Minutes of ICASSP 2000 Meeting, held 6 June 00 in Istanbul, Turkey

(Action items appear below in boldface) 

In attendance: Georgios Giannakis (chair), Alle-Jan van der Veen (minutes), Zhi Ding, Moeness Amin, Dirk Slock, Nicolas Sidiropoulos, Luc Vandendorpe, Pierre Duhamel, Philippe Loubaton, Sergio Barbarossa, Javier Fonollosa, Brian Sadler, Jitendra Tugnait, Ananthram Swami, Lang Tong, G. Tong Zhou, John Treichler.

1. TC membership and representation
   Meeting began with an introduction of new TC members (Vandendorpe, Zhou, Sidiropoulos), and the new vice-chair (Van der Veen). One new TC member (Xia) was not attending the meeting. The minutes of the previous meeting were approved unanimously.

   SPCOM-TC representatives: current representatives are

   • Technical Directions Committee: Giannakis
   • Publications Board: Giannakis
   • Multimedia liaison: Ding
   Zhou volunteered to represent SPCOM in the conference board, since she is already secretary at that meeting. Fonollosa will represent SPCOM at the education committee.

   Expert Speaker for ICASSP-2000 is Slock (impromptu, no material was sent around). Expert speaker for ICASSP-2001 will be Sidiropoulos.

   New TC members with the following expertises are desired: compression, source and channel coding, networking, implementations.

2. SPCOM Webpage is now maintained by Zhou. Additional items that may be included are: forms for nominating new TC members, list of expertise for each TC member. A suggestion to include links to relevant publications was dismissed.

3. ICASSP reviews: The electronic review system used for ICASSP-2000 was generally working satisfactory. Suggestions for enhancements to ICASSP-2001 committee:
   • easier downloading of all papers assigned to a reviewer (in bulk)
   • feedback from reviewers to authors. Question is what authors can do with feedback unless the paper may be updated.
   • Enable authors to update their paper?
   • final ranking of reviews was not completely clear
   • updating of submitted reviews was not possible with the system, but sometimes desided.
   In general, SPCOM received an increasing number of papers. More reviewers are needed for the industry track: reviewing is harder because how can one judge if a design works? Another note to future ICASSP organizers: SPCOM-TC meeting are often scheduled coinciding with the AE lunch meeting. Since there is a large overlap (at least 9 members are also AEs), this is undesired.

4. Pool of associate editors: Tong presented a list of 10 potential candidates. After pruning and voting, 4 could be added to our pool.

5. Awards:
   Nobody contributed nominations for the IEEE level awards (deadline 15 June) so that we will miss this opportunity.
   September 15 is the deadline for the SP-level major and paper awards (including society, technical achievement, and service awards). We will finalize nominations and vote on those during our Sept. 1-8 e-mail meeting. Swami and Van der Veen will solicit, gather nominations for deserving individuals and will coordinate the review and voting processes. Target is to obtain a good pool of papers and have maximal endorsement for the final selection.

   Procedure:

   • July 15: each TC member to nominate at least one paper/person for any category.
   • papers are assigned by Swami and Van der Veen to volunteers, who produce summaries and evaluations (3 evaluations per paper).
   • Compiled summaries are distributed; email discussion.
   • first vote (secret): range of grades, reducing number of candidates to at most 3 papers.
   • second vote, to produce a maximal support for the final selection of award candidates.

   Starting next year, we will start the award selection procedure by April 2 for all paper categories, so that we can vote during ICASSP.

6. SPCOM conferences:
   • Sadler presented the final report of the SPAWC'99 workshop. The meeting had 129 attendees, and incurred a small loss due to higher student attendance (35) than initially estimated.
   • Amin presented some numbers on the upcoming SSAP'00 workshop (Pennsylvania, August 13-16, 2000). 175 papers have been accepted. This is the last SSAP workshop that SPCOM is formally involved.
   • SPAWC-2001 (March 20-23, 2001, Taiwan): a report by Chi was distributed. It was suggested to ask Chi to contact Verdu (Princeton) to see how ultra-fast printing of the proceedings can be done, as for the CISS conference, to push back the deadline of the full paper. (Van der Veen to inform Chi).

7. Additional discussion:
   • (Sadler) There is some overlap in EDICS in our category.
   • Barbarossa is willing to organize SPAWC-03 in Rome, if there is a sufficient number of people in his group to help
   • In response to a request by the organizer of Special Sessions for ICASSP-01 (Robert Nowak), Tong and Sidiropoulos propose to organize special sessions in ICASSP-01 on SP for Communication Networks.

8. Future meetings:
   • September 1-8, 2000: Email voting on new TC members
   • September 5-12, 2000: Email voting on awards
   • March 20-23, 2001: Next face-to-face meeting during SPAWC-2001, Taiwan