Activity Report from the AASP-TC

by Akihiko (Ken) Sugiyama (Chairman of the AASP-TC and Liaison to eNews)

The Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing Technical Committee (AASP TC) had its second annual TC meeting on Tuesday, October 18, at Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, NY, USA, where the IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA) 2011 was held. We had 18 members present and discussed subcommittee establishment for EDICS, ICASSP reviews, awards, news letter, fellow nomination, webpage, nominations and elections, and AASP Challenges, as well as the next WASPAA in 2013.

WASPAA 2011 was over with a great success. Because of too much popularity and a limited capacity of the venue, the WASPAA committee chaired by Dan Ellis of Columbia University had to decline some registrations. The committee selected 88 papers for presentation from 214 submissions in total. The participants enjoyed beautiful autumn leaves and a historical hotel building in addition to presentations of state-of-the-art technology in the field and hot discussions. WASPAA2013 will be co-chaired by Sharon Gannot of Bar-Ilan University and Emanuel Habets of University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and take place at the same venue.

Just before closing of 2011, AASP TC had an annual election of new members. The following nine new members were successfully elected: Israel Cohen (Technion - Israel Institute of Technology), John Hershey (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), Craig Jin (The University of Sydney), Vinay Melkote (Dolby Laboratories, Inc.), Gautham Mysore (Adobe Systems Inc.), Sven Nordholm (Curtin University), Augusto Sarti (Politecnico di Milano), Sascha Spors (Deutsche Telekom Laboratories), Emmanuel Vincent (INRIA: French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control)
We also have three re-elected members as follows: Walter Kellermann (University of Erlangen- Nürnberg), Tomohiro Nakatani (NTT), Ivan Tashev (Microsoft Research). On the other hand, we are sad to see the following important members leaving the AASP TC, in order to comply with the rules of the IEEE Signal Processing Society: Marina Bosi (Stanford University), Karlheinz Brandenburg (Fraunhofer Institute), Ramani Duraiswami (University of Maryland), Gary Elko (mh acoustics), Michael Goodwin (Audience, Inc.), Yoichi Haneda (NTT), Yiteng (Arden) Huang (WeVoice, Inc.), Osamu Hoshuyama (NEC), Rainer Martin (University of Bochum)

Gary Elko and Michael Goodwin were both former chairs of this TC when it was still called Audio and Electroacoustics TC. I would like to thank all of these outgoing members for their contributions. Most of them, however, will stay in the AASP TC as associate members for their wisdom and future contributions. The whole process of this election was efficiently managed by Paris Smaragdis, Chair of Nominations and Elections Subcommittee.

The emphasis of the AASP TC activities in these months has been placed on preparation of ICASSP 2012. ICASSP is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications with world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and over 120 lecture and poster sessions. Malcolm Slaney, the review subcommittee chair, has devoted himself to review coordination of 282 submissions in a short time, not to mention the contributions by AASP TC members. Michael Brandstein, Simon Doclo, Tomas Gänsler, Jürgen Herre, Shoji Makino, Tomohiro Nakatani, Gäel Richard, Hiroshi Sawada, and Paris Smagradis helped Malcolm assign reviewers as area chairs who are responsible for their fields of expertise. AASP TC finally accepted 137 papers for presentation at poster and lecture sessions. The AASP TC Chair, Akihiko (Ken) Sugiyama, has been playing an unrivaled role as a Technical Program Co-chair for ICASSP2012.

The AASP TC is also deeply involved in the International Conference on Emerging Signal Processing Applications (ESPA), which was held from January 12 through 14 at Caesar’s Palace Hotel in Las Vegas, NV, USA for its first series. It is newly started to serve practicing engineers and will have a strong emphasis on applications and cutting edge practical signal processing. It is co-located with and follows the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) to enable attendees to attend both CES and ESPA and learn about the technology in the latest products announced in CES, as well as the technologies that may help create future CES products. Attendees will learn about the current technologies from the major industry and academic players in the field, and about the future directions from visionary keynote speakers. The AASP TC has two invited speakers: Ivan Tashev of Microsoft Research and Malcolm Slaney of Yahoo! Research. Ivan talked about audio signal processing in Kinect that was one of the most popular booths at CES. Malcolm’s talk was entitled “Web Scale Multimedia Processing” and covered how to make it easier for people to find the multimedia content they want. The AASP TC was also represented by two Tutorial speakers, Ivan Tashev of Microsoft Research and Akihiko (Ken) Sugiyama of NEC Corporation. Ivan presented the whole and detailed aspects of how one can optimize a signal processing application with Kinect as an example in a tutorial session. Ken talked about applications and implementation of adaptive filters with a series of exciting demonstrations as another tutorial with its theoretical aspects covered by Prof. V. John Mathews of University of Utah. He also served as ESPA’s Tutorial Chair and coordinated all tutorials. ESPA will be held in the same city, in the same season in 2013.

An EDICS Subcommittee has been established with Sharon Gannot as its chair and the following members: Emanuel Habets (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg), James D. Johnston (Independent Consultant), Vesa Valimaki (Aalto University). The EDICS Subcommittee has started its discussions on updated EDICS for IEEE Journals such as Transactions on Signal Processing, Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, Signal Processing Letters and some others.

We should not forget our new activity called AASP Challenges. It is to introduce a sequence of ‘challenges’ in order to encourage research and development with comparable and repeatable results, and to stimulate new ground‐breaking approaches to specific problems in our technical scope. AASP TC has a dedicated Subcommittee for this specific purpose chaired by Patrick A. Naylor of Imperial College, London. More details, including the schedule of the challenges, will be available at AASP TC website shortly. So, stay tuned for it.

A job market page has been popular with many visitors in the AASP TC website. If there is any information about job openings, please direct it by email to the AASP webmaster, Patrick Naylor.