Welcome Note by Technical Program Co-Chairs

It was our great pleasure to serve as Technical Program Chairs of ICASSP 2014, especially because the technical program of this edition turns out to be particularly exciting, starting from its record-breaking number of paper submissions. We received more than 3500 manuscripts, of which only 1709 were accepted. This translates to an acceptance rate of about 48%. Undoubtedly, the review workload was tremendous; three or more independent experts reviewed thoroughly every single submission, including special session submissions.

As in previous years, the ICASSP 2014 program includes tutorials, which will be held on the afternoon of Sunday, 4 May 2014 and all of Monday, 5 May 2014. Out of 38 high-quality proposals for tutorials, only 15 were accepted, thus providing attendees with the opportunity to listen to excellent speakers conveying most timely topics. We wish to thank all those who submitted a tutorial proposal for their support of ICASSP 2014. Space unfortunately did not allow accommodating some of the excellent proposals. Special thanks go to Tutorial Co-Chairs, Ercan Kuruoglu and Antonio Napolitano who worked very hard to maintain high-quality tutorial sessions.

World caliber personalities, as plenary speakers, will share with us their views and highlight challenges on the most exciting topics for signal processing. Some of the topics, although a bit unusual for our community, reveal most timely as well, and present great opportunities for novel signal processing research. We wish to thank the plenary speakers for taking the time to come to Florence to address us. Special thanks go also to our Plenary Co-Chairs Ezio Biglieri and Ali H. Sayed for their hard work in identifying excellent topics and excellent speakers.

We issued a call for special sessions and solicited special session proposals from outstanding experts. Out of the total number of 24 special session proposals, we selected 13. To ensure that papers submitted to special sessions are treated in the same way as regular papers, the special session organizers assigned to each of the submitted papers two independent reviewers, while the Technical Co-Chairs selected the third reviewer, as well as all reviewers for papers co-authored by special session organizers. We thank our Special Session Organizers and our Special Session Co-Chairs, Sergio Barbarossa and Ananthram Swami for their hard work. We hope that all of you will share our view that the selected special sessions form a fine set.

 

By recognizing the need to strengthen the interaction between researchers and practitioners, as well as to encourage industrial participations, ICASSP 2014 will feature a number of “Show & Tell” sessions, which will offer an exciting opportunity for participants to demonstrate their state-of-the-art results to a wide audience of professionals in the area of signal processing. Thanks to the effort of the “Show & Tell” chairs, Augusto Sarti and Mazin Gilbert, we selected 19 highly innovative presentations specially tailored to favor interaction with the attendants in a highly dynamic environment.

 

There was a good response to the call for Signal Processing Letters, amounting to 50 letters, 46 of which were included in the technical program. These submissions did not undergo an additional review as they have been already published in the IEEE SPS Letters. We wish to thank all authors for taking the opportunity to present their work and meet with us in Florence.

 

It was the first time that EDAS paper handling system was used for ICASSP. With the number of submissions we received this year, this change was a bit of a challenge not only for us, but also for the chairs of the twelve Technical Committees (TCs) and their Area Chairs who coordinated the review of regular submissions. We wish to thank them for their support in securing high-quality reviews in a timely fashion. We take also this opportunity to thank the many reviewers who are members or non-members of the TCs for their voluntary work and dedication. Without the help of reviewers, we would not be able to provide a high-quality technical program.

 

A special thank is due to Maria Sabrina Greco, Publication Co-Chair, who worked very hard for numerous months to tailor the EDAS configuration to the needs of ICASSP, and to answer the many queries by TC Chairs, Area Chairs, authors, and also to assist us. It was thanks to her great dedication, timely and friendly support that running the review process and setting up the technical program did not overwhelm us.

 

ICASSP would not exist without the support of the many colleagues and students who submitted their research results to ICASSP. It is unfortunate that some of the papers could not be accommodated and we hope to see the authors in Florence, even if their papers did not find a place in the technical program. We thank all authors of accepted and non-accepted papers for their support and we look forward to meeting with you at ICASSP 2014.

 

Abdelhak Zoubir and Mauro Barni

Technical Program Co-Chairs, ICASSP 2014