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SPM e-Newsletter

April 2007
 

Welcome to the opening issue of SPM e-Newsletter, a new form of publication introduced by the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.  The e-Newsletter will complement the bi-monthly Magazine to serve the members in the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS).  Through email notification and expanded coverage on its website, the e-Newsletter will provide members with timely updates on:

• society and technical committee news,

• conference and publication opportunities, new books, and Ph.D. theses,

• signal processing related research opportunities, and

• activities in industry consortiums, local chapters, and government programs.

The e-Newsletter is a gateway to reach out to signal processing professionals around the world.  We invite you to contribute and share your news with tens of thousands of SPS members through this monthly electronic publication with fast turn-around cycle! At the bottom of this web page you may find instructions to submit news items and contact information of the e-Newsletter Team. Contributions submitted by the 20^th day of each month will be considered for inclusion in the next month’s e-Newsletter.
 

Society News          Conference News      Publication News    TC News      Chapter and DL News
Industry/Standard    X-disciplinary News   New PhD Theses    New Books    Job Portals

Highlights of This Issue

• Introducing SPM e-Newsletter   Call for Information
   
• Society News   SPS 2006 awards announced; 37 new fellows honored
   
• Conference News  ICASSP 2007 - Hawaii (April 15-20, 2007)
   
• New Journal and Cfp  Introducing the Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (JSTSP)
   
• TC News  Exclusive In-depth Report from the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee
   
• Distinguished Lectures   Check out upcoming SPS Distinguished Lectures near you
   
• Chapter News   Washington Chapter established; Activity reports from UK/Ireland and Chicago
   
• Industry News   Exploratory Stream Processing Research at IBM
   
• X-disciplinary News  European collaboration on Signal Processing in the EncryptEd Domain (SPEED)
   
• New PhD Theses and New Books

PDF Version

1. Society News

SPS 2006 Major Awards Announced:  IEEE Signal Processing Society congratulates the following SPS members who will receive the Society's 2006 prestigious awards during ICASSP 2007 in Honolulu, Hawaii.

SOCIETY AWARD Petre Stoica, "for outstanding contributions to the theory and applications of statistical signal processing through fundamental research papers and prominent books." TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS Arye Nehorai, "for fundamental contributions to sensor array processing with applications to radar, sonar, biomedicine, and the environment." Chin-Hui Lee, "for exceptional contributions to the field of automatic speech recognition." MERITORIOUS SERVICE AWARD Richard V. Cox, "for exceptional and dedicated service over many years as a leader of the IEEE Signal Processing Society." IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE BEST PAPER AWARD Zixiang Xiong, Angelos D. Liveris and Samuel Cheng, for the paper entitled, "Distributed Source Coding for Sensor Networks," published in the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Volume 21, Number 5, September 2004. BEST PAPER AWARDS Eduard A. Jorswieck and Holger Boche, for the paper entitled, "Optimal Transmission Strategies and Impact of Correlation in Multiantenna Systems with Different Types of Channel State Information," published in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Volume 52, Number 12, December 2004. Dinggang Shen and Christos Davatzikos, for the paper entitled, "HAMMER: Hierarchical Attribute Matching Mechanism for Elastic Registration," published in the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, Volume 21, Number 11, November 2002. Richard J. Kozick and Brian M. Sadler, for the paper entitled, "Source Localization with Distributed Sensor Arrays and Partial Spatial Coherence," published in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Volume 52, Number 3, March 2004. Martin Vetterli, Pina Marziliano, and Thierry Blu for the paper entitled, "Sampling Signals with Finite Rate of Innovation," published in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Volume 50, Number 6, June 2002. Gerald D. T. Schuller, Bin Yu, Dawei Huang, and Bernd Edler for the paper entitled, "Perceptual Audio Coding Using Adaptive Pre- and Post-Filters and Lossless Compression," published in the Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, Volume 10, Number 6, September 2002. YOUNG AUTHOR BEST PAPER AWARD Herbert Buchner and Robert Aichner, for the paper co-authored with Walter Kellermann entitled, "A Generalization of Blind Source Separation Algorithms for Convolutive Mixtures Based on Second-Order Statistics," published in the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, Volume 13, Number 1, January 2005. Jean-François Chamberland, for the paper co-authored with  Venugopal V. Veeravalli entitled, "Decentralized Detection in Sensor Networks," published in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Volume 51, Number 2, February 2003. Joakim Jaldéni, for the paper co-authored with Björn Ottersten entitled, "On the Complexity of Sphere Decoding in Digital Communications," published in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Volume 53, Number 4, April 2005. Michael L. Seltzer, for the paper co-authored with Bhiksha Raj and Richard M. Stern entitled, "Likelihood-Maximizing Beamforming for Robust Hands-Free Speech Recognition," published in the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, Volume 12, Number 5, September 2004.

