Distinguished Industry Speakers

Ioannis Katsavounidis

Ioannis Katsavounidis (SM) studied Electrical Engineering at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, from 1986-1991, where he received a 5-year B.S. degree with double specialization in Electronics/Computer Engineering and Telecommunications.  He continued his graduate studies in Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), CA, USA, from 1991-1998, receiving M.S., EEE and Ph.D. degrees in 1992, 1997 and 1998 respectively. His work and research were focused on Signal Processing, as part of the Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI), with minor in Telecommunications and another minor program in Mathematics.

Dr. Katsavounidis was part of Caltech’s High Energy Physics department research team at the Italian National Laboratory at Gran Sasso (Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso – LNGS) (1996 to 2000); member, Italian network of research institutes in Nuclear Physics (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare – INFN), working as engineer for the MACRO (Monopoles, Astrophysics and Cosmic Ray Observatory) large-scale high-energy physics experiment.  He worked at InterVideo, a startup company based in Fremont, CA, USA (2000 to 2007); co-founder, CTO and Chief Scientist of Cidana, San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA (2007 to 2008); Associate Professor, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Thessaly in Volos, Greece (2008 to 2015); Senior Research Scientist at Netflix in Los Gatos, CA, USA, (2015 to 2018).  He is a Research Scientist at Meta Platforms in Menlo Park, CA, USA, (2018 till present) part of the Video Infrastructure team, supporting all video processing for the popular Facebook, Instagram and Messenger applications.  He led the efforts from Video Infrastructure to design Meta’s Scalable Video Processor (MSVP), a custom ASIC that is used in Meta’s datacenters for all the back-end transcoding and quality measurement tasks.  MSVP received in 2024 the 75^th Technology and Engineering Emmy Award in the “Design and Deployment of Efficient Hardware Video Accelerators for Cloud” category.

Dr. Katsavounidis has been serving as co-chair of the Software Implementation Working Group (SIWG) at the Alliance for Open Media, as a co-chair of the No-Reference Quality Metrics (NORM) and Statistical Analysis Methods (SAM) groups at the Video Quality Experts Group. He holds two music degrees; a BA in music theory, awarded in 1990 by the Macedonian School of Music in Thessaloniki, Greece and a MA in classical piano performance, awarded in 1991 by the School of Music in Veria, Greece.

Dr. Katsavounidis is a Senior Member of IEEE; Member, IEEE Signal Processing (SPS) and IEEE Computers and Systems (CAS) societies. He is a member of SPIE and the Technical Chamber of Greece.  He received the Distinguished Alumni award (senior industry category) at the 50^th anniversary of the Signal and Image Processing Institute at the University of Southern California in 2022.  He has organized and led industry workshops at ICIP conferences since 2019 and ICASSP conferences since 2023.

Ioannis Katsavounidis

Lecture Topics

• Video Streaming Principals and Quality/Efficiency Optimization
• Full Reference Video Quality Metrics - A Review
• Video Transcoding - HW and SW Solutions

Jinyu Li

Jinyu Li (F) received the B.E. and M.E. degrees in electrical engineering and information systems from University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China, in 1997 and 2000, respectively. He received the Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA in 2008.

Dr. Li currently serves as a Partner Applied Science Manager for Microsoft, Redmond, WA, USA since 2008 and leads a science team dedicated to designing and enhancing speech modeling algorithms and technologies. From 2000 to 2003, he was a Researcher in the Intel China Research Center and Research Manager in iFlytek, China.

Dr. Li has been a Member, IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee from 2018 to 2023; Associate Editor, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing from 2015 to 2020; Area Chair, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) from 2018 and 2023; Lead Technical Program Chair, IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workship (SLT) 2021 and IEEE Workshop of Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) 2023. Dr. Li was awarded as the Industrial Distinguished Leader at Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA) in 2021 and APSIPA Sadaoki Furui Prize Paper Award in 2023.

Dr. Li’s research areas include end-to-end modeling for speech recognition, speech translation, and multimodal modeling.

