APSIPA ASC 2018

It is my great pleasure to see significant growth of APSIPA at the 10th APSIPA-ASC in Hawaii. During the 2007 IEEE ICASSP conference held in Hawaii, Prof. Ray Liu and I got the idea of creating an academic association encouraging research and education on signal and information processing in the Asia-Pacific region. The name APSIPA was decided at the 1st Steering Committee Meeting held at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan in December 2007, and after 3 more meetings, the inaugural APSIPA-ASC was held in Sapporo, Japan, in 2009. I look forward to seeing many colleagues who have contributed to create and develop various APSIPA activities.

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It was April 2007, during IEEE ICASSP in Honolulu at the exact same locations of convention center and hotel, a group of us gathered together for a dinner to talk about if we might want to start an Asian/Pacific Association on signal and information processing for a very simple reason: The world’s technology gravitation center has been shifting from Atlantic Ocean to Pacific Ocean. Yet there was no organized community to serve the specific needs for colleagues in Asian/Pacific regions.

At the table were Sadaoki Furui, Lin-shan Lee, Soo-Chang Pei, Hideaki Sakai, Wan-Chi Siu, Min Wu, Meng-Hwa Er, and myself. The consensus was unanimous that we shall take on this noble task, not because it is easy but because it is hard.

Sadaoki called for the first steering committee meeting in Tokyo in December 2007 to commence the activities of starting APSIPA. Afterward, we met in Las Vegas during ICASSP 2008, in Hong Kong in December 2008 hosted by Wan-Chi, and then in Taipei during ICASSP 2009, to lay out the groundwork to give birth to APSIPA and the hosting of the first Annual Summit and Conference (ASC) in Sapporo in October 2009.

Ever since the first edition of APSIPA ASC, APSIPA continues to grow. Many colleagues kept coming back year after year to form a community that we have gradually seen as an extended family and friends. It is now the tenth edition of ASC taking place at the birthplace of the idea of creating APSIPA. Therefore it carries very special meaning to the hearts of many of us.

I welcome you to join this special family, where APSIPA serves as a community to help each other to learn, to network, to grow, and to accomplish. We started from here, we meet again here, and we will continue to serve the community that we care so much.

A warm welcome to the tenth edition of APSIPA ASC! Enjoy ASC and Hawaii!

Aloha!

K. J. Ray Liu