For more information about SPS awards, visit http://www.ieee.org/organizations/society/sp/awards.html .

37 SPS members elevated to IEEE Fellow:  The IEEE Signal Processing Society congratulates these Society Members who were elevated to Fellow as of 1 January 2007. Each year, the IEEE Board of Directors confers the grade of Fellow on up to one-tenth percent of the members.  To qualify for consideration, an individual must have been a Member, normally for five years or more, and a Senior Member at the time for nomination to Fellow. The grade of Fellow recognizes unusual distinction in IEEE’s designated fields. Visit this link for full citations of these new fellows and more information about the Fellow program.

Ronald Aarts, Paul Antonik, Gregory Bottomley, Kwang-Cheng Chen, Tsuhan Chen, Grace Clark, Pierre Comon, Gary Elko, Wanda Gass, Fulvio Gini, John L. Hansen, Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Reginald Lagendijk, Sang-Uk Lee, Steven Leeb, Jerome Liang, Alexander Loui, Zhi-Quan Luo, Urbashi Mitra, Marc Moonen, Antonio Ortega, Ioannis Pitas, Nalini Ratha, Brian Sadler, Hideaki Sakai, Seiichi Sampei, Kiyohiro Shikano, John Smith, Athanasios Stouraitis, Reiner Thomae, Annamaria Varkonyi-Koczy, Rodney Vaughan, Maximus Viergever, Bo Wahlberg, Lihua Xie, Zixiang Xiong, Jar-Ferr Yang.

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2. Conference News

ICASSP 2007 Call for Participation.  April 15-20, 2007, Honolulu, Hawaii.  http://www.icassp2007.com/

The IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) is the world’s largest and comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications. The conference will feature world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and over 50 lecture and poster sessions. 

This year 2912 papers were submitted, out of which 1344 papers were accepted for presentation. The conference features 12 special sessions and 16 tutorials, offering a broad spectrum of choices for the attendees. Four outstanding plenary speakers will discuss the following emerging topics:

-  Expanding Utility of the Amazing and Ubiquitous Cell Phone  (Irwin Mark Jacobs, Co-Founder and Chairman, QUALCOMM)

-  Fifty Years of Progress in Speech Recognition Technology -- Where we are, and where we should go (Sadaoki Furui, Tokyo Institute of Technology)

-  Embedded Intelligence: Beyond Sensor Webs  (Shankar Sastry, University of California, Berkeley)

-  Network Media Distribution: A Decade of Revolution   (Philip R. Wiser, President and Chairman, Building B; Former Chief Technology Officer of Sony Corporation of America)
 

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3. Publication News


Upcoming deadlines for Signal Processing Magazine:  http://www.ieee-spm.org/?i=cfp 

• Special Issue on Spoken Language Technology: white paper June 1, 2007
• Special Issue on Visual Cultural Heritage: white paper due July 1, 2007
• SPM Columns/Forums rolling submission deadlines

Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (JSTSP) - A new SPS journal: 

J-STSP is a new journal of the IEEE Signal Processing Society that emphasizes emerging technical areas within the discipline. The first issue of the journal will appear in June, and will be on the topic of "Adaptive Waveform Design for Agile Sensing and Communication." Other special issues with open submission dates are:

• "Signal Processing and Networking for Dynamic Spectrum Access" - Deadline: 15 April 2007
• "MIMO-Optimized Transmission Systems for Delivering Data and Rich Content" - Deadline: 15 July 2007
• "Genomic and Proteomic Signal Processing" - Deadline: 1 September 2007

For more information on submitting papers to these special issues, or how to propose a topic for the journal, please visit the J-STSP website: http://www.ece.byu.edu/jstsp .  Inquiries can be addressed to Prof.  A. Lee Swindlehurst, Editor-in-Chief  (Brigham Young University, UT, USA) - Email:  swindle at ee.byu.edu

Recent Issues of SPS Sponsored and Co-sponsored Publications

IEEE Signal Processing Magazine (Volume: 24, Issue: 2;  Cover;  Contents)
     Special Section on "Computer Generated Sounds and Music for All"  

IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (Volume: 15, Issue: 3;  Table of contents)  

IEEE Transactions on Image Processing  (Volume: 16, Issue: 4;  Table of contents) 

IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security (Volume: 2, Issue: 1;  Table of Contents)

IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing  (Volume: 55, Issue: 4;  Table of Contents) 

IEEE Signal Processing Letters (Volume: 14, Issue: 4;  Table of Contents)
 

IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (Volume: 26, Issue: 3)

IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (Volume: 6, Issue: 4)

IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (Volume: 9, Issue: 3)

IEEE Sensors Journal  (Volume: 7, Issue: 4)

IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications  (Volume: 6, Issue: 3) 
 

Computing in Science & Engineering Magazine (Volume: 9, Issue: 2) 

IEEE MultiMedia (Volume: 14, Issue: 1)

 

Expanded Content Offering on IEEE Xplore - Online Course and Standards Subscriptions

IEEE members can now purchase individual courses from the "IEEE Expert Now" collection directly through the IEEE Xplore digital library. IEEE Expert Now courses feature IEEE’s educational content delivered in one-hour, online courses. The interactive, multimedia, peer-reviewed course material contains the latest information on emerging technologies and cutting-edge trends presented by the leading experts in IEEE fields of interest. IEEE members can purchase each one-hour course for $69.95, with unlimited online access for 30-days from date of purchase. To review the course catalog, visit http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/modules/modulebrowse.jsp .

Also newly available through the IEEE Xplore digital library are the IEEE Standards Online subscription packages. Subscribers can sign up for email notifications of new content and multiple search options, including searches by standard status and industry grouping. For more information on the IEEE Standards Online subscription packages, visit http://www.ieee.org/digitalsubs .

For more information and resources about IEEE educational activities, visit the IEEE Educational Activities Board (EAB) at http://www.ieee.org/portal/pages/education/aboutus.html .
 

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4. TC News

Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC)

The IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (SLTC) has undergone significant changes over the past year. One of the most significant and symbolic changes is the change in the TC’s name from the Speech Processing Technical Committee to the Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee. This change is one of several outcomes of the efforts by the “SPS Ad-Hoc Committee of Advancing and Strengthening Speech” to help the IEEE Signal Processing Society embrace newer areas of spoken language processing in addition to the well-represented areas of speech coding, recognition, and synthesis. Outcomes of this committee’s efforts include renaming the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing to IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, broadening the EDICS to reflect the range of topics within speech and spoken language processing, and creating a new biannual workshop on Spoken Language Technology.

Learn more about the first biannual workshop, the SLTC leadership and members, and SLTC's recent major effort through this in-depth report. 

Signal Processing Theory and Methods (SPTM) Technical Committee

The Signal Processing Theory and Methods (SPTM) Technical Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society promotes activities within the technical areas of DSP and statistical signal processing theory and methods. The scope of interests to SPTM have a broad span ranging from digital filtering and adaptive signal processing to statistical signal analysis, estimation and detection. The SPTM TC sponsors the annual IEEE Statistical Signal Processing (SSP) workshop. This year's SSP workshop will be held August 26-29, 2007, in Madison, Wisconsin, a vibrant city situated on a narrow isthmus between two large lakes. The scope of the workshop includes basic theory, methods and algorithms, and applications of statistical methods in signal processing. Prospective attendees are invited to visit the workshop's webpage at http://ssp07.org or the SPTM's webpage at http://www.sptm.gatech.edu/ .

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5. Chapter News and Distinguished Lectures

Do you know?  IEEE SPS provides travel support for local chapters to invite SPS Distinguished Lecturers.  See a list of 2006 and 2007 SPS DLs, and check below for upcoming SPS Distinguished Lectures near you.

Chapter Activities at A Glance

IEEE SPS United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland Chapter

The United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland (UKRI) Chapter has been very active organizing scientific seminars on innovative research work by leading experts from academia and industry. From December to March, the Chapter has hosted three seminars, two SPS Distinguished Lectures, and a research exchange visit between an industry regulator and university research group. Learn more from this exclusive in-depth report.

IEEE SPS Chicago Chapter

The Chicago Chapter of the IEEE Signal Processing Society held a series of seminars in various technical areas. Among the speakers presenting were several IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer Speakers including C.C. Jay Kuo from the University of Southern California, Robert M. Gray from Stanford University, and Georgios B. Giannakis from the University of Minnesota. The chapter is scheduled to host another IEEE Signal Processing Society Distinguished Lecturer this month, Tsuhan Chen from Carnegie-Mellon University. For additional information about upcoming events, please contact Dan Schonfeld from the University of Illinois at Chicago or consult the IEEE Signal Processing Society Chicago Chapter web site. Dan Schonfeld also serves as the Representative of Regions 1-6 to the SPS Chapters Committee. Please contact him if you need assistance in creating a new signal processing chapter in your section.

