7th International Conference on Independent Component Analysis and Signal Separation (ICA 2007)

9-12 September 2007

The 7th International Conference on Independent Component Analysis and Signal Separation (ICA 2007) was held at Queen Mary University of London from Sunday 9th to Wednesday 12th September 2007. This was the latest in a series of conferences held about every year and a half: previous conferences in this series were held in Aussois (France), Helsinki (Finland), San Diego (CA, USA), Nara (Japan), Granada (Spain) and Charleston (SC, USA). This year ICA 2007 was organized and sponsored by the ICA Research Network, a network of researchers in over 25 UK institutions and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). Over 150 international delegates attended the conference.

The conference proper was preceded by tutorials on the Sunday afternoon. In the first tutorial, Remi Gribonval (IRISA-INRIA, France) discussed Sparse Representations, including how this relates to the problem of under-determined source separation (with more sources than microphones), and the new field of compressed sensing. Jose Principe (University of Florida, USA) then introduced Information Filtering, including using information theoretic learning to estimate entropy, and the use of Renyi’s quadratic entropy as an alternative to the more well-known Shannon entropy.

On the Monday the conference was opened by Prof Adrian Smith FRS, Principal of Queen Mary, followed by the first keynote by Scott Makeig (UCSD, USA), on the use of independent component analysis (ICA) to observe cognitive brain dynamics, including some of the important practical issues involved. The remainder of the sessions were single-track throughout, with papers covering theory, algorithms and applications of source separation and ICA, including biomedical and audio applications. Papers on related techniques were included, such as on independent subspaces and sparsity. Poster and refreshment sessions were held in the magnificent "Octagon", originally built in the 19th Century as a library inspired by the British Museum reading room.

On Tuesday, the conference banquet was held at the Trafalgar Tavern, a riverside Pub in Greenwich. Transport was provided by historic double-decker buses as transport – much enjoyed by all! Two prizes were awarded at the conference: Richard Turner won "Best Student Paper" prize for his paper "Probabilistic Amplitude Demodulation"; and Frédéric Vrins, Dinh-Tuan Pham and Michel Verleysen won the "Best Paper" prize for their paper "Is the general form of Renyi’s entropy a contrast for source separation?".

On the final day, Shoji Makino (NTT, Japan) gave the second keynote talk, on audio source separation, including methods working in the frequency domain, and those using direction of arrival estimates to help separate sources. After lunch, the conference was rounded off with a panel discussion on evaluation, chaired by Emmanuel Vincent (IRISA-INRIA, France). Evaluation is an increasingly important issue in the source separation community, and this panel featured lessons and results of the first "Stereo Audio Source Separation Evaluation Campaign", with posters from entrants featured in the final day’s poster session. Thanks to all the input from many people, including the organizers, authors, reviewers, delegates and co-sponsors, the conference was a great success.

Mark Plumbley
General Chair, ICA 2007

Further Information

• ICA 2007 Website
• Conference Photos