Jinyu Li
Microsoft, USA

Lecture Topics

• End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition: Advances and Next Trends
• Unlocking Multimodal Intelligence with Large Language Model
• Large-Scale Streaming End-to-End Speech Translation

Morteza Mardani

Morteza Mardani (SM) is a lead scientist at NVIDIA Research, specializing in generative learning. He also serves as a visiting researcher in the Electrical Engineering Department at Stanford University. Dr. Mardani was a postdoctoral researcher and research associate at Stanford (June 2015 to January 2020) and he was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's RISE Lab (January 2015 to June 2015). He earned his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota (September 2009 – May 2015).

Dr. Mardani's work has been recognized with several awards, including the IEEE Signal Processing Society's Young Author Best Paper Award in 2017 and the Best Student Paper Award at IEEE Signal Processing Advances in Wireless Communications (SPAWC) in 2012. Dr. Mardani is a Senior Member of IEEE; Member, IEEE Signal Processing Society; and Member, IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Computational Imaging Technical Committee (2023-2024).

Dr. Mardani's expertise lies in statistical learning, particularly in the area of generative AI.

Morteza Mardani
San Jose, CA, USA

Lecture Topics

• Introduction to Diffusion Models: Signal Processing Perspective
• Diffusion Models for Inverse Problems

Tomohiro Nakatani

Tomohiro Nakatani (F) received his B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees from Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan, in 1989, 1991, and 2002, respectively.  He is currently a Senior Distinguished Researcher at Communication Science Laboratories, NTT Corporation, Japan. In 2005, he was a Visiting Scholar at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA, and from 2008 to 2017, he served as a Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Media Science at Nagoya University, Japan. Since joining NTT Corporation as a Researcher in 1991, he has focused on developing audio signal processing technologies for intelligent human-machine interfaces, including dereverberation, denoising, source separation, and robust automatic speech recognition (ASR).

Dr. Nakatani served as Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing (2008 to 2010); Member, IEEE SPS Audio and Acoustics Technical Committee (2009 to 2014); Member, IEEE SPS Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (2016 to 2021); and Member, IEEE SPS Fellow Evaluation Committee (2024). He Co-Chaired the 2014 REVERB Challenge Workshop and was a General Co-Chair of the IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU) (2017).

Dr. Nakatani’s accolades include the 2005 IEICE Best Paper Award, the 2009 ASJ Technical Development Award, the 2012 Japan Audio Society Award, an Honorable Mention for the 2015 IEEE ASRU Best Paper Award, the 2017 Maejima Hisoka Award, and the 2018 IWAENC Best Paper Award.

Tomohiro Nakatani

Lecture Topics

• Speech Dereverberation: Theory, Algorithms, and Applications
• Convolutional Beamforming for Joint Denoising, Dereverberation, and Source Separation
• Boosting Distant Automatic Speech Recognition Using Multiple Microphone Frontend
• High-Quality Speech Enhancement Integrating Neural Networks and Model-Based Signal Processing

Justin Picard

Dr. Justin Picard (SM) attended Polytechnique Montréal, where he received his B.S. degree in physics engineering (1990-1994), and his MSc in electronics engineering (1994-1997). He received a PhD in computer science from the University of Neuchâtel (1996-2000), before attending the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) for postdoctoral research in digital watermarking (2000-2001). 

Dr. Picard was a research and development engineer at Mediasec Technologies in Rhode Island (2001-2004), the head of research and development at Thomson Technicolor in Germany (2004-2006), and later the chief scientist at Advanced Track & Trace in France (2006-2013). In 2014, he co-founded Scantrust in Switzerland, after filing a patent on a QR Code, which secures against counterfeit attempts. He was Chief Executive Officer of the company until 2017, then took the role of Chief Technology Officer. 

