Thursday, May 7, 11:30 – 13:30
The success of the special program Celebrating Signal Processing Education at ICASSP 2019, which included two special sessions and an Education Panel, has highlighted that the Society is both very perceptive to this type of initiative and is looking forward to follow-on activities. The Education Panel, entitled Innovation Starts with Education, provided a forum for prominent educators in our field to address most pressing issues faced by both the budding academics and more experienced colleagues, in the fast-changing landscape of university careers. A theme which recurred many times during the Panel and further discussions was centered round the role of various metrics imposed by universities and research councils on the “freedom to express” ourselves in our roles as educators and researchers. This motivates us to propose a Panel Discussion at ICASSP 2020, entitled Your Career. We consider such a panel as a natural and more focused complement other career-focused events at the ICASSP series of conferences.
The targeted audience for this panel are both postdoctoral academic researchers and current academics at any level of seniority. The Panel will revolve around the following three main discussion topics:
- Research Strategy – A step-by-step plan of action that gives direction to thoughts and efforts towards conducting research in a systematic way, and a “winning” schedule to produce quality results and detailed reporting. Subtopics will include issues such as the identification of gaps in existing data, maximization of resources, and analysis of priorities.
- Collaborations with Other Disciplines – While it is widely accepted that it is the crossroads where breakthroughs happen, the actual process of establishing fruitful collaborations, especially the multidisciplinary ones, is not straightforward and requires both personal and technical skills. Our focus will be on issues ranging from “getting started”, through to how and where to publish this type of work, to opportunities and know-how on getting funded. Main challenges and causes of conflict will also be addressed.
- Metrics – The tendency to over-rely on scientometrics/informetrics will be discussed as well as their role in our careers. To paraphrase our ICASSP 2019 panelist Alan Oppenheim “the research enterprise, including its education mission, has been hijacked by funding mechanisms, the metrics and media hype”. Emphasis will be on how to manage a research career in the presence of pressure from evaluation based on metrics and the need to acquire research funding, together with the available alternatives.
Each panelist will present six to eight slides on the topic within their allocated theme, followed by a general discussion at the end of each of the three topics above. Any outstanding questions and more discussion will follow once all the topics are covered. We expect 8 minutes per presentation/panelist, while topic discussions are envisaged to be of 8 – 15 minutes in duration. The wrap-up discussion will last for about 10 minutes, with the total duration of the event of about 90 minutes. We would like to reiterate that this panel will not interfere with other existing activities like the Student Career Luncheon (with focus on connecting eligible students and graduates with industry representatives to explore job opportunities within their companies) but is aimed at complementing them in a coherent and focused way. It is our hope that the Your Career Panel at ICASSP 2020 will serve as a vehicle to provide extremely valuable insights to our current future colleagues in the field of signal processing.
List of speakers:
- Zhi (Gerry) Tian, George Mason University, USA
- Martin Vetterli, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
- Rabab Ward, University of British Columbia, Canada
- Al Hero, University of Michigan, USA
- Victor Solo, University of New South Wales, Australia
Organizers:
- Mónica Bugallo, Stony Brook University, USA
- Danilo Mandic, Imperial College, UK
- Victor Solo, University of New South Wales, Australia