On behalf of the organizing committee of ICASSP 2008 and the IEEE Signal Processing Society, I would like to welcome you to the 2008 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), which is being held at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, March 30 – April 4, 2008. The ICASSP meeting is the world’s largest and most comprehensive technical conference focused on signal processing and its applications. The conference will feature distinguished speakers, tutorials, exhibits, and over 50 lecture and poster sessions.
LAS VEGAS

The conference venue is the city of Las Vegas. This vibrant city continues to build upon its reputation as a showcase for the extraordinary. The city attracts more than 38 million visitors a year by offering the grandest hotels, the biggest stars in entertainment, the highest caliber of award-winning chefs, and, of course, the brightest lights. Seventeen of the 20 biggest hotels in the United States are located in Las Vegas.

ICASSP 2008 is being held in one of the grandest and most recognizable hotels on the Las Vegas Strip – Caesars Palace – one of the most opulent hotels in the heart of the desert, echoing the glory of ancient Greece and Rome. Caesars Palace has been a popular destination resort since it opened its doors. Located in the heart of the Las Vegas Strip, its famous fountains and columns are world-renowned.

Attendees can reach Las Vegas via the McCarran International Airport, which is the central airport serving the Las Vegas Area. It serves over 60 carriers and has direct flights to over 60 U.S. cities. The airport is just one mile from the Las Vegas Strip. Upon arrival, attendees have a variety of local transportation options at their disposal, including the Las Vegas monorail system, which provides seven stations and a convenient way to travel from one end of the strip to the other in about 15 minutes.

ATTRACTIONS

There is a wide variety of entertainment options in Las Vegas, much of which is family-oriented. There are several magnificent hotels on the strip including Caesars Palace (the conference venue), Mandalay Bay, Bellagio, The Venetian, Aladdin, Monte Carlo, Paris, and others. Attractions include theme parks, roller coasters, museums, dining, shopping, and more. The dining options appeal to all tastes, from fine cuisine to casual cooking. Sightseeing tours are possible to various destinations including Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam, Valley of Fire, Red Rock Canyon, Lake Mead, Colorado River, and Death Valley.

PROGRAM

ICASSP 2008 offers IEEE members and attendees a vibrant technical program with novelties that are meant to encourage student participation, create a greater sense of community, and recognize excellence.

The conference received close to 2800 valid submissions (excluding duplicate and erroneous submissions). Following a thorough review process, the accepted submissions form the core of the technical program. The papers are divided into poster session presentations and oral session presentations.

Two initiatives are in place to encourage student participation and recognize outstanding student contributions. The first initiative is an implementation of a directive from the Conference Board of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. It has been decided to lower the student registration fee at ICASSP meetings for IEEE student members. The rate is now fixed at US$150 (down from US$250). Additionally, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) has provided a generous grant to support student participation at ICASSP and to help cover some of their travel costs. The ICASSP committee is grateful to Dr. Rabinder Madan for the ONR support. The second initiative is a decision by the organizers of ICASSP 2008 to limit the number of Best Conference Paper Awards to four. The awards cover four major areas. It is felt that handing out too many conference paper awards dilutes the purpose of the award. The conference awards selection process is chaired by Dr. Phillip Regalia.

A third initiative is in place to bring ICASSP participants together and alleviate the burden of costly banquet fees. A free but limited-seating Grand Dinner Reception with a fabulous entertainment program will be held in the famous Neptune and Temple Pool Areas on Tuesday, April 1st, 2008, during the period 6:00-10:00pm. The event will have a maximum cap of 1000 attendees. Since the event cannot accommodate everyone, attendees are requested to register for the Grand Dinner Reception on a first-come first-served basis. We encourage our attendees to take advantage of this opportunity and to enjoy the special and unique event. This program is organized by the Social Program Chair Dr. Lina Karam.

The technical program is ably co-chaired by Drs. Lee Swindlehurst and Bjorn Ottersten. Their diligent work, in coordination with their fellow committee members, has resulted in an outstanding program. The program includes twelve special sessions, selected by Special Session co-Chairs Drs. Moeness Amin and Allejan van der Veen. These sessions cover a range of topics:

•     Voice Search Technology and Applications
•     Revamping Signal Processing for Neuroscience
•     Theory of Biometric Systems
•     Signal Processing Challenges in Environmental Monitoring
•     Compressed Sensing
•     Acoustical Scene Analysis via Spherical Microphone Arrays
•     Through-the-Wall Radar Imaging
•     Physical Layer Challenges in Underwater Acoustic Communications
•     Non-GNSS Radio Frequency Navigation Techniques
•     Game Theory for Signal Processing in Wireless Communications
•     Industry Perspectives on Multimedia for Mobile Phones
•     Design Challenges in Energy Efficient Software Defined Radio

Several of these topics match well with the themes of the tutorial sessions, which were selected by Tutorial co-Chairs Drs. Naofal Al-Dhahir and Jake Gunther. The tutorials provide overviews of a variety of subjects:

•     Adaptive MIMO Techniques and Performance
•     Majorization and Matrix Monotone Functions in Signal Processing for Wireless Communications
•     Rapid Language Adaptation Tools and Technologies for Multilingual Speech Processing Systems
•     Optimal Design of Wireless Sensor Networks
•     Signal Processing Issues in Global Satellite Navigation Systems
•     Adaptive Techniques in Wireless Networks: From Adaptive Signal Processing to Cross- Layer Adaptation
•     Modulation Frequency Analysis and Modification of Signals
•     Introduction to Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
•     Compressive Sensing Theory and Applications
•     Multimedia Signal Processing on Processors with many Cores
•     MIMO Radar
•     Algorithms and Architectures for Next-Generation Optical Fiber Communications
•     Signal Processing for Cognitive Radio Communications and Networking
•     Biometric System Security

In addition, there is a free tutorial on the Connexions Project for attendees that are interested in learning about this online educational initiative.

Four outstanding plenary speakers have been invited to lecture on topics of interest by Plenary Session co-Chairs Drs. Mats Viberg and Abdelhak Zoubir, covering both technical trends as well as trends in education:

•     R. Mittra (Pennsylvania State University), “RFIDs”
•     P. Kroon (LSI Corporation), “Media Signal Processing for Cell Phones.”
•     N. Takhor (Johns Hopkins), “Biomedical Signal Processing.”
•     D. Yue (MIT) “MIT Open CourseWare and Engineering Education.”

The Plenary Session co-Chairs were keen on exploring new horizons and on inviting speakers that would alert our community to useful trends where signal processing has an important role to play. In particular, ICASSP 2008 is giving special attention to trends in online education. There are also three Panel Sessions organized by Panel co-Chairs Drs. Huseyin Abut and Helmut Bölcskei on the following topics:

•     Convex Optimization Theory and Practice in Signal Processing
•     Compressed Sensing and Sparse Signal Processing
•     Human behavior signal processing for vehicular applications

The discussions in the panel sessions complement well the special sessions and tutorials program of ICASSP 2008.

SEE YOU IN LAS VEGAS

We are looking forward to welcoming you to ICASSP 2008. We would like to take this opportunity to extend a warm thank you to every single member of the ICASSP 2008 Organizing Committee for their dedication and help. Our society is strong because of the dedication of its selfless volunteers. We also wish to thank Billene Mercer, Bryan Stewart, and the rest of the Conference Management Services staff for their outstanding assistance with the conference organization. Some images in this article are courtesy of Caesars Palace and the Las Vegas Monorail and their permission to use the images is gratefully acknowledged.