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President's
Message
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It is my great honor to serve as the President of APSIPA from 2023. As you know, APSIPA was founded about 15 years ago. I am not among the founding members (maybe I am the first President who is not a founding member), but I have been engaged in many roles, such as TC chair, DL, VP, and EiC of the T-SIP. In the beginning, I had a naive question in my mind. Why do we have another conference in addition to ICASSP, InterSpeech, ICIP, and so on? What is the identity (raison d'tre) of APSIPA? I found the answer as I have attended all conferences since 2009. When we attend big conferences such as ICASSP, there are so many people, but we attend only focused sessions and meet people in our expertise, in my case, automatic speech recognition and spoken dialogue systems. On the other hand, in APSIPA ASC, we can review many areas and meet people (many key persons!) in all areas of signal and information processing. It is like a family, and we feel at home during the conference. And this community network is invaluable. That is why the large majority of the people chose to attend in-person to ASC 2022 in Chiang Mai rather than attending virtually.
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My mission as the President is to enlarge this family with more activity. Specifically,
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Keep growing the conference. We received a very high number of paper submissions and attendees as we recover from the pandemic. ASC 2023 will be in Taipei, and ASC 2024 will be in Macao.
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Keep growing the publications. APSIPA Transactions on Signal and Information Processing (T-SIP) will get indexed with Impact Factor. The APSIPA Book Series is launched.
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Reach out to developing countries which are still under-represented. We will organize seminars and seasonal schools. We will set up a scheme of financial support for attending ASCs.
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Enhance the diversity and networks in the members, such as female researchers, young researchers, and local chapters.
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Encourage technical activities and education programs to be aligned with the above missions.
Last July, we lost our founding President, Sadaoki Furui. In October, I visited his home with Ray Liu and Hitoshi Kiya to give our condolence to his family. We remember much about him and that he cared about APSIPA so much. When I was nominated to be President-elect two years ago, I was hesitant but pushed forward by these people. I am much more inexperienced than the predecessors, but will be able to manage much more easily as I have a big heritage of the past 15 years. In my term of two years, I will try my best to make APSIPA better than now. Your support will be appreciated.
Tatsuya Kawahara
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