Welcome Message from the technical CoChairs

On behalf of the Technical Program Committee (TPC), it is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 27th European Signal Processing Conference, EUSIPCO 2019, in A Coruña, one of the westernmost cities in Europe, founded by the Romans more than two thousand years ago in a place close to what they considered Finis Terrae, the end of the Earth. This year, 823 papers were submitted to EUSIPCO, 753 to regular tracks and 70 to special sessions. A total of 2834 authors from all over the world submitted their work to EUSIPCO 2019. Of these, 1141 (40%) are authors from outside Europe, which reveals EUSIPCO’s international projection beyond European borders.

The review of submitted articles was the major task performed by the Technical Program Committee. Submitted articles were classified into 27 regular tracks and 10 special sessions. Each track had at its head one or several Area Chairs which in turn distributed the work among all the members of the TPC. All of them were responsible for ensuring that each article had at least three reviews. In total, more than 1500 people participated selflessly in the review process to all of whom we would like to acknowledge their efforts and express our deep gratitude. Their work has been fundamental for EUSIPCO 2019 to reach the demanding quality requirements established by EURASIP. The Area Chairs had the additional work of integrating the individual evaluations received by each article and producing a recommendation about its acceptance or rejection. At the end of the entire review process, the total number of articles accepted amounted to 509, 62% of all submissions. In the regular tracks, 443 articles were accepted, which represents 59% of those sent.

The accepted papers have been organized in 78 technical sessions, 49 in lecture format and 29 in poster format. The sessions have been conformed according to strict criteria of coherence and thematic affinity. At the same time, the sessions were distributed in the calendar minimizing thematic overlaps so that all attendees have a greater opportunity to attend the sessions of their interest. The assignment of a paper to a lecture or poster session was not related to its quality and in the conference proceedings, all articles have received the same treatment regardless of their presentation format.

The technical sessions constitute the fundamental nucleus of the program. There are 68 sessions that correspond to regular tracks and cover a wide variety of signal processing topics. In addition, there are 10 special sessions in new or emerging areas that complement the regular tracks. The special sessions were managed by co-chairs Markus Rupp and Danilo Mandic, whose work we want to acknowledge and thank.

Keynote talks are another fundamental part of the technical program. We are honored to have Josiane Zerubia (INRIA, France), Yurii Nesterov (CORE, UCL, Belgium), Raymond Knopp (EURECOM, France) and Alejandro Ribeiro (University of Pennsylvania, USA), all well-known world-class researchers. We are convinced that their talks, which will deal with topics of enormous relevance and novelty, are one of the most attractive parts of our technical program.

EUSIPCO 2019 also offers in its program two Satellite Workshops that will take place during the last day of the conference. One is “Xove TIC”, the 2nd edition of a workshop sponsored by the University of A Coruña Centre for ICT Research (CITIC). “XoveTIC” is an initiative for young pre- and post-doctoral researchers in ICT area from universities in Galicia and northern Portugal to present their ongoing work. The second is “Signal Processing Computer vision and Deep Learning for Autonomous Systems”, a workshop consisting of one keynote talk and two lecture sessions featuring research papers. The workshop is organized by Nikos Nikolaidis and Anastasios Tefas from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, and is sponsored by the H2020 Project MULTIDRONE.

EUSIPCO 2019 has dedicated a special effort to the participation of students. Our Students Activities co-chairs, Jordi Vilà-Valls and Pau Closas, did an extraordinary job in this respect. The program includes the final phase of the Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) contest in which participants will present a summary of their doctoral work for a strictly limited time of three minutes. The choice of the winner will be made by vote of all contest attendees. The call to the 3MT contest was particularly successful with 24 proposals received. The selection of the 10 finalists was a difficult and tough process. Again, proposals of excellent quality had to be rejected. Another student-centered activity is the final phase of the Best Student Paper competition. Of all the articles accepted at EUSIPCO 2019, a selection of thirteen was made with a first author student and high ratings during the review process. The selected thirteen students have been invited to present their work to a panel of experts, who will determine the winners, in a special poster session scheduled for the first day of the conference. Prizes for the winners of the student competitions will be presented at a ceremony during the conference banquet.

Finally, the technical co-chairs wish to express their gratitude to the organizing committee, the keynote speakers, the tutorials presenters, the special sessions and satellite workshop organizers, the area chairs, the reviewers, the session chairs, and above all the authors and presenters. The work of all of them has been essential for EUSIPCO 2019 to offer an attractive and exciting technical program that we hope will be of great interest to all attendees.

 

María Sabrina Greco and Marius Pesavento
EUSIPCO 2019 Technical Co-Chairs