The Origins of Digital Signal Processing

Date:  6 June 2023

Time:  5:15-6:45 PM

Location: Jupiter Ballroom

It was in the mid-sixties that what is today known as Digital Signal Processing (DSP) emerged from the analog realm. Many advances, which today are taken for granted, were created by visionary pioneers who sensed the transformative power of the advancing digital world for representing and processing signals. Commemorating the 75^thanniversary of the IEEE SP Society, the ICASSP-2023 organizing committee has invited three of the founding fathers of DSP to share with us their memories and experiences from those early days.

Host: Sergios Theodoridis, ICASSP-23 Organizing Committee

Moderator: Mos Kaveh

Panelist:  Alan Oppenheim, Ron Schafer, Tony Constantinides

Biographies

Alan V. Oppenheim is Ford Professor of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He received the S.B. and S.M. degrees in 1961 and the Sc.D. degree in 1964, all in Electrical Engineering, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He is also the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Tel Aviv University. He is coauthor of several widely used textbooks in multiple editions and editor of a number of advanced books all in the general area of signal processing. Throughout his career he has published extensively in research journals and conference proceedings.

Dr. Oppenheim is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Life Fellow of the IEEE, a member of Sigma Xi, and Eta Kappa Nu.  He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Sackler Fellow. He has received a number of IEEE awards for outstanding research, teaching and mentoring including the IEEE Kilby Medal, the IEEE Education Medal, the IEEE Centennial Award, the IEEE Third Millennium Medal, and the Society, Technical Achievement, and Senior Awards of the IEEE Society on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing. Dr. Oppenheim has also received multiple awards at MIT for excellence in teaching, advising and mentoring

Ronald W. Schafer, BSEE (1961), MSEE (1962) University of Nebraska, Ph.D. (1968) MIT.  As a member of the Acoustics Research Department, Bell Laboratories, (1968—1974), he contributed to some of the earliest research on digital signal processing.  As John and Marilu McCarty Professor of ECE at Georgia Tech (1974—2004), he helped to introduce thousands of students to DSP, and he supervised graduate student researchers (including the General Chair of ICASSP 2023).  As a Hewlett-Packard Fellow (2004—2012) he focused on acoustic signal processing.  Since 2007 he has been teaching DSP at Stanford University.

Dr. Schafer is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and a Fellow of both the IEEE and the Acoustical Society of America.  He has co-authored nine widely used textbooks in the DSP field, and he has received numerous awards for teaching and research including the 2010 IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal.

Tony G. Constantinides (a.constantinides@imperial.ac.uk) is an emeritus professor at Imperial College London, London, SW7 2AZ, U.K. He is the founder and former head of the Research Department of Communications and Signal Processing. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, an honorary mem­ber of Eta Kappa Nu, and a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. He has received honorary doctorates from several universities notable amongst these is from the National Technical University of Athens. In 2012 he received the IEEE Kirchmayer

Medal, and 2016 European Association for Signal Processing Meritorious Service Award, and 2018 Imperial College Medal. His research interests range from Signal Processing and Communications to interpreting of symbols in Linear B. He is a Life Fellow of IEEE

Mos Kaveh received his B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Purdue University. He has been a faculty member in Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at the University of Minnesota since 1975, where he currently serves as the Interim Associate Vice President and Dean of Global Programs and Strategy Alliance. From 1990 to 2022 he has also served as the Head of the ECE department, Associate Dean for Research and Planning, and Dean of the College of Science and Engineering. Kaveh’s service to the IEEE Signal Processing Society has included President (2010-11), Vice President for Awards and Membership (2005-07), Vice President for Publications (1993-96), General Chair of ICASSP’93, Chair of the Publications Board (1985-88), and a member of the Board of Governors (1997-1999) and (2005-2011). A Life Fellow of the IEEE, he is the recipient of the 1988 Leo L. Beranek Meritorious Service and the 2000 Norbert Wiener Society Awards.

