Recent Activities by the Audio and Electroacoustics (AE) Technical Committee

Contributed by Walter Kellermann - AE TC Chair

The Audio and Electroacoustics (AE) TC promotes the advancement of technologies and applications in audio and acoustic signal processing and to enhance interaction with similar organizations within IEEE and throughout the world.

The AE TC is participating in a recently formed subcommittee on TC bylaws initiated by the Technical Directions Board of the SPS.  The aim of this bylaw subcommittee is to find a set of bylaws that accommodate both the claim for specific characters of each TC as well as the desire to establish a certain level of consistency across all TCs within the Society. The AE TC is also represented in a newly established editorial board for Overview Articles to be published in the four IEEE Transactions sponored by the Society.  The Overview Articles are expected to be both technically deep to merit publication in the Transactions as well as sufficiently broad in scope to attract a large readership.

ICASSP 2009 was a great success for the AE community: 84 regular papers and 6 papers in a special session on reverberant speech were presented and engaged an audience with great interest both in the lecture sessions and at the posters. Related to the special session held in the ICASSP on handling reverberant speech, a proposal for a "Special Issue on Processing Reverberant Speech:  Methodologies and Applications" has been accepted by the IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (ASLP), with manuscripts due by October 15, 2009.

Currently, the community around the AE-TC is looking forward to the next edition of the  IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA 2009), which has been a continuously growing  success over the past ten editions since 1989.  This year again we look forward to an inspiring get-together with top-quality presentations in a relaxed and perfectly organized environment. The names in the organizing committee and the keynote speakers raise the highest expectations.

TC member Shoji Makino serves as a Distinguished Lecturer for 2009 and 2010, and will promote the field of the TC and the Society as a whole through numerous lectures around the world.

Finally, an initiative was started by a subcommittee of the AE TC to build up a data collection as a basis for multichannel acoustic signal processing in all its facets. Starting from defining mandatory and optional descriptors, collection and distribution are in a planning stage.  More progress is anticipated in the near future.