(Action items appear below in boldface)

In attendance: Pierre Duhamel, Dirk Slock, Alle-Jan van der Veen, Bjorn Ottersten, Michail Tsatsanis, Rick Blum, Lang Tong, Sergio Barbarossa, Chong-Yung Chi (representative for SPAWC 2001), Ananthram Swami, Brian Sadler, John Treichler, Zhi Ding, Michael Zoltowski, Lee Swindlehurst, Jitendra Tugnait and Georgios Giannakis.

Prof. Chong-Yung Chi of the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan attended the meeting to submit a proposal for hosting the 2001 SPAWC meeting at the Ta Shee Resort in Taiwan. After reviewing the proposal, the committee unanimously voted to approve it. Prof. Chi was advised that his tentative budget should show a larger profit before it is submitted to the Signal Processing Society (SPS) Conference Board. Prof. Chi will work together with Lee Swindlehurst in setting a date for the workshop and starting the SPS approval process. (Since the time the meeting was held, a tentative date of March 20-23, 2001, has been set for the next SPAWC workshop).

At the time of the meeting, very few candidates for paper award nominations had been received. A discussion ensued about how to increase both the number of candidates and the breadth of topics covered. Due to the impending deadline for nominations (June 1), it was decided that every member of the committee would be responsible for nominating at least one paper by the following week. After all nominations were received, Swindlehurst would be responsible for coordinating the paper award voting.

In the past, nominations for new committee members have only come from current members. It was agreed that the committee should allow any IEEE SPS member to nominate candidates for the SPCOM committee, and various ways to encourage such nominations were discussed. One method was via the SPCOM website, and Swindlehurst will add a link to the website encouraging new member nominations. The committee unanimously agreed to maintain the current voting procedure when new members are considered at the end of this year.

A discussion followed regarding how to maintain a pool of potential Associate Editors in the SPCOM area for the Signal Processing Transactions. At ICASSP, we had decided to try and vote for the current pool of AEs prior to the SPAWC meeting, but the vote did not take place. Tong will broadcast to the committee the names of those currently in the pool. The committee members will then send a Yes or No vote for each name in the pool to Giannakis. To remain in the pool, a candidate must receive a Yes vote from at least half the committee. It was decided that nominations for the Associate Editors pool could be sent to Tong at any time during the year. A vote for new members of the pool will be held periodically.