Dr. Picard is a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Task Force on Countering Illicit Trade (2012-) and a member of the network of experts at the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (2016-). He was selected as World Economic Forum Technology (WEF) Pioneer (2009), and served as member of the WEF Global Agenda Council on Illicit Trade (2009-2014). He is a member of the GS1 Digital Link technical committee and an advisor to the European Union Intellectual Property Organization (EUIPO) on anti-counterfeiting technologies. He is also co-founder of the non-governmental organization Black Market Watch, where he developed a methodology to assess the impacts of illicit trade.

Dr. Picard was co-organizer of the special session on “Forensics and Security of Physical Objects” at the 2021 IEEE Workshop on Information Forensics and Security (WIFS). He is a reviewer for WIFS and is on the program committee of the ACM Symposium on document engineering.

Justin Picard

Lecture Topics

• Signal Processing Techniques for Authentication and Security of Physical Objects
• Image Processing Techniques for Product Authentication with Smartphones
• Counterfeit Detection Using Machine Learning and Deep Learning

Michiel Bacchiani

Michiel Bacchiani (F) currently manages a research group in Google Tokyo focused on jointly modeling speech and natural language understanding. Previously, he managed the acoustic modeling team responsible for developing novel algorithms and training infrastructure for all speech recognition applications backing Google services. Before joining Google, Dr. Bacchiani worked as a member of technical staff at IBM Research (2004-2005), as a technical staff member at AT&T Labs Research (1999-2004) and as a research associate and visiting researcher at Advanced Telecommunications Research labs in Kyoto, Japan.

Dr. Bacchiani served as Chair, IEEE Spoken Language Technical Committee (2017-2018); elected member, IEEE Spoken Language Technical Committee (2003-2006 and 2013-2016); area chair, International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) in 2005, 2007 and 2015. He is a Senior Area Editor for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language and a subject editor and board member of the Speech Communication journal. He has served as an organizing committee member for ASR 2015 and ASRU 2017.

Michiel Bacchiani
SHIBUYA STREAM
Shibuya-ku, Tokyo, Japan
E: michiel@google.com

Lecture Topics

• Japanese Spelling Inconsistency
• Neural Vocoding and Speech Enhancement
• Research Projects at the Google Tokyo Office

Farhan Baqai

Farhan Baqai (F) earned a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Engineering and Technology, Lahore, Pakistan, a Master of Engineering Science degree from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, USA. He worked on half-toning algorithms for inkJet printers at Xerox Corporation in Rochester, NY, USA and on digital camera signal processing at Sony US Research Center in San Jose, CA. Currently, he is a Senior Research Manager at Apple Inc. where he leads the development of state-of-the-art algorithms for digital photography.

Dr. Baqai’s research and product contributions span digital camera image processing, machine learning, computer vision, stereoscopic image processing, statistical signal processing, digital printing, and radar imaging. His innovations have shipped in more than a billion devices which capture trillions of images and videos every year. Dr. Baqai setup, contributed to, and led successful multi-year research collaborations between Sony and Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, USA, and the University of Dayton in Ohio, USA.

Dr. Baqai’s image noise modeling, propagation, and reduction technologies have been incorporated in Sony BIONZ image signal processors shipping in CyberShot and Alpha camera product lines. At Apple, Dr. Baqai and this team pioneered noise reduction, image fusion, resolution transfer, chromatic aberration correction, adaptive bracketing, and registration methodologies that have been shipping in iPhone cameras since 2014. He led the research and cross-functional development effort that resulted in Night mode in iPhone cameras. Night mode provides dramatic improvements to lowlight imaging and has made Apple a world leader in mobile lowlight photography.

Dr. Baqai is an IEEE Fellow (2023), a Deputy Editor in Chief (2023-present) and a past Senior Area Editor (2018-2022) and Associate Editor (2010-2014) of IEEE Transactions on Image Processing. He sits on the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Image, Video, and Multidimensional Signal Processing Technical Committee (2020-present). He served as a Member of IEEE SPS Industry DSP Technology Standing Committee (2007-2014) and was Publicity Co-Chair of 2012 IEEE Conference on Image Processing. In 2020, Purdue University School of Electrical and Computer Engineering conferred on him the Outstanding Electrical and Computer Engineer (OECE) award.

