"Trends" Expert Overview Sessions Revived at ICASSP 2011 [In the Spotlight]
M any of the technology trends we see today in audio and acoustic s ignal process ing (AASP) can be traced back to visionary ideas of those we now call luminaries. Key figures in our community include Colin Cherry (1914– 1979) for defining the cocktail party problem; Manfred Schroeder (1926– 2009) for contributions to understanding of acoustics, hearing, music, and speech coding; and many other researchers equally important but too numerous to list. The AASP area has seen strong growth in research activity in recent years. Drivers for such growth include rapidly increasing customer expectations for quality, mobility, and functionality for audio in communications and entertainment scenarios. Many consumers have come to expect that there is really nothing that cannot be done with audio, whether it’s music or speech, providing your battery holds out. This “demand” is coupled with the “supply” of low-cost, high-performance audio processing capability. The number of AASP submissions to ICASSP grew again this year by 25% with papers in speech enhancement, source separation, array processing, and music analysis being the most numerous. Similar trends can be seen for IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing.