Highlights from the Sensor Array and Multichannel Technical Committee: Spotlight on the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Committees

The IEEE Signal Processing Society Sensor Array and Multichannel Technical Committee (SAM TC) promotes activities within the technical areas of sensor array processing and multichannel statistical signal processing, including:

beamforming ■ direction-of-arrival estimation ■ source localization ■ multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems ■ compressed sensing ■ sparse modeling ■ tensor-based signal processing ■ deep neural networks machine learning for sensor arrays ■ signal processing for sensor networks ■ network beamforming ■ blind source separation ■ channel identification ■ array processing for radar, sonar, communications, microphone arrays, and biomedical applications.

Our biannual IEEE International Workshop on Computational Advances in Multisensor Adaptive Processing (CAMSAP) has been organized in December every odd-numbered year since 2005. The statistics of recent editions are summarized in Table 1. The seventh edition was held 10–13 December 2017 at the Santa Barbara Beach and Golf Resort, Curaçao, Dutch Antilles (https://signalprocessingsociety.org/ CAMSAP2017/). After Josef A. Nossek and Georgios B. Giannakis delivered instructive tutorials on 10 December, we had six exciting plenary presentations (given by Yonina C. Eldar, Daniel P. Palomar, Antonio Ortega, Tülay Adalı, Nikos Sidiropoulos, and our plenary speaker from industry Mérouane Debbah), 19 special invited sessions, and ten regular sessions. As indicated in Table 1, CAMSAP 2017 received the highest number of submissions thus far and attracted a record number of attendees—38% of whom were student participants. Some photos from the workshop are shown in Figure 1. An IEEE SPS questionnaire was distributed to all participants to evaluate how satisfied they were with the workshop. The results were extremely positive. CAMSAP 2019 will be held in December in Guadeloupe, French West Indies.

The Tenth IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing (SAM) Workshop took place 8–11 July 2018 in Sheffield, United Kingdom (http:// www.sam2018.group.shef.ac.uk/). SAM is a biannual series of workshops that takes place midyear of even-numbered years. The ninth edition occurred 10–13 July 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, about a month before the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. This ideal timing ensured that plenty of cultural activities and festivities (in addition to the excellent scientific highlights) made SAM 2016 a memorable experience. The statistics of the last five editions of SAM are summarized in Table 2. SAM 2016 received a record number of submissions and the highest number of attendees. Two very attractive proposals (from China and Mexico) for the 11th SAM Workshop in 2020 were presented at the recent SAM TC meeting in Calgary, Canada. For the first time in its history, the SAM workshop will be organized in Asia, in Hangzhou, China, 8–11 June 2020 (http://www.isee.zju .edu.cn/sam2020/).