Minutes of the SPCOM-TC face-to-face meeting at SPAWC 2005, NYC, June 6, 2005

Meeting commenced at 1 pm

Members attending (19): Gregori Vasquez, Javier Garcia-Frias, Hesham El Gamal, Robert Heath, Phil Schniter, Geert Leus, Jonathan Manton, Visa Koivunen, Daniel Xu, Constantinos Papadias, Luc Vandendorpe, Pierre Duhamel, Brian Sadler, Xiaodong Wang, Ananthram Swami, Nikos Sidiropoulos, David Gesbert, Anna Scaglione, Yingbo Hua

Members absent (11): Mounir Ghogho, Marc Moonen, See-May Phoong, Bhaskar Rao, Phil Regalia, Ali Sayed, Xiang-Gen Xia, Holger Boche, Helmut Boelcskei, Naofal Al-Dhahir, Franz Hlawatsch Vazquez

Meeting was called to order by A. Swami.

• Anna Scaglione updated the TC on SPAWC 2005. There were a record 256 registrants, with many student attendees.

• Dirk Slock updated the TC on progress towards SPAWC 2006. The SPAWC'06 dates have now been changed to 2-5 July, and the budget looks healthy.

• There was a general discussion regarding workshop budget surpluses, reduced student regsitration fees, etc.

• Nikos Sidiropoulos attempted to play video submitted via s-mail by Thomas Kaiser containing 15-minute presentation of Duisburg's bid for SPAWC2007. Audio volume was aparently low at recording, and it was difficult to follow the presentation. All members had soft copy of presentation slides.

• Visa Koivunen subsequently presented the Helsinki proposal for SPAWC 2007. It was noted that the Finnish Academy has agreed to assume financial responsibility for the event.

• Nikos Sidiropoulos updated the TC regarding the awards process. Nikos Sidiropoulos and Ananthram Swami emphasized the importance of TC member participation and voting.

• There was a discussion regarding Ali Sayed's suggestion to institute a hard rule prohibiting nomination of papers co-authored by colleagues who have already received the same paper award within a two year window upon recommendation of the SPCOM-TC. Ali's rationale was to promote award diversity among the numerous outstanding colleagues in the SPCOM area. The consensus of the TC was that this aspect should be kept in mind but that instituting a hard rule is not necessary.

• Brian Sadler updated the TC about the AE pool and the associated AE candidate endorsement process. There was a brief discussion of the TC's role with respect to the Trans. on wireless Communications AE selection process.

• Pierre Duhamel updated the TC about ICASSP06, specificaly regarding the review of special session submissions. There was a subsequent discussion about the best way to select candidates for ICASSP student paper awards. Several ideas were discussed. Anna Scaglione suggested to include a "student paper award quality" button for reviewers to click during the review process (drawback: not all reviewers are TC members, how do we normalize the mean and variance of reviewer scores?). Consensus was not reached, the TC will revisit this issue.

• Xavier Garcias-Frias shared his experience from handling the student paper award process for ICASSP 2005.

Meeting adjurned at 1:55 pm.

Transcribed by Nikos Sidiropoulos

Submitted by Ananthram Swami