Farhan Baqai
Fremont, CA, USA
E: fbaqai@gmail.com

Lecture Topics

• Research in Academia and Industry from the Lens of Digital Camera
• Image Processing — A Personal Odyssey
• Digital Camera Signal Processing — History, Recent Advances, Challenges, and Opportunities

Nada Golmie

Nada Golmie (F) received her Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Maryland at College Park in 2002, and her B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Engineering from Toledo University in 1992 and Syracuse University in 1993 respectively. Since 1993, she has been a research engineer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). From 2014 until 2022, she served as the chief for Wireless Networks Division at NIST. She is a NIST Fellow in the Communications Technology Laboratory. Her research in media access control and protocols for wireless networks led to over 200 technical papers presented at professional conferences, journals, and contributed to international standard organizations and industry led consortia. She is the author of “Coexistence in Wireless Networks: Challenges and System-level Solutions in the Unlicensed Bands," published by Cambridge University Press (2006). She leads several projects related to the modeling and evaluation of future generation wireless systems and protocols and serves as the chair of the NextG Channel Model Alliance.

Dr. Nada is a Fellow of IEEE and member, IEEE Communications and IEEE Signal Processing societies. She has served as Director, IEEE Communications Society Standardization Program Development Board (2018-2019, 2022-2023); member, IEEE Technical Activities Boards on Standards (2020-present), IEEE Communications Society Awards Committee (2022-2024), Communications Society Nominations and Elections Committee (2020-2022), Communications Society Fellow Evaluation Committee (2024-2025). She is an associate editor, IEEE Transactions on Cognitive Communications and Networking (2023-2025); associate editor, IEEE Journal on Select Areas in Communications (2011-2015). She received the U.S. Department of Commerce Gold medal in 2011 and Bronze medal in 2023 and the NIST Slitcher Award in 2019.

Dr. Nada’s research interest includes the performance evaluation of wireless communications systems and protocols, propagation measurement and modeling, next generation wireless, and millimeter-wave communication systems.

Nada Golmie
National Institute of Standards and Technology
Gaithersburg, MD, USA
E: nada.golmie@nist.gov

Lecture Topics

• Joint communications and sensing
• RF propagation measurement and modeling
• Measurement data for modeling of wireless systems and protocols

John Treichler

John Treichler (F) received his BA and MEE degrees from Rice University, Houston, TX in 1970 and his PhDEE from Stanford in 1977. He served as a line officer aboard destroyers in the US Navy from 1970 to 1974. In 1977 he joined ARGOSystems in Sunnyvale CA and then helped found Applied Signal Technology, Inc. in 1984 after serving for a year as an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Cornell University. Applied Signal Technology, now a business unit of Raytheon Technologies, Inc, designs and builds advanced signal processing equipment. For three years he was the president of the business unit and continues to serve as its Chief Technical Officer.

Dr. Treichler was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1991. He was awarded the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Technical Achievement Award in 2000 and its first Industrial Leader Award in 2016. He is the Past President of the IEEE Foundation, and in 2016 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 2019 he received the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Norbert Wiener Society Award.

John Treichler
E: jrt@treichler.net

Lecture Topics

• Four or More Ways to Go Out of Business – All Performed by the Same Company
• The Worst Day of my Professional Engineering Life or How I Learned to Love Multipath Propagation
• The Effect of Entropy on the Choice of a Technical Career or Four Stories

Kush R. Varshney

Kush R. Varshney (SM) received the B.S. degree (magna cum laude) in electrical and computer engineering with honors from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, in 2004. He received the S.M. degree in 2006 and the Ph.D. degree in 2010, both in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge. While at MIT, he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow.

