APSIPA 2012 Conference
Organizers: C.-C. Jay Kuo, Antonio Ortega and Shri Narayanan
Sponsored: December 3-6, 2012

APSIPA ASC 2012 was held at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel & Spa in Hollywood, CA on December 3-6, 2012 with an international organization committee led by three faculty members of the Signal and Image Processing Institute (SIPI). Besides, quite a few SIPI faculty, staff and alumni take critical roles in this conference.

The APSIPA Annual Summit and Conference (ASC) 2012 was held in Hollywood, California, USA, from December 3-6, 2012. It was the fourth APSIPA annual conference, yet the first one in the North America continent. Although the venue was geographically far away from most countries in the Asia Pacific rim, the conference had a record high attendance number, which was slightly over 400.

Paper submission and presentation were organized in 6 separate tracks, corresponding to the technical areas covered by 6 APSIPA technical committees. Among them, the Speech, Language and Audio (SLA) tract and the Image, Video and Multimedia (IVM) tract attracted the largest numbers of submissions. For the first time, we got the technical sponsorship from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and all accepted papers are accessible via IEEEXplore.

The technical program included 8 tutorial sessions, 3 keynote speeches, 2 panel discussion sessions (on the new APSIPA transactions and on guidance to high quality research), one forum discussion session (on the interaction of academia and industry), together with 54 oral sessions and 6 poster sessions.
Three best awards were granted in the conference banquet. They are:

    • The Best Paper Award (Long Paper Category): Ernest Kurniawan, Stefano Rini and Andrea Goldsmith, “Energy Efficient Cooperation for Two-Hop Relay Networks”
    • The Best Paper Award (Short Paper in Regular Session Category): Hironori Doi, Tomoki Toda, Tomoyasu Nakano, Masataka Goto and Satoshi Nakamura, “Singing Voice Conversion Method Based on Many-to-Many Eigenvoice Conversion and Training Data Generation Using A Singing-to-Singing Synthesis System”
    • The Best Paper Award (Short Paper in Special Session Category): Zhizheng Wu, Tomi Kinnunen, Eng Siong Chng, Haizhou Li and Eliathamby Ambikairajah, “A Study on Spoofing Attack in State-of-The-Art Speaker Verification: the Telephone Speech Case”

The social program included a welcome reception, a conference banquet and a presentation of the IRIS show by Cirque du Soleil performed at the Dolby Theater. IRIS explores the different techniques of cinema, as it evolves from black and white to color in a world of shadows and light. The story unfolds as our two young heroes venture through a universe that brings to life a succession of cinematic genres, reawakening the limitless potential of this art form.

Hollywood is the heart of the American motion picture industry and home to the stars and to some of the most recognizable attractions in the world. Attendees enjoyed this environment very much, walking among the “stars” on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and using the camera to capture the world famous Hollywood sign and attractions such as hand/footprints in the cement courtyard of the Chinese Theatre, the Kodak Theatre, Madame Tussaud’s and more.

A large number of interview sessions were conducted during the conference. Leaders in the field of signal and information processing shared their valuable experience with young researchers. There is a companion article in this newsletter will provide more details on these interview sessions.
APSIPA ASC 2012 was successfully concluded at the noon of Dec. 6. We welcome your contributions to ASIPA ASC 2013, which will be held in KaoHsiung, Taiwan, from Oct. 29 to Nov. 1, 2013. Look forward to seeing old as well as new friends there.

Website: http://www.apsipa2012.org/

Published on May 22nd, 2017Last updated on February 10th, 2020