ICASSP 2016

Technical Program Chairs’ Welcome

It is a great pleasure to welcome you at ICASSP 2016. ICASSP is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications. It is a unique forum for scholars, scientists and engineers to disseminate their work and latest results and to exchange ideas and future perspectives. The large spectrum of novel contributions by authors from all over the world was the key of success for previous ICASSP. We are extremely pleased that the response to ICASSP 2016 call for papers was once again overwhelming. We received a total of 2682 regular paper submissions, and these papers were sent to the various Technical Committees, Standing Committees and Special Interest Groups for review. Nearly every manuscript received at least three reviews and the entire review process is a monumental task as one can imagine. We are grateful to the professionalism and hard work of all TC/SC/SIG members and reviewers under the leadership of Patrick A. Naylor (AASP), Michael Liebling (BISP), Warren Gross (DISPS), Pascal Frossard (IVMSP), Umit Batur (IDSP), Gwenaël Doërr (IFS), Vince Calhoun (MLSP), Dinei Florencio (MMSP), Peter Willett (SAM), Erik Larsson (SPCOM), John Mathews (SPTM), Bhuvana Ramabhadran (SL, HLT), Douglas Williams (ED), Antonio Ortega (BigData) and Yen-Kuang Chen (IoT). This year we have a particularly tight schedule and we deeply appreciate the dedication and support of all reviewers in completing the immense review task within such a short period of time, it is their efforts that underpin the quality of the Technical Program. After much deliberation based on the rigorous selection results, we accepted 1265 papers for presentation, which is equivalent to an acceptance rate of 47%, and we are sorry for not being able to accommodate more papers as we wish.

In addition to regular oral and poster sessions, we have eleven special sessions which are carefully chosen by the Special Session Chairs, Time Davidson and Jianguo Huang, from a total of 15 impressive proposals. Every special session paper has also undergone an equally rigorous review process, and we would like to thank the Special Session Chairs, the individual special session organizers and authors of all contributors for their great efforts. Furthermore, the Technical Program also includes 55 SPL papers, and we would like to thank the authors for participating and presenting their work in ICASSP 2016. Following the previous success, this year we have organized a few “Show & Tell” sessions in which some interesting state-of the-art results in real life applications will be demonstrated. Thanks to the effort of Fa-Long Luo in selecting 27 highly innovative projects to be presented in a dynamic and interactive setting.

Tutorials will continue to be a feature of ICASSP and Jian Li and Jose Principe, the Tutorial Chairs, were instrumental in preparing and administering a wonderful tutorial program for ICASSP 2016. Of the 34 tutorial proposals we received, 15 were selected that covered a wide spectrum of leading edge topics of current interest to many students and researchers in the SP society. These tutorials are conducted on Sunday and Monday prior to the beginning of the regular technical program and we are indebted to all the tutorial instructors for their contribution.

ICASSP 2016 is highlighted by five plenary talks and we are fortunate to have invited five distinguished speakers to share their vision and insight with us. These talks include “Convex Optimization with Abstract Linear Operators” by Stephen Boyd, “5G Wireless Enabling Technologies” by Wen Tong, “Sparsity and Inverse Problems: Think Analog, and Act Digital” by Michael Unser, “Deep Learning for AI: From machine Perception to Machine Cognition” by Li Deng and “Learning with Primal and Dual Model Representations: A Unifying Picture” by Johan Suykens. We are grateful to all plenary speakers for joining us in Shanghai and special thanks go to our Plenaries Chairs, Zhi-Pei Liang and Björn Ottersten, for their great effort in identifying excellent speakers.

With the generous support of Starkey, IBM and iFLYTEK, we will recognize students for their outstanding papers with the ICASSP 2016 Best Student Paper Awards and Spoken Language and Speech Processing Student Paper Awards. We are grateful to all TC Chairs for making nominations from their respective tracks and we would like to particularly thank Scott Acton, Mauro Barni, Ken Kreutz-Delgado, C.-C. Jay Kuo, Haizhou Li, Wan-Chi Siu, Sergios Theodoridis, Wade Trappe for their efforts in selecting the winners.

We would also like to express our gratitude to Lance Cotton and Billene Cannon from Conference Management Services, whose professional assistance and unfailing support have ensured that all submitted papers were handled carefully and efficiently and the Technical Program being constructed in good order.

ICASSP would not have been so successful without the support of the authors and volunteers, we appreciate all your efforts and contributions and we look forward to welcoming you in Shanghai in March 2016.

PC Ching, Dominic KC Ho
Technical Program Chairs, ICASSP 2016