It is a great pleasure to welcome you at ICASSP 2003. ICASSP is the world's largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications. It provides a forum for scholars, scientists and engineers to disseminate their work and latest results and future perspectives. What made previous ICASSP so successful was the large spectrum of novel contributions by authors from all over the world. We are extremely pleased that the response to ICASSP 2003 call for papers was once again tremendous. We received a record number of 2377 submissions from 65 countries, and the titles of many papers coincide with the theme of this year's conference: Multimedia Signal Processing in the Information Era. The submissions can be broken down as follows among the eleven Signal Processing (SP) Society Technical Committees (TCs) including the Industrial Technology Track which has been fully integrated in the organization:

The papers were sent to the various TCs for review and every paper received at least two reviews. The entire review process is a monumental task and we are grateful to the professionalism and hard work of all TC members and reviewers under the leadership of Michael Brandstein, Magdy Bayoumi, Thrasyvoulos Pappas, Jennifer Trelewicz, John Sorensen, Scott Douglas, Arye Nehorai/Alex Gershman, Thad Welch, Alle-Jan Van der Veen, Mats Viberg and Michael Picheny. Some individuals in committees with many submissions had to review more than 30 papers each within a short period of time. We deeply appreciate their efforts, especially since much of the work occurred during the holidays. Overall, the quality of proposals was excellent and after much deliberation, we accepted 1290 papers for presentation at ICASSP 2003 from the 2377 submitted (an acceptance rate of 54.3%). Regrettably, we have to disappoint many authors of good papers due to space and time limitations. We thank them sincerely for their support and we hope they will still come and attend the conference this year.

Together with the committee chairs, we have organized the accepted papers into 69 lecture and 76 poster sessions. There are at most 7 parallel oral sessions and 7 parallel poster sessions. Each oral session will have 6 presentations while a poster session will consist of 10-14 papers. The allocation of a paper as an oral or poster presentation was primarily based on program focus and we do not view lecture sessions as more prestigious. Most of the sessions are tightly coupled with a particular TC, but there are also some areas that have significant overlaps in two or more TCs.

We organize the Student Forum in a slightly different format this year. To warrant certain degree of quality control, only those papers with a score just below the threshold to be accepted in the regular sessions would be considered. We invited 28 student authors (all are first authors) to participate and present their work in 4 poster sessions on Tuesday afternoon, April 7. However, their papers will not be published in the conference proceedings and the Forum serves as a venue for the students to share their research findings with the experts in the field.

In the fall, we invited proposals for Special Sessions and Tutorials at ICASSP 2003 on topics of special interest to the signal processing community. We have received an enthusiastic response and the Special Session Chairs, Qinag Huo and S.C. Chan, have selected 7 excited proposals: "Smart Meeting Rooms" organized by H. Bourlard, D. Gatica-Perez, I. McCowan and P. Wellner, "Exploiting High-level Information for High Performance Speaker Recognition" organized by Douglas Reynolds, "Multimedia Security and Right Management" organized by Min Wu and Mauro Barni, "Distributed Digital Signal Processing for Sensor Networking: Theory and Implementation" organized by Robert Nowak, Kannan Ramchandran and Minerva Yeung, "Multi-user MIMO Wireless Downlink Processing" organized by A. Lee Swindlehurst, "Support Vector Machines and Kernel Techniques in Signal Processing" organized by Maneul Davy, and "Image-based Rendering" organized by Harry Shum.

Tutorials will continue to be a feature of ICASSP and C.F. Chan, the Tutorials Chair, was instrumental in preparing and administering a wonderful tutorial program for ICASSP 2003. Of the 16 tutorial proposals we received, 9 were selected for presentation on Sunday, April 6. These tutorials cover a wide spectrum of leading edge topics of current interest to many students and researchers in the SP society. We are indebted to all the special session organizers and tutorial instructors for their outstanding contributions.

ICASSP 2003 is highlighted by one keynote address and two plenary talks and we are fortunate to have invited three distinguished speakers to share their vision and insight with us. Nikil Jayant will deliver a keynote address on "Pervasive Broadband: Opportunities for Signal Processing". In addition, Ya-Qin Zhang will talk about "Advances in Networked Media - Theory and Practice", and Georgios B. Giannakis will be speaking on "Ultra-Wideband Communications: An Idea whose Time has Come".

We look forward to welcoming you in Hong Kong. We are confident that ICASSP 2003 will be an enjoyable and rewarding conference. On the other hand, Hong Kong, a vibrant city better known as "Pearl of the Orient" also has a lot to offer and we hope you will find your stay here fascinating with fond memories.

P.C. Ching and W. Kenneth Jenkins
Technical Program Chairs
ICASSP 2003