Women in Signal Processing Luncheon

Date and time: Tuesday 18 October @ 12:30 PM – 2:30 PM

Join the IEEE Women in Signal Processing Committee for a luncheon featuring a presentation by guest speaker Cristina Olaverri-Monreal, a panel discussion on the Importance of Mentor-Mentee Program to Promote WISP Members in Leadership of Technical, Industrial, and Entrepreneurial Activities with Q&A, followed by a networking session.

Opening Remarks

Athina P. Petropulu

President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society

Athina P. Petropulu is a Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Rutgers University. Her interests include radar signal processing and PHY security. She received the Presidential Faculty Fellow Award (1995) from NSF and the U.S. White House, and the 2012 IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Meritorious Service Award. She is an AAAS Fellow. She is co-author of the 2005 IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Best Paper Award, the 2020 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award (B. Li), the 2021 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award (F. Liu), and the 2021 Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society Barry Carlton Best Paper Award. She is currently the President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. [More information]

The Role of Automation and Connectivity on Sustainable Mobility

Abstract Digital technologies that belong to the field of intelligent transport systems and are based on the use of sensors for physical and virtual interconnection and interoperability of objects through information and communication make it possible to respond to changing transport needs. Decisions related to transport systems and infrastructure not only affect transport efficiency, but can also make a significant contribution to achieving climate neutrality. In this context not only the interaction between networked system elements is important, but also the effect of these technologies and automation on human behavior. These dynamic scenarios are crucial for road safety in terms of decision-making processes and will be discussed at the conference.

Cristina Olaverri-Monreal
Full Professor, Chairholder Intelligent Transport Systems-
BMK Endowed Professorship and Chair for Sustainable Transport Logistics 4.0
President IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Society

Cristina Olaverri-Monreal graduated with a master’s degree in Computational Linguistics, Computer Science and Phonetics from the Ludwig- Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich 2002 and received her PhD 2006 in cooperation with BMW.

After working several years in different European countries and in the US, both within the industry and academia she is holding the BMK endowed professorship and chair for sustainable transport logistics 4.0 at the Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria. Her research aims at studying solutions for an efficient and effective transportation focusing on minimizing the barrier between users and road systems, applying wireless communication and sensing technologies.

Dr. Olaverri is president of the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Society and Chair of the Technical Activities Committee on Human Factors. In addition, she serves as a senior / associate editor and editorial board member of several journals in the field, including the IEEE ITS Transactions and the IEEE ITS Magazine. In 2017 she was the general chair of the IEEE International Conference on Vehicular Electronics and Safety (ICVES’2017) and was additionally recognized for her dedicated contribution to continuing education in the field of ITS with the 2017 IEEE Educational Activities Board Meritorious Achievement Award in Continuing Education.

Panel Discussion: Importance of Mentor-Mentee Program to Promote WISP Members in Leadership of Technical, Industrial, and Entrepreneurial Activities

Panelists

Iole Moccagatta
Principal Engineer at Intel
IEEE Signal Processing Society Regional Director-at-Large Regions 1-6

Iole Moccagatta is a Principal Engineer at Intel working on HW Multimedia IPs that are integrated on Intel platforms. Prior to Intel, Iole hold the position of Senior Video Architect at NVIDIA, and that of Science Director at IMEC, Belgium.

Iole has been a very active member of MPEG, ITU-T, and JPEG, where she has represented US interests and companies and made a large number of technical contributions. A number of those have been included in MPEG and JPEG standards. Iole is currently Co-chair of the MPEG/ITU-T Joint Video Experts Team (JVET) Ad-Hoc Group on H.266/VVC Conformance and Co-editor of the H.266/VVC Conformance Testing document.

Iole has been an active participant of the Alliance for Open Media (AOM) AV1 Codec WG, where she has co-authored two adopted proposals. She currently represents Intel in the AOM Board.

