Sensing Trends at ICASSP 2011

The 36th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2011) will take place at the Prague Congress Centre (PCC), May 22-27, 2011. As the flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, ICASSP is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications. The ICASSP 2011 conference will feature world-class speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and over 120 lecture and poster sessions. Learn more about the technical program at the ICASSP 2011 website.

Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, is a beautiful city rich in history and architecture. Late May is a great time to visit Prague to enjoy “the golden city” or the “city of a hundred spires”. For more information about the conference please visit http://www.icassp2011.com/.

This year's ICASSP will include new sessions in its technical program, namely Emerging Trends in Signal Processing. Those sessions will be held during lunch time on Wednesday till Friday, and last 30 minutes. In a session, a Technical Committee of the Signal Processing Society will feature a number of experts that will highlight the most significant advances and upcoming trends within the TC area over the past year. The TC chair will introduce the speakers and moderate the discussion--or initiate and stimulate it, as in a panel discussion.

In order to get a better grasp on what is going to happen, Dr. Gwenaël Doërr, the Associate Editor of the Inside Signal Processing eNewsletter, approached some of the selected experts so that they give us a teaser of their Emerging Trends in Signal Processing session.

WEDNESDAY, May 25, 2011, 11:45 - 12:15

Trends in Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing
Moderator: Gaurav Sharma
Speakers: Patrick J. Wolfe and Lina Karam
Teaser: Are we really "Swimming in sensors and drowning in data", (A. Deptula, 2009)? Is "Water, water, every where/ nor any drop to drink", (S. Coleridge, 1798) an even more apt analogy? We argue that, faced with ever-increasing data rates across a range of scientific, engineering, and consumer applications, the signal processing community is forced to consider new paradigms for high-dimensional data analysis and understanding. As illustrative examples we discuss current trends in 3-D video processing, the analysis of signals that can be represented as graphs, and the mathematics of non-Euclidean data analysis that will be required to drive future developments in signal processing for "big data".

Trends in Machine Learning for Signal Processing
Moderator: Kostas Diamantaras
Speakers: Tülay Adali, Kostas Diamantaras, and Jan Larsen
Teaser: By putting the accent on "learning" from the data and the environment, the MLSP TC provides the essential bridge between the machine learning and signal processing communities. MLSP techniques have always been attractive solutions for traditional signal processing applications such as pattern recognition, speech, audio, and video processing. More importantly, owing to their polyvalent nature, these methods are also primary candidates for a new wave of emerging applications such as brain-computer interface, multimodal data fusion and processing, behavior and emotion recognition, and learning in environments such as social networks. At this session, we will discuss the role MLSP plays in such emerging applications as well as major paradigm shifts in learning as demonstrated by cognitive systems. We shall also explore what these paradigm shifts offer for the signal processing community.

Trends in Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing
Moderator: Mats Viberg
Speakers: Jian Li and Brian Sadler
Teaser: Sensor arrays are becoming ubiquitous across a broad swath of signal processing applications, and this trend is accelerating in new directions and dimensions. The panelists will outline these trends, including distributed arrays and networks, and highlight recent signal processing advances and open issues.

WEDNESDAY, May 25, 2011, 13:00 - 13:30

Trends in Multimedia Signal Processing
Moderator: Philip A. Chou
Speakers: Francesco De Natale, Eckehard Steinbach, and Enrico Magli
Teaser: Pushed by the tremendous technological and societal changes of the last decade, multimedia is more and more emerging as the cornerstone of next generation ICT. Mobile devices, sensors, embedded systems, high-performance computing, broadband networks, 3D, are some of the technologies that are pervading a generation of users that are more and more exigent and proactive. Evolving from a simple integration of existing technologies to a mutually-aware, interdisciplinary, development of new technologies is the biggest challenge of the Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP) community. After introducing the technological and societal trends that have an impact on our work, we will list some of the most promising research trends that have recently emerged in MMSP.

Trends in Signal Processing Education
Moderator: Wayne Padgett
Speaker: Rich Baraniuk
Teaser: This is an exciting time for signal processing education. Many SP educators are breaking out of the standard practice of chalk and talk lectures and weekly homeworks/labs and experimenting with more interactive and immersive teaching techniques. In this talk, we'll review some of the recent progress and future trends in SP education through a range of different initiatives, including (i) Connexions open-source textbook and peer evaluation system (IEEEcnx.org), (ii) open problem and answer databases, (iii) interactive simulations and video tutorials of SP concepts, (iv) machine-learning driven personalized learning systems, and (v) the Signal Processing Education Network (SPEN).

Trends in Bio Imaging and Signal Processing
Moderator: Jean-Christophe Olivo-Marin
Speakers: Michael Unser, Laure Blanc-Feraud, Andrew Laine, and Boudewijn Lelieveldt
Teaser: Increasingly sophisticated imaging devices and protocols are now being developed for biological and medical imaging. Understanding functional and pathological mechanisms in patients or model organisms indeed requires being able to visualize and measure in vivo and in situ at scales ranging from sub-cellular to whole body. This session will present latest developments in this area of research that has sparked a full array of challenging topics for the signal and image processing community.