Norbert Wiener Society Award Recipients Panel Discussion: Past, Present and Future of Signal Processing

Date:  7 June 2023

Time:  5:15-6:45 PM

Location: Jupiter Ballroom

The IEEE SP Society Awards Board organizes an event that will reflect on the past, the present, and the future of Signal Processing. This is part of the commemorations of the 75 years of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, over which Signal Processing has evolved and flourished. It takes the form of a panel that assembles five former Presidents of the Society, who are also recipients of the Norbert Wiener award, the highest honour that IEEE SP Society offers. After brief presentations by the panelists, the event opens to questions from the audience to engage panel members in lively discussion with participants.

Host: Sergios Theodoridis, SPS Awards Board Chair

Moderator: José M.F. Moura

Panelist: Alex Acero, K.J. Ray Liu, Ali H. Sayed, Rabab K. Ward

Biographies

Sergios Theodoridis
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens; Aalborg University, Denmark

Sergios Theodoridis is currently Professor Emeritus at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece and  Distinguished Professor at Aalborg University, Denmark. His research interests lie in the areas of Signal Processing and Machine Learning. He is the co-author of the best-selling book “Pattern Recognition”, Academic Press, 4th ed., 2008, the co-author of the book “Introduction to Pattern Recognition: A MATLAB Approach”, Academic Press, 2010, the author of the book “Machine Learning: A Bayesian and Optimization perspective”, 2^nd ed. ,  Academic Press,  2019, and the co-author of three books in Greek.

He is the co-author of seven papers that have received Best Paper Awards including the 2014 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine best paper award and the 2009 IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Transactions on Neural Networks Outstanding Paper Award. He is a past Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.

He is the recipient of the 2021 IEEE SPS Norbert Wiener Award, the 2017 EURASIP Athanasios Papoulis Award, the 2014 IEEE SPS Carl Friedrich Gauss Education Award and the 2014 EURASIP Meritorious Service Award. He has received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Edinburg, UK.

He is a Fellow of EURASIP and a Life Fellow of IEEE.

José M. F. Moura
University Professor
Carnegie Mellon University

José M. F. Moura is the Philip L. and Marsha Dowd University Professor at CMU, with interests in statistical, distributed, geometric, and graph signal processing and learning. A detector in two of his patents with Alek Kavcic is found in over 60% of the disk drives of all computers sold worldwide in the last 15 years (4 billion and counting)–leading in 2016 to a US $750 Million settlement between CMU and Marvell. He was the 2019 IEEE President and CeO. He is Fellow of the IEEE, AAAS, and the US National Academy of Inventors, holds honorary doctorates from the University of Strathclyde and Universidade de Lisboa, he is a member of the Academy of Sciences of Portugal, and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. He received the Great Cross of the Order of The Infante D. Henrique bestowed to him by the President of the Republic of Portugal. He is the recipient of the 2023 IEEE Kilby Signal Processing Medal.

Alex Acero
Senior Director
Apple

Alex Acero is Sr. Director at Apple leading speech recognition, speech synthesis, perception, language understanding, and conversational intelligence for Siri. These systems process over 30 billion utterances a month, in 41 locales for Siri and 65 locales for Dictation. His team has contributed to several industry firsts, including on-device neural TTS for iPhone in 2019, Hey Siri detection on AirPods in 2019, and on-device dictation for Apple Watch in 2020.

Prior to joining Apple in 2013, he spent 20 years at Microsoft Research leading teams in speech, audio, multimedia, computer vision, natural language processing, machine translation, machine learning, and information retrieval. His team at Microsoft Research built Bing Translator, contributed to Xbox Kinect’s far field speech recognition, and pioneered the use of deep learning in large vocabulary speech recognition. From 1991-1993 he managed the speech team for Spain’s Telefonica. His first stint at Apple started in 1990. He is Affiliate Faculty at the University of Washington.

Alex is a Fellow of IEEE and ISCA. He is the recipient of the 2017 IEEE Norbert Wiener Award, and the 2013 IEEE Signal Processing Society Best Paper Award. Alex has served the IEEE in many leadership roles including the Board of Directors of IEEE and the IEEE Foundation, and as President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Alex has served in advisory boards for the University of Washington, Stony Brook University, and IDIAP. Alex is author of the textbook “Spoken Language Processing”, over 230 technical papers and 160 US patents.