Dr. Varshney is a distinguished research scientist and senior manager with IBM Research at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, where he leads the Trustworthy Machine Intelligence department. He was a visiting scientist at IBM Research - Africa, Nairobi, Kenya in 2019. He is the founding co-director of the IBM Science for Social Good initiative. He and his team created several well-known open-source toolkits, including AI Fairness 360, AI Explainability 360, Uncertainty Quantification 360, and AI FactSheets 360. AI Fairness 360 has been recognized by the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center as a tech spotlight runner-up and by the Falling Walls Science Symposium as a winning science and innovation management breakthrough.

Dr. Varshney conducts academic research on the theory and methods of trustworthy machine learning. His work has been recognized through paper awards at the Fusion 2009, SOLI 2013, KDD 2014, and SDM 2015 conferences and the 2019 Computing Community Consortium / Schmidt Futures Computer Science for Social Good White Paper Competition.

Kush R. Varshney
Yorktown Heights, NY, USA
E: krvarshn@us.ibm.com

Lecture Topics

• Safe and Trustworthy Foundation Models
• A Carative Approach to AI Governance
• Trustworthy Machine Learning

Jakob Hoydis

Jakob Hoydis (SM) is a Principal Research Scientist at NVIDIA working on the intersection of machine learning and wireless communications. Before joining NVIDIA, he was Member of Technical Staff and later Head of a research department at Nokia Bell Labs (2012-2021), with a short break during which he co-founded the social network SPRAED (2014-2015). He obtained the diploma degree in electrical engineering (2002-2008) from RWTH Aachen University, Germany, and the Ph.D. degree (2009-2012) from Supéléc, France.

Dr. Hoydis was Chair, IEEE Communications Society Emerging Technology Initiative on Machine Learning as well as Editor, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications (2019-2021). From 2019-2022, he was Area Editor, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communication Series on Machine Learning in Communications and Networks.

He is recipient of the VTG IDE Johann-Philipp-Reis Prize (2019), the IEEE SEE Glavieux Prize (2019), the IEEE Marconi Prize Paper Award (2018), the IEEE Leonard G. Abraham Prize (2015), the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference 2014 Best Paper Award, the VDE ITG Förderpreis Award (2013), the Publication Prize of the Supéléc Foundation (2012), the Nokia AI Innovation Award (2018), as well as the Nokia France Top Inventor Awards (2018 and 2019). He is one of the maintainers and core developers of Sionna, a GPU-accelerated open-source link-level simulator for next-generation communication systems.

Dr. Hoydis’ research interests include machine learning, signal processing, and information theory and their applications to wireless communications and related applications.

Jakob Hoydis
NVIDIA, France
E: jhoydis@nvidia.com

Lecture Topics

• Machine Learning & Deep Learning for Wireless Communications
• AI/ML for 5G and Beyond
• End-to-end Learning for the Physical Layer
• Graph Neural Networks for Physical Layer Processing

Linda J. Moore

Linda J. Moore (SM) received a B.S. in computer engineering (2000-2004) from Wright State University (Dayton, Ohio, USA) and an M.S. in electrical engineering (2004-2006) from The Ohio State University (Columbus, Ohio, USA). She received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering (2006-2016) from the University of Dayton (Dayton, Ohio, USA) where she focused on the impact of phase information on radar automatic target recognition.

Dr. Moore is an IEEE Senior Member (2020), served as a Technical Session Chair at the IEEE Radar Conference, Radar Imaging Systems Session (2014) and the SPIE Defense and Commercial Sensing Conference, Algorithms for SAR Imagery Session (2014, 2017).

Dr. Moore has 19 technical publications including journal articles in IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems (2018), and IEEE Aerospace and Electronics Systems Magazine (2014). She also contributed content to Part VII: Imaging Radar in Stimson’s Introduction to Airborne Radar book (2014) (acknowledgement to AFRL Gotcha Radar Program).

