Activity Report from the AASP-TC

Published in TC News on 1 March 2015

by Shoji Makino (AASP-TC Past Chair)

Honors

The AASP TC had the following successful honors from IEEE.

1. IEEE Fellow: Israel Cohen, Haifa, Israel: for contributions to the theory and application of speech enhancement.
2. IEEE Fellow: Mark Plumbley, London, United Kingdom: for contributions to latent variable analysis.
3. IEEE Fellow: Paris Smaragdis, Urbana, Illinois: for contributions to audio source separation and audio processing.
4. IEEE Fellow: Vesa Valimaki, Espoo, Finland: for contributions to synthesis and processing of audio signals.
5. BEST PAPER AWARDS: Hiroshi Sawada, Shoko Araki and Shoji Makino, "Underdetermined Convolutive Blind Source Separation via Frequency Bin-Wise Clustering and Permutation Alignment", IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, Volume: 19, No. 3, March 2011.
6. BEST PAPER AWARDS: Alexey Ozerov and Cédric Févotte, "Multichannel Nonnegative Matrix Factorization in Convolutive Mixtures for Audio Source Separation", IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, Volume: 18, No. 3, March 2010.
7. IEEE SIGNAL PROCESSING LETTERS BEST PAPER AWARD: Emanuël A. P. Habets, Sharon Gannot and Israel Cohen, "Late
   Reverberant Spectral Variance Estimation Based on a Statistical Model", IEEE Signal Processing Letters, Volume: 16, No. 9, September 2009.

New Members

In October 2014, AASP TC had an annual election of new members with the leadership of Walter Kellermann, Chair of the Nominations and Elections Subcommittee. The following four new members were successfully elected:

1. Alexey Ozerov (Technicolor, France),
2. Heinz Teutsch (mh acoustics, USA),
3. Mads Christensen (Aalborg University, Denmark),
4. Tao Zhang (Starkey Hearing Technologies, USA).

We also have eight re-elected members as follows:

1. Israel Cohen (Technion, Israel),
2. John Hershey (Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, USA),
3. Craig Jin (University of Sydney, Australia),
4. Gautham Mysore (Adobe Research, USA),
5. Sven Nordholm (Curtin University, Australia),
6. Augusto Sarti (Politecnico Milano, Italy),
7. Sascha Spors (University of Rostock, Germany),
8. Emmanuel Vincent (INRIA, France).

Welcome back to them.

On the other hand, it is pity to ask the following four members to leave AASP TC because of a rule imposed by the Signal Processing Society. Walter Kellermann (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany), Tomohiro Nakatani (NTT Communication Science Laboratory, Japan), Ivan Tashev (Microsoft Research, USA), Vinay Melkote (Dolby Labs, USA). I would like to thank all of these outgoing members for their contributions. Now the committee consists of 36 members, well represented world-wide with roughly half the members from academia and half from industry.

Signal Processing Magazine Special Issue

IEEE Signal Processing Magazine publishes the Special Issue on "Signal Processing Techniques for Assisted Listening" on March 2015. This special issue focuses on technical challenges of assisted listening from a signal processing perspective. Nine tutorial and survey articles are selected that articulate signal processing methodologies which are critical for applying assisted listening techniques to mobile phones and other communication devices. Of particular interest is the role of signal processing in combining multi-media content, voice communication and voice pick-up in various real-world settings. The papers in this special issue are focusing on three main aspects of signal processing in this domain, namely audio enhancement, presentation/rendering and evaluation. Guest Editors are Sven Nordholm (Curtin University), Walter Kellermann (University Erlangen-Nürnberg), Simon Doclo (University of Oldenburg), Vesa Välimäki (Aalto University), Shoji Makino (University of Tsukuba), John Hershey (Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories), all are AASP TC Members.

Conference and Workshops

AASP TC members and voluntary reviewers have been busy reviewing papers submitted to ICASSP 2015 to be held on April 19 – 24, 2015, in Brisbane, Australia. The number of submissions to the AASP area was 290, demonstrating that AASP is a popular area and that this 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. Tomohiro Nakatani, the Review Subcommittee Chair, has spent lots of time on review coordination of 290 submissions in a short time, not to mention the contributions by AASP TC members. Michael Brandstein, Jean-Marc Jot, Shoji Makino, Vinay Melkote, Patrick Naylor, Sven Nordholm, Bryan Pardo, Gäel Richard, Malcolm Slaney, Paris Smagradis, and Emmanuel Vincent helped Tomohiro assign reviewers and perform meta-review as area chairs who are responsible for their fields of expertise.

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 in September. The IWAENC 2014 was over with a great success in Antibes – Juan les Pins on the French Riviera, on September 9 – 11, 2014. The general chairs are Dirk Slock of EURECOM and Christophe Beaugeant of Intel Mobile Communications. The committee selected 70 papers for presentation from 87 submissions in total. The 175 participants enjoyed beautiful Mediterranean Sea and luxurious COTE D'AZUR in addition to presentations of state-of-the-art technology in the field and hot discussions. IWAENC 2016 will be co-chaired by Jingdong Chen of Northwestern Polytechnical University and Andy Khong of Nanyang Technological University and take place in September 2016 in Xi’an, China.

WASPAA 2015, IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics, will be held on October 18 – 21, 2015 in Mohonk Mountain House, NY. The general chairs are Gael Richard of TELECOM ParisTech and Laurent Daudet of Paris Diderot University. Submission deadline of regular paper is April 10, 2015.

AASP Challenges

Our activity called AASP Challenges 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.

In the coming year, a new Challenge will be running: “Characterization of Acoustic Environments (ACE)”. Organizers are Nick Gaubitch from Delft University and James Eaton and Patrick Naylor from Imperial College London. This will have the dissemination event at WASPAA 2015.

In order to pursue this endeavor, we are issuing a call for expressions of interest in organizing new challenges. This is an open call with no deadline. Prospective organizers should provide a brief description of the challenge, the planned test data and evaluation methodology, and their value to the community. Challenges at the crossroads of other communities such as speech processing or machine learning are especially welcome. For more details, see AASP Challenges.

The AASP TC Challenges Subcommittee will help organizers run a successful Challenge by providing scientific and organizational feedback, sharing industrial sponsorship contacts, and awarding official prizes to the most reproducible challenges entries.

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 Publicity Chair, Boaz Rafaely.