Welcome Message from the EUSIPCO 2018 Technical Program Chairs

Welcome to Rome, the first metropolis of humanity, and one of the cradles of Western civilization. Its 3 millennia of history unfold before our eyes in the amazing variety of architectural styles, spanning from ancient Rome, to Medieval times, to the Renaissance and the Baroque periods, all the way to modern times.

It is an honor for us to welcome you all to the 26th edition of the EURASIP European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO 2018) in the Eternal City. This year, EUSIPCO has received 869 submissions, including 709 papers submitted to 28 regular tracks and 160 papers submitted to 25 special sessions. Out of these submissions, 409 have been accepted for the regular tracks and 138 for the special sessions. The reviewing process has been possible thanks to the coordinated effort of a newly formed team of 161 track chairs and 1,174 reviewers.

The Technical Program (TP) chairs wish to express their gratitude to all track chairs and reviewers who spent a considerable amount of their precious time and energy to handle the review process. Without their effort and dedication, organizing the EURASIP flagship signal processing conference would not have been possible.

The TP chairs have worked together to identify emerging "hot" research areas and promote special sessions. This has been done by looking at current trends in research as well as special sessions in previous editions of EUSIPCO. Tracks on Compressed Sensing and Sparse Modeling, Computational Imaging/Spectral Imaging, and Optimization Methods, for example, have been consolidated into regular tracks. A new regular track on Graph Signal Processing has been added, to account for the increased interest of the signal processing (SP) community in this field. Five regular sessions on machine learning are also clear evidence of the recent growth of this research trend, where SP researchers are contributing important results. Machine learning has played a key role in this edition of EUSIPCO, not just in the regular sessions, but also in special sessions devoted to deep neural networks, security and acoustic scene analysis; as well as in a number of tutorials. In addition, keywords such as Big Data, Computer Vision, Power Systems, and 5G mobile networks are now appearing explicitly in the technical program. These tracks, we believe, will keep growing in the forthcoming editions of EUSIPCO.

The technical program is enriched by a series of plenary talks, organized by the plenary talks co-chairs Lajos Hanzo and Enrico Magli. The plenary speakers are well-known world-class researchers. The plenary talks of this edition of EUSIPCO cover exciting and diverse topics, such as Coalitional Multimedia Signal Processing in Smart Device Networks, by Marc Moonen from KU Leuven, Synthetics Molecular Communications: Fundamentals, Opportunities and Challenges, by Robert Schober from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Deep Convolutional Networks: An Opportunity for Signal Processing, by Stéphane Mallat from Collège de France, and Sensing and Processing with Events, by Tobi Delbruck, from ETH.

A wide range of very interesting tutorials enriches the conference program. The topics cover a remarkable variety of inspiring subjects, from ultra-reliable and low-latency communications, to lightfield image processing, deep learning for forensics, random matrix advances for machine learning, to name a few.

EUSIPCO 2018 continues the initiative, launched in the 2017 edition of this Conference, of integrating satellite workshops in our technical program. Two satellite workshops were accepted and included: one devoted to body motion analysis ("Wholodance"), and one devoted to graph signal processing ("Statos").

After the success of past editions, EUSIPCO 2018 also features a Three-Minute Thesis (3MT) contest, where PhD students do their best to offer a compelling presentation of their thesis and its significance and impact in no more than three minutes. This activity is sponsored by EURASIP, and it represents an extremely useful exercise for doctoral students in summarizing and consolidating their ideas for a diverse audience. With these activities EURASIP intends to promote not just scientific and technical quality, but also transversal skills and communication/presentation skills, in order to help PhDs gain maximum visibility of their works.

The TP chairs wish to warmly thank all the colleagues who contributed their time and effort to the activities of the organizing committee, the plenary speakers, the tutorials presenters, the reviewers, the area chairs, the special session organizers, the session chairs, and of course all the authors, and the presenters, for helping make this edition of EUSIPCO a successful one. We all did the best we could to renew the pool of TPC members and to build a technical program of great scientific relevance, highest standards of quality, which we hope will meet the interests of our community. We hope you enjoy it!

Sergio Barbarossa, Pedro Comesaña Alfaro, and Augusto Sarti
EUSIPCO 2018 Technical Program Chairs