Welcome from the General Chair
Technical Program Chairs' Overview
On behalf of the ICASSP 2004 Organizing Committee, I welcome you to Montreal, a city where Europe meets North America. First settled by the French 350 years ago, and later on by the British, Montreal is a modern city where technology meets culture. It is the major metropolis of Quebec and the second largest city in Canada.
ICASSP is sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society and is the premier forum for the presentation of technological advances and research results in the fields of theoretical, experimental, and applied signal processing. ICASSP 2004 is the 29th in an series held annually every spring since 1976, which assemble leading scientists, engineers, and educators in signal processing from around the world.
Last year, in a very exceptional and unfortunate occurrence, ICASSP 2003 had to be cancelled owing to the SARS outbreak in Hong Kong. It was decided that we would offer to authors of papers in the 2003 Proceedings the opportunity to present their work this year (if they had not done so elsewhere), although there would be no re-publication of this work. Thus you will see a number of such papers at this year’s conference, specifically labelled as 2003 work.
We follow the traditional format for ICASSP. Monday is dedicated to tutorials, with the traditional Welcome Reception in the evening. Each of the next four days follows a similar format, i.e., a plenary session to start the day, with a well-known expert from different signal processing fields giving an hour-long presentation of wide interest. The initial morning of May 18th is dedicated to a special opening session with a keynote speech by a long-time leader in the field of signal processing. Following the keynote speech will be a welcome ceremony including presentation of awards. Typically, each day has three two-hour technical sessions, one in the morning following the plenary talk and two in the afternoon. Coffee breaks will occur both in the morning and afternoon. For space reasons, we have five oral sessions in parallel, with the large majority of papers presented as posters.
Montreal has many sites to visit and many activities to do outside of the conference, and the ICASSP site is well situated to allow both short lunch trips and longer tourist excursions. Montreal is a popular tourist city, yet by visiting in May one avoids the summer crowds. It is a very cosmopolitan city—one of the most diverse in North America, with people of many different cultures. As in all of Quebec, the majority speaks French, but English is spoken easily in almost all situations. We have comfortable weather in mid-May (the average high is about 20 degrees C). Montreal has many museums, many historic churches (including the magnificent Notre Dame Cathedral, Mary Queen of the World (right next to the ICASSP site), and the Oratory). Other major attractions: a world-class Casino, the Biodome, the Insectarium, the Botanical Gardens, and the 1976 Olympic Stadium. Early visitors may even find late-spring downhill skiing available at hills 2 hours away.
Finally, allow me to thank everyone who has contributed to making this ICASSP a success, with special thanks to our local organizing committee and to CMS, the conference management company. This conference would not exist if not for their efficient and timely help. Welcome to ICASSP 2004 in Montreal.
Douglas O’Shaughnessy
General Chair, ICASSP 2004
This year, we received a record number of 2556 submissions that are broken down as follows in terms of the Signal Processing Society Technical Committees (TCs) and special sessions:
| Speech Processing | 542 |
| Signal Processing Theory and Methods | 362 |
| Signal Processing for Communications | 368 |
| Image & Multidimensional Signal Processing | 357 |
| Sensor Array & Multi-channel Signal Processing | 184 |
| Audio & Electroacoustics | 153 |
| Industry Technology Track | 105 |
| Design & Implementation of SP Systems | 110 |
| Multimedia Signal Processing | 81 |
| Machine Learning for Signal Processing | 187 |
| Signal Processing Education | 11 |
| Special Sessions | 84 |
The submitted papers were routed to the appropriate TCs for review. The TCs have worked very hard, with the help of external reviewers, to ensure that each paper is thoroughly and fairly reviewed. The review process is a monumental task. The high degree of professionalism of the TCs is one major factor of the success of ICASSP. Much of the credit of goes to the hard work of all TC members and reviewers, under the leadership of the TC Chairs: Michael Picheny, Mats Viberg, Michael Brandstein, Thrasyvoulos Pappas, John Sorensen, Alle-Jan van der Veen, Alex Gershman, Magdy Bayoumi, Tulay Adali, Thad Welch, and Jennifer Trelewicz. We, as Technical Chairs of the conference, worked closely with the TC chairs to put together the final technical program. Conference Management Services, Lance Cotton and Billene Mercer in particular, provided the excellent infrastructure for the organization of the program. We want to express our special thanks to these people, to all the contributing authors, and to the special session chairs who organized those sessions.
In this year’s ICASSP Technical Program, we have organized the papers into 11 technical tracks, comprising 55 lecture and 88 poster sessions. Among the 1255 accepted regular papers, many, in fact most, will be poster presentations. The choice of oral or poster was made by the TCs based entirely on subject grouping.
We issued a call for Special Sessions and Tutorials last Fall. Lang Tong and Janusz Konrad, the Tutorial Chairs, spearheaded the efforts and organized the tutorial program consisting of eight high-quality tutorials, to be held prior to the start of the regular technical program. Aishy Amer, the Special Sessions Chair, did an excellent job of coordinating the 13 special sessions, while working closely with all the individual session chairs. The special sessions are leading edge topics of interest to the signal processing community. They have been selected carefully so as to be complementary to the regular sessions.
Our ICASSP 2004 Keynote and Plenary Speakers program keeps the tradition of high quality and motivating topics highlighting key issues in signal processing. This year, with the efforts of Plenary Chair Hui Jiang, an excellent keynote address and three plenary talks are planned. The keynote will be given by Nikil Jayant on the topic of “Pervasive Broadband: Opportunities for Signal Processing”. The three plenary talks will be given by Gene Frantz on “Human Speech: The Alpha and Omega of Signal Processing”, by Bill Dally on “Streaming Signal Processing”, and by Metin Akay on “Bio-complexity from System to Neuron and Beyond”. We look forward to seeing you in Montreal!
Li Deng and
Peter Kabal
Technical Program Chairs, ICASSP 2004