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[

president’s

MESSAGE

]

IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE [6] MARCH 2015

Alex Acero

2014–2015 SPS President

a.acero@ieee.org

The IEEE Signal Processing Cup:

A Competition for Undergraduate Students

ignal processing is becoming

part of the curriculum in many

undergraduate engineering

programs. To leverage and rein-

force this, the IEEE Signal Pro-

cessing Society (SPS) has created the

IEEE Signal Processing Cup, a competi-

tion that provides undergraduate students

with the opportunity to form teams and

work together to solve a challenging and

interesting real-world problem using sig-

nal processing techniques and methods.

The theme of the inaugural 2014 com-

petition was “Image Restoration/Superres-

olution for Single-Particle Analysis.” Each

team participating in the competition was

composed of one faculty member (who is

the supervisor of the team members), at

most one graduate student (who will assist

the supervisor), and at least three but no

more than ten undergraduates. At least

three of the undergraduate team members

had to be either IEEE SPS members or

student members.

Twelve teams from all over the world

submitted their work. Three of these

teams were selected to present their work

at the International Conference on Acous-

tics, Speech, and Signal Processing

(ICASSP) 2014. I was part of the panel that

judged the three projects, and I was pleas-

antly surprised by the work of these

talented and energetic undergraduates. I

could envision several future start-ups

based on all three projects.

All three projects were very good, but

we had the difficult job of ranking them in

first, second, and third place as follows.

■ First place: EPOCH (Anik Khan,

Forsad Al Hossain, Tawab Ullas, Md.

Abu Rayhan, and Mohammad Ariful

Haque) from Bangladesh University of

Engineering and Technology

■ Second place: NtUeLsA (Kai-Wen

Liang, Yen-Chen Wu, Guan-Lin Chao,

Kuan-Hao Huang, Shao-Hua Sun,

Ming-Jen Yang, Po-Wen Hsiao, Ti-Fen

Pan, Yi-Ching Chiu, Wei-Chih Tu, and

Shao-Yi Chien) from National Taiwan

University

■ Third place: Uchihas (Emroz Khan,

Shiekh Zia Uddin, Mukhlasur Rahman

Tanvir, and Md. Kamrul Hasan) from

Bangladesh University of Engineering

and Technology.

Teams were awarded SPS-sponsored

prizes in the amounts of US$5,000,

US$2,500, and US$1,000 for first, second,

and third place, respectively.

Each team invited to ICASSP2014 had

their travel expenses supported by the

SPS. Each team member was offered up

to US$1,200 for continental travel, or

US$1,700 for intercontinental travel, with

at most three people from each team sup-

ported. We are very grateful to the Bioim-

aging and Signal Processing Technical

Committee for proposing the theme for

the first Signal Processing Cup and steer-

ing this competition and to Mathworks

for providing complimentary licenses of

MATLAB and selected toolboxes.

Following the success of the first com-

petition, we will be hosting another com-

petition at ICASSP2015 with the theme of

“Heart Rate Monitoring During Physical

Exercise Using Wrist-Type Photoplethys-

mographic Signals,” and we expect just as

much interest!

The students’s feedback was extremely

positive: they told us that they learned

much about signal processing and working

on a team, and they also relayed that this

was a tremendously enriching experience

for them. I encourage professors to help put

together more teams for the Signal Pro-

cessing Cup and undergraduate students to

participate in this unique opportunity.

[SP]

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MSP.2014.2378016

Date of publication: 12 February 2015

I WAS PART OF THE

PANEL THAT JUDGED

THE THREE PROJECTS,

AND I WAS PLEASANTLY

SURPRISED BY THE WORK

OF THESE TALENTED

AND ENERGETIC

UNDERGRADUATES.

THE WORLD’S NEWSSTAND

THE WORLD’S NEWSSTAND

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