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The editor reflects on the special issue of the periodical which is based on the 2012 International Microwave Symposium held on June 17-22, 2012 in Montreal, Quebec. He mentions that due to increased number of submissions to the special issue, it has been divided into two issues the first one was published in December 2012, and the next one in January 2013. He adds that the aim behind including conference papers in the issue is to present results that might help improve engineering designs.

The IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society (IEEE MTT-S) International Microwave Symposium (IMS) was held in Montreal, QC, Canada, on June 17?22, 2012, and the conference Chair introduced several exciting ideas to stimulate paper submissions to the conference. First, the conference committee made a determined effort to increase publicity, especially in Asia. Second, and definitely more controversial, they reduced the paper length from the traditional four pages to three pages. The thought behind this was that it would make it easier for authors to write a journal paper based on the conference paper because the conference paper would not contain as much technical information. Thus, the authors would have an easier time meeting the IEEE MTT-S threshold that every paper, whether conference or journal, must present substantially new technical material. There were a record number of submissions to the IEEE MTT-S IMS, and there were a record number of submissions to this TRANSACTIONS' "Special Issue on the 2012 International Microwave Symposium." In fact, there were too many submissions for the reviewers, the Associate Editors, and me to complete all of the papers before the deadline for the December issue. Therefore, I have divided the IEEE MTT-S IMS "Special Issue on the 2012 International Microwave Symposium" into two parts, which will be published in this TRANSACTIONS' December 2012 and January 2013 issues. In the January 2013 Special Issue, the Editor-in-Chief will write a full editorial detailing the number of papers, the acceptance rate, and my opinion on the success or failure of the three-page experiment. In the meantime, please enjoy this Special Issue with 32 papers based on papers presented at the 2012 IEEE MTT-S IMS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elimination of intra-artifacts in EEG has been overlooked in most of the existing sleep staging systems, especially in deep learning-based approaches. Whether intra-artifacts, originated from the eye movement, chin muscle firing, or heart beating, etc., in EEG signals would lead to a positive or a negative masking effect on deep learning-based sleep staging systems was investigated in this paper. We systematically analyzed several traditional pre-processing methods involving fast Independent Component Analysis (FastICA), Information Maximization (Infomax), and Second-order Blind Source Separation (SOBI). On top of these methods, a SOBI-WT method based on the joint use of the SOBI and Wavelet Transform (WT) is proposed. It offered an effective solution for suppressing artifact components while retaining residual informative data. To provide a comprehensive comparative analysis, these pre-processing methods were applied to eliminate the intra-artifacts and the processed signals were fed to two ready-to-use deep learning models, namely two-step hierarchical neural network (THNN) and SimpleSleepNet for automatic sleep staging. The evaluation was performed on two widely used public datasets, Montreal Archive of Sleep Studies (MASS) and Sleep-EDF Expanded, and a clinical dataset that was collected in Huashan Hospital of Fudan University, Shanghai, China (HSFU). The proposed SOBI-WT method increased the accuracy from 79.0% to 81.3% on MASS, 83.3% to 85.7% on Sleep-EDF Expanded, and 75.5% to 77.1% on HSFU compared with the raw EEG signal, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that the intra-artifacts bring out a masking negative impact on the deep learning-based sleep staging systems and the proposed SOBI-WT method has the best performance in diminishing this negative impact compared with other artifact elimination methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IEEE International Symposium on Robotic and Sensors Environments (ROSE 2011) was held on September 17?18, 2011, at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, in Montreal, QC, Canada. ROSE 2011 was the first opportunity for the conference series to be conducted as an IEEE Symposium, following a sustained and successful number of ROSE Workshop venues from 2003 to 2010, that took place in Europe, Canada, and the USA. Following the tradition established in 2003, the ROSE Symposium addresses all aspects of sensing systems and technologies for robotics and industrial automation, as well as their impact on autonomous robotic and intelligent systems development and applications. At ROSE 2011, 41 papers presenting contributions of high quality were presented, addressing the diversity of problems and applications that combine sensors, decision systems, and robots. Following the symposium, a number of substantially extended manuscripts, inspired by papers presented at ROSE 2011, and addressing topics of particular relevance for the IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement, were submitted and went through a rigorous peerreview process, identical to that of regular paper submissions. Following this process, three manuscripts were accepted and are included in this Special Section. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Information about several papers discussed at the 22nd International Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA 2007) in Montreal, Quebec is presented. The conference was in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the paper entitled "No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering," by Fred Brooks. The panelists discussed whether Brooks' assumptions that the complexity of software was not accidental.

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is the preliminary stage of dementia, which may lead to Alzheimer’s disease (AD) in the elderly people. Therefore, early detection of MCI has the potential to minimize the risk of AD by ensuring the proper mental health care before it is too late. In this paper, we demonstrate a single-channel EEG-based MCI detection method, which is cost-effective and portable, and thus suitable for regular home-based patient monitoring. We collected the scalp EEG data from 23 subjects, while they were stimulated with five auditory speech signals. The cognitive state of the subjects was evaluated by the Montreal cognitive assessment test (MoCA). We extracted 590 features from the event-related potential (ERP) of the collected EEG signals, which included time and spectral domain characteristics of the response. The top 25 features, ranked by the random forest method, were used for classification models to identify subjects with MCI. Robustness of our model was tested using leave-one-out cross-validation while training the classifiers. Best results (leave-one-out cross-validation accuracy 87.9%, sensitivity 84.8%, specificity 95%, and F score 85%) were obtained using support vector machine (SVM) method with radial basis kernel (RBF) (sigma = 10/cost $= 10^{2}$). Similar performances were also observed with logistic regression (LR), further validating the results. Our results suggest that single-channel EEG could provide a robust biomarker for early detection of MCI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Features Kazuhiko Yamanouchi, the recipient of the 2004 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control Society Achievement Award held in Montreal, Quebec. Educational attainment; Career background; Contributions of the awardee to the vitality of the industry.

Describes the above-named upcoming conference event. May include topics to be covered or calls for papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Features Fred S. Hickernell, recipient of the 2004 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control Society Distinguished Service Award in Montreal, Quebec. Educational attainment; Career background; Contribution of Hickernell to the vitality of the industry.

Discusses the intelligent information processing-related topics discussed at the IFIP World Computer Congress held in August 2002 in Montreal, Quebec. Identifying communities of practice through ontology network analysis; Promise of Semantic Web; Role of artificial intelligence in supporting distributed intelligence over the Internet.