News from the AASP-TC

by Akihiko (Ken) Sugiyama (AASP-TC Liaison to eNews)

The Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing (AASP) Technical Committee had its annual TC meeting on Thursday, May 26, at Corinthia Hotel in Prague, Czech, where International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2011 was held. We had a record high attendance and discussed subcommittee establishment, award nominations, job market page, and AASP challenges.

ICASSP is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications. The conference features world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and over 120 lecture and poster sessions on signal processing including Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing. One of the highlights at ICASSP2011 was 30-minute expert summaries of current trends, presented by each of the Technical Committees. On behalf of the AASP TC, Malcolm Slaney, Yahoo! Research, and Patrick Naylor of Imperial College, London presented their expert opinion on the most significant advances and upcoming trends within the AASP TC area over the past year. Their summary mainly covers four areas, namely, microphone arrays, source separation and signal enhancement, music information retrieval, and sparse representations.

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 and is intended to stimulate discussions among those working in the AASP area with beautiful autumn leaves. The next workshop will be in October of 2011 and is chaired by Dan Ellis of Columbia University. Paper submission has been closed and the total number of submissions is one of the highest in the history of the workshop.

The AASP TC is also deeply involved in HSCMA, Joint Workshop on Hands-Free Speech Communication and Microphone Arrays, which is held once every couple of years since 2005. The latest workshop was held recently from May 30 through June 1, at Infomatics Forum, University of Edinburgh, in Edinburgh, UK and was co-chaired by TC member Walter Kellermann. It attracted 100 people and was very successful. The AASP TC was also represented by two keynote speakers, Akihiko (Ken) Sugiyama of NEC Corporation and Dan Ellis of Columbia University. Ken talked about a versatile speech front-end for telecommunication and speech recognition with an emphasis on useful implementation tips and tricks. Dan addressed some application areas for analysis of web-style video including extraction of information using both speech and nonspeech contents. Ivan Tashev of Microsoft Research, also a member of AASP TC, delivered a closing talk about the most recent product innovation, Microsoft Kinect. This talk revealed detailed design of Kinect from the AASP point of view with a series of exciting demonstrations.

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. The next IWAENC will be chaired by Peter Vary in Aachen, Germany in 2012.

A job market page is open in the AASP TC website and is popular. If there is any information about job openings, please direct it to the AASP webmaster, Patrick Naylor.