ICASSP 2006

Technical Program Overview

Welcome to Toulouse, for the 31st edition of ICASSP, the premier conference in Signal Processing. Our field is constantly evolving. The «Speech Processing Technical Committee» is now the «Speech and Spoken Language Processing» TC. The «Bio Imaging and Signal Processing» TC was reviewing papers for the first time for this ICASSP. One new TC will meet for the first time at ICASSP: the Information Forensics and Security TC.

This year, excluding special sessions, we received a record-breaking 3040 submissions. The submissions figures are ranked below according to the various Signal Processing Society Technical Committees:

Compared with 2005, three of these TC’s show an increase in the number of submissions by more than 20% : SPTM, DISPS, and ITT. The SLP TC (the largest one in terms of submissions) also had an increase above the global increase percentage. The AE TC also has an above average increase in the number of submissions.

In order to ensure high conference quality, the acceptance rate for submitted papers was set to 48 %. This is slightly lower than last year and continues the trend observed in the last several years. This year, out of 3040 submissions, 1460 were accepted.

The challenging task of reviewing so many papers was efficiently handled by the TC’s under the supervision of Mazin Gilbert, Antonio Ortega and Sheila Hemami, G. Tong Zhou and Petar M. Djuric, Ananthram Swami and Nicholas Sidiropoulos, Alex Gershman, Tulay Adali and Jan Larsen, Michael Goodwin, Michael Unser, Chaitali Chakrabarti and Wayne Burleson, Yu Hen Hu, Eli Saber, and Huseyin Abut. All TC chairs and members worked very hard, with the help of external reviewers, to provide accurate and timely evaluations of the submissions.

For most papers, they managed to obtain three reviews. Most of the success of this conference should be credited to them. They also selected the student contest finalists, under the coordination of Inbar Fijalkow and Philippe Salembier. Awards will be decided by the TC’s after the presentations given at ICASSP, thus providing a well-deserved recognition to very bright young researchers.

The special sessions were handled by Josiane Zerubia and Patrick Flandrin, who selected 13 sessions out of the 18 that were submitted. The technical committees were also involved in the selection process. Josiane and Patrick did an excellent job of coordinating the selection of leading edge topics of interest to the signal processing community. Altogether, these sessions constitute a very good sample of emerging areas which nicely complement the regular sessions. The first slot of each session will feature an overview of the topic.

All these tasks were facilitated by the excellent infrastructure and support provided by Conference Management Services, and especially Lance Cotton and Billene Mercer. Their efficient work allowed the review process to run painlessly, and the technical program to be put together very smoothly. This year, the technical program is organized into 6 parallel oral sessions, plus 8 parallel poster sessions. The choice between acceptance as a poster or an oral presentation was made by the TC chairs based on subject grouping, and not on paper quality.

The overview of the technical program would not be complete without a word about the plenary speaker program, put together by Benoit Macq and Yves Tourneret. Four plenary talks are planned on «Cooperative Wireless Communication» by David Tse, «Discreet Signaling: An Information Theoretic Perspective» by Pierre Moulin, «Signal Processing Challenges in Automotive Engineering» by Mats Viberg, and «On Board Data Processing in Space Missions» by Jacques-Emile Blamont. Undoubtedly, these talks will maintain the tradition of very high quality overviews of key issues in Signal Processing established over the years.

Tutorials, given this year on Sunday afternoon and Monday, before the conference, are attracting more and more attendees each year. The program was selected by Phil Regalia and Dirk Slock from proposals received after a call during the summer, and covers a nice mixture of presentations on new, open subjects, and of in depth presentations of new results.

Finally, everybody knows that conferences are also regular opportunities to exchange point of views and informations with good friends. Two such opportunities will be offered by interactive panel sessions on «Women in SP», and «Patentability of algorithms and software for signal processing».

In addition to the regular ICASSP conference, and in order to promote Signal Processing and scientific work at early levels of education, Inbar Fijalkow has organized a presentation of the “infinity project” on Monday 15th. Target audience is made of professors of College and of “preparatory schools” (special training to the best students to enter the top schools of engineering in France), as well as people involved in the definition of programs (inspecteurs d’académie). Even if this event is not full part of the conference, we think that such events truly deserve support by the Signal Processing community (Presentation will be in English, and the debate in French).

We look forward to working with you all in a friendly atmosphere, from Sunday, 14th to Friday 19th of May, 2006.

See you in Toulouse!

Pierre Duhamel and Luc Vandendorpe
Technical program co-chairs, ICASSP 2006