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, March 27, at Grand Prince Hotel in Kyoto, Japan, where International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2012 was held. We had a record high attendance and discussed new ICASSP2013 format, a new fall conference SPS plans to introduce, and China activity support in addition to subcommittee reports including 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 160 lecture and poster sessions on signal processing including Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing. AASP TC Chair, Akihiko (Ken) Sugiyama, has been playing an unparalleled role as Technical Program Chair for ICASSP2012. This year's ICASSP was one of the most successful ones with approximately 2100 registrations and an over-20% profit-to-turnover ratio. The only regret was cherry blossoms which arrived a week after ICASSP.

Many members of the AASP TC are deeply involved in the International Workshop on Acoustic Signal Enhancement (IWAENC). IWAENC is held bi-annually in even years, usually in and around the month of September. The IWAENC this year is held in Aachen, Germany, on September 4 through 6. The general chairs are Peter Vary, Hans-Wilhelm Gierlich, and Walter Kellermann who is AASP TC’s Past Chair. Current and former members of AASP TC, Patrick Naylor and Sharon Gannot, will deliver keynote talks at IWAENC entitled "Acoustic Signal Processing in Noise: It’s Not Getting Any Quieter" and "Multi-Microphone Speech Enhancement."

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 in 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 2013 and chaired by Sharon Gannot of Bar-Ilan University and Emanuel Habets of University of Erlangen-Nuremberg.

Our new activity called AASP Challenges started this year after continuing preparation since last fall directed by Patrick Naylor of Imperial College, London, Chair of AASP TC's Challenges Subcommittee. 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. A call for interest (CFI) was distributed in February 2012 and AASP TC received four Statements of Interest (SOIs) by the deadline set on March 9, 2012. Challenges Subcommittee carefully reviewed all SOIs and responded with comments to encourage submission of proposals by the end of April. AASP TC finally received two proposals for which the Subcommittee made further comments. As an outcome of this series of efforts, the first Call for Participation (CFP) is available at AASP TC website, which is entitled “Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events.” This challenge is organized by the following group of people: Dimitrios Giannoulis (QMUL), Emmanouil Benetos (QMUL), Dan Stowell (QMUL), Mathieu Lagrange (IRCAM) and Mark Plumbley (QMUL).

There will be a discussion phase where potential participants are invited to contribute their ideas, ending on September 30, 2012. The deadline for code submission is March 31, 2013. Results will be presented at a special session in WASPAA 2013; participants are invited to present a poster at a special session. Also, authors of novel work are encouraged to submit their work as a regular paper at WASPAA 2013. For more details as well as a copy of the full proposal of the challenge please visit the website for this challenge.

The second CFP has just been made available at AASP TC website, whose title is "The 2nd 'CHiME' Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge". It is planed following the success of its predecessor "2011 PASCAL CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge" and details can be found Patrick Naylor.