Grand Challenge Chairs

• Jon Barker, University of Sheffield, UK
• Kyogu Lee, Seoul National University, Korea
• Heiga Zen, Google Japan, Japan
• Devrim Unay, Izmir Democracy University, Turkey (IEEE SPS CDC Chair)

The 2024 International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, & Signal Processing (ICASSP) invites proposals for its Signal Processing Grand Challenges (SPGC) program. ICASSP is the flagship conference of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and will be held in Seoul, Korea, from April 14 to April 19, 2024. It will offer a comprehensive technical program presenting all the latest developments in research and technology for signal processing and its applications. Featuring world-class oral and poster sessions, keynotes, plenaries and perspective talks, exhibitions, demonstrations, tutorials, short courses and satellite workshops, it is expected to attract leading researchers and global industry figures, providing a great networking opportunity.

SPGC Program Guidelines

Proposal: Prospective SPGC organizers should complete the proposal form available at the link below. The form asks you to provide the following information:

• A brief introduction to the challenge;
• The expected impact and significance of the challenge in the research and/or industry community;
• Details of the rules for participation;
• Details of datasets that will be used, and state of preparedness of any newly constructed datasets.
• Criteria that will be used to evaluate the submitted systems;
• Details of the challenge organisers including names, affiliations and short bios.
• The full challenge schedule include dates for data release, submission deadline and announcement of results
• List of potential participants (indicate confirmed participants if applicable).

SPGC proposals can be submitted via this page. See the button below.

Participation: Grand Challenge organizers should facilitate participation, communication, and impact. Grand Challenge organizers are not allowed to participate in the competition they are organizing.

Dataset: If applicable to the challenge, organizers should make the competition datasets available to the participants. Organizers are encouraged to provide at least one training dataset with both input and ground truth and one test dataset without the ground truth—the latter to be used for final assessment. A secondary test set for evaluation, which is not available to participants, is also encouraged to highlight the generalizability of their approach. It is encouraged to also include a standard algorithm/model to serve as a baseline and for illustrative purposes.

Evaluation: How the results are evaluated and ranked should be announced along with the challenge description. During the competition, the participants and organizers have to follow the challenge’s criteria carefully. The evaluation methods should be unbiased and transparent to all participants. Regular update of ranking is also encouraged via management platforms such as Kaggle or Piazza. The provision of baseline approaches and evaluation metrics is encouraged. Each SPGC would have around 2-3 months to run the competition and rank/select winning teams. As a general policy, none of the ICASSP SPGCs is allowed to provide (monetary) rewards to the winning team(s).

SPGC Papers: The challenge organizers will present an overview of their SPGC at ICASSP-2024 during a dedicated session in conjunction with a 2-page paper for the ICASSP proceedings. The organizers will also be invited to submit an extended challenge overview paper to the IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing (OJ-SP). Both papers should describe the challenge context, data sets, and the challenge results. In addition, the challenge organizers will invite the best 5 submissions of their SPGC to submit a 2-page paper and present it at ICASSP-2024 (accepted papers will be in the ICASSP proceedings, the review process is coordinated by the challenge organizers and the SPGC chairs). All 2-page proceedings papers should be covered by an ICASSP registration and should be presented in person at the conference. The teams that present their work at ICASSP in person are also invited to submit a full paper about their work to OJ-SP.

All submitted OJ-SP papers will undergo peer review by the OJ-SP Editorial Board, in collaboration with the IEEE SPS CDC committee and ICASSP-2024 GC Chairs. OJ-SP is a fully open-access publication of the IEEE Signal Processing Society, with a scope encompassing the full range of technical activities of the Society. A limited number of article processing charge (APC) waivers for SPGC-related papers may be available upon request.

SPGC Sessions: SPGC organizers should organize an SPGC session in the ICASSP 2024 program. This session should include an overview presentation of the organisers (including the announcement of the winners), followed by the SPGC paper presentations (oral or poster) of the top-5 participants, typically followed by a panel or open discussion.

The ICASSP SPGCs are supported by the SPS Challenges and Data Collections Committee. For more information about the SPS CDC and examples of previous SPS Challenges visit their website.

Contact Information: For inquiries please contact the SPGC committee. Contact email to appear shortly.

Representative from the IEEE SPS CDC committee: Devrim Unay

Submission Instructions:

Proposals should be submitted through the online form, below. Inquiries should be sent via e-mail to the Grand Challenges Chairs: challengesessions@2024.ieeeicassp.org.

If you have any question please get in touch with the Grand Challenges Chairs.

All who submitted challenge session proposals will be informed of the decisions of the technical program chairs of ICASSP 2024 by email on Wednesday, August 30 2023.

Questions regarding Challenge Sessions may be directed to challengesessions@2024.ieeeicassp.org.