Activity Report from the AASP-TC

by Akihiko (Ken) Sugiyama (AASP-TC Past Chair)

New Members

In October 2012, the AASP TC had an annual election of new members with the leadership of Paris Smaragdis, Chair of the Nominations and Elections Subcommittee. The following six new members were successfully elected:

1. Nancy Bertin (INRIA),
2. Dorothea Kolossa (Ruhr University),
3. Bryan Pardo (Northwestern University),
4. Schuyler Quackenbush (Audio Research Laboratories),
5. Boaz Rafaely (Ben-Gurion University),
6. Ann Spriet (NXP Semiconductors).

Please note that Schuyler was once our TC Chair and comes back this time.

We also have four re-elected members as follows:

1. Sharon Gannot (Bar-Ilan University),
2. Meinard Müller (International Audio Laboratories Erlangen),
3. Gaël Richard (TELECOM ParisTech),
4. Malcolm Slaney (Microsoft Research).

Welcome back to them.

On the other hand, it is pity to ask the following important members to leave AASP TC because of a rule imposed by the Signal Processing Society: Ashish Aggarwal (Violet 3D), Grant Davidson (Dolby Laboratories), Dan Ellis (Columbia University), Jürgen Herre (FhG IIS), George Tzanetakis (University of Victoria). I would like to thank all of these outgoing members for their contributions.

Conferences and Workshops

AASP TC members and voluntary reviewers have been busy reviewing papers submitted to ICASSP 2013 to be held in May in Vancouver, Canada. ICASSP is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications with world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and over 120 lecture and poster sessions. Malcolm Slaney, the Review Subcommittee Chair, has spent lots of time on review coordination of 348 submissions in a short time, not to mention the contributions by AASP TC members. Michael Brandstein, Simon Doclo, Tomas Gänsler, Shoji Makino, Tomohiro Nakatani, Gäel Richard, Hiroshi Sawada, Paris Smagradis, and Akihiko (Ken) Sugiyama helped Malcolm assign reviewers as area chairs who are responsible for their fields of expertise. The number of submissions to the AASP area was increased by 23% compared to last year and marked a record high, demonstrating that AASP is a popular and growing area.

AASP TC’s flagship workshop, the Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA 2013), will be held in Mohonk Mountain House, New Paltz, NY, as usual in October 2013. It is co-chaired by Sharon Gannot of Bar-Ilan University and Emanuel Habets of University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. Preparations are well underway.

A member of AASP TC, Gaël Richard of TELECOM ParisTech, is deeply involved with the upcoming 14th International Workshop on Audio Analysis for Multimedia Interactive services (WIAMIS 2013). It is scheduled on July 3 through 5 in Paris. Its scope has been extended to cover audio and is co-sponsored by IEEE.

AASP Challenges

A new activity, AASP Challenges, started last year and now AASP TC is involved in “Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (D-CASE)” and “2nd CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge.” They are both described in the AASP-TC’s website.

D-CASE Challenge is to develop systems that achieve comparable performance to that of human auditory system with the help of computational auditory scene analysis (CASA). The deadline for code submission is scheduled on March 31, 2013 and results will be presented in a special session at WASPAA 2013. For more information, visit the D-CASE website.

The 2nd CHiME Challenge follows its previous activities held in 2011 and extends the vocabulary size or applies a more realistic signal mixing process. Submission deadline was January 29, 2013 and the results will be shared in the group after February 18, 2013. The whole results will be made public at a post-ICASSP workshop in Vancouver on June 1, 2013.

There is also a special session at ICASSP2013 related to this activity entitled “Acoustic Event Detection and Scene Analysis,” which is organized by our committee member, Mark Plumbley of Queen Mary University of London and his colleagues. You will find more information about AASP Challenges here.

There is one more challenge planned about dereverberation. Organizers are working hard to address raised questions and comments by AASP TC and release a call for participation. You will find up-to-date information at our website.

Job opportunities

A job market page has been popular with many visitors in the AASP TC website. If there is any information about job openings, please direct it to the AASP webmaster, Patrick Naylor.