It is with great pleasure that we welcome you to the 2018 APSIPA ASC in Honolulu. In celebration of the 10th anniversary of APSIPA ASC, we have put together a strong, multi-faceted program, and we hope you will enjoy it.
First, we are very pleased to have four distinguished keynotes given by outstanding leaders in our community: Prof. Jose Moura (Carnegie Mellon University), Dr. Hsiao-Wuen Hon (Microsoft Research Asia), Prof. Bin Yu (University of California-Berkeley), and Dr. Shinji Watanabe (Johns Hopkins University), to share with us their visions. It is an especially great opportunity to have Prof. Moura, 2018 President Elect of IEEE, with us. We hope his presence could help foster closer collaborations between APSIPA and IEEE. As part of the APSIPA ASC tradition, the Friend Labs gathering is held during lunch breaks. We also organized the Overview sessions that feature talks given by experts on various topics. The Big Data Overview session is organized by the General Chair, Prof. Anthony Kuh and three other Overview sessions are organized by the current APSIPA President, Prof. Wan-Chi Siu.
For the celebration of the 10th anniversary of APSIPA ASC, we have organized a President Forum and invited past, current, and newly elected APSIPA presidents to speak on the history of APSIPA, and to offer their insights into the future directions of APSIPA. Another first for APSIPA ASC is a PhD Forum for PhD students to present their dissertation research and ongoing research works. These students are our future, and we hope they will flourish on their research endeavors, continue to participate actively in APSIPA activities, and become leaders in their fields.
This year, the Technical Program Committee received 199 regular paper submissions from 16 countries. Among them, 144 papers were accepted. The top two countries are Japan and China, which comprise 76% of the accepted regular papers. The acceptance rate is about 72.4%. In addition, we accepted 212 special session papers, which cover special topics of interest. The paper reviews for both regular and special sessions are results of relentless efforts of 357 reviewers. A total of 1290 reviews were received, which represents an average of 3.1 independent reviews for each paper. The regular paper sessions and the special session papers together form 60 oral sessions and 4 poster sessions.
Being always FREE, tutorials at APSIPA ASC are a great way to get up to speed on important and active research topics. This year we have six tutorials offered by leading experts and pioneers from industry and academia, on Autonomous Driving, Sparse Signal Processing, Voice Conversion, 360° Video, Machine Learning, and Generative Adversarial Network.
The success of this conference represents the efforts of all our colleagues that are too numerous to name individually. We would especially like to thank: the authors, without whose content there would be little to discuss; our paper reviewers, without their expertise there would be no way to select the papers; our keynote speakers, for anchoring our conference; our session chairs for chairing our technical sessions; and all the other organizing committee members. Last but certainly not least, we want to thank all of you to participate in this conference, making this a lively community dedicated to the advancement of technology.
APSIPA ASC Technical Program Co-Chairs,
Regular sessions: Hsueh-Ming Hang, Ming-Ting Sun, Z. Jane Wang, Isao Yamada, Woon-Seng Gan, Juin-In Guo, Kazunori Hayashi, Kazushi Ikeda, Sung Chan Jun, Sanghoon Lee, Shinsuke Ibi, and Wen-Hsiao Peng.
Special sessions: Toshihisa Tanaka, Yan Lindsay Sun, Zhi Tian, Chris Lee, Shoko Imaizumi, Supavadee Aramvith