The Dialogue will be featured at ICASSP 2016 as a new initiative for the first time in the ICASSP history of 41 years to promote the dialogue between young researchers (PhD students, Postdoc, young professionals) and academic & industry leaders in signal processing field.

In the Dialogue, a few world-class research leaders will be invited

• to meet with students & young researchers to share their experience in research and industry,
• to have a face-to-face dialogue,
• to network and discuss future research directions,
• to offer advice on how to become successful R&D, and
• to present challenges & opportunities in future signal processing technologies.

The Dialogue is planned to last 90 minutes in the ICASSP 2016, with first 45 minutes for invited lectures (by 3 keynote speakers, 15 minutes each), followed by 45 minutes dialogue session with about 250 students and young researchers.

The confirmed invited speakers are:

• Dr. Baining Guo

  Research as a Career

  Abstract: In the talk, I will share my experience of building a research career in industrial labs, based my experience at Intel Research in Silicon Valley and Microsoft Research in China.

  Dr. Baining Guo is Deputy Managing Director of Microsoft Research Asia, where he also leads the graphics lab. Prior to joining Microsoft Research in 1999, he was a senior staff researcher with the Microcomputer Research Labs of Intel Corporation in Santa Clara, California. Dr. Guo received his B.S. from Peking University and his M.S and Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1989 and 1991 respectively. Dr. Guo is a fellow of IEEE, ACM, and Canadian Academy of Engineering.

  Dr. Guo's research interests include computer graphics, visualization, and human-computer interaction. A focus of his research is data-driven techniques for texture and reflectance modeling, particularly techniques for studying light transmission and reflection in complex materials and environments through the discovery of coherent structures in large-scale, high-dimensional image data. He also worked on real-time rendering, geometry modeling, and gesture recognition (for Kinect natural user interface). Dr. Guo was on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (2006--2010), Computer and Graphics (2007 -- 2011), IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (2007—2014). In 2014 he served as the papers chair for the ACM SIGGRAPH Asia conference. He has been on the program committees of numerous conferences in graphics and visualization, including ACM SIGGRAPH and IEEE Visualization. Dr. Guo holds over 50 US patents.


• Professor Rabab Ward (President of IEEE Signal Processing Society 2016-)
  

  How Our Society Deals with the Fast Evolving Signal Processing Field

  Abstract: There have been great advancements and innovations over the last few decades in the theories and applications of the signal processing field. It has been exciting to see the ever-increasing abstractions of the signal processing discipline and the rapid spread of its applications to a vast number of fields. Signal processing has now become a fundamental science, addressing various technical problems and critical societal needs. It is now the science that powers essential aspects of our everyday digital life, including healthcare, energy systems, sustainability, transportation, entertainment, education, communication, collaboration, finance, defense, and security. The challenges signal processing is continuously overcoming has Influenced our Society to be an ever-evolving one. The talk will show how our Society responds to this highly dynamic evolution of our field. The increased capacity and scope of our Technical Committees along with our Special Interest Groups, both take leading roles in fostering the development of new technologies, as new fields and theories emerge. Examples are the recent introduction by our Society of two new publications, two new conferences, the paper repository SigPort, the video tutorial online library SigView, the Signal Processing Cup, the SPS seasonal schools, two public relations videos about signal processing, and the new awards for industry members.

  Rabab Kreidieh Ward has around 40 years of post-doctoral experience in academic education, research, development and leadership. Her research interests are in broad areas of signal and image processing and their applications. She has published over 500 papers in refereed journals and conferences and holds six patents. Some of her work has been licensed to US and Canadian industry. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the IEEE, the Canadian Academy of Engineers and the Engineering Institute of Canada. Amongst her large number of awards are the “Career Achievement Award”, the top award of CUFA, BC, the organization representing all professors at BC's doctoral universities, the IEEE Signal Processing Society top award "The Society Award", and British Columbia's top engineering award "The RA McLachlan Memorial Award". She has served in leadership positions at the University of British Columbia, the IEEE and other professional societies. She is presently the President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society.


• Prof. Kai Yu

  Bridging academic research and industry need in the area of natural speech interface

  Abstract: In recent years, the development from PC internet to mobile internet, and then internet of things has significantly changed the way human interacts with devices. Natural user interface, especially speech and image based interfaces, is replacing the traditional key board and GUI. This talk will briefly review the key technologies and challenges in building cognitive speech interface which can deal with uncertainty in natural human machine conversation. In addition to the technology review, the talk will also share thoughts and experiences of bridging advanced academic research and practical industry need by setting up start up companies.

  Prof. Kai Yu is the co-founder and Chief Scientist of AISpeech Ltd. and the Director of the SpeechLab at Computer Science and Engineering Department of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTU). Prior to joining SJTU as a research professor, he was a senior research associate at Cambridge University and a co-founder of VocalIQ which was later acquired by Apple. He got his B.S. and M.S. from Tsinghua University in 1999, 2002 and his Ph.D. from Cambridge University in 2006. He is a senior member of IEEE, a Technical Committee Member of the Speech, Language, Music and Auditory Perception Branch of the Acoustic Society of China, and a Technical Committee Member of the Human Machine Interaction Branch of China Computer Federation. He is also the associate director of the technical committee of the Alliance of Intelligent Speech Technology Industry of China.

  His research interests include dialogue systems, speech recognition, synthesis, speaker verification, natural language processing and machine learning. The goal of his research is to build speech-based cognitive user interface which can operate in complex environment, deal with uncertainty, deliver information in a humanized way and evolve via interacting with human. Prof. Yu has published over 80 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers and won 3 best paper awards of international conferences (InterSpeech and IEEE SLT) and the ISCA Computer Speech and Language Best Paper Award (2008-2012). He served as the area chairs for speech processing and dialogue systems for EUSIPCO and INTERSPEECH. He was selected into the “1000 Overseas Talent Plan (Young Talent)” by Chinese central government, the “Excellent Young Scientists Project” by NSFC China and the Programme for Professor of Special Appointment (Eastern Scholar) at Shanghai Institutions of Higher Learning. He was awarded WuWenJun Science and Technology Progress Award by the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence for his contribution in commercialising speech technology for language learning.

A pre-registration is needed to attend the event.The pre-registration is free to students/young professionals who will attend the ICASSP 2016, Shanghai, China.

The pre-registration was closed on 23-Feb-2016. The confirmations were sent to the successful registrants on 22-Feb-2016.

Any questions may be directed to Student Session Chair: Prof. Wei Zhang at Email: w.zhang@unsw.edu.au.