News from the MLSP TC

By Kenneth E. Hild II (MLSP Liaison to E-Newsletter)

The Machine Learning for Signal Processing Technical Committee (MLSP TC) is excited to announce their upcoming workshop in Southampton. Below I give a summary of this workshop, as well as a specific details of the plenary speakers, tutorials, special track on Latent Variable Analysis (LVA), and the MLSP competition. I will also list the new members of the MLSP TC and awards/appointments recently received by the MLSP TC.

MLSP 2013 Workshop

The IEEE Signal Processing Society is sponsoring the 23rd Machine Learning for Signal Processing (MLSP) Workshop, which will take place on September 22-25, 2013. The venue for the workshop is the Chilworth Manor Hotel & Conference Centre, which is located on 12 acres of beautifully-landscaped grounds just 4 miles from Southampton, United Kingdom, and 75 miles from London. Southampton is regarded as the cruise capital of Northern Europe and plays host to over four million visitors a year. It is a diverse city with a broad range of attractions to offer all ages. Everyone is invited to submit a paper. Papers should discuss a signal processing development for machine learning. Specific topics include, but are not limited to: Learning theory, Graphical models, Pattern recognition, Bayesian learning, Perceptual signal processing, and Cognitive information processing. A few of the submitted papers will be chosen for inclusion in a special issue of the Springer Journal of Signal Processing Systems. All the papers presented at the workshop will be published in and indexed by IEEE Xplore. Also, one Best Student Paper Award will be awarded by the MLSP TC. For more information, visit the MLSP 2013 website. The deadline for submission of six-page papers is May 24, 2013.

Plenary speakers and Tutorials

We are please to annouce that the plenary speakers for the MLSP 2013 Workshop include:

1. Sergios Theodoridis (Department of Informatics & Telecommunications, University of Athens, Greece),
2. Christian Jutten (GIPA-lab, University Joseph Fourier of Grenoble, France),
3. Simon Godsill (SigProC Laboratory, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom).

The workshop will also host the following two tutorials:

1. "Non-linear System Identification in Reproducing Kernel Hilbert Spaces - Methods and Applications", by Cédric Richard (Laboratoire Lagrange, University of Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France),
2. "Tensor Tools for Signal Processing and Data Analysis" by Lieven De Lathauwer (ESAT/SCD, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium).

LVA Special Track

The MLSP 2013 Workshop will have a special track to host the International Conference for Latent Variable Analysis (LVA). The Intl. Conf. on LVA, which was formerly known as the Intl. Conf. for Independent Component Analysis and Signal Separation, has been held a total of 10 times, the first of which was in Aussois, France in 1999, and the most recent of which was held last year in Tel-Aviv, Israel. The LVA community, which was an early adopter of machine learning for signal processing, has been responsible for many significant developments concerning Independent Component Analysis (ICA), Blind Source Separation (BSS), and Non-Blind Signal Separation. The MLSP TC and the LVA steering committee have recently been working together much more closely, which will bring some of the events and members of the LVA community to the IEEE.

Data Analysis Competition

A Data Analysis Competition is being organized in conjunction with the workshop. The goal of the competition is to advance the current state-of-the-art of signal processing algorithms. The problems are selected to reflect current trends, evaluate existing approaches on common benchmarks, and identify critical new areas of research. The competition this year will be hosted and judged on Kaggle.com. It starts on April 26, 2013 and continues for 90 days. Winners will be announced at the workshop.

New Members of MLSP TC

The MLSP TC recently had an election to determine who will stay on for a second term and who will join the MLSP TC as new members. We are pleased to announce that the following three members were re-elected to a second term: Weifeng Liu, Morten Morup, and Asoke Nandi. In addition, the following four new members, who bring a wealth of knowledge to the MLSP TC, have been added:

1. Suleyman Serdar Kozat (Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey)
2. Cedric Richard (Universite de Nice Sophia-Antipolis, France)
3. Saeid Sanei (University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey)
4. Vincent Tan (Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore)

Awards/Appointments

The MLSP TC would also like to congratulate several members of the TC on their recent achievements. Below I mention three such achievements and I have no doubt that I am not aware of many other achievements of the MLSP TC.

1. Ignacio Santamaria has been awarded the 2012 Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award, which will be presented during the Opening Ceremony at ICASSP 2013 in Vancouver. The article is titled "Detection of Spatially Correlated Gaussian Time Series," which was co-authored by David Ramirez, Javier Via, Ignacio Santamaria, and Louis L. Scharf and was published in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Vol. 58, No. 10, October 2010.
2. Paris Smaragdis has been selected to serve on the editorial board for the IEEE Signal Processing Letters.
3. Tulay Adali was elected to serve on the editorial board of the Proceedings of the IEEE. Her initial three-year term started this January. Tulay also received the 2013 University System of Maryland's Regents' Award for Research.