IEEE SPS Washington Chapter Established

Over 200 SPS members from the D.C. metropolitan area have formed a new SPS local chapter in 2006. The new SPS Washington chapter will foster interactions among members, create opportunities for them to share common interests, and facilitate collaborations and career development.  Dr. Rama Chellappa, Minta Martin Professor of Engineering at University of Maryland, delivered a lecture at the opening event on September 20, 2006. Chellappa spoke on the subject of face and gait recognition research, by which the latest advances are enabling the integration of biometrics into video-based surveillance systems for homeland security and other applications. He discussed the challenges in getting these biometrics to work reliably, and how innovative research can help address these problems. Click here to check out the full story, and contact [washington.sps AT ieee.org] for more information about the chapter activities.
 

Interested in organizing a new SPS chapter, or participating activities in a SPS local chapter near you? 
Visit Local Chapter Resources at http://www.ieee.org/organizations/society/sp/chapter.html .

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6. Standard/Industry News

Learn Standards in a Nutshell from the latest issue of SPM on
"The H.264/AVC Video Coding Standard" by T. Wiegand and G.J. Sullivan (March 2007, pp. 148-153).

Exploratory Stream Processing Research at IBM

The Exploratory Stream Processing Systems (ESPS) team at IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center is investigating fundamental research issues for the production and management of information from continuous data streams, from both a systems and algorithmic perspective.  More and more applications seek to exploit valuable information captured from sensors ranging from cameras, to network packet capture devices, to instrumentation embedded in manufacturing machinery, to health or environmental sensors. Obtaining actionable information from these distributed, unstructured, noisy data streams requires applying machine learning, data mining, and signal processing techniques. Traditional database and transactional systems are not equipped to handle these processing requirements nor the volumes and real-time nature of incoming data streams.  Stream processing systems provide a high performance and scalable alternative to transactional systems, but come with a wealth of research challenges. Learn more about stream processing and collaboration opportunities in the in-depth report.

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7. Collaborative and Cross-disciplinary News

European Collaboration Project - SPEED (Signal Processing in the EncryptEd Domain)

SPEED is a new collaboration project funded by the European Commission's Information Security Technologies program, as part of a range of ideas for future and emerging technologies to be explored and realized. The goal of SPEED is to foster the advancement of the marriage between Signal Processing and Cryptographic techniques. By initiating and developing a totally new and unexplored interdisciplinary framework and technologies for signal processing in the encrypted domain, entirely new solutions will potentially emerge to the problem of security in multimedia communication/consumption and digital signal manipulations. Click here to learn more.

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8. New PhD Theses

Pedro Comesaña Alfaro (University of Vigo, Spain):
"Side-informed data hiding: robustness and security analysis," June 2006.
Advised by Prof. Fernando Pérez-González.

Whenever a researcher faces the design of a data hiding method, probably the two basic requirements that he/she will always take into account (besides perceptual imperceptibility) will be the robustness and security of that method. The core of this thesis is devoted to the analysis of these requirements for those data hiding methods with side information available at the embedder, i.e., where the embedder takes advantage of deterministically knowing the document to be watermarked. These methods, which currently constitute the state of the art of data hiding methods, have been extensively studied in the literature; there are however several important aspects which deserve attention and which have been analyzed in this thesis. Concerning the robustness analysis, one can highlight the computation of the exact probability of error of Distortion-Compensated Dither Modulation based on uniform quantizers and repetition coding under a wide range of attacks. Furthermore, a novel sensitivity attack, named the Blind Newton Sensitivity Attack, was proposed, showing to be effective against a wide range of state-of-the-art data hiding methods.

Click here to download the dissertation, or contact the author.
 

Javier Latorre (Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan):
"A study on speaker-adaptable multilingual synthesis," July 2006.
Advised by Prof. Sadaoki Furui.

In this thesis, a new method to synthesize multiple languages with any speaker’s voice, regardless of the languages actually spoken by that speaker, is proposed. This permits, for example, to synthesize Japanese, Spanish or other language with the voice of a speaker who only speaks German. The hypothesis of this approach is that given a sufficient number of speakers, their average voice is the same for any language. To create this average voice, speech data from multiple speakers of different languages are normalized and used to train a set of speaker-independent multilingual Hidden Markov models. These models are then adapted to a target speaker by means of maximum likelihood linear regression and some minutes of speech data from that speaker. From these adapted models, HMM-based synthesis can now generate speech in any of the languages included in the initial models with a voice that resembles that of the target speaker.  

