The Year 2009

The year 2009 is closing and it is a good time to summa-rize what happened in TICSP during this year. The year has again been quite busy with workshops, several lec-tures by visitors, and many other activities. In June there was the Sixth International Workshop on Computational Systems Biology (WCSB 2009) in Aarhus, Denmark, and in August the workshops on Information Theoretic Methods in Science and Engineering (WITMSE’09) in Tampere, and on Local and Non-Local Approximations in Image Processing (LNLA2009) in Tuusula. The work-shops in Tampere and Tuusula also brought many of the

participants to spend a bit longer time at TICSP. Next year will bring big changes, because Tam-pere University of Technology will start operating in the form of a foundation from the beginning of 2010, and we all have high hopes that the more agile organisation will benefit researchers by removing unnecessary bureaucrat-ic obstacles. I wish to thank all those who have participated in TICSP workshops, visited TICSP or otherwise contrib-uted to our activities.

Jaakko Astola

FiDiPro Fellowship

Prof. Bogdan Dumitrescu has been selected by Tekes as a fellow of the Finland Distinguished Profes-sor programme for 2010-2013, with the project “Convex optimization in audio and image processing”. The main topics of the project are sparse representations, oversampled filter banks and multidimensional systems

analysis and synthesis, viewed as generators of problems suited to optimization. The TUT coordinator of the proj-ect is prof. Jaakko Astola. Bogdan Dumitrescu is a professor at Politehnica University of Bucharest, Romania, where he teaches signal processing and numerical methods. Since his first

visit at TICSP in 1998, he has traveled a lot between Romania and Finland. His main research interest is in convex optimi-zation techniques, in particular in semidefinite program-ming, and their use for solving various signal processing problems like filter, filter bank and wavelet design, with special attention to the multidimensional case, where a fine balance between complexity and optimality must be reached. He has written more than 30 journal articles and the book “Positive trigonometric polynomials and sig-nal processing applications”. He is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing. Prof. Dumitrescu is also known in the Depart-ment of Signal Processing as an avid football player.

TICSP Workshop WCSB 2009

The Sixth International Workshop on Computational Systems Biology, WCSB 2009 (http://www.cs.tut.fi/wcsb09/) hosted in Aarhus, Denmark, on June 10 - 12, 2009 brought together a large group of both biology and computing oriented researchers. Main themes of the in-terdisciplinary WCSB 2009 meeting included modeling and understanding biological networks, such as metabol-ic, genetic, signal transduction, and neuronal networks, using cellular and genome-level information.

WCSB 2009 was organized by the Computation-al Systems Biology research group from Tampere Uni-versity of Technology, Department of Signal Processing, in collaboration with Aarhus University and Technical University of Dortmund. It was decided to make the workshop even more influential in the field of computational systems biology by inviting five keynote speakers from top laboratories all over the world. The keynote speakers at the workshop

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TICSP Workshop WITMSE 2009

The second Workshop on Information Theoretic Meth-ods in Science and Engineering (WITMSE’09) was held at the Tampere University of Technology, Tampere, Fin-land on August 17-19, 2009. The workshop covered hot topics at the intersection of statistics, information theo-ry, machine learning, and their applications. The invited speakers presented the latest fundamental results, trends, and open issues from all these promising scientific fields. The technical program included plenary lectures, invited oral sessions, and contributed sessions. The workshop had also a strong educational drive, being intended to increase the cooperation be-tween Tampere Graduate School in Information Science and Engineering (TISE), Helsinki Graduate School in

Computer Science and Engineering (HECSE), and the Research Training Group - Statistical Modelling at the Technische Universität Dortmund. The workshop was a unique interaction opportunity for the students and su-pervisors from these graduate schools and at the same time it offered for attending students exposure to the state of the art presented by international experts. The plenary speakers were among the founders of fundamen-tal research in information theory at intersection with statistics: Jorma Rissanen, Shun-ichi Amari, Bin Yu, Vladimir Vovk, and Paul Vitanyi. All accepted papers were published by the Tam-pere International Center for Signal Processing in its Proceedings and Report Series.

In and Out

Dr. Andre Ribeiro, Institute for Biocomplexity and Infor-matics, Biological Sciences Building, Alberta, Canada, from January 1, 2009.

