Plenary Sessions

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Plenary Sessions

Three distinguished speakers will begin plenary sessions at 8:30 am on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday respectively in Room 4B of the Convention Center.

Multimedia Communications

Wednesday, May 13, 8:30 am - 9:20 am
Ballroom 4B of the Convention Center
Nikil Jayant
Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies

Signal Processing has shaped an impressive array of technologies, not the least of which is Multimedia, particularly audiovisual communications. As we respond to emerging businesses in high-quality signal storage, broadcasting, internetworking and natural human-machine interfaces, our capabilities in audiovisual communications are being fiercely challenged. To keep up with what the technological community seems to have promised itself, we are looking for continued advances in the core disciplines of source and channel coding, audiovisual networking and automatic systems for machine recognition and synthesis of speech and visual information. Some of the advances in these areas will come from incisive applications from the disciplines of information theory, psychophysics and audiovisual linguistics. Some of the progress will come about by pragmatic use of non-discipline-specific, compute-intensive methods such as analysis- by-synthesis and correction-by-feedback. Perhaps even more compelling than these linear advances are opportunities for interdisciplinary breakthroughs. Significant among these will be the co-design of technologies for signal compression and networking, the matching of next-generation VLSI memories and processors to algorithms for personalized communications, and the integration of database science with speech and image interface technologies in networked digital libraries. Implicit in the above prospects for multimedia communications are exciting new challenges for signal processing, as we chart the next 50 years of this celebrated discipline.

Speech Recognition: Are We Having Fun Yet?

Thursday, May 14, 8:30 am - 9:20 am
Ballroom 4B of the Convention Center
Richard M. Schwartz
BBN Technologies, GTE-Internetworking

Automatic speech recognition has progressed dramatically over the last decade. There are now, finally, several applications that are widely used. But speech recognition still has a long way to go before it can be judged fully functional. This plenary talk will describe the state of the art and give some examples of fielded applications. Most of the talk will be devoted to how we might progress from now on. In particular, we will discuss possible sources for improvement in speech recognition accuracy. In addition, it will discuss the use of speech recognition in applications that require some degree of understanding, and predict what is needed for those applications to become pervasive.

DSP Challenges in Future Wireless Systems

Friday, May 14, 8:30 am - 9:20 am
Ballroom 4B of the Convention Center
Robert Brodersen
University of California Berkeley

In the future, wireless communications will be extended to provide communications of all types, ranging from retrieval of data from low bandwidth sensors, up to the access of multimedia information from the internet. However, this vastly increased applicability of wireless access will require a significantly increased robustness and bandwidth efficiency of the wireless link. In addition, to provide ubiquitous access these links will have to perform over a wide range of environments, which will span short range interior connections to long range outdoor communications all of which are complicated by a wide variety and levels of interference. Critical to obtaining this range of capabilities will be the implementation of sophisticated algorithms and modulation schemes, which require the lowest possible energy. This will be facilitated by the scaling of integrated circuit technology which will allow orders of magnitude more processing, at orders of magnitude lower energy per operation over what is available today. To understand the opportunities, the future capabilities of VLSI technology will be presented as well as the future applications and their requirements. The challenge to the DSP community will be to match the vastly expanded computational capabilities with algorithms and architectures which meet the new demands of wireless applications.