K.J. Ray Liu
2023 IEEE Past President
IEEE

K. J. Ray Liu was the founder and CEO, now Chairman and CTO, of Origin AI, which pioneers AI for wireless sensing and indoor tracking. The invention of wireless AI won three prestigious CES Innovation Awards, including CES Best of Innovation in 2021.

He was Distinguished University Professor and Christine Kim Eminent Professor of Information Technology of the University of Maryland, College Park, from where he retired after a career of more than three decades in education. His research contributions encompass broad aspects of signal processing and communications. He has trained over 70 doctoral/postdoctoral students, of which 10 are now IEEE fellows.

Dr. Liu is the recipient of the 2021 IEEE Fourier Technical Field Award for Signal Processing, the 2016 IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Graduate Teaching Award, IEEE Signal Processing Society 2014 Society Award, and IEEE Signal Processing Society 2009 Technical Achievement Award. Recognized as a Web of Science Highly Cited Researcher, he is a Fellow of IEEE, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the U.S. National Academy of Inventors.

Dr. Liu was the 2022 IEEE President and CEO, 2019 IEEE Vice President for Technical Activities, and a member of the IEEE Board of Directors as Division IX Director in 2016-2017. He has also served as 2012-2013 President of IEEE Signal Processing Society, where he was Vice President for Publications and Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Signal Processing Magazine.

Dr. Liu received the B.S. degree from the National Taiwan University in 1983 and the Ph.D. degree from UCLA in 1990, both in electrical engineering.

Ali H. Sayed
Professor and Dean of Engineering
École Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland

Ali H. Sayed is Dean of Engineering at EPFL, Switzerland, where he also directs the Adaptive Systems Laboratory. He has served before as Distinguished Professor and Chair of Electrical Engineering at UCLA. He is a member of the US National Academy of Engineering and The World Academy of Sciences. He served as President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) in 2018 and 2019 and is currently a member of the IEEE Board of Directors.  He authored over 600 scholarly publications and 9 books, including the 3-volume treatise on Inference and Learning from Datapublished by Cambridge University Press in 2022. His research areas include adaptation and learning theories, data and network sciences, and statistical inference. His work has been recognized with several awards including the 2022 IEEE Fourier Award for Signal Processing and the 2020 IEEE SPS Norbert Wiener Society Award, as well as the 2015 IEEE SPS Education Award, the 2014 Papoulis Award from the European Association for Signal Processing, the 2013 IEEE SPS Meritorious Service Award and the 2012 IEEE SPS Technical Achievement Award, the 2005 Terman Award from the American Society for Engineering Education, the 2003 Kuwait Prize, and the 1996 IEEE Donald Fink Prize. He has been awarded several Best Paper Awards from the IEEE and EURASIP (2002, 2005, 2012, 2014, 2015) and is a Fellow of IEEE, EURASIP, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He is a past Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing.

Rabab Kreidieh Ward
Professor Emeritus
University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC. Canada

Dr. Rabab Kreidieh Ward is a Professor Emeritus in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of British Columbia, Canada. A Fellow of IEEE, the Royal Society of Canada, and Member of the USA National Academy of Engineering, she was the first woman appointed as a professor in engineering in British Columbia, marking a significant milestone in the history of the province’s academic community. With an illustrious career spanning four decades, Dr. Rabab has amassed a wealth of expertise and knowledge in the areas of education, research, and leadership. She has supervised a total of 48 Ph.D. and 50 Master’s students, published over 600 refereed journal and conference papers, and held ten patents related to monitoring, measurement, and noise reduction concerning cable television. Her research contributions are in broad areas of signal processing, including signal detection, image encoding, and restoration, and their applications in cable TV, HDTV, medical imaging, infant cry signals, and brain computer interfaces.

Dr. Ward has served in leadership positions at UBC as Director of the (UBC) Institute for Computing, Information and Cognitive Systems (1996-2007) and as the Research Coordinator in UBC VP Research and International Office (2008- 2014). She has also actively contributed to the growth and development of IEEE and other professional societies and held leadership positions such as President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society (2016-2017), an IEEE Director, Division IX (2020-2021) and is currently the VP of IEEE Educational Activities.