Activity Report from the AASP-TC

by Steven Grant (AASP-TC Liaison to E-Newsletter)

The Signal Processing Society Board of Governors has approved our Technical Committee’s new name, Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing (AASP). This new name reflects the expanding interests of the committee especially with the recent integration of the music signal processing community. In addition, the interest areas of the TC include all the aspects of processing of audio signals, including: sound production, reception, transduction, analysis, enhancement, semantics and information processing, coding, synthesis, rendition, and perception.

The committee consists of 34 members, well represented world-wide with roughly half the members from academia and half from industry. Two new IEEE Fellows are members of the TC, Rainer Martin and Akihiko (Ken) Sugiyama. The new chair of the committee is Akihiko (Ken) Sugiyama taking Walter Kellermann’s place as his term expired in December of 2010.

The annual increase in ICASSP submissions demonstrates the AASP‘s steady growth. For example, submissions are up from 220 in 2010 to more than 260 in 2011. Of these submissions 60 were from the music processing field making it the largest area in the TC in only its second year as a separate subject. Still, the 200 submissions in other areas show that this seemingly mature field is still growing due to the steady increase of available computing power at relatively low cost allowing increasingly sophisticated processing to tackle longstanding challenges in acoustic signal processing. All submissions to the ASSP for ICASSP are reviewed by TC members only to assure high quality reviews.

IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (ASLP) published a “Special Issue on Processing Reverberant Speech: Methodologies and Applications” in October of 2010. The issue had 17 technical papers.

Many members of the AASP TC are also involved in the International Workshop on Acoustic Echo and Noise Control (IWAENC). IWAENC is held bi-annually in even years, usually in and around the month of September. In 2010, IWAENC was held in Tel Aviv, Israel. All four plenary speakers and its chairman, Sharon Gannot, are members of the AASP TC. There were 76 peer reviewed papers and the 176 participants were from 20 different countries. The next IWAENC will be chaired by Peter Vary in Aachen, Germany in 2012. Also, IWAENC is changing its name. It will now be known as the International Workshop on Acoustic signal ENhanCement, retaining the acronym, IWAENC. This change in name reflects the workshop’s broadening technical scope.

The AASP Technical Committee’s main workshop is the Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA). This is a bi-annual event held on odd years in October at Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, New York. The next workshop will be in October of 2011 and is chaired by Dan Ellis of Columbia University.