Welcome Message from the EUSIPCO 2017 Technical Program Chairs

Welcome to Kos, the birthplace of Hippocrates, the father of Western Medicine, the third largest island of Dodecanese, and the second most populated one! Welcome to the 25th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO 2017)!

This year, EUSIPCO has attracted over 868 submissions to 27 regular tracks and 22 special sessions. Interestingly, almost one third of the authors, who submitted papers to EUSIPCO 2017, come from countries outside the regions of Europe, Middle East and Africa, which traditionally attract the EUSIPCO audience, manifesting the growing international reputation of the EURASIP flagship signal processing conference.

The Technical Program (TP) chairs have introduced several changes to this EUSIPCO:

First, the number of regular tracks has increased from 20 to 27 in order to bring "hot" research topics within the EUSIPCO scope. For example, tracks on Compressed Sensing and Sparse Modeling, Computational Imaging/Spectral Imaging, Optimization Methods, Signal Processing for Graphs and Networks have been organized. Moreover, keywords, such as Big Data, Computer Vision, Power Systems, and Internet of Things, appear explicitly in the technical program. We envisage that such tracks will flourish in the forthcoming EUSIPCOs.

Second, to streamline the peer-reviewing procedure, following the tradition established at Nice, 71 area chairs were actively engaged in the reviewing of the papers submitted to the regular tracks. The area chairs were chosen by TP chairs from the Special Area Teams, established by EURASIP, as well as prominent members of the scientific community around the globe in order to maintain the international character of EUSIPCO. On average, every area chair handled 10 papers. We are grateful to the few area chairs, who coordinated the review of up to 15 papers in popular regular tracks. A total of 766 colleagues accepted invitations to serve as reviewers. These invitations were extended by the TP chairs as well as the area chairs. The area chair recommendations combined with the reviewers' assessments helped us to select 461 regular submissions among the 730 ones, yielding a corresponding acceptance ratio of 63.15%. The TP chairs would like to thank the special session chairs, Maurizio Omologo and Alexandros Potamianos, who selected 22 special sessions among the 24 proposals. The special session topics complement and enrich the technical program of EUSIPCO 2017. The special session organizers have coordinated the review of the 138 papers submitted to the special sessions in cooperation with the TP chairs, who resolved any conflicts of interest. To allow for an unbiased treatment of each paper submitted to special sessions, at least one reviewer, who did not participate in the specific special session, was invited to contribute an independent judgment. In total, 118 special session papers were finally accepted. The acceptance ratio in special sessions was 85.51%. All accepted papers are presented as lectures or posters. The assignment of a paper to an oral or poster session was not related to its quality, but rather was decided on the basis of exploiting, to the extent possible, the available venue resources and of grouping together papers that address similar topics, at the same time. We were particularly pleased that the original schedule was more-or-less met. Final accept/reject decisions were sent on time, on May the 25th. Nowadays, indispensable part of the reviewing process is the so called "plagiarism check". Although the available tools, such as IThenticate used by the IEEE, are far from being considered fully reliable, we would like to thank the cooperation of the authors to reduce as much as possible any minor overlaps with previously published works, which is in line with the rules so that a paper to appear in the proceedings and the IEEE Xplore library. While the process can still be improved, we hope that the changes introduced this year and the accumulated experience that we have obtained from the previous editions as well as the preparation of this one, will further increase the visibility, reputation, and impact of EUSIPCOs.

Third, a new initiative for integrating satellite workshops in the technical program of EUSIPCO was launched for a first time. This was coordinated by the workshop chairs Kostas Berberidis and Iasonas Kokkinos. Satellite workshops are common and established events in a number of prestigious conferences. We would like to see this initiative strengthened in the future, gaining the support of our community.

The technical program is supplemented with tutorials and plenary presentations. The tutorial chairs, Béatrice Pesquet-Popescu and Aggelos Pikrakis, had a very hard task selecting 10 tutorials among the 24 proposals submitted in response to the corresponding call. The plenary chairs, Nikos Sidiropoulos and Shri Narayanan have compiled a first-class lineup with keynotes to be delivered by Prof. Ron Kimmel (Technion Univ., Israel), Dr. Francis Bach (INRIA, France), Prof. Sabine Van Huffel (KU Leuven, Belgium), and Prof. Simon King (Univ. of Edinburgh, U.K.). Prof. Aggelos Katsaggelos (Northwestern University, USA) will open the technical program with this year EURASIP Fellow Inaugural Lecture. We are indebted to the publications chairs, Petros Boufounos and Elias Manolakos, for their support in the preparation of the technical program.

The 25th EUSIPCO also features a Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) competition organized by our 3MT co-chairs Petros Boufounos and Aggelos Pikrakis. Launched by EURASIP to promote transversal skills, 3MT is a research communication competition, through which PhD students are challenged to present a compelling oration on their thesis and its significance to a non-specialist audience. You are warmly invited to attend the 3MT session on Wednesday morning. Also, do not miss the Workshop on Real-Time Prototyping of DSP Algorithms on Live Real-World RF, Vision, and Audio Signals, organized by MathWorks during the lunch break of Wednesday.

The TP chairs wish to thank all the colleagues who participated in the organizing committee, the plenary speakers, the tutorials presenters, the reviewers, the area chairs, the special session organizers, the session chairs, and above all the authors, and the presenters for their contributions to a successful EUSIPCO 2017. You have all helped us compile an exciting and up-to-date technical program of the highest quality, meeting the interests of our community. We hope you enjoy it!

Konstantinos Diamantaras, Stefanos Kollias, Constantine Kotropoulos, Gerasimos Potamianos

EUSIPCO 2017 Technical Program Chairs