2017 EURASIP the Group Technical Achievement Society Award

STADIUS Member: Joos Vandewalle
Start date: 24/02/2017
End date: 1/01/1970
Type: Award

EURASIP Group Technical Achievement Award

The group technical achievement award is given on demand, annually, to leaders of research groups that have made relevant contributions in the field of signal, speech, or image processing. The award-candidate and his/her research group should:

•  be actively involved with the international signal processing community, having a recognised leadership in their field of action and a significant impact on the European research activities;
•   have a significant list of achievements, namely in terms of relevant publications, original contributions, or inventive value (patents),
•  publish regularly in EURASIP journals;
•  participate regularly in conferences sponsored by EURASIP, and in particular in EUSIPCO conferences. These awards, in the form of a plaque, crafted according to the current standard layout, presented to the leader of the selected research group, are given by the EURASIP BoD at the annual EUSIPCO conference.

Short acceptance speech by Joos Vandewalle on Tuesday August 29 at the EUSIPCO awards ceremony in Kos, Greece.

I am grateful to the EURASIP Board of Directors for granting us the 2017 Group Technical Achievement Award with the citation “For Sustained Pioneering Contributions to Theory and Applications in Signal Processing and Machine Learning”. 
I would like to briefly highlight two essential ingredients for these achievements : the people and the research topics.
Over a period of about 35 years I have supervised 43 PhD students. Many of them are now professors and have now their own PhD students and have built successful teams. In total there are at least 262 PhD descendents that are listed in the mathematics genealogy http://www.genealogy.ams.org/id.php?id=92883. And that list is only partial.
Second the research topics typically cover a creative trajectory between theory and application. Some are starting from the application towards the mathematics and some do it the other way round. Mathematics has proven to be an immensely rich source of inspiration for new algorithms and designs. Initially this was mainly the use of singular value decomposition but has since branched out to many more mathematical concepts like optimization, cryptography, support vector machines and tensors, that is the topic of the plenary talk of Sabine Van Huffel later in the conference. Real world applications have also been an important element to attract and motivate PhDs. The many challenges for our society like health care,  care or elderly, communication, cybersecurity provide interesting opportunities. These arguments have often been the key elements to select and guide the PhD works. So the award is really recognizing these achievements. Sometimes young people think that all important research is already done. I can assure you that in deeper layers of mathematics and the evolving societal challenges there are enough interesting opportunities to develop a research career and later stand here for such an award.