Newsletter – Vol. 28, January 2017
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Welcome Message New President
Calendar of Events
EURASIP Seminars
EURASIP Seasonal Schools
Open Special Issues
Recent Ph.D. Theses
Job Posts
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Welcome Message New President & new BoD task distribution
I am honoured to write to you as the new president of The European Association for Signal Processing (EURASIP). Firstly, let me express my very best wishes to everyone for a happy and successful New Year 2017. Secondly, I wish to thank the members of the former Board of Directors (BoD) to have elected me to lead EURASIP for the upcoming two years. I have accepted to take this challenge with humility and all dedication and desire to move EURASIP to greater heights. Let me also thank Ana Isabel Pérez-Neira, whose term on the BoD ended on 31 December 2016. I had great pleasure to working with Ana over two terms, i.e., eight years on the BoD. We will certainly miss her contributions and friendship. Fulvio Gini’s term as President of EURASIP was also completed on 31 December 2016, but he will continue to be a non-voting member on the BoD. It was great to work with Fulvio over the past eight years in his capacity as a member of the BoD, and also as the President of EURASIP. I am very happy to have him collaborate with me for the next two years in his capacity as Past-President of EURASIP. Fulvio has been an extremely dedicated and hard-working member, and I know that he will continue to do so. Indeed, he is a great asset and resource for EURASIP.

In the new Board of Directors, Jean-Luc Dugelay, Patrick Naylor, Fernando Pereira, and Alle-Jan van der Veen will continue as Directors for Membership Development, Workshops/Conferences, External Relations and Publications, respectively. I welcome our newly elected BoD Members, Toon van Waterschoot (Secretary/Treasurer) and Kostas Berberidis (Awards). In addition, Aggelos Pikrakis will continue to be an Affiliate Member of the BoD responsible for Web Services.

I am often asked the following question, either by my own PhD students or colleagues at large: Why should I become a member of EURASIP? Before I answer this question, let me first repeat the mission statement of EURASIP, enunciated at its foundation in 1978: EURASIP is to improve communication between groups and individuals that work within the multidisciplinary, fast growing field of Signal Processing in Europe and elsewhere, and to exchange and disseminate information in the field all over the world.

The two evident keywords in that statement are: communication (between groups), dissemination (of information). Let me emphasise that unlike other professional associations, one becomes EURASIP member through attendance of The European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), which brings me to the word communication in the above statement. High-standing conferences, such as EUSIPCO, feature first-class plenary talks, tutorials, exhibits, and lecture and poster sessions. It is a forum for many researchers seeking feedback for their work and for those who want to identify the most recent advances in signal processing theory and applications. The 25th edition of EUSIPCO will be held in Kos Island (Greece) from 28 August to 2 September 2017. Not only is Kos Island a magical place, but also the program promises to be a superb forum for signal processing theory and practice. It will provide as did previous EUSIPCOs, an excellent platform for communication. In addition, EUSIPCO 2017 features a one-day satellite workshops (see www.eusipco2017.org for details). This new all-day program, in addition to plenaries, tutorials and poster and lecture sessions, promotes the multidisciplinary nature of signal processing, mentioned in the above mission statement.

Multidisciplinarity has become a central element of signal processing practice. The power of the signal processing discipline is its wide-ranging application to diverse areas of engineering and beyond. Today, we experience the golden age of signal processing, with its demonstrated power in new emerging areas that are far beyond traditional signal processing. They include, inter-alia, bio-inspired signal processing, cultural heritage preservation and social networks. I am confident that in a few years such new areas will be referred to as ‘traditional topics’ as new ones would have emerged. This new era is most interesting and challenging, with the extraordinary potential to generate greater societal impact. To make this happen, we need to educate ourselves in areas outside engineering and to also educate others in signal processing. Thus, the interaction between interdisciplinary research communities will take a central role in the future and is needed more than ever before. This is a prerequisite for innovative research, which will change the mindset of industrialists and others.

EURASIP is not a publisher, but it owns journals published by Elsevier and Springer. All the Springer journals are Open Access (OA) publications under the publishing division “Springer Open” (www.springeropen.com). EURASIP identified very early the need of this fast moving trend; while several well-established publications are still experimenting with the model, most of the EURASIP journals have been OA journals for several years. OA is online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Thus, it overcomes many of the problems we experience with the publication of articles. When my first co-authored OA journal paper published in a special issue some years ago, I asked myself why I should pay to get my paper published while in the past I had published for free. This is a legitimate question many of us have asked. In a June 2012 Internet publication by Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Open Access Project (www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm), I found a very interesting analogy of OA to television broadcasting. He wrote, “OA journals pay their bills very much the way broadcast television and radio stations do: those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free of charge for everyone with the right equipment.” Although this statement is sensible, it may not be satisfying to some of us.