Click here to download the dissertation, or contact the author at <javier.latorre AT toshiba.co.jp>.

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9. New Books

Multidimensional Signal, Image and Video Processing and Coding, John W. Woods, Academic Press, 2006.

[Contents]  1: Two-Dimensional Signals and Systems; 2: Sampling in Two-Dimensions; 3: Two-Dimensional Systems and Z-transforms; 4: 2-D Discrete Transforms; 5: Two-Dimensional Filter Design; 6: Introductory Image Processing; 7: Image Estimation and Restoration; 8: Digital Image Compression; 9: Three-Dimensional Signals and Systems Properties of 3-D Fourier Transform, 3-D Filters, 3-D Sampling Theorem; 10: Digital Video Processing; 11: Digital Video Compression; 12: Video Transmission over Networks. Read the book review in the latest issue of SPM (March 2007, pp. 160-161) or visit the publisher's site.

MIMO Wireless Communications, E. Bilgieri, A. R. Calderbank, A. G. Constantinides, A. Goldsmith, A. Paulraj and H. V. Poor (eds),  Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Book Description From the Publisher: Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) technology constitutes a breakthrough in the design of wireless communications systems, and is already at the core of several wireless standards. Exploiting multipath scattering, MIMO techniques deliver significant performance enhancements in terms of data transmission rate and interference reduction. This book is a detailed introduction to the analysis and design of MIMO wireless systems. Beginning with an overview of MIMO technology, the authors then examine the fundamental capacity limits of MIMO systems. Transmitter design, including precoding and space-time coding, is then treated in depth, and the book closes with two chapters devoted to receiver design. Written by a team of leading experts, the book blends theoretical analysis with physical insights, and highlights a range of key design challenges. It can be used as a textbook for advanced courses on wireless communications, and will also appeal to researchers and practitioners working on MIMO wireless systems. [Contents]  Preface; Abbreviations; 1. Introduction; 2. Capacity limits of MIMO Systems; 3. Precoding design; 4. Space-time coding for wireless communications: principles and applications; 5. Fundamentals of receiver design; 6. Multiuser receiver design.

Multimedia over IP and Wireless Networks – Compression, Networking and Systems, M. van der Schaar, P. Chou (eds), Elsevier, 2007.

Book Description From the Publisher:  This all-inclusive, expertly structured contributed volume will serve as an indispensable guide for professionals or researchers working in areas like networking, communications, data compression, multimedia processing, streaming architectures, and computer graphics. Beginning with a concise overview of the fundamental principles and challenges of multimedia communication and networking, this book then branches off organically to tackle compression and networking next before moving on to systems, wireless multimedia and more advanced topics. The Compression section advises on the best means and methodology to ensure multimedia signal (images, text, audio and data) integrity for transmissions on wireless and wired systems. The Networking section addresses channel protection and performance. In the Systems section the focus is on streaming media on demand, live broadcast and video and voice's role in real-time communication. Wireless multimedia transmission and Quality of Service issues are discussed in the Wireless Multimedia section. An Advanced Topics section concludes the book with an assortment of topics including Peer-to-Peer multimedia communication and multipath networks. [Contents]  Ch1: Multimedia Networking And Communication / Ch2: Error Resilient Video / Ch3: Error Resilient Audio / Ch4: Bandwidth Adaptation Mechanisms / Ch5: Scalable Video Coding For Adaptive Streaming Applications / Ch6: Scalable Audio Coding / Ch7: Channel Protection Fundamentals / Ch8: Channel Modeling And Analysis For The Internet / Ch9: Forward Error Control / Ch10: Network-Adaptive Media Transport / Ch11: Mac-Layer Wireless Channel Models / Ch12: Cross-Layer Wireless Multimedia / Ch13: QoS Support In Wireless Environments / Ch14: Streaming Media On Demand / Ch15: Real Time Communication / Ch16: Adaptive Media Playout / Ch17: Path Diversity / Ch18: Distributed Video Coding And Applications / Ch19: Media Overlays

 

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10. Job Listing Portals

http://careers.ieee.org/
http://jobs.phds.org/jobs/engineering/
http://engineering.academickeys.com/seeker_job.php

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Contributors of articles in this issue:

Marwan Al-Akaidi, Lisa Amini, Roberto Pieraccini, Mike Seltzer, Dan Schonfeld, and G. Tong Zhou.

Contributors:  Mike Seltzer, Chair of the SLTC Electronic Newsletter Subcommittee 
                   Roberto Pieraccini, SLTC Chair

Contributor: Marwan Al-Akaidi, UKRI Chapter Chair