Prof. Edward J. Delp, Purdue University, School of Electri-cal Engineering, West Lafayette, IN, USA, January 1 - June 30, 2009.

Prof. Leonid Yaroslavsky, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, Engineering Faculty, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, January 1 - September 30, 2009.

Prof. Eduard Danielian, Yerevan State University, Depart-

ment of Mathematics, Yerevan, Armenia, January 6 - Febru-ary 28, 2009.

Pavlo Molchanov, National Aerospace University, Depart-ment of Transmitters, Receivers and Signal Processing, Kharkov, Ukraine, February 1 - 28, 2009.

Dr. Oleksandr Totskiy, National Aerospace University, De-partment of Transmitters, Receivers and Signal Processing, Kharkov, Ukraine, February 1 - March 16 and August 3 - Sep-tember 15, 2009.

Dr. Volodymyr Lukin, National Aerospace University, De-

Tampere International Center for Signal Processing (TICSP) has been continuously aiming at organizing high-profile international workshops on advanced and emerging topics of modern signal processing. This year TICSP organized the Second International Workshop on Local and Non-Local Approximation in Image Process-ing (LNLA). The workshop was held in Tuusula, Finland, on August 19-21, following the very successful first edi-tion, held in Lausanne, Switzerland. The LNLA work-shops continue the tradition of the TICSP International Workshop on Spectral Methods and Multirate Signal Processing (SMMSP), held seven times in 2001-2007, and of the TICSP International Workshop on Transforms and Filter Banks, held twice in 1998 and 1999. As with the previous workshops, the aim has

been at generating stimulating interaction between peo-ple with diverse yet complementary background and ex-pertise, emphasizing the transfer of theoretical results to practical applications, and building long-term coopera-tion between teams. The organizers wish to thank the co-sponsors Nokia, IEEE SP & CAS Chapter of Finland, DSP Tech-nical Committee of IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, EURASIP, Federation of Finnish Learned Societies, and TICSP for their support, and especially the authors for their high-quality contributions. The workshop program is online at http://sp.cs.tut.fi/ticsp/lnla09/ and the complete proceedings can be found on the IEEE Xplore archive.

TICSP Workshop LNLA 2009

were Erik De Schutter, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Japan, Lucas Pelkmans, Swiss Fed-eral Institute of Technology Zürich, Switzerland, Ilya Shmulevich, Institute for Systems Biology, USA, Jean-Philippe Vert, Mines ParisTech, France, and Stephen Wong, Methodist Hospital Research Institute, USA. Furthermore, Stuart Kauffman from the University of

Calgary, Canada, gave a Lindhard lecture organized by Centre for Theory in Natural Science one day before the workshop as well as a dinner speech during the work-shop. Olli Yli-Harja and Carsten Wiuf acted as the workshop chairs. The next meeting, WCSB 2010, will be orga-nized in Luxembourg.

Doctoral Theses

Esin Guldogan, “Improving Content-Based Image Indexing and Retrieval Performance”, on January 9, 2009. Opponents: Prof. Vladimir Lukin, Kharkov Aviation Institute, Ukraine, and PhD Iivari Kunttu, Nokia, Devices R&D, Finland. Custos: Prof. Moncef Gabbouj.

Antti Saarinen, “Stochastic Modeling of Neuronal Excitability: Model Construction, Simulation and Parameter Estimation”, on January 13, 2009. Opponent: Prof. Pétr Lansky, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Czech Republic. Custos: Prof. Olli Yli-Harja.

TICSP Seminar Series

Dr. Alessio Brutti, Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Center for Information Technology - Irst, Trento, Italy, “DICIT project: an overview”, on January 30, 2009.

Pavlo Molchanov, Department of Transmitters, Receivers and Signal Processing, National Aerospace University, Kharkov, Ukraine, “Time-frequency Analysis of Non-stationary Multi-frequency Signals by Parametrical Short-time Bispectral Density Estimation”, on February 12, 2009.

Dr. Giacomo Boracchi, Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Italy, “Camera-shake Image Deblurring: Modeling and Analysis of the Restoration Performance”, on February 20, 2009.

Prof. Dr. Michael D. Miller, Department of Computer Science, University of Victoria, Canada, “Logic Design for Reversible and Quantum Circuits”, on March 6, 2009.