Iole has served at Secretary (2015) and Chair (2016 and 2017) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society Santa Clara Valley Chapter, and she is currently serving as IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Regional Director-at-Large Regions 1-6, supporting and advising Chapters and their officers, providing input on how to serve and engage the SPS community in general, and the SPS industry members in particular, and using her professional network to attract new volunteers to serve in SPS subcommittees and task forces.

Iole is the author or co-author of more than 30 publications, 2 book chapters, and more than 10 talks and tutorials in the field of image and video coding. She holds more than 10 patents in the same fields. She received a Diploma of Electronic Engineering from the University of Pavia, Italy, and a PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Roxana Saint-Nom
Engineering Director at Eurocase

Roxana Saint Nom received her Electrical Engineering degree in 1987 from ITBA (Buenos Aires Institute of Technology, a 6-year program), Argentina. She completed an Advanced Studies degree (Suficiencia Investigadora, 2003) in Speech Processing from the “Universidad Politécnica de Madrid”, Spain.  She held academic positions in Argentina from 1988 and became tenured faculty in the rank of the Full Professor in 2004. She was appointed Electrical Engineering Department Chair at ITBA from 2007 to 2013.

She changed her career path from academia to industry in 2013, when she became Engineering Director at Eurocase, a small company that designs and manufactures technology products for Latin America. In 2020, she started as Project Manager in HipCam Global to develop products with AI capabilities. In 2022, she became a consultant for Eurocase and Bairex Constructions.  She maintains her connections with academia by serving as a part-time professor at UADE (Universidad Argentina de la Empresa) since 2018, where she teaches Signal & Systems and Speech Signal Processing.

Roxana’s research area is primarily Signal Processing, with speech processing and education as subareas.  For her years as a faculty member in universities, she started research groups in different specialty areas, such as speaker verification, acoustics, DSP applications, and electromagnetic compatibility (EMC). She is the author of more than 25 papers, mostly in the area of signal processing education, published in peer-reviewed journals and international conferences, such as IEEE ICASSP and ISCAS. She has been a technical reviewer for the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems and IEEE ICASSP Proceedings.

She has designed and successfully obtained accreditation of a 5-year degree electrical engineering program (CONEAU, the ABET equivalent in Argentina), with the option of a senior year that is specifically signal processing oriented. She also led the accreditation of two Master’s degree programs.

In recent years, her responsibilities in the industry include leading companies’ R & D efforts to develop a range of technology products, building and implementing a detailed work plan to fulfill the development objectives of the company, and developing software prototypes for a range of products.

Roxana Saint-Nom is a Telecommunications Electrical Engineer with post-graduate studies in Speech Signal Processing. Twenty-five years of an academic career at ITBA, a prestigious Argentinian University, reaching to EE Department Chair. Nine years in Industry, as a consultant and Project Manager oriented to the development of technological products involving Software, AI, and Hardware. IEEE volunteer involved in several leadership positions at Argentina Section, Women in Engineering, and Signal Processing Society.

 

Gloria Menegaz

PhD, Professor, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Verona, Italy

