Seen on the interwebs this week.

From David and Tibault here is an announcement:

Call for Papers
IEEE Circuits and Systems Society
IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems

Special Issue on *Circuits, Systems and Algorithms for Compressive Sensing*

The IEEE Journal on Emerging and Selected Topics in Circuits and Systems
(JETCAS) seeks original contributions for an issue on circuits, systems and algorithms for compressive sensing, scheduled to appear in October 2012.

Compressive sensing (CS) is an emerging discipline which has recently attracted increasing attention thanks to its ability to guarantee data compression during the signal acquisition phase and decompression/reconstruction thanks to suitable optimization algorithms (such as L_1 and L_0 norms minimization). These recent results have generated an explosion of research activity in a wide range of applications, ranging from radar signal to biomedical imaging and from data processing in sensor networks to multipath channel estimation. Aim of this issue is to move a step forward by linking the most recent results in CS theory and algorithms towards the actual circuits and systems implementing them, to achieve the desired application improvement.

The retained papers will present original works or review state of-the-art approaches that paves the way from theoretical results to circuits/systems implementation. Original contributions are solicited from the following non-exhaustive list of topics:

- Foundations and concepts of CS
- Algorithms for CS signal reconstruction
- Circuits and Architectures for CS
- Design and implementation of circuits/systems based on CS (RF receivers, A/D converters, Image Sensors)
- Image processing applications
- Biomedical signal applications
- Radar signal applications

Prospective authors should submit PDF versions of their papers following the instructions provided on the JETCAS web-site:
http://jetcas.polito.it/general.html

Submitted manuscripts should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere.  Manuscripts will undergo a peer review process according to standard IEEE regulations.

Manuscript submissions due: February 15, 2012 First round of reviews completed: May 1, 2012 Revised manuscripts due: June 1, 2012 Second round of reviews completed: July 1, 2012 Final manuscripts due: July 15, 2012


Guest Editors:
- David Allstot, University of Washington (allstot@ee.washington.edu)
- Riccardo Rovatti, University of Bologna (riccardo.rovatti@unibo.it)
- Gianluca Setti, University of Ferrara  (gianluca.setti@unife.it)

Thanks David and Tibault.

Vlad is implementing OMP in Python for insertion in scikits.learn. He recently implemented a sparse PCA algo on that platform.


Bob has some entries on his blog after a short break:

• Paper of the Day (Po'D): Matching Pursuits with Random Sequential Subdictionaries Edition
• Coming Papers

In the last entry, Bob mentioned a poster shown a SAHD by Phil Schniter and Jeremy Vila entitled An Empirical-Bayes Approach to Compressed Sensing via Approximate Message Passing.

Zhilin tells us about a paper that took seven years to publication.

Petros Boufounos announced one of his paper:High Resolution SAR Imaging Using Random Pulse Timing by Dehong Liu, Petros T. Boufounos

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) is a fundamental technology with significant impact in remote sensing applications. SAR relies on the motion of the radar platform to synthesize a large aperture, and achieve high resolution imaging of a large area. However, current strip-map SAR designs, relying on uniform pulsing, suffer from a fundamental trade-off between the azimuth resolution and the range coverage length. In this paper we overcome this trade-off using a randomized pulsing scheme combined with non-linear compressive sensing (CS) reconstruction. Our experimental results demonstrate significant improvement in the azimuth resolution using the proposed approach, without compromise on the range length of the imaged area.

Finally, of interest is the following video. At issue is not whether statements by the maker of Minecraft is true or not, but rather that there would be discussion on the claim. It looks as though some of the numbers we are able to deal with on a computer can now reach the actual size of the population being modeled (6 billion faces for instance for dictionary learning for face recognition).

 Credit: NASA / JPL / SSI / color composite by Emily Lakdawalla, A gaggle of moons, Cassini caught five moons at the edge of Saturn's ring system in this natural color photo from July 29, 2011. From left to right the moons are Janus, Pandora, Enceladus, Mimas, and Rhea.