he purpose of the Signal Processing Education Technical Committee (SPEd TC) is to foster the growth of all aspects of the intersection between signal processing and education. The past months have been both busy and productive for SPEd TC.

On 29 April 2010, the Franklin Institute held its ceremony in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to honor Gerhard Sessler and James West with Franklin Institute medals for their invention of the practical electret microphone. The day before the ceremony, a symposium took place at Temple University in which Dr. Flanagan summarized some of the history of the electret microphone. In his talk, Dr. Flanagan shared his perspective on invention of the device that is a commodity nowadays and how the initial incentive was telephony. Later, Dr.

(Source: Information from jobs.ieee.org) The Director’s Office initiated these special postdoctoral fellowships at Argonne to be awarded internationally on an annual basis to outstanding doctoral scientists and engineers who are at early points in promising careers.

The SPCOM TC aims at illuminating and exploring signal processing challenges in communications and networking.

IEEE has announced the launch of the IEEE eLearning Library, composed of nearly 200 short, online courses in core and emerging technologies. Each course was developed and peer-reviewed by subject experts and awards continuing education units (CEU) or professional development hours (PDH) upon successful completion. IEEE eLearning Library courses can be viewed in the IEEE Xplore digital library and accessed via the IEEE Learning Management System (LMS).

Vinay Melkote (University of California, Santa Barbara), “Optimal Delayed Decisions in Encoding and Decoding of Audio Signals and General Sources”, Advisor: Kenneth Rose (2010) The dissertation commences with the exploration of delayed-decision approaches to optimize the encoding operation over the entire signal, a concept that is of considerable benefit to applications that employ off-line coded content.

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Three new Members-at-Large will take their seats on the Signal Processing Society Board of Governors beginning 1 January 2011 and will serve until 31 December 2013.

The Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing (IVMSP) Technical Committee is currently seeking nominations for new members.