On behalf of the Technical Program Committee (TPC) of the first Annual Summit and Conference of the Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA ASC 2009), we welcome all of you to this historical first conference of APSIPA in Sapporo, one of the most beautiful cities in Japan. We are very proud to serve as the Co-Chairs of this historical conference.

For this conference, we set two categories of papers for submission, namely, long and short. Long papers were allowed to be a maximum of 10 pages long, and short ones a maximum of 4 pages long.

In response to our call for papers, a total of 243 papers from 16 countries were submitted, of which 72 were submitted as long papers, 126 as short ones, and 45 for special sessions. Each paper was assigned to an appropriate Track for the review process. Based on the ratings and detailed comments from the reviewers, the TPC carefully selected the final papers for publication. Papers submitted for the special sessions were applied to the same review process as papers submitted for the regular sessions.

Among these submissions, 169 papers in total were accepted for publication, of which we accepted 48 long papers, 82 short papers, and 39 special session papers. These accepted papers were then placed into oral or poster sessions according to their type. Long papers were assigned to oral sessions and short papers to poster sessions.

For this conference, a total of 287 outstanding researchers have gathered to organize the TPC. The TPC members are categorized into the four Tracks below according to their research field.

1. Signal Processing Track
2. Communications Track
3. Computer/Information Track
4. Circuits and Systems/VLSI Track

We invited 381 experts to review all of the submissions. These reviewers were from all over the globe, including the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle-East, Europe. We would like to thank them for providing high quality reviews, which ensures the excellence of the technical program.

Finally, we express our utmost gratitude to the contributions of the Technical Program Committee members, the reviewers, session chairs and the authors of the submitted papers. Without their efforts , we could not have arranged the technical program.

Next year, the APSIPA ASC 2010 will be held in Singapore. We hope all of the TPC members, reviewers, authors, and participants will continuously support the APSIPA in the future.