It is our great pleasure to welcome you to 2019 APSIPA ASC in Lanzhou. Under the theme of intelligent signal and information processing, we have designed a strong program, and hope you will enjoy it.
This year, the Technical Program Committee received 272 regular paper submissions from 15 countries. This is the highest number in APSIPA. Among these submissions, 187 papers were accepted. The acceptance rate is about 68.8%. In addition, we have approved 28 special session proposals, and accepted 164 special session papers. The top-two submission countries are China and Japan, which contributed 78% of the submissions.
The paper reviews for both regular and special sessions represent great efforts of 563 reviewers. A total of 1469 reviews were received, which represents 4.1 independent reviews for each paper in average. The regular paper sessions and the special session papers together form 51 oral sessions and 2 poster sessions.
This year, we are very pleased to have three distinguished keynotes given by world-famous scholars: Prof. Chin-Hui Lee (Georgia Tech University), Prof. Wen Gao (Beijing University), and Prof. Kate Knill (Cambridge University). They will share their insights on transfer learning, cloud artificial vision system , and language assessment.
As part of the APSIPA ASC tradition, the Friend Labs gathering is held during lunch breaks. In this year, we have three friend labs: friend lab for ML TC, friend lab for Women in APSIPA, and friend lab in China. We also organized four overview sessions that feature overview talks given by leading experts on diverse topics. Thanks to Prof. Homer Chen, Nam Ik Cho, Yoong Choon Chang, Guan-Ming Su for the organization. We also have a one-day workshop on Autoware, organized by Prof. Alexander Carballo and Prof. Qingguo Zhou.
We have six tutorials offered by leading experts in the community. The optics cover tensor component analysis, speech enhancement, speech synthesis, few-shot learning and adversarial learning, immersive visual media communications, and signal enhancement for consumer products.
This year we have organized a very special event, the APSIPA Winter School. Our goal is to promote the research on signal and information technologies in the residence of APSIPA annual conference, and benefit students of the local universities. The theme of this inaugural event is “Speech and AI”. We invited six speakers, and most of them are supported by the APSIPA distinguished lecture program. Thanks to Prof. Woon Seng Gan for the initiative, and thanks to Prof. Axu Hu for the local organization.
Another innovation this year is the portrait poster show. We invited the authors of each paper to present an A3-size small poster to introduce their research and their institutes. These portrait posters are put in the corridor outside our conference rooms, which may give you some interesting information, e.g., opening positions of other groups. You can enjoy them in the coffee time.
As another innovation, we have designed a WeChat program to assist attendees to manage the conference. You can search papers, check the ongoing sessions, set alarms for interested sessions and papers, and receive notifications from the local organizer. You can download the WeChat App and scan the bar code everywhere in our conference venue to access these functions.
Finally, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Prof. Chung-Nan Lee, the VP TC of APSIPA and all the TC chairs for organizing the review process. Most thanks to the special session organizers and our 563 reviewers. In order to give more time to our authors to prepare the manuscripts, we have delayed the submission deadline for a couple of weeks, which makes the reviewing process very stringent. Nevertheless, we finally met our goal and delivered high-quality review.
Once again, thanks for attending APSIPA and enjoy your stay in Lanzhou!
APSIPA ASC Technical Program Co-Chairs:
Regular sessions: Dong Wang. Jiun-In Guo, Zhiyi Yu, Kazushi Ikeda, Sung Chan Jun, Mingyi He, Yu Tsao, Supavadee Aramvith, Sanghoon Lee, Shinsuke Ibi, Naveed Ul Hassan, Woon-Seng Gan, Isao Echizen
Special sessions: Qin Jin, Yoshinobu Kajikawa, Chung-Nan Lee, Lap Pui Chau, Hsin-Min Wang, Kosin Chamnongthai, Askar Hamdulla