Minutes of the MMSP Technical Committee Meeting on October 2nd 2007 at MMSP’07 In attendance: Phil Chou (PC) Ingemar J. Cox (IC) Pascal Frossard (PF) Shipeng Li (SL) Shrikanth Narayanan (SN) Fernando Pereira (FP) Beatrice Pesquet (BP) Amir Said (AS) Min Wu (MW) Also in attendance (non-members) David Feng Yu Hen Hu Douglas O’Shaughnessy Alex Potamianos Jian Zhang Minutes: 1. MMSP 2007 Alex Potamianos provided a summary review of this year’s MMSP 2007. The number of submitted papers was 165, of which 106 were accepted, a 65% acceptance rate. The number of attendees was 125. A 15% surplus will be returned to the IEEE. A Best Student Paper Prize was awarded. Alex also offered advice to the organizers of MMSP’08. IN particular, the MMSP’08 organizers were strongly encouraged to use the CMS conference management system. 2. MMSP 2008 David Feng and Jian Zhang provided a summary of preparations for MMSP 2008 in Cairns, Australia (8-10 October 2008). The budget has been approved by the IEEE Signal Processing Society and a contract has been signed with the hotel. A Call for Papers has been prepared and was available at MMSP’07. The website is also available at www.mmsp08.org. It is planned to award prizes for Best Oral Presentation, Best Student Paper, and Best Poster. Microsoft, NEC and the National ICT University, Australia will fund these prizes, respectively. No decision has yet been made regarding the use of a conference management system. However, as noted above, the organizers were strongly encouraged to use CMS. 3. MMSP 2009 The MMSP TC has received two proposals to host MMSP 2009. The first proposal is located in Montreal, Canada and the second in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Douglas Shaughnessy (Univ. of Quebec) provided a presentation of the Montreal proposal. It is tentatively planned for September/October 2009 with an expected attendance of 139. Doug stated that Montreal is a North American city that is very accessible, with excellent public transport. It is also home to four universities: McGill, Concordia, Quebec and Montreal. Some of the organizing committee were responsible for organizing ICASSP in Montreal on 2004. It is proposed to hold the Workshop at the Ritz-Carlton, though other venues are possible. BP noted that the budget of $1K for advertising was probably too low. BP also asked whether any panel discussions or demos had been considered. DS responded that nothing had been planned yet. SN asked why the organizers wished to host MMSP’09 in Montreal. DS responded that all the organizers were involved in signal processing even if not regularly attending MMSP Workshops. DS also noted that the younger members of the organizing committee sought experience in organizing international events, but not on the scale of ICASSP. SL noted that the first week in October is a national holiday in China. It is unclear whether this would encourage of discourage participation from China, if MMSP was scheduled then. BP questioned whether one Technical Chair was sufficient. DS responded that it probably was, especially when using a conference management syste. IC noted that the organizing committee was almost exclusively Canadian. DS indicated that additional international members could be included, if recommended. Phil Chou (Microsoft) and Amir Said (HP) provided a presentation for the Brazilian proposal. It was noted that Brazil has never hosted a digital signal processing workshop, despite its strong engineering tradition. It was also noted that the organizing committee has a strong international reputation and included members from a variety of countries. The proposed theme of the Workshop would be “Immersive telecommunications and human collaboration”. The Workshop is anticipated to have 3 keynotes, 3 overview talks and about 100 papers. Amir indicated that the organizing committee now favoured holding the Workshop in Rio de Janeiro, especially as it is very accessible. It was noted that the organizers have had experience organizing other conferences and workshops. SL asked what other major conferences had been held in Brazil. It was noted that ICCV will be held in Brazil next week. SN noted the need for strong local arrangements support. AS agreed and indicated that this was one factor for choosing Rio de Janeiro over other sites in Brazil. IC raised the issue of safety. AS responded that it was ok and improving. AS also recommended taking a proactive stance, including organizing social events in the evenings. BP supported this. MW recommended reducing the oral presentations to allow for a single track with posters. PC responded that the format can be adjusted, as desired. Agreed that there needed to be a separate time for posters, but possibly with some overlap with oral presentations. MW commented that the proposal offered an opportunity to engage more with South America. SN concurred and added that accessibility was no more difficult than to Crete, or Cairns, Australia. SN also noted the strength of the organizing committee. 4. Awards Phil Chou summarized progress regarding awards nominations, first noting that our TC was actually endorsing nominations. PC noted that 50% of the eligible vote of the TC was needed to endorse a candidate. There were two Best Paper nominations, one Young Author Best Paper Award and no Signal Processing Magazine nomination. Voting for the Best Paper Award was 17/30 in favour of “Nonlinear approximation based image recovery using adaptive sparse reconstructions and iterated denoising – Part I: theory, and Part II: adaptive algorithms” by O. G. Guleryuz in IEEE Trans. on Image Processing, 15, 3, 2006. Insufficient votes were received to endorse the Young Author Best Paper Award. PC also reported voting for the Society Award and the Technical Achievement Award. 20/30 votes were received in support of CC Jay Kuo for the Society Award and 19/30 votes were received in support of Rabab Ward for the Technical Achievement Award. Both were approved. Min Wu raised the issue of nominations for the Signal Processing Magazine Best Column Award. It was agreed that MW would send an email to the TC encouraging nominations. Ingemar Cox noted that the TC has also been requested to nominate candidates to serve on the SPS Awards Board. PC commented that candidates should be of very high standing, perhaps having won major awards themselves. SN suggested nominating Sanjit Mitra and it was agreed that SN would do so. 5. AOB There was a brief discussion on new member election of 6 members this year. Pascal Frossard reminded the TC members to encourage and nominate new members by Oct. 15. Ingemar Cox reminded the TC that we need to update our byelaws. IC and Anthony Vetro will draft a proposal. IC also noted the poor response to the awards nominations. Some of the discussion/suggestions made by members included (i) encouraging previous year's promising candidates to be re-nominated, (ii) soliciting and possibly establishing a repository of strong award-quality papers throughout the year to alleviate the normal rush just before the nomination deadline, (iii) reminding TC members that participation in voting is one of the major responsibilities of a TC member (in addition to icassp/mmsp reviews, attending TC meetings, etc).