Welcome to the 52nd Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers! I am honored to serve as the General Chair for this traditional conference. I first attended Asilomar in the mid-1990’s as a post-doc, and I have returned almost every year since then. What keeps me coming back is the high-quality technical program, the friendly atmosphere, and the outdoor activities in the Asilomar beaches and parks. Moreover, many of the emerging research topics and remarkable new results in our research fields are presented for the first time at the Asilomar Conference. Asilomar brings together academic and industry researchers in signal processing, wireless communication, networking, computing, machine learning, multisensor systems, data science, and speech/audio/video, and provides the opportunity to interact and exchange ideas in a relaxed setting.
This year we have a couple of innovations. First, we start a new tradition of a Sunday afternoon tutorial lecture by one of the leading scholars in our field. We start with a big bang. We are honored to have IEEE President Prof. Jose Moura (CMU) as our inaugural tutorial speaker. His tutorial will focus on graph signal processing and learning over graphs. Prof. Moura is truly a pioneer in these research fields. Second, we have expanded the scope of many of the technical area tracks in order to accommodate more machine learning, data science, and large-scale signal processing, wireless connectivity and data analytics related research papers. As an result, we had a record number of 547 submissions this year.
We have a very exciting technical program for you this year with a good mixture of emerging and well-established research topics among invited, regular and poster sessions. I would like to express my gratitude to the Technical Program Chair Prof. Martin Haardt and his team of Technical Area Chairs: Mario Huemer, Emil Björnson, Alejandro Ribeiro, Waheed U. Bajwa, Fauzia Ahmad, Mikko Valkama, Behtash Babadi and Gerald Schuller for a brilliantly crafted technical program. They handled a large number of paper submissions in a timely and highly professional manner. The help of Technical Area Vice Chairs was also invaluable in getting the reviews completed in time. A total of 86 papers were submitted to the student paper contest, from which eight finalists were selected by the Track Chairs. On Sunday before the Welcome Reception, these finalists will present their work before a panel of judges organized by Prof. Balu Santhanam.
We are proud to have Prof. H. Vincent Poor from Princeton University as the plenary speaker this year. He is among the leading scholars in the world in the fields of information and communication theory and statistical signal processing. He will be talking about fundamentals of low-latency wireless communication, which is a key enabling technology in 5G and beyond wireless systems, factory automation, IoT, and autonomous vehicles such as UAVs and self-driving cars.
I am thrilled and deeply honored to serve as the General Chair of the 52nd Asilomar Conference. I hope that you all enjoy the inspiring conference program this year and discover everything that Asilomar has to offer in terms of scholarly work, meeting colleagues and friends, and outdoor experiences in the beautiful Asilomar beaches and parks.
Visa Koivunen, Aalto University, Finland, June 2018.