Minutes of ICASSP 2001 Meeting, held 8 May 01 in Salt Lake City, Utah

In attendance: Georgios Giannakis (chair), Alle-Jan van der Veen (minutes), Javier Fonollosa, Brian Sadler, Mike Zoltowski, Guo-Tong Zhou, Ananthram Swami, Jitendra Tugnait, Moeness Amin, PP Vaidyanathan, Pierre Duhamel, Luc Vandendorpe, Philippe Loubaton, Dirk Slock, Bjorn Ottersten, Lang Tong, Sergio Barbarossa, Nicolas Sidiropoulos, John Treichler.
Victor Barosso (partly attending wrt SPAWC)

Absent: Zhi Ding, X-G Xia, Rick Blum, John Shynk, Mike Tsatsanis, Greg Wornell

  1. Agenda of the May'01 and Minutes of the June'00 meeting were approved.

  2. TC membership and representation
    One new TC member (Xia) was not attending the meeting hence could not be introduced.

    SPCOM-TC representatives: current representatives are

    Expert Speaker: this year there was no expert summary session at ICASSP.

    New TC members will be needed by December 2001 since 17 terms are ending. A new Chair will be needed since Giannakis doesn't intend to be reelected after serving 2 terms as chair.

  3. SPCOM Webpage: not discussed during the meeting.

  4. ICASSP reviews: not discussed during the meeting.
    The general impression is that the electronic review system used for ICASSP-2001 was working very smooth. Reviewers could update their review, and authors could update their paper using the feedback. Remaining point would be the easier downloading of all papers assigned to a reviewer (in bulk). As last year, SPCOM received an increasing number of papers.

  5. Pool of associate editors:
    Lang Tong presented a list of 4 potential candidates, with expertise in estimation, space-time processing, VLSI architectures, and SSAP. After a brief discussion, voting was used to rank them. The list will be forwarded with the rank information to Arye Nehorai (editor in chief). More candidate editors are needed to be added to the pool.

  6. Awards:
    Nobody contributed nominations for the IEEE level awards.
    There are only a few nominations for SP-level awards (including society, technical achievement, and service awards). More nominations are needed before we can have a meaningful selection. All TC members are expected to nominate at least 1 candidate before June 1 (copy to Swami and Van der Veen). We will finalize nominations and vote on those during our Sept. 1-8 e-mail meeting. Swami and Van der Veen will coordinate the review and voting processes. Target is to obtain a good pool of papers and have maximal endorsement for the final selection.

    Procedure:

    Starting next year, we will start the award selection procedure by April 2 for all paper categories, so that we can vote during ICASSP.

  8. SPCOM conferences:
    There was no time to comment on the SPAWC'00 workshop in Taiwan. Apparently it was a success, although expensive, and the food was well appreciated.

    There have been no less than four proposals to organize SPAWC'03: Rome, Lisbon, Antalya (Turkey), and Toronto. In view of this, the meeting first discussed whether we should have SPAWC every year from now on. An additional motivation is that it would increase the visibility and also will produce a larger pool of associate editors. The disadvantage is that there are already too many conferences on Communications, hence it would further delute the quality. In addition, it might draw from SSAP.

    A vote to have SPAWC every year for the next 3 years gave 18 in favor, 1 abstain, hence was accepted. (Note from the vice-chair: in the days after the meeting at least 5 members approached me to say that in fact it might not be such a good idea after all. We'll have to try once and decide again.)

    There was a brief discussion on the best period to have SPAWCs. May is good for academics in the US but not particularly for those in Europe, and might be too close to ICASSP. June-August is harder to secure accomodation. The general impression is that April to early May would be best in general.

    Victor Barroso defended his proposal to have SPAWC at a resort in Lisbon, with as main motivation the recent start of several institutions on SP. Sergio Barbarossa defended his proposal to have SPAWC at the university in the center in Rome. The other candidate places were not represented but their written applications were distributed.

    Voting for SPAWC'03 produced a majority support for Rome, and minor support for Lisbon. We agreed that Sergio will try to organize SPAWC in 2002, or 2003 if 2002 is not possible anymore (report by 1 June). Victor will organize SPAWC in the year after Rome.

  9. Additional discussion:

  10. Future meetings: