IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - May 2018 - 3

Notes from the Editor

Improving the Quality of Life
for the Visually Impaired
By Saraju P. Mohanty

W

elcome to the third issue of
IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine this year. I
hope that the first two issues,
with the topics of smart health care and
smart technologies for sustainable smart
cities, respectively, were interesting
reading for the consumer electronics
(CE) community.
I am happy to report that the Inter-
national Conference on Consumer
Electronics (ICCE) 2018, for which I
was chair, went very well. The attend-
ees found the six keynote speakers, two
plenary panels, and the technical ses-
sions to be very enlightening. At the
IEEE CE Society's Board of Governors
meeting, I was pleased to learn that the
MIT group who conducted the CE
Society membership study reported that
all members read IEEE Consumer
Electronics Magazine. It is evident that
our magazine is driving the CE Society,
and I hope to take it to a place that
makes the CE Society proud.
At CES 2018, I saw a product that
could be used by visually impaired peo-
ple that converts images to audio signals.
Using this audio signal, the person is
able to comprehend what is being cap-
tured by the camera. Witnessing this
technology inspired me to include "con-
sumer electronics for the visually im-
paired" on the cover of this month's
issue. The January 2017 issue of IEEE
Consumer Electronics Magazine fea-

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2018.2797578
Date of publication: 10 April 2018

I am happy to report
that the International
Conference on Consumer
Electronics 2018, for which
I was chair, went very well.
tured the article "A Multitask Grocery
Assist System for the Visually Impaired,"
which presented interfaces, algorithms,
and hardware platforms to help visually
impaired people grocery shop. The relat-
ed CE systems can have a significant
impact on the estimated 285 million peo-
ple worldwide who are visually impaired.
This is an integral part of smart health
care that we covered in the January
2018 issue.

2018 AWARDS
The Ibuka Award, which is presented by
the IEEE for outstanding contributions
in CE technology, is named in honor of
Masaru Ibuka, the cofounder and honor-
ary chair of Sony Corporation. The 2018
Ibuka Award was conferred to Linus
Torvalds "for his leadership of the devel-
opment and proliferation of Linux." It
was a great honor for me to join IEEE
President James A. Jefferies to host Tor-
valds at ICCE 2018.

ICCE 2018
The Best Paper Awards were given as
follows:
▼ First Prize: "A Hardware-Trojan Clas-
sification Method Utilizing Boundary
Net Structures," by Kento Hasegawa,

▼

▼

Masao Yanagisawa, and Nozomu
Togawa
Second Prize: "Learning Data Aug-
mentation for Consumer Devices
and Services," by Joseph Lemley,
Shabab Bazrafkan, and Peter Corcoran
Third Prize: "Energy-Aware Core Switch-
ing for big.LITTLE Multicore Mo-
bile Platform," by Yeomin Nam and
Moonju Park.

IEEE CONSUMER ELECTRONICS
MAGAZINE AwARdS
The following awards were initiated
this year and, hence, were covered the
last three years. Next year, IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine will pres-
ent Best Paper and Best Performing
Member of the editorial board awards
for a specific year.
▼ Long-Term High-Impact Award:
"HEVC: The New Gold Standard
for Video Compression: How Does
HEVC Compare with H.264/AVC?"
by Mahsa T. Pourazad, Colin Doutre,
Maryam Azimi, and Panos Nasiopou-
los, July 2012
▼ 2015 Best Paper Award: "Brain-Com-
puter Interface Technology and Devel-
opment: The Emergence of Imprecise
Brainwave Headsets in the Commercial
World," by Narisa N.Y. Chu, July 2015
▼ 2016 Best Paper Award: "Everything
You Wanted to Know About Smart
Cities: The Internet of Things Is the
Backbone," by Saraju P. Mohanty,
Uma Choppali, and Elias Kougianos,
July 2016
▼ 2017 Best Paper (Joint Award): "Deep
Learning for Consumer Devices and
may 2018

^

IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

3
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