Dr. Moore has focused on innovative solutions for real-time radar processing to create 24/7, all-weather, day/night sensing capabilities. Dr. Moore has strengthened the workforce through internships, technical/strategic guidance, development of “soft skills” (e.g., communication), promotion of professionalism, and emphasis on participation in world-class technical societies like IEEE. Her exemplary science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) leadership and mentoring was recognized in 2020 when she received the IEEE Dayton Section Women in Engineering (WIE) Award. Dr. Moore has significantly contributed to the engineering community by publishing data sets and challenge problems to reduce the barrier of entry for radar signal processing researchers.

Linda J. Moore
E: linda.moore.10@us.af.mil

Lecture Topics

• Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Sensing and Signal Processing Challenges with Data Sets for Associated Research
• Considerations for Using Deep Learning for Radar Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) and Data Sets for Associated Research
• Leadership and Professionalism Skills for the Workplace

Ruhi Sarikaya

Ruhi Sarikaya (F) received his B.S. degree from Bilkent University, Turkey (1990-1995); M.S. degree from Clemson University, USA (1995-1997); and Ph.D. degree from Duke University, USA (1997-2001), all in electrical and computer engineering. He has been a Director at Amazon Alexa since 2016. He built and is leading the Intelligence Decisions organization within Alexa AI at Amazon. With his team, he has been building core AI capabilities around ranking, relevance, natural language understanding, dialog management, contextual understanding, personalization, self-learning, proactive suggestions, metrics and analytics for Alexa. Prior to that, he was a principal science manager and the founder of the language understanding and dialog systems group at Microsoft between (2011 and 2016). His group has built the language understanding and dialog management capabilities of Cortana, Xbox One, and the underlying platform. Before Microsoft, he was a research staff member and team lead in the Human Language Technologies Group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center for ten years. Prior to IBM, he worked as a researcher at the Center for Spoken Language Research (CSLR) at University of Colorado at Boulder for two years.

Dr. Sarikaya is IEEE Fellow (2021) and is the recipient of the Best Paper Award: “Convolutional Neural Network Based Triangular CRF for Joint Intent Detection and Slot Filling”, IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (2013). He was Lead Guest Editor, Special Issue on “Processing morphologically rich languages”, IEEE Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing (2009); Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Audio Speech and Language Processing (2007-2011); Associate Editor, IEEE Signal Processing Letters (2010-2012); and IEEE Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (NLP Area) (2015-2017).

Dr. Sarikaya has served as Member, Speech and Language Processing Technical Committee (2015-2017); General Co-Chair, IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT) (2012); Publicity Chair, IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU) (2005); Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing (2008-2012) and IEEE Signal Processing Letters (2011-2012). He has given keynotes in major AI, Web and language technology conferences. He has published over 130 technical papers in refereed journal and conference proceedings and is the inventor of over 80 issued/pending patents.

Ruhi Sarikaya
Amazon
Bellevue, WA, USA
E: rsarikay@amazon.com

Lecture Topics

• An Overview of Conversational Agents
• Intelligent Conversational Agents for Ambient Computing
• Self-Learning in Conversational AI Systems

Ivan Tashev

Ivan Tashev (F) received his Diploma Engineer degree in Electronic Engineering in 1984 and PhD in Computer Science in 1990 from the Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria. He was Assistant Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering of the same university, when in 1998 joined Microsoft in Redmond, USA. Currently, Dr. Tashev is a Partner Software Architect and leads the Audio and Acoustics Research Group in Microsoft Research Labs in Redmond, USA. Since 2012, Dr. Tashev is Affiliate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Washington in Seattle, USA. Since 2019, he is an Honorary Professor at the Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria.

Dr. Tashev is IEEE Fellow (2021); Member, Audio Engineering Society (2006); Member, Acoustical Society of America (2010); Member, SPS Audio and Acoustics Signal Processing Technical Committee (2011-2014), IEEE SPS Standing Committee on Industry DSP Technology (2013-2020), IEEE SPS Applied Signal Processing Systems Technical Committee (2021), Chair, IEEE SPS Industry Technical Working Group (2020-2022).

