Time to Get Affiliated?

Steve Young

SLTC Newsletter, April 2010

Time to Get Affiliated?

ICASSP is over for another year and its time to reflect on the year ahead. One of the main talking points at our annual Technical Committee (TC) meeting was the new Bylaws which have now been adopted by the Signal Processing Society. As I mentioned in the last newsletter, these were instigated by Alex Acero with the aim of harmonising the operation of all of the TCs around a common set of Policies and Procedures (P&Ps).

One particular innovation in these new P&Ps is that TCs are now encouraged to recruit a new class of member called an Affiliate. Affiliates are non-elected, non-voting members of the Technical Committee. Any IEEE SPS member interested in Speech and Language or non-IEEE members of professional organizations in related fields can sign up as an affiliate. All that you need do is to visit www.signalprocessingsociety.org/tcaffiliate and request membership.

Once signed up, affiliate members will receive various TC circulars including calls for Member and Vice Chair nominations, newsletter announcements and invitations to get involved in various TC activities. Affiliates may also be invited to act as reviewers for workshops and conferences.

IEEE student members are particularly welcome as affiliates. Indeed, we need students to affiliate to our TC because we have a new Student Subcommittee whose remit is to engage with students and facilitate greater sharing of ideas and information. We hope that this subcommittee will eventually provide tutorials, courses, networking events, access to job postings, student grants, and other activities of interest to students. This subcommittee will be run by students for students, and its chair will be a student. So if you are a student and you read this, please sign up as an affiliate. Your student status will be noted and you will in due course start to receive information from the Student Subcommittee.

The new Bylaws and Policies and Procedures Manual are available at: http://www.signalprocessingsociety.org/about/governance.

Steve Young

Steve Young is Chair, Speech and Language Technical Committee.