May 2010

The SLTC has participated in organizing several remarkable events since last fall. The 11th biannual IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) workshop was hosted in December 2009 in the historical Kurhaus Theatre in Merano, Italy. The TC was involved in coordinating the review for ICASSP 2010, with a total contribution of 308 published papers from the SLTC community. Two SLTC members received major IEEE SPS awards and recognitions. And the Spring 2010 issue of the SLTC eNewsletter is now available online.

The submissions to the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing (TSP) have increased dramatically in recent years. The TSP Editor-in-Chief, Athina Petropulu, is announcing a new review model to help handle the high submissions volume while making best use of valuable reviewer resources. All submitted manuscripts will be prescreened according to IEEE guidelines to determine whether they are comprehensible, fall within the scope of TSP, and meet a minimum criterion for technical substance established for the journal. The prescreening process will be coordinated by Area Editors and will be conducted within the editorial board.

The SPS Awards Board is now accepting nominations for 2010 major SPS awards.

The IEEE International Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS) is the primary annual event organized by the IEEE Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee (IFS TC). The 2nd WIFS workshop will be held in Seattle, WA, on 12-15 December 2010. Tutorial Proposals are due 15 May 2010, and full papers (4-6 pages) are due 15 June 2010.

The IEEE Signal Processing Society invites nominations for the 2011 Class of SPS Distinguished Lecturers. The deadline for nominations is 1 June 2010. The nomination form can be found online

at this link.

The call for security is increasingly pervading our society, touching many diverse and fundamental facets of our life. Signal processing technology plays a fundamental role in many security-oriented applications. The Information Forensics and Security Technical Committee (IFS-TC) was established in recent years to promote this areas of research and technology development as well as community building. Two new initiatives are going to play a key role toward the establishment of an IFS community inside the SP Society, namely, the creation of affiliate membership in the Technical Committees of the SP Society and the annual WIFS workshop.

IEEE members now have access to more than 220 eBooks from the IEEE Press collection through IEEE Xplore at no additional cost. The eBook collection spans a number of today's technologies across 15 content areas. There are 13 free eBooks for the subject of Signal Processing & Analysis, and they can be accessed using your IEEE web account.

The Hong Kong Chapter of IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) organized the 4^th Signal Processing Postgraduate Forum on Saturday, April 24 2010 at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.  Every two years, the SPS Hong Kong Chapter organizes the Forum as an opportunity for the local signal processing research students to get together and discuss their research.

Under the auspices of the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), Pennsylvania State University (PSU), Tufts University and the University of California-Riverside are collaborating to establish an Industry/University Cooperative Research Center on optical wireless technologies, with PSU as the lead institution. A planning workshop will take place on June 8-10 2010 at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, PA.

# US 7,702,408, “Extending digital rights management and authentication to audio speakers”;
# US 7,702,405, "System and method for transferring non-compliant packetized and streaming data into and from a multimedia device coupled to a network across which compliant data is sent”;
# US 7,698,009, "Control surface with a touchscreen for editing surround sound";
# US 7,698,008, "Content-based audio comparisons";
# US 7,696,426, "Recombinant music composition algorithm and method of using the same";
# US 7,693,289, "Method and apparatus for remote control of an audio source such as a wireless microphone system";
# US 7,689,303, "Data transfer in audio codec controllers";
# US 7,684,885, "Wireless digital audio system".