Minutes of SPCOM-TC Meeting at ICASSP-2004, Montreal, Tuesday, May 20, 2004

Chair: Alle-Jan van der Veen
Roster: Ananthram Swami

• The meeting was called to order at 11:35

• 22 of 30 Members attended the meeting: Xiang-Gen Xia, See-May Phoong, Luc Vandendorpe, Dirk Slock, Brian Sadler, Ali Sayed, Daniel Xu, Constantinos Papadias, Javier Garcia-Frias, Gregori Vazquez, Helmut Boelsckei, Javier Fonollosa, Nikos Sidiropoulos, Mike Zoltowski, Anna Scaglione, Franz Hlawatsch, Alexei Gorokhov, Bjorn Ottersten, Yingbo Hua, Geert Leus, Ananthram Swami, Alle-Jan van der Veen

• New members were introduced (Anna, Daniel, Franz, Javier G-F) and just-retired members were thanked.

• SPAWC'04 Report was presented by Alle-Jan on behalf of Victor Barroso. Budget was reported to be under control, with 20K support from NSF. 133 of 187 papers were accepted. A nice program is being planned.

• SPAWC'05 status report was presented by Anna. Planning is on track; a surplus is expected. Depending upon sponsorship, registration fees may be reduced by $100, and will include banquet and a show. Student grants are planned. An awards committee will be formed. There was some discussion about whether or not SPAWC should include `wired' papers and whether `wired' should be explicitly mentioned in the CFP. The consensus was that SPAWC CFP does not preclude `wired', although it does not encourage it.

• SPAWC'06 proposals.

  Alle-Jan presented the proposal from Germany; dates and venues are to be TBD. Budget details etc. will be presented at the Lisbon meeting.

  Dirk presented the French proposal. Dirk has put together a good team, and expects a big surplus or reduced registration fees. Scheduling issues were discussed inconclusively (should SPAWC be well-separated from ICASSP which will be in Toulouse, or should it be the week before/after). Dirk will provide more details at Lisbon. Since the registration fees does not include hotels, information on hotels will be provided.

  A proposal from Brazil is expected to be presented at Lisbon.

  All proposals will be presented at Lisbon and the TC will vote on the venue at Lisbon.

  Action item: Alle-Jan to distribute all proposals electronically.

• Nikos volunteered to maintain the AE pool, both for TSP as well as for SPL. The TC will vote on candidates who will then be recommended to the EIC's. There was some discussion on whether the TC should recommend AE's to TWC.

• Awards process.

  [Side discussion on issues with the e-mail list maintained by SPS.]
  Ananthram reported on the paper awards process: TC volunteers went through all of SPCOM relevant papers in TSP 2003; a short-list of papers is currently being reviewed carefully.

  SPS appears to change the deadlines and procedures for awards from year to year. This year, SPMag and Education awards nominations should be sent directly to those committees. But the nomination process for SPMag needs to be clarified. This year, our TC is not considering any nominations for the SPMag award.

  Ali led a discussion on whether the TC should consider other awards.

  Action item: Ali to provide TC with a full list of society and IEEE awards.

• ICASSP 2004.

  There were many issues with the organization of ICASSP 2004; in particular, SPCOM was allocate far fewer lecture sessions than it had been in 2003, and not commensurate with the number of submissions. There are also issues of overlap with the SAM TC (e.g., MIMO sessions). It was suggested that the SPCOM and SAM TC chairs should co-ordinate the review of papers in overlapping areas (and at least the composition of such sessions).

• EDICS.

  Ali will circulate the new TSP EDICS. Alle-Jan indicated that the SPL EDICS may have to be revised soon.

• New members.

  9 of our members will be retiring this year, and another 5 are eligible for re-election. We need to look for good candidates.

• Alle-Jan circulated a copy of the TCs report to IEEE SPS BOG

• Our next face-to-face meeting will be at SPAWC'04, Lisbon, July 11-14. E-mail meetings will take place in July to vote on paper awards, and December to vote on new members.

• The meeting adjourned around 1:30 pm