Dr. Tashev is listed as inventor of 55 USA patent applications, 50 of them already granted. The audio processing technologies, created by Dr. Tashev, have been incorporated in Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Auto Platform, and Microsoft Round Table device. He served as the audio architect for Kinect for Xbox and for Microsoft HoloLens. His latest passion is Brain-Computer Interfaces.

Dr. Tashev’s research interests include processing multichannel signals with the means of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, especially processing audio and biological signals.

Ivan Tashev
Microsoft
Redmond, WA, USA
E: ivantash@microsoft.com

Lecture Topics

• Sound Capture and Speech Enhancement for Gaming and Entertainment – and the Story of Kinect
• Spatial Audio for Virtual and Augmented Reality Devices – Approaches and Implementation, Examples From Hololens
• Sound Capture and Speech Enhancement for Augmented and Virtual Reality Devices
• Multichannel Echo Cancellation: Problems and Solutions
• Single Channel Speech Enhancement: From Wiener Filtering to Neural Networks
• Microphone Array Processing – From Theory to Manufacturable Microphone Arrays
• Brain-Computer Interfaces – Are We There Yet?
• Optimization Methods in Digital Signal Processing – Practical Use and Approaches
• Audio Analytics – What We Can Get From Speech Beyond Speech Recognition, and is There Anything Useful in the Non-Speech Audio
• Audio for Intelligent Devices – Approaches and Applications
• Microsoft Research – History, Building Principles, and How the Innovation in Microsoft Works

Yan Ye

Yan Ye (SM) received her Ph.D. degree from the University of California, San Diego, in 2002, and her B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Science and Technology of China in 1994 and 1997, respectively. She is currently the Head of Video Technology Lab of Alibaba’s Damo Academy, Alibaba Group U.S. in Sunnyvale California. Prior to Alibaba, she held various management and technical positions at InterDigital, Dolby Laboratories, and Qualcomm.

Dr. Ye was Guest Editor, IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT) special section on “the joint Call for Proposals on video compression with capability beyond HEVC” (2020) and TCSVT special section on “Versatile Video Coding” (2021). She has been Program Committee Member, IEEE Data Compression Conference (DCC) (since 2014); Conference Subcommittee Co-Chair, IEEE Visual Signal Processing and Communication Technical Committee (VSPC-TC) (since 2022); Area Chair, of “multimedia standards and related research” of the IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) (2021); Publicity Chair, IEEE Video Coding and Image Process (VCIP) (2021); Industry Chair, IEEE Picture Coding Symposium (PCS) (2019); Organizing Committee Member, IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo (ICME) (2018); and Technical Program Committee Member, IEEE Picture Coding Symposium (PCS) (2013 and 2019).

Dr. Ye has been actively involved in developing international video coding and video streaming standards in ITU-T SG16/Q.6 Video Coding Experts Group (VCEG) and ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 29 Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG). She holds various leadership positions in international and U.S. national standards development organizations, where she is currently an Associate Rapporteur of the ITU-T SG16/Q.6 (since 2022), the Group Chair of INCITS/MPEG task group (since 2020), and a focus group chair of the ISO/IEC SC 29/AG 5 MPEG Visual Quality Assessment (since 2020). She has made many technical contributions to well-known video coding and streaming standards such as H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, H.266/VVC, MPEG DASH and MPEG OMAF. She is an Editor of the VVC test model, the 360Lib algorithm description, and the scalable extensions and the screen content coding extensions of the HEVC standard.

Dr. Ye is devoted to multimedia standards development, hardware and software video codec implementations, as well as deep learning-based video research. Her research interests include advanced video coding, processing and streaming algorithms, real-time and immersive video communications, AR/VR/MR, and deep learning-based video coding, processing, and quality assessment algorithms.

Yan Ye
E: yye2009@gmail.com

Lecture Topics

• Video Coding: Standards and Applications
• Deep Learning-Based Video Coding
• 360-Degree Video Coding