companies and government see these new social media tools as ways to deliver better customer services, create better designs more cheaply, and provide better oversight and regulation. Unfortunately, we don’t yet understand fully how to design social media so that they can accomplish these lofty goals.

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Social networking applications have emerged as the platform of choice for carrying out a number of different activities online. In addition to their primary target of social interaction, we now also employ such applications to search for information online or to share multimedia content with our friends and families.  For instance, according to recent statistics, each of us spends on average 15 min on YouTube every day. Similarly noteworthy is the daily rate of queries that Twitter’s search engine receives: 600 million.

The following SPS members will receive 2012 IEEE awards. Clifford Carter has been selected as the IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal recipient “for contributions to the fundamentals of coherence and time-delay estimation and to underwater acoustics signal processing.” The IEEE James L.

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Vijayaraghavan Thirumalai (EPFL, Switzerland), “Distributed Compressed Representation of Correlated Image Sets”, Advisor: Prof. Pascal Frossard (2012) Vision sensor networks and video cameras find widespread usage in several applications that rely on effective representation of scenes or analysis of 3D information. These systems usually acquire multiple images of the same 3D scene from different viewpoints or at different time instants. Therefore, these images are generally correlated through displacement of scene objects.

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