THURSDAY, May 26, 2011, 11:45 - 12:15

Trends in Signal Processing Theory and Methods
Moderator: Abdelhak Zoubir
Speakers: Ali Sayed and Vikram Krishnamurthy
Teaser: The scope of the Signal Processing Theory and Methods (SPTM) Technical Committee (TC) has a broad span, ranging from digital filtering and adaptive signal processing to statistical signal analysis, estimation and detection. These areas continue to play a key role in classical and timely applications. Under the unifying theme "how can simple local behavior generate rational global behavior," the panelists will discuss the role of signal processing in networks and its power to solving timely problems. Topics, including distributed cognitive and bio-inspired processing, in-network adaptation and learning, game theory, distributed and social learning in signal processing will be discussed. The session promises to spark interest in a wide range of new and challenging advances in statistical signal processing. Do not miss it!

Trends in Information Forensics and Security
Moderator: Mauro Barni
Speakers: Ed Delp and Ton Kalker
Teaser: The history of the IFS TC is strongly tied to the surge in watermarking and stegonagraphy research that started in the mid-nineties. The expectations were high: watermarking was scheduled to solve every possible multimedia security problem. Looking back, those expectations were clearly naive. Also, the multimedia security community realized that there is a larger arsenal than just watermarking and stegonagraphy, and reflecting this, the IFS TC was founded on a much broader scope than just watermarking. Topics such as robust (perceptual) hashing, traitor tracing, homomorphic encryption, DRM, secure biometrics and many more are now within the domain of IFS. In this panel session we discuss to what the future of IFS should be. Should we keep on focussing on watermarking and stego? What is the relevance of new kids on the block? Do we expect major breakthroughs in any of them? What research topics should we focus on?

Trends in Audio and Acoustic Signal Processing
Moderator: Walter Kellermann
Speakers: Malcolm G. Slaney and Patrick A. Naylor
Teaser: Audio Ergo Sum - We are surrounded by sound and each space we occupy has characteristic acoustic properties. Whether for music, telecommunications or a host of other applications, capturing, rendering and processing sound is crucial to human existence. Audio and acoustic signal processing targets single and multichannel processing techniques and leverages classification technology, adaptive signal processing, system identification, wave field techniques and machine learning to name but a few of the exciting challenges with the scope of this vibrant and growing topic.

Trends in Signal Processing Applications and Industry Technology
Moderator: Fa-Long Luo
Speakers: Ward Williams, Rajesh Narasimha, and Raghuveer M. Rao
Teaser: Will the next generation Smartphone be that single essential device with High Definition Wide Dynamic Range 3D and gesture recognition engines running augmented reality applications with the help of the cloud? Perception is a many-layered process and signal processing is essential to extracting world models from sensor outputs. What are the emerging signal processing techniques for perception in autonomous systems such as robots?

FRIDAY, May 27, 2011, 11:45 - 12:15

Trends in Speech and Spoken Language Processing
Moderator: John H. Hansen
Speakers: Junlan Feng, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, and Jason D. Williams
Teaser: The past few years have been an exciting time for speech and language processing technology. Speech recognition is now standard in major mobile phone operating systems, and has more users than ever. New computer models such as cloud computing enable models of unprecedented scale and accuracy to be widely deployed. With a wide range of applications ranging from simple search to complex ones involving understanding, dialog interaction, information extraction, translation and speech synthesis, new paradigms have evolved to address their speed and accuracy requirements. This talk will look at some of the technical developments underpinning these recent developments, and look ahead to current work which promises to enable the next wave of innovations in accuracy and scale for speech and language processing.

Trends in Design and Implementation of Signal Processing Systems
Moderator: Wonyong Sung
Speakers: Liang-Gee Chen and Mohammad M. Mansour
Teaser: The platform of Digital Signal Processing played an important role for driving the progressing in signal processing applications including wireline/wireless communication, multimedia processing, speech coding, recognition, synthesis, audio processing and graphics in the past decades. Due to the progressing from semiconductor technology, DSP platform is getting more powerful and complex and still plays as the driving force to enable dramatic applications in the efficiency and effectiveness of human life. In this talk, the trends of DiSPS including bio-medical signal processing, green technology for DSP platform and software/embedded system design methodology will be addressed.

Trends in Signal Processing for Communications and Networking
Moderator: Geert Leus
Speakers: Robert W. Heath Jr. and Shuguang Cui
Teaser: The area of signal processing for communications and networking (SPCOM) is shifting from a focus on the physical layer to a view that encompasses higher communication layers. Timely examples include interference management, heterogeneous networks, and cognitive radio networks. But is the physical layer really dead? What about non-traditional communication applications like underwater communications and optical communication? Are social networks and energy networks within the domain of SPCOM? Do new algorithmic techniques like compressive sampling have a future in SPCOM?

More related session details can be found at the Emerging Trends in Signal Processing website of ICASSP 2011. Do not hesitate any longer and check ICASSP's Trends schedule to be sure to attend the sessions of your choice and engage in lively discussions with your peers.