The General Chairs would like to wish every attendee to ICASSP 2018 a White Hat Welcome to Calgary, home of the famous Stampede. Especially in light of the inadvertent venue move from Seoul to Calgary, everybody complied with full support and we are happy to see you all for another successful conference. We hope that the time you spend with us will be memorable, meaningful, and enjoyable. The first ICASSP was in Philadelphia in 1976, and featured 226 paper presentations and an attendance of slightly more than 600 participants. Today, ICASSP has grown into the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications with over 2,000 attendees and over 1200 papers.
The Technical Program Committee Chairs, Drs. Dan Schonfeld, Pascale Fung, and Nam Ik Cho, along with the SPS Technical Committee Chairs, have worked hard to put together an outstanding technical program that is well-aligned with the theme of the conference, “Signal Processing and AI: Changing the World.” To kick off this year’s conference, attendees can choose from fourteen half-day tutorials that were selected by the Tutorial Chairs Dr. Homer Chen and Dr. Chungyong Lee from a record number forty-two tutorial proposals.
Then, ICASSP attendees will be able to attend the many lecture and poster sessions that provide the fabric for a technically rewarding conference. Within the technical program you will find sixteen special sessions, many of which are in line with the theme of the conference. These special sessions were selected by the Special Session Chairs, Dr. Tulay Adali and Dr. Seungjin Choi, from a record number 48 submissions.
The highlights of the technical program will be the exceptional distinguished speakers that the Plenary Chair Dr. Henrique Malvar, along with his co-Chair Dr. Changick Kim, have selected for the plenary sessions. These speakers are: Dr. Alex Acero, a renowned speech processing researcher and director for speech research for Siri at Apple, Prof. Julia Hirschberg, Chair for the Computer Science Department at Columbia University and a pioneer in text-to-speech synthesis, especially prosody for speech synthesis, Dr. Yann LeCun, one of the pioneers of neural networks in and their applications in AI, and director of the Facebook Research Artificial Intelligent labs, and Dr. Luc Vincent, vice-president of engineering at Lyft, who is responsible for their efforts in autonomous vehicles.
In addition to the technical program, we hope that you will find time to enjoy many of the sights and treats that Calgary has to offer. Calgary is a cosmopolitan Alberta city with numerous skyscrapers that owes its rapid growth to its status as the center of Canada’s oil industry. However, it’s still steeped in the western culture that earned it the nickname “Cowtow,” evident in the Calgary Stampede, its massive July rodeo and festival that grew out of the farming exhibitions that were once presented here. The main attractions include the Calgary Tower, featuring a 1,228m-high observation deck; Glewbow, a museum of art and history; and the Calgary Zoo. The Stephen Avenue pedestrian mall and the 17th Avenue offer shops, restaurants, lounges and entertainment. Hiking and biking are popular in sprawling Fish Creek Provincial Park. Olympic Park, built for the 1988 winter games, is a year-round sports hub with a bobsled run. The Inglewood Bird Sanctuary has trials and wildlife. Mountainous Banff, Canada’s oldest national park, is about 130km west of the city.
Finally, the Chairs would like to acknowledge the hard work and dedication of the members of the Technical Program and Organizing Committees. It is they who brought all of the pieces together that will make ICASSP 2018 an exciting and dynamic conference. Thanks also goes out to the hundreds of reviewers who diligently reviewed the over 2800 paper submissions, the second largest number in the 43 year history of the conference. We would be remiss if we did not acknowledge the extraordinary job that Billene Mercer and Jay Lightfoot and the rest of the CMS team has done in support of nearly every aspect of the conference. Special thanks also goes out to the City of Calgary for their generous help and assistance in welcoming ICASSP to Calgary. Without all of these supporters, ICASSP would not be what it is.
Monson Hayes and Hanseok Ko ICASSP 2018 General Chairs