IEEE Spanish Signal Processing and Communications Joint Chapter’s Activities in 2015

By Víctor P. Gil Jiménez - Chair of the IEEE Signal Processing and Communications Joint Chapter, Spain

Our Chapter had a fantastic year in 2015. We experienced significant growth with many activities, including the coordination of the Distinguished Lecturer Tour by Prof. Hamid Jafarkhani across five countries. This tour started in Italy, where he attended the Annual Meeting of GTTI (National Telecommunications and Information Theory Group), then moved to France, and later to Spain, where he gave three talks at the University Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), Polytechnic University in Madrid (UPM), and the University of Malaga (UMA), with the topic “Distributed Space time Coding and Cooperative Communications for Next Generation Wireless Broadband Systems.” Then he travelled to Portugal, and finally to Switzerland. This talk was a very interesting introduction to the history of space time coding, followed by a discussion of what we can expect from it in the near future of broadband communications.

Prof. Ying-Dar Lin answering questions.

In addition, the chapter organized several other Distinguished Lectures, including the one by Prof. Hamid Krim at the University of Alcala (UA) and Polytechnic of Valencia (UPC), with the topics “Sparsity, Convextity, Nullity and all that...,” and “Sensor and Social Networks: A Case for Topological Data Analysis.” There was also a lecture by Prof. Jianwei Huang at the CTTC speaking about “Mobile Data Offloading.” Prof. Ying-Dar Lin gave several talks at Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC), the University of Zaragoza (UZA), and the University Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M) on the topics “Software Defined Networking: Why, Where, When, and How,” “ Research Roadmap Driven by Network Benchmarking Lab (NBL): Deep Packet Inspection, Traffic Forensics, WLAN/4G/5G, Embedded Benchmarking, Software Defined Networking, and Beyond,” and “Traffic Forensics: Capture, Replay, Classification, Detection, and Analysis,” during which he shared his experiences during the past 15 years in the field. Finally, in September Prof. John Thompson gave a DL at the University Carlos III (UC3M) and the University of Malaga (UMA) on the topic “The Advantage of Communications Enabling the Smart Grid,” being at the same time at IEEE EUROCON held by the University of Salamanca (USAL).

As it can be seen, the activities have been spread around the country in order to reach as many IEEE members as possible. Several of these activities attracted great interest by IEEE members, and the discussions after them valuable for the attendees. Indeed, the Chapter was awarded by the IEEE Spanish Section as the Best Chapter in 2015.

All past activities, including some streaming, and the new activities can be found at our new webpage: http:\\spcom.ieeespain. org, which is also the best way to contact the chapter board and other IEEE members. We encourage you to share your ideas with us. If they are interesting and possible, we will do our best to make them a reality.