Prof. Dr. Boris Ryabko, Siberian State University of Telecommunications and Computer Science, Novosibirsk, Russia, “Compression-based Methods for Nonparametric Prediction and Estimation of Some Characteristics of Time Series”, on August 10, 2009.

Prof. Dr. Mikhail Malioutov, Department of Mathematics, Northeastern University, Boston, USA, “Universal Compressors in Attributing Authorship of Literary Texts: several results and case studies”, on August 14, 2009.

Jacob Yang, M.Sc., School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia, “Robust Statistical Temporal Filtering for Temporal Fluctuation Artifact Reduction”, on September 4, 2009.

Stanislaw Raczynski, M.Sc., University of Tokyo, Japan, “Language models for music information retrieval”, on October 2, 2009.

Prof. Dr. Valeri Skliarov, DETIUA - Department of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics, Aveiro University, Portugal, “DETIUA Projects of 2009 in the Scope of Reconfigurable Digital Systems”, on November 2, 2009.

Prof. Dr. Raimund Ubar, Department of Computer Engineering, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia, “About research at the Department of Computer Engineering at Tallinn University of Technology”, on November 4, 2009.

partment of Transmitters, Receivers and Signal Processing, Kharkov, Ukraine, February 13 - 28 and August 1 - 31, 2009.

Dr. Mykola Ponomarenko, National Aerospace University, Department of Transmitters, Receivers and Signal Processing, Kharkov, Ukraine, February 9 - 28 and August 1 - 31, 2009.

Sergiy Abramov, National Aerospace University, Department of Transmitters, Receivers and Signal Processing, Kharkov, Ukraine, February 9 - 28 and August 1 - 31, 2009.

Prof. Radomir S. Stankovic, University of Nis, Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Electronics, Nis, Serbia, Feb-ruary 1 - April 15, August 15 - September 30 and November 1 - 30, 2009.

Prof. Dan Stefanoiu, University Politehnica of Bucharest, Department of Control Systems and Computers, Bucharest, Romania, April 1 - July 31, 2009.

Assistant Prof., Giulia Boato, DIT, University of Trento,

Trento, Italy, June 24 - July 2 and November 29 - December 2, 2009.

Dr. Marco Carli, University of Roma TRE, Department of Applied Electronics, Roma, Italy, June 24 - July 2 and Novem-ber 29 - December 2, 2009.

Prof. Boris Ryabko, Siberian State University of Telecommu-nication, Novosibirsk, Russia, July 15 - August 14, 2009.

Prof. Mikhail Malioutov, Northeastern University, Depart-ment of Mathematics, Boston, MA, USA, August 3 - 19, 2009.

Jacob Yang, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Melbourne, Australia, August 1 - September 30, 2009.

Prof. Corneliu Rusu, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Cluj-Napoca, Romania, September 1 - 30 and December 17, 2009 - January 14, 2010.

Pasi Pertilä, “Acoustic Source Localization in a Room Environment and at Moderate Distances”, on January 30, 2009. Op-ponent: Prof. Martin Vermeer, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland. Custos: Prof. Ari Visa.

Miska Hannuksela, “Error-Resilient Communication Using the H.264/AVC Video Coding Standard”, on March 23, 2009. Opponents: Prof. Fernando Pereira, Instituto Superior Técnico – Instituto de Telecomunicacoes, Portugal, and PhD Nikolaus Färber, Fraunhofer IIS, Germany. Custos: Prof. Moncef Gabbouj.

Andriy Bazhyna, “Image Compression for Digital Cameras”, on March 30, 2009. Opponent: Prof. Reiner Creutzburg, Fach-hochschule Brandenburg, Germany. Custos: Prof. Karen Egiazarian.

Tomi Mikkonen, “The Ring of Graph Invariants”, on May 8, 2009. Opponent: Prof. William Kocay, University of Manitoba, Canada. Custos: Prof. Jaakko Astola.

Miikka Ermes, “Methods for the Classification of Biosignals Applied to the Detection of Epileptiform Waveforms and to the Recognition of Physical Activity”, on May 15, 2009. Opponent: Assoc. Prof. Georg Dorffner, Medical University of Vienna, Austria. Custos: Dos. Alpo Värri

Jussi Virkkala, “Automatic Sleep Stage Classification Using Electro-oculography”, on May 20, 2009. Opponent: Prof. Piotr Durka, University of Warsaw, Poland. Custos: Dos. Alpo Värri.

