Welcome from the General Chair
Technical Program Chairs' Overview
On behalf of the ICASSP 2005 Organizing Committee we welcome you to Philadelphia, a city of elegance, historical beauty, and modern inspiration. American independence began there, with the adoption of the Declaration of Independence in Independence Hall on July 4, 1776. A decade later, the U.S. Constitution was drafted in Philadelphia and the city became the Nation’s first capital in 1790. The city itself was founded by William Penn, a believer of people living in harmony and freedom of religion. The word Philadelphia is of Greek origin and translates into “city of brotherly love” a term quite fitting for a city that would become the temporary capital of the new United States and the symbol of independence.
ICASSP, the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s flagship conference, is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical meeting focused on signal processing and its applications, covering the areas of communications, speech and image processing. ICASSP 2005 is celebrating its 30th anniversary and is returning to Philadelphia, the city that hosted the first ICASSP in 1976.
The conference starts on a Friday, March 18 and goes through Wednesday of the following week. Friday and Saturday are dedicated to a great selection of advanced and basic tutorials on cutting-edge topics. The Welcome reception is on Saturday evening, March 19. The technical program begins on Sunday at 12:30pm with the Awards Ceremony. Following the presentation of awards there will be a one-hour long keynote address, and one two-hour technical session. For each of the following three days, there will be a one-hour long plenary talk in the morning, followed by three two-hour long technical sessions. Each technical session consists of seven oral sessions and eight poster sessions in parallel.
This ICASSP is featuring several non-traditional additions. ICASSP 2005 introduces the first ever ICASSP Student Paper Competition. The student nominees, who have been identified during the review process, will be honored at the Welcome Reception on Saturday at 5:30pm. The finalists will be determined based on their presentations and will be announced after the end of the Conference and in the May issue of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine. We are grateful to the U.S. Office of Naval Research for subsidizing the travel expenses of the student award winners through a grant of $10K, and also to International Computer Science Institute, IBM Research, Seagate Technology, InterDigital, and Synplicity for their support. We would also like to thank Texas Instruments and The MathWorks for their participation in ICASSP 2005.
In addition to the regular oral and poster sessions, there will be four panel sessions: one each day after the end of the sessions on Sunday and Tuesday, one over the lunch break on Tuesday, and one during the afternoon technical session on Monday.
The ICASSP 2005 proceedings will be available on CDROM, but in addition, this ICASSP will be released on DVDROM which will also contain supplemental multimedia files with the papers.
ICASSP 2005 offers to IEEE members a limited number of passport registration packages. This is a new form of registration, and includes conference registration, two tutorials, and the added value of a DVD with the SP Society member electronic library (SPeL) containing journal and conference articles of the SP Society through 2001.
Philadelphia is the home of some 1.5 million residents (an additional 3 million residents are comfortably ensconced in its suburbs). Its prime location serves as a great stopping place between New York and Washington D.C. During spring temperatures are variable. The average daily high temperature for Philadelphia in March is 50F or 10C, with average low temperatures of 33F or 1C. Philadelphia has several attractions to offer, a good number of which are within walking distanced from the conference site. Those include the Liberty Bell, Independence Hall and the new National Constitution Center, the city’s Art District, the renowned Philadelphia Orchestra. Other major attractions are the Philadelphia museum of Art and the Barnes Foundation.
We would like to thank everyone who helped in the organization of this ICASSP, the student awards sponsors, the student volunteers, CMS, and Mercy Kowalczyk of IEEE. Welcome to ICASSP 2005 in Philadelphia!
Athina P. Petropulu, General Chair
Xiang-Gen Xia, General Co-Chair
It is our great pleasure to welcome you to ICASSP 2005. Since its beginning 30 years ago, ICASSP has been the premier technical conference on signal processing and on its applications to audio/acoustics, speech, image, multimedia, communication, and other areas. It provides a prominent forum for the creation and dissemination of signal processing knowledge contributed by scientists and engineers from all over the world.
This year, we received a record number of 2732 submissions that are broken down as follows in terms of the Signal Processing Society Technical Committees (TCs) and special sessions:
| Speech Processing | 571 |
| Image & Multidimensional Signal Processing | 520 |
| Signal Processing for Communications | 405 |
| Signal Processing Theory and Methods | 378 |
| Sensor Array & Multi-channel Signal Processing | 189 |
| Machine Learning for Signal Processing | 179 |
| Audio & Electroacoustics | 152 |
| Design & Implementation of SP Systems | 82 |
| Multimedia Signal Processing | 79 |
| Industry Technology Track | 60 |
| Signal Processing Education | 18 |
| Special Sessions | 102 |
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 the papers were thoroughly and fairly reviewed, most submissions received three reviews this year. The review process is a monumental task. The high degree of professionalism demonstrated by the TCs is a major factor contributing to the success of ICASSP. Much of the credit goes to the TC members and reviewers, who worked hard under the TC leadership of Mazin Rahim, Antonio Ortega, Alle-Jan van der Veen, Ananthram Swami, Petar Djuric, Alex Gershman, Max Wong, Michael Zoltowski, Tülay Adali, Michael Brandstein, Wayne Burleson, Yu Hen Hu, Eli Saber, and Huseyin Abut. Several TC chairs were also efficiently seconded by area coordinators who had the responsibility of a group of expert reviewers.
We, as Technical Program Chairs of the conference, worked closely with the TC chairs to put together the final technical program. Conference Management Services, and in particular, Lance Cotton and Billene Mercer, provided the excellent infrastructure and support that enabled that technical program to come together. We want to express our special thanks to all these people, to all the contributing authors, and to the special session chairs who organize outstanding sessions on timely topics.
In this year’s ICASSP Technical Program, we have organized the papers into 11 technical tracks, comprising 70 lecture and 80 poster sessions. Among the 1430 accepted 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. A new feature of this ICASSP is the student paper contest, which was coordinated by Javier GarciaFrias and will allow the TCs to distinguish the work of bright, young researchers.
In preparation for this year’s conference, a call for Special Sessions and Tutorials was issued last Summer. Gonzalo Arce, the Tutorial Chair, spearheaded the organization of this year’s tutorial program, which consists of fourteen high-quality tutorials to be held prior to the start of the regular technical program. Zhi Ding, the Special Sessions Chair, did an excellent job coordinating the 17 special sessions. The special sessions cover leading-edge topics of interest to the signal processing community. They have been selected carefully so as to be complementary to the regular sessions. As a new feature this year, the first talk in each of these sessions will be an overview of the session topics.
The ICASSP 2005 Plenary Speakers program keeps the tradition of high quality and motivating topics highlighting key issues in signal processing. This year, four plenary talks are planned. The four plenary talks are to be given by C. Nikias on “Can Hollywood Survive in the Digital Age?”, by L. Tong on “Signal Processing for Large Scale Sensor Networks”, by A. Hero on “Gene Profiling, Clustering, and Networking”, and by B. H. Juang on “Making Machines Speak and Listen - Why It is Still Interesting”.
This year’s conference will also feature four panel sessions: “Women in signal processing”, “Does the world need more engineers?”, “Funding agencies: signal processing research for communications - current focus and visions for the future” and “When will smart antennas be ready to the market?” These panel sessions will provide information on important topics to our community and allow for interactive debate.
We look forward to seeing you in Philadelphia!
Kenneth E. Barner and Jean-Christophe Pesquet
Technical Program Co-chairs, ICASSP 2005