ICASSP 2008

Technical Program Overview

Welcome to Las Vegas for the 33rd edition of ICASSP, the world’s premier Signal Processing Conference. This year we received 2729 submissions including those invited for 12 special sessions. The submissions figures are ranked below according to the various Signal Processing Society Technical Committees (TCs):

Five of the TCs experienced a significant increase in the number of paper submissions in their area compared with last year; in particular, the following committees had an increase of over 20%:

• Audio & Electroacoustics
• Sensor Array & Multi-channel Signal Processing
• Machine Learning for Signal Processing
• Bio Imaging and Signal Processing
• Industry Technology Track

From the 2656 submissions, a total of 1282 were selected for presentation at the conference (a 48% acceptance rate).

A tremendous effort has gone into a thorough review of all submitted papers to ensure the high quality of the conference. Special thanks go to the TC chairs and their assistants in organizing the efforts of several hundred reviewers to quickly and efficiently review all of the papers: Tulay Adali, John Apostolopoulos, Kristine Bell, Chaitali Chakrabarti, Ingemar Cox, Michael Deisher, Ed Delp, Alex Gershman, Michael Goodwin, Sheila Hemami, Ton Kalker, Jelena Kovacevic, Geert Leus, David Miller, Roberto Pieraccini, Roxana Saint-Nom, Ali Sayed, Nicholas Sidiropoulos, Anthony Vetro, Tong Zhou. The review task is complex and cumbersome and we appreciate the TC chairs’ efficient and timely handling of this process. Thanks to the diligent work of the technical committee members and external reviewers, most papers received at least three reviews. The TC chairs also selected the student paper finalists under the direction of Phillip Regalia. The finalists will present their papers at ICASSP with final awards selected by panelists from the organizing committee and the TC members.

As a complement to the regular papers in the technical program, twelve special sessions have been included. The special session organizers, Moeness Amin and Alle-Jan van der Veen, have put together a program with emerging signal processing topics of high interest to the community. We would like to thank the individual organizers of the sessions and the authors of the contributed papers. Prior to the start of the regular technical program, sixteen half day tutorials will be held. Naofal Al-Dhahir and Jacob Gunther are responsible for the tutorials program having selected a range of topical areas and high quality speakers.

Mats Viberg and Abdelhak Zoubir were responsible for organizing our plenary sessions, and together with them, we are very pleased to announce the following four excellent plenary speakers for the ICASSP 2008 program:

“A Review of Radio Frequency Identification Systems – Present Status, Design Challenges and Future Outlook”
Raj Mittra, Pennsylvania State University

“From Mind to Matter: Using Brain Waves to link Thoughts and Action”
Nitish Thakor, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine

“Unlocking Knowledge, Opening Minds – The MIT OpenCourseWare Experience”
Dick K.P. Yue, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“Media Signal Processing in Cell Phones – An Amazing Story”
Peter Kroon, Infineon Technologies

During the regular conference program lunch breaks on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, a panel session will be held. Our panel session coordinators, Huseyin Abut and Helmut Boelcskei, have selected three topics which we are confident will attract your interest and spark discussions: “Compressed Sensing, Sparse Signal Processing, Rate of Innovation, Real Field Coding, and Irregular Sampling,” organized by Farokh Marvasti, “Convex Optimization Theory and Practice in Signal Processing,” organized by Yonina Eldar, and “Human Behavior Signal Processing for Vehicular Applications,” organized by Kazuya Takeda and Hakan Erdogan.

This year, the ICASSP program will feature a new “Show & Tell” event, organized by Mazin Gilbert and Constantinos Papadias. This event will be held on Wednesday afternoon, and will include hardware demonstrations of some of the latest innovations by research groups in industry, academia and government.

After tutorial programs on Sunday and Monday, the regular technical program starts on Tuesday and is organized into twelve different time slots during four days. Each time slot has five to six parallel oral sessions and seven to eight parallel poster sessions. The decisions as to whether a paper would be placed in a lecture or poster session were made primarily to keep the technical content of the sessions as focused as possible. At ICASSP, we do not view lecture sessions as more prestigious than poster sessions -- high quality papers will be found in both venues.

We wish to thank all of the members of the ICASSP Technical Program Committee for helping to create an exciting and interesting program for this year’s conference. Ultimately, the quality of the conference is determined by the efforts of the authors and speakers; we appreciate their participation and look forward to learning about their research. Finally, we express our utmost gratitude to Lance Cotton and Billene Mercer from Conference Management Services, whose prompt and professional assistance was invaluable in putting together the technical program.

Björn Ottersten and A. Lee Swindlehurst
Technical Program Co-chairs, ICASSP 2008