Raija Lehto, “Synthesis Methods for Linear-Phase FIR Filters with a Piecewise-Polynomial Impulse Response”, on June 2, 2009. Opponents: Prof. Paulo S. R. Diniz, Cidade Universitaria, Brasil, and Prof. Håkan Johansson, Linköping Universitet, Sweden. Custos: Prof. Tapio Saramäki.

Marko Helén, “Similarity Measures for Content-Based Audio Retrieval”, on June 11, 2009. Opponent: Prof. Petri Toiviainen, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Custos: Prof. Moncef Gabbouj.

Antti Eronen, “Signal Processing Methods for Audio Classification and Music Content Analysis”, on June 25, 2009. Oppo-nents: Prof. Petri Toiviainen, University of Jyväskylä, Finland, and PhD Geoffroy Peeters, Research & Development Depart-ment of IRCAM, France. Custos: Prof. Anssi Klapuri.

Juho Vihonen, “Sequential Detection Applied to Line-Scan Gray Level Defect Imaging”, on August 31, 2009. Opponents: Prof. Juha Röning, University of Oulu, Finland, and Prof. Björn Kruse, Linköping University, Sweden. Custos: Prof. Ari Visa.

Tommi Aho, “Modeling for Molecular Interaction Networks: Methodology and Applications”, on October 20, 2009. Oppo-nent: Prof. Carsten Carlberg, Université du Luxembourg, Luxembourg. Custos: Prof. Olli Yli-Harja.

Andrea Hategan, “Lossless compression and nonlinear modeling of protein data”, on October 23, 2009. Opponents: Prof. Pasi Fränti University of Joensuu, Finland, and Assoc. Prof. Sören Forchhammer, Technical University of Denmark, Den-mark. Custos: Prof. Ioan Tabus.

Stanislav Stankovic, “XML Based Framework for Representation of Decision Diagrams”, on November 3, 2009. Opponents: Prof. Raimund Ubarin, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia, and Prof. Valeri Skliarov, University of Aveiro, Portugal. Custos: Prof. Jaakko Astola.

Sakari Junnila, “Modern Digital Interfaces for Personal Health Monitoring Devices”, on November 27, 2009. Opponent: Prof. Jouni Isoaho, University of Turku, Finland. Custos: Dos. Alpo Värri.

Dmytro Rusanovskyy, “Adaptive interpolation and transform based filtering for video coding”, on December 4, 2009. Op-ponents: Prof. Reiner Creutzburg, Fachhochschule Brandenburg, Germany, and Dr. Thomas Wedi, Panasonic R&D Center, Germany. Custos: Prof. Karen Egiazarian.

Tuomo Pirinen, “Confidence Scoring of Time Delay Based Direction of Arrival Estimates and a Generalization to Difference Quantities”, on December 4, 2009. Opponent: Prof. Martin Vermeer, Helsinki University of Technology, Finland. Custos: Prof. Ari Visa.

Antti Pettinen, “On Simulation Software and Parameter Estimation for Biochemical Models”, on December 8, 2009. Oppo-nent: Prof. Maria Samsonova, Center for Advanced Studies, St. Petersburg Polytechnical University. Russia. Custos: Prof. Olli Yli-Harja.

Antti Lehmussola, “Image Processing for Systems Biology: Validation and Performance Evaluation Through Simulation” on December 10, 2009. Opponent: PhD Carolina Wählby, Broad Insititute of Harvard and MIT, USA. Custos: Prof. Olli Yli-Harja.

Tampere University of TechnologyP.O. Box 553, FIN-33101 Tampere, FinlandStreet: Korkeakoulunkatu 1, 33720 Tamperehttp://ticsp.cs.tut.fi/index.php/TICSP

Editor-in-Chief

Prof. Jaakko AstolaTel. + 358 3 3115 2923Fax + 358 3 3115 3817E-mail: jaakko.astola@tut.fi

Editor

Kaisa EerolaTel. + 358 40 198 1302Fax + 358 3 3115 4989E-mail: kaisa.eerola@tut.fi