About the Inside Signal Processing E-Newsletter

Since April 2007, the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine has introduced a new form of publication - the Inside Signal Processing E-Newsletter.  This monthly electronic 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 Inside Signal Processing 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. IEEE members may manage their subscription of the email notification of the E-Newsletter and related SPS announcements at this page.  Please bookmark <http://enews.ieee-spm.org> for current and archived issues of the Inside Signal Processing E-Newsletter.

Submission Instructions  - Contribution for the January-February '08 Issue Due January 10, 2007

Visit the web submission site to provide your input. Make sure that you include your name, affiliation, and email and phone contact information. Contributions submitted by January 10, 2007 will be considered for inclusion in the next issue of the Inside Signal Processing E-Newsletter. Please contact the Associate Editors of the corresponding sections as listed below if you have questions. Your comments and suggestions on the new submission system are welcome.

Contact Information of the E-Newsletter Team

  Min Wu, SPM Area Editor for E-Newsletter, University of Maryland, College Park, USA (minwu AT umd.edu)

  Huaiyu Dai, Associate Editor, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA (huaiyu_dai AT ncsu.edu)
     Conference and publication news (including new books)

  Alessandro Piva, Associate Editor, University of Florence, Italy (piva AT lci.det.unifi.it)
     News and activities in local chapters and research groups (including new Ph.D. theses)

  Mihaela van der Schaar, Associate Editor, University of California, Los Angeles, USA (mihaela AT ee.ucla.edu)

     News and activities of SPS Technical Committees, industry consortiums and international standards

  Nitin Chandrachoodan, Digital Production Editor, Indian Institute of Technology – Madras (nitin AT ee.iitm.ac.in)
     Online submission and production system

  Shih-Fu Chang, SPM Editor-in-Chief, Columbia University, New York, USA (sfchang AT ee.columbia.edu)

  * Please replace "AT" in the email addresses with @.

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In-Depth Articles of E-News - December 2007

Exclusive Report from Bio Imaging and Signal Processing (BISP) Technical Committee Contributor:  Jelena Kovačević (TC Chair)

The Bio Imaging and Signal Processing (BISP) Technical Committee is one of the youngest in the Signal Processing Society; it is currently in its third year of existence. It was approved and formed in late 2004, in response to the growing need within our society to have a forum and umbrella for activities related to processing of signals in biology and medicine. Specific fields of interest include (but are not limited to): molecular and medical imaging, microscopy, SP in computational biology and biological networks, signal processing of physiological signals, and bioinformatics.

The BISP TC is organized similarly to the other TCs: Chair with a two-year term (Michael Unser was the inaugural chair), Vice Chair with a two-year term (currently Erik Meijering), and a membership of 32 members with three-year terms, including the current Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. Each year, a third of the membership is renewed. Member responsibilities include reviewing for conferences (including ICASSP, ISBI, and GENSIPS), promoting activities in the Signal Processing Society related to the areas of biology and medicine, promoting papers in those areas and nominating them for paper awards, making connections to the funding agencies dealing with the BISP areas, etc. Unlike some of the other TCs, the BISP TC instituted a category of Associate Members (currently six members). These members are typically our younger colleagues for whom this is an opportunity to learn about the growing area and who provide us with additional resources to conduct the activities above.

Our members are diverse in many ways and we would like to continue promoting that: 21 of our members are in the general area of Bioimaging, six are in Bioinformatics and seven in Biomedical Signal Processing; 14 members are from North America, 19 from Europe and one from Asia; six members are female.

The BISP TC is intimately involved in planning and organizing International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI). All of its past and present chairs have been members of the BISP TC. Similarly, the leadership of International Workshop on Genomic Signal Processing and Statistics (GENSIPS) is from the BISP TC. These are examples of active involvement of the TC in promoting activities within our charter.

If you would like to get involved in the work of this new and exciting TC, want to contribute ideas, suggestions, or would simply like to learn more about it, please contact Jelena Kovačević <jelenak AT cmu.edu> or visit the TC website.
 

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Research Trend in Relaying and Cooperative Communications Contributor:  Aria Nosratinia

A relay channel consists of a source, a destination, and a relay that does not have a message of its own, but assists in the communication of the two other nodes. This channel was introduced by van der Muelen in 1971, and its capacity investigated by Cover and El Gamal in 1979. Then the topic laid dormant for many years, until the appearance in 1998 of the work of Sendonaris, et al. Since then, the relay channel has been the focus of much attention.

A key difference between the relay channel and the conventional packet forwarding in the network layer (e.g. TCP/IP) is that in TCP/IP, the packets go through one node at a time. The network layer has traditionally decoupled the operations of nodes, for robustness purposes. The relay channel, on the other hand, operates in the physical layer where the source and the relay's transmissions are coordinated.  Relaying has tangible benefits, especially under fading conditions in wireless links, but it also needs more complex signal processing.

Relaying has been introduced in the 802.16j (WiMax) standard. The present provisions for relaying in 802.16j are basic ones, and are mostly for coverage extension. The most sophisticated aspects of relayed cooperation are, at the moment, absent from the standards.

There has been some debate regarding the computational power needed for relaying, and if it is worth the savings in transmit power. In the past few decades, semiconductor and circuit technologies have reduced the cost of computation. Despite ominous clouds on the horizon, the trend has not abated to the present. While the computational power per flop has continued to shrink, the laws of propagation are immutable, so it seems that the future is with methods that reduce transmit power at the cost of additional computation. In the end, however, we must acknowledge that the validity of this argument (as well as the continued growth of the communications industry as a whole) is largely dependent on innovations in semiconductors and circuits.

Many open questions remain in both the theory as well as the practical aspects of the relay channel. It is too early to make specific predictions about the adoption of cooperative methods in commercial products. Nevertheless, the ideas and algorithms that are developed in cooperative communication seem too promising to lay fallow forever. It is not a stretch to predict that these ideas will be introduced into communication systems in the future, although possibly in ways that we do not foresee today.

Interested readers may read more from this tutorial article and recent special issues on cooperative communications in IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (Feb. 2007) and IEEE Trans. Information Theory (Oct. 2007).

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IEEE Signal Processing Magazine 2007 - Hosted by the Digital Video and Multimedia Lab at Columbia University
Inside Signal Processing E-Newsletter Hosted by the Communications and Signal Processing Labs at University of Maryland