Activity Update from the MLSP TC

Contributed by Paris Smaragdis (Chair of the MLSP TC)

The Machine Learning for Signal Processing Technical Committee (MLSP TC) is involved with activities that support the use of Machine Learning techniques for Signal Processing problems. The scope of this TC is fairly wide, ranging from traditional machine learning and pattern recognition, to approaches that combine material from both disciplines. Under the scope of the MLSP TC we find areas such as source separation, graphical and kernel methods for time-series, Bayesian non-parametrics, and matrix and tensor factorizations among many more.

Starting this year we have nine new members joining the MLSP TC. We welcome Volkan Cevher (EPFL), Maarten De Vos (U of Oldenburg), Li Deng (MSR), Mário A. T. Figueiredo (IST), Catherine Huang (Intel), Dmitry Malioutov (IBM), Mamadou Mboup (U of Reims), Kush Varshney (IBM) and David Wipf (MSR). We also are happy to see Raviv Raich (OSU) re-elected for a second term and we also welcome our new Vice-Chair, Vince Calhoun (UNM). We would like to thank our departing members Tülay Adali, Taylan Cemgil, Gerard Dreyfus, Kenneth Hild and Francesco Palmieri for their service and ongoing support.

The main workshop of the MLSP TC took place last September in Southampton, UK, in which we had 102 accepted papers and 90 attendees. Also this year the MLSP workshop was co-located with the LVA/ICA conference which brought in new people and helped our continuous broadening of the scope of the workshop. The plenary speakers were Simon Godsill (Univ. of Cambridge), Sergios Theodoridis (Univ. of Athens) and Christian Jutten (Joseph Fourier Univ.).

As is customary, we also had our data competition as part of the workshop. This year the competition was announced in Kaggle.com and involved a birdsong classification challenge. We had a record 79 teams submitting material for this competition with the first place going to Gábor Fodor from the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. The competition received significant attention and was also featured in an article in Forbes.com.

The 2014 MLSP workshop will take place in Reims, France on September 21-24, 2014. Information on this event and online submission forms can be found on the conference website. Just this month the MLSP TC voted to hold the 2015 MLSP workshop in Boston, MA, bringing the workshop back to the USA after a short hiatus. Finally, MLSP TC members are co-organizing a GlobalSIP 2014 symposium on Machine Learning Applications in Signal Processing, on which you can find more information here on our web page.