Is OA something we should favour? Even if OA means that journals charge a processing fee on accepted articles, OA publication is the model of the future. It is widely accepted that OA journals enable us to share our knowledge with a worldwide community instantly and at virtually no cost. This model also accelerates the pace of innovation and facilitates interdisciplinary research. Governments see this as an opportunity to get a better return on their investment in publicly-funded research.

I believe that there are strong arguments to join our family, EURASIP, and to support the Association. I would like to encourage you to participate in publishing in our journals and conferences and EURASIP sponsored workshops, in performing editorial work, and organising EUSIPCO conferences and summer schools. We are open to new ideas and suggestions, so please feel free to write to us. We will certainly benefit from your valuable advice.

Abdelhak Zoubir
EURASIP President
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Calendar of EURASIP Co-Sponsored Events
Event organizers who wish to apply for EURASIP co-sponsorship should send an e-mail to the EURASIP Events Coordinator, containing the following information: (1) Name of the conference/workshop, (2) Place and dates, (3) Previous editions of the conference/workshop, (4) Previous co-sponsorship, (5) Expected number of attendees, (6) Names of plenary speakers, (7) A rationale as to why EURASIP should sponsor the conference/workshop.
Reports of past EURASIP co-sponsored events can be found on the 'Past Conferences' webpage.
Name & Link Date Location
EUSIPCO 2017, The 25th European Signal Processing Conference
(Paper submission deadline: Feb. 17, 2017)
August 28 - September 2, 2017 Kos, Greece
contributed by Patrick A. Naylor, EURASIP Events Coordinator back to top
EURASIP Seminars
Upcoming Seminars Date Location
Cloud and Fog Radio Access Networks: An Information Theoretic View
(by Shlomo Shamai, Technion, Israel)
15 Mar. 2017 Berlin, Germany
Reports and technical presentations of past EURASIP Seminars can be found on the EURASIP Seminars webpage.
contributed by Jean-Luc Dugelay, EURASIP Membership Development Coordinator back to top
EURASIP Seasonal Schools

The EURASIP BoD welcomes proposals from prospective organizers of seasonal schools. For more information, click here.
Name & Link Date Location
IEEE SPS and EURASIP Summer School on Signal Processing for 5G Wireless Access May 29 - Jun. 1, 2017 Gothenburg, Sweden
Reports of past EURASIP Seasonal Schools can be found on the Seasonal Schools webpage.
contributed by Jean-Luc Dugelay, EURASIP Membership Development Coordinator back to top
Open Special Issues of EURASIP Journals
Signal Processing Deadline
Data Mining in Human Activity Analysis
Mar. 01, 2017
Signal Processing: Image Communication Deadline
Big Media Data Analysis
Feb. 28, 2017
Speech Communication Deadline
Realism in Robust Speech and Language Processing May 31, 2017
EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking Deadline
Heterogeneous cloud radio access networks March. 31, 2017
EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing Deadline
Visual information learning and analytics on cross-media big data Jul. 31, 2017
EURASIP Journal on Information Security Deadline
Authentication, Authorization and Auditing in Real-World Systems Feb. 13, 2017
Signal processing for network forensics and security May 1, 2017
contributed by Toon van Waterschoot, EURASIP Newsletter Editor back to top
Recently submitted Ph.D. Theses in EURASIP Library
Author Title & Link University Supervisors Publication Year
Haque, Mohammad Ahsanul Visual Analysis of Faces with Application in Biometrics, Forensics and Health Informatics Aalborg Univeristy Thomas B. Moeslund, Kamal Nasrollahi 2016
Kok, Manon Probabilistic modeling for sensor fusion with inertial measurements Linköping University Thomas Schön, Fredrik Gustafsson, Jeroen Hol 2016
contributed by Aggelos Pikrakis, EURASIP Web Services Coordinator back to top
Job Posts
EURASIP encourages employers to post open research positions in Signal Processing on the EURASIP Job Site.
Open positions will be continuously accessible online and will be advertised monthly in the EURASIP Newsletter.
Open Positions Institution Location Closing Date
Postdoctoral Researcher in Biomedical Machine Learning University of Oxford Oxford, UK Mar. 1, 2017
Ph.D. Positions Johannes Kepler University (JKU) Linz, AU Mar. 31, 2017
PhD stipends in acoustic signal processing, machine learning, and information theory Aalborg University Aalborg, DK May 1, 2017
Post-doctoral positions in Statistical Signal Processing for Gravitational Wave Astronomy CNRS AstroParticule et Cosmologie Paris, FR Dec. 31, 2017
contributed by Aggelos Pikrakis, EURASIP Web Services Coordinator back to top
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