General Chair's Message

On behalf of the organizing committee of ICASSP 2009 and the IEEE Signal Processing Society, I am delighted to welcome you to join us at the 34th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), which will be held at the Taipei International Convention Center in Taipei, Taiwan, April 19-24, 2009. The ICASSP meeting is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications. The conference will feature world-class speakers, exhibits, and over 140 lecture and poster sessions.

It is apparent that the frontiers of science as well as various new technologies have created a completely new horizon of signal processing. The ICASSP 2009 theme is hence “Signals over the Horizon.” It is our hope that signals about such frontiers and new technologies and beyond will be transmitted from the conference and received all over the world.

This will be the second ICASSP held physically in Asia after the first one, ICASSP 1986 in Tokyo. ICASSP 2003 was originally to be held in Hong Kong, but was unfortunately canceled due to the SARS scare, resulting instead in a virtual conference. We are pleased that ICASSP is coming back physically to the region after 23 years, and treasure this extraordinary opportunity to host ICASSP 2009 in Taipei. This will no doubt be one of the most notable national events in Taiwan for years. We would like to take this opportunity to invite you to experience the modern, oriental metropolis of Taipei with Taiwanese-style hospitality. We are sure you will find this conference to be an excellent forum for innovative and technical discussions, and a natural environment for extending friendship and fellowship.

The Asia-Pacific region has emerged as a significant force driving the future in terms of technology development and innovations, global market and economics, as well as culture development. The world has witnessed the evolution of this region over the past few decades. It is an area full of diversity and excitement, and Taiwan is the pivotal location of this region.

Formerly called “Formosa”—the “beautiful island”—by the Europeans, the island of Taiwan is located in the Pacific Ocean off the southeast coast of China, from which it is separated by the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan has a dense population of over 23 million people, and is endowed with a wide variety of breathtaking natural scenery, from the sublime marble cliffs of Taroko Gorge to the coral reefs and beaches of Kenting. Taiwan is full of beautiful mountains, with more than 100 peaks above 3,000 meters. Classical Chinese culture is faithfully preserved in Taiwan, and traditional Chinese flavor flourishes everywhere. Historically, Taiwan has always been a melting pot of cultures, including those of Europe, Japan, and America, and the influences of these cultures have naturally fused with the island's aboriginal cultures.

The people of Taiwan have made it a national goal to construct a green silicon island, promoting the development of information and electronics technologies as well as industry, while preserving the island's beautiful natural resources. Established as an IT industry stronghold since the 90's, Taiwan ranked among the world's top 4 suppliers of information products in 2002. Today, Taiwan hosts the world's largest suppliers of notebook PCs, motherboards, and liquid crystal display (LCD) monitors. Taiwan's eight major IT products also include desktop PCs, servers, digital still cameras (DSCs), optical disk drives, and color display tube (CDT) monitors. More than 83% of Taiwan's households have computers. Internet users number about 75% of the island's population, while the mobile phone penetration rate reaches over 99%.

Taipei, located in northern Taiwan, covers 270 square kilometers, with a population of 2.6 million people. It is the largest city in Taiwan. In addition to the friendly, hospitable nature of its inhabitants, the rich cultural heritage and the high level of development have made Taipei a cosmopolitan city that brings together the traditional and the new. The National Palace Museum houses the world's finest collection of Chinese arts and crafts, and Taipei's beautiful temples are the setting for colorful folk festivals. The city is also the Chinese cuisine capital of the world. Visitors can enjoy the best of regional specialties from all parts of China; they may try a different cuisine for each meal during their stay in Taipei, and find each meal unforgettably exquisite. Taipei also boasts bustling night markets, areas of spectacular natural beauty, streets lined with shops selling brand-name products, and numerous international hotels. Taipei can meet all of the needs of people coming from all parts of the world, whether food, accommodations, entertainment, or meeting environments.

The conventional Technical Program of ICASSP 2009 has been ably coordinated by our Technical Program co-chairs, Professors Liang-Gee Chen of National Taiwan University and James R. Glass of MIT. Paper review was handled by the 13 Technical Committees of the IEEE Signal Processing Society with a rigorous review process. A total of 144 lecture and poster sessions was organized. Two additional Show & Tell sessions including demos featuring latest results of signal processing systems were also organized.

The program also includes a very strong tutorial program of 17 tutorials covering a wide range of balanced topics selected by a committee chaired by our Tutorial chair, Professor Tsuhan Chen of Carnegie Mellon University. The tutorial topics are:

Fundamentals
- Beyond Bandlimited Sampling: Nonideal Sampling, Smoothness and Sparsity
- Distributed Adaptive Filters and Networks
- Signal and System Theoretic Foundations of Quantization and Data Acquisition (A/D and D/A conversion)
- Sparse Sampling: Theory, Algorithms and Applications
Speech and audio
- Automatic Recognition of Natural Speech
- Applications of Psychoacoustics to Signal Processing
- Special Interests in Mandarin Speech Recognition and Chinese-to-English Machine Translation
Image and video
- Distributed Video Coding for Low Cost Multimedia Communications Systems
- Distributed Processing in Smart Cameras
- Digital Video Image Quality and Perceptual Coding
Communications
- Distributed Source Coding: Theory, Code Designs and Applications
- Peak-to-Average Power Ratio Reduction: Applications and Algorithms
- A Unified Design Framework for Non-Linear MIMO Transceivers Using Majorization Theory
- Game Theory and Resource Allocation in Wireless Communications
Retrieval
- Analysis and Retrieval Techniques for Music and Motion Data
- Recent Developments in Content-based and Concept-based Image/Video Retrieval
Implementation
- Multimedia Signal Processing on CPU and GPU with Many Cores

The program further includes a total of 12 special sessions and 4 panels selected by a committee chaired by our Special Session chair and co-chair, Professors Shih-Fu Chang of Columbia University and Lee Swindlehurst of University of California, Irvine. The 12 special sessions cover a wide range of topics:

Multimedia Surveillance
Voice Transformation
Signal Processing Challenges for 4G Wireless Communications
Distributed Signal Processing and Consensus Gossiping
Handling Reverberant Speech: Methodologies and Applications
Interference Channels and Spectrum Sharing
Signal Processing for Neural Spike Trains
Multimedia Social Networks
Signal Processing Techniques and Algorithms on Robot Audition
Signal Processing for Improper and Noncircular Complex-Valued Data
The Data Deluge: the Challenges and Opportunities of Unlimited Data in Signal Processing
Video Search and Event Analysis

The 4 very exciting panels are:

LTE and WiMAX - What is Next? Challenges for 4G Wireless
The Changing World of "Educational Resources" in Signal Processing Education
Signal Processing for Human/Human and Human/Computer Communication
Mobile Media Search: Has media search finally found it's perfect platform?

We have invited four distinguished plenary speakers, respectively from the U.S., Japan, Europe and Taiwan, presenting their views on topics ranging from academia to industry:

Dynamic Spectrum Management
by John M. Cioffi, Stanford University & ASSIA Inc.
Signal Processing Bringing on Market Growth – Its Industrial Successes and Future Expectations
by Kazuo Murano, President, Fujitsu Laboratories Limited
Cognitive User Interfaces: an Engineering Approach
by Steve Young, University of Cambridge
The Evolution and Trends of the Semiconductor Industry and Signal Processing SoC
by Ming-Kai Tsai, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, MediaTek Inc.

In addition, we are experimenting an initiative by creating a new embedded program component, called Thematic Symposium (TS), in order to cultivate more coherent technical activities, achieving more educational goal, and enhance interdisciplinary interaction at ICASSP. A Thematic Symposium (TS) is a grouping of multiple technical sessions (including regular lecture/poster sessions, special sessions, panels, tutorials, and keynote talks) that share a common technical theme. Related activities of a TS are carefully scheduled in a streamline fashion over 1 or 2 days so that a continuous momentum is established without interruption or schedule conflict. To make the technical subjects of a TS more accessible to general audience, a new session exclusively dedicated to overview talks are also added to each TS, referred to as an overview talk session. Such overview talks are given by experts of the field and experienced speakers, with a specific objective to introduce emerging knowledge from the TS area to broader audience so that cross-disciplinary collaboration can be fertilized. Every overview talk is synchronized with two regular lecture presentations. Therefore, the goal of TS is two-fold: (1) adding multiple coherent threads to the overall program and (2) bridging the discipline gaps by introducing the new overview talk sessions. With the strong support from the 13 technical committees and their volunteers, four outstanding TSs have been organized:

Signal Processing for 4G Wireless
Network Distributed Signal Processing
Immersive Communication
Multimedia Search and Retrieval

In addition, we made a special arrangement of video recording the presentations of plenary talks, special sessions and overview talks, upon the consent of the speakers and authors. These will be made available for online access by conference attendants within three weeks of the conference. In this way we hope people may be able to listen to talks they have to miss during the conference sessions, and listen to some talks the second time when they find it helpful.

We hope all these programs will make ICASSP 2009 not only the perfect occasion to exchange knowledge and experience, but also an outpouring of creativity and productivity.

The conference will be held at the Taipei International Convention Center (TICC). TICC is located at the center of Taipei city, just one block from the Taipei 101, which remains the highest building in the world through 2008: a bird’s-eye view of the entire city from the top floor of the skyscraper is an extraordinary experience. While the Grand Hyatt Taipei, located adjacent to TICC, will be the conference hotel, enough rooms in several other hotels at different price levels have also been reserved for the conference; round-trip, free shuttles will be provided for participants staying in these other hotels.

Please make sure to join us for the Welcome Reception on the evening of April 20th in the Grand Ballroom of the Grand Hyatt Taipei, and for the Banquet at the Golden Dragon Grand Ballroom of the Grand Hotel on the evening of the 22nd. In both cases not only will you enjoy “real” Chinese food, but the culture programs will be exceptional and unique: please make sure to have your cameras ready. In particular, the Grand Hotel, in which the banquet will be held, is another of Taipei's magnificent landmarks: its traditional palace-style architecture and impressive lobby are unparalleled.

Taipei is a paradise for gourmets. A gourmet’s map will be provided to help plan a different style for each meal, if so desired. Several sightseeing tours will also be offered; these can be reserved either in advance via the Internet, or on-site at the convention center. In particular, the half-day tour to the National Palace Museum to see the thousands of traditional Chinese treasures and the one-day tour to the Taroko Gorge National Park to see the 20 kilometers of marble cliffs are highly recommended. These are truly world-class, unique sites.

Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our organizing committee members and all of our colleagues in the Conference Board of the Signal Processing Society for their support, help, and effort to realize this conference. Special thanks go to all of the technical committee chairs, liaisons and representatives, the review organizers, and the many reviewers for their diligent effort in reviewing the submissions, selecting the papers, and organizing the sessions. We would also like to thank all of the speakers and authors. Special thanks also go to the many local volunteers, helpers, and supporters in Taiwan. The knowledge, experience, wisdom, innovation, and efforts of those mentioned above are indeed reflected in this conference. Thank you very much.

We look forward to meeting you in Taipei soon.

Lin-shan Lee
General chair, ICASSP 2009
http://icassp09.com