About

The IEEE Signal Processing and SP Education Workshop is sponsored by the IEEE Signal Processing Society.

The workshop used to be known as the DSP/DSP Education Workshop, and has been held approximately every two years since 1984, as described below. It was most recently held in 2013 in Napa Valley, California.  The 2015 IEEE SP/SPE workshop was held August 9 – 12, 2015, at the beautiful Snowbird resort.    

History

(Credit: 2013 DSP Workshop site)

The first ICASSP was held in 1976 with just a few hundred attendees. By the early 1980s more than 1000 engineers and educators were coming to ICASSP, and it had turned into a multi-day event with many parallel sessions. As the ICASSPs became larger, there was no way to see everything happening in the field and little time to interact with other investigators. Some remembered fondly ‘the early days’ when a few workshops with many fewer attendees were held at Arden House, a small conference facility at the Harriman estate in rural New York. Noting the value of this type of meeting, the DSP Technical Committee, the largest in the Society at the time, instigated the first ‘DSP workshop’ in October of 1984. It was held in Chatham Bar, Massachusetts, and established several precedents that continue to this day — it was ‘small’ in the sense that only 100 or so folks attended, the number of parallel sessions was limited to at most two in order to encourage personal interaction, and it was held in a nice, but out of the way, place so that the attendees would be able to focus on each other and their work. A scan through the accompanying list indicates the range of locations and venues, all adhering to this approach.

The first workshop was adjudged a total success, which led to a second, and then one roughly every two years, through this one, the sixteenth. In 2000, for the first time, the scope of the workshop was extended to explicitly include Signal Processing Education, with the support of the SP Education Technical Committee. The workshops have continued jointly since then.  The 2015 workshop, was renamed to “Signal Processing and SP Education Workshop”, as it was felt that removing the word “digital” from the name would make it more reflective of the broad nature of the content of the workshop.  As is typical in IEEE workshops, each one reflected both the character of the organizing committee and the ever evolving nature of field of signal processing. Featured at the first workshop in 1984 were plenary talks on speech recognition and noise cancellation in the cockpits of fighter aircraft. In 1990 the focus was on digital television and wavelets, and so it has gone of the years that the newest applications of signal processing, and the newest theoretical approaches are first aired at the DSP workshop.

The workshop is now ‘co-owned’ by the Signal Processing Techniques and Methods (SPTM) technical committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and the Education Committee, both direct ancestors of the technical committees that started and then evolved the workshop into its current form.

Past workshops: