Technical Program Overview

It is a pleasure to welcome you at ICASSP ’98. This year is the 50th anniversary of the Signal Processing Society (SPS) and we are glad that you can personally witness the progress made in the past 50 years and share with us your vision for the next decades. There were 913 papers accepted for the presentation at ICASSP ’98 from the 1,584 submitted (out of 47 countries). In addition, there were 41 papers included in six special sessions: "Beyond Toy Problems: Real World Signal Processing Applications Using Neural Networks," organized by Jan Larsen; "Signal Processing with Sparseness Constraints," organized by Bhaskar D. Rao and Y. Bresler; "Signal Processing in Modern Multimedia Standards," organized by Tsuhan Chen and Joern Osterman; "On Advancing from Speech Recognition Toward Speech Understanding: the Research Challenge," organized by Joe Picone and George Doddington; "Multimedia DSP Processors," organized by Wanda Gass, Peter Pirsch, and Takao Nishitani; and "Future Directions in Signal Processing Education," organized by Robert E. Bogner.

This year, for the first time, the Signal Processing Society decided to adopt a new paper selection process in which full papers, rather than extended summaries of the past years, were requested at the time of the submission. We were somewhat uncertain about this important change but it turned out to be a good success, both in quantity and quality. The excellent technical program offered in this conference should be credited to tremendous review efforts of nine SPS Technical Committees (TCs) under the chairmanship of Tsuhan Chen, Pierre Duhamel, Wanda Gass, Alfred O. Hero, Jenq-Neng Hwang, Mark Kahrs, Chin-Hui Lee, A. Murat Tekalp, and Richard J. Vaccaro.

Furthermore, we have asked several academic and industrial leaders to present their views of Digital Signal Processing (DSP). Thus, at the Tuesday opening 50th Anniversary Celebration Session, you will hear industrial leaders Thomas J. Engibous (TI), David D. French (Analog Devices), Fred Shlapak (Motorola), along with Bernard Gold (MIT Lincoln Lab.), Alan Oppenheim (MIT) and Lawrence Rabiner (AT&T ) giving their views of the past, present, and future of DSP. At the banquet you will hear Nathan Myhrvold (Microsoft) to share with us his vision in DSP and computers. In addition, Nikil Jayant (Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies), Richard Schwartz (GTE-BBN), and Robert Brodersen (UC Berkeley) will comment on current topics of their research interests at a separate morning plenary sessions.

The Tutorial Program, chaired by Gary Bernard, is one of the strong features in ICASSP ’98. The program covers Speech and Audio Compression: Techniques and Applications (Peter Kroon and Deepen Sinha), Simulation-based Computational Methods for Statistical Signal Processing (Patrick Duvaut), Low-power Multimedia DSP Systems (Keshab Parhi), MPEG-4 (Karlheinz Brandenburg), Wavelets: What Can They Do for You? (Martin Vetterli and Jelena Kovacevic), and Conversational Systems: The Development of Spoken Dialog Interfaces (Salim Roukos).

Of course, the main credits for the quality of ICASSP ’98 should go to you, the participants. We sincerely hope that you will enjoy the conference.

Hynek Hermansky and Jenq-Neng Hwang
Technical Program Chairs