Gloria Menegaz is Professor of Bioengineering at the Dept. of Computer Science, University of Verona (Italy), where she leads the BraiNAVLab. She holds a PhD in Applied Sciences (EPFL 2000), a MSc in Electronic Engineer (1993) and a post-grade Master’s in information technology (1995) (Politecnico di Milano, Italy). From 2000 to 2002 she was first research assistant at the Telecommunications Lab (LCAV) of EPFL, that she left to join the Computer Science Dept. of the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) as an Assistant Professor. In 2004 she was awarded the Rita Levi Montalcini grant by the Italian Ministry of University and Research (MIUR)(DM 20/03/2003 n. 501) and joined the Dept. of Information Engineering of the University of Siena (Italy) as an Assistant Professor. In 2007 she joined the Dept. of Computer Science of the University of Verona (Italy) as an Associate Professor in Computer Science and became full Professor in Computer Science in 2017 and Professor in Bioengineering (ING-INF/06) in 2021. Prof. Menegaz is a Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE, 2017, valued member 1995-2017), and member of the IEEE Woman in Engineering since 2000. She is a member of the Signal Processing Society (SPS) and the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBS), Liason representative of the IEEE-SPS at the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (TMI), Member of the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention Society (MICCAI) Special Interest Group on Biomedical Image Analysis Challenges (SIG-BIAC) and co-chair of the TC on Challenges & Data Collections (CDC) of the IEEE Bioimaging and Signal Processing (BISP) Technical Committee). She is also a Member of the Ad Hoc Group (AHG) on Digital Media Storage using DNA (JPEG-DNA) and Observer for the DICOM WG-32 (Neurophysiology data). She is Associate Editor for IEEE-SPL, Editorial Board Member of Scientific Reports (Nature portfolio), Guest Editor of the IEEE-SPM and Review Editor for Frontiers journal on Computational BioImaging (Front. in Bioinformatics) and Computer Vision. She has been Vice-Chair for the FET-REA and the MSCA-IF for many years and Independent Expert for many international funding Institutions. She authored more than 120 publications in international journals and conference proceedings and one patent, has organized many Special Sessions and served as chair, area chair and technical committee member for many international conferences, especially of the IEEE. Prof. Menegaz holds a highly interdisciplinary profile. Her research activity on neuroimaging, imaging genetics and numerical biomarker discovery relying on classical and AI (statistical/machine/deep learning) focusing on explainable methods.

 

Celia Shahnaz
Chair, IEEE SPS Women in Signal Processing

Celia Shahnaz, SMIEEE, Fellow IEB, received Ph.D. degree from Concordia University, Canada and is currently a Professor at, Department of EEE, BUET, Bangladesh since 2015.

She has published more than 150 international journal/conference papers. She is a recipient of the Canadian Commonwealth Scholarship/Fellowship and Bangladesh Academy of Science Gold Medal for her contribution in Science and Technology. Her research interests include the areas of signal processing for speech analysis and speech enhancement, audio-visual recognition for biometric security, control system, robotics, pattern recognition, machine learning and deep learning for audio, video, biomedical, power signals, multimodal emotion recognition, and humanitarian technology.

Recently, her papers have received best paper awards in IEEE BECITHCON 2019, biomedical Engineering tracks at TENCON 2017 and at IEEE WIECON-ECE 2016, in Humanitarian Challenge track at R10 HTC 2017, and the best interactive poster award at ICIVPR 2017. Her paper has been selected for the top ten best paper awards in the Student Paper Contest of the 2018 and 2014 IEEE International Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS), College Station, Texas, USA and Knoxville, TN, USA, respectively. She was the winner, the Best Student Paper Award, 2008 IEEE International Conference on Neural Networks and Signal Processing (ICNNSP), Zhenjiang, China. She was selected as one of the finalists of the Student Research Presentation Competition in the 2009 SYTACOM Workshop, Montreal, QC, Canada.

She was the mentor of 1st/2nd prize winning projects in IEEE IAS CMD Contests (Robotics, Humanitarian) in 2017-2019, USA. She was the supervisor of 4th/5th rank winning teams in SPCUP competitions, ICASSP 2020 (Spain)/2015 (Australia) and 5th rank winning team in VIP CUP competition, ICIP 2020 (United Arab Emirates) .

She is the recipient of the 2021 IEEE MGA Achievement Award, 2021 Inspiring Women in Academia Award from Bangladesh brand forum, 2019 R10 Humanitarian Activities Outstanding Volunteer Award, 2016 MGA Leadership Award 2015 WIE Inspiring Member Award, 2013 R10 WIE Professional Volunteer Award.

She has been elected as 2022 IEEE WIE Committee Chair-Elect and she will serve as the 2023-2024 IEEE WIE Committee Chair. She has been appointed as 2022-23 Member, IEEE New Initiative Committee, 2021-23 Chair, IEEE SPS Women in Signal Processing, 2021-23 Liaison between IEEE SPS and IEEE WIE. She has been appointed as 2021-22 Member, IEEE History Committee, Liaison between IEEE History Committee and IEEE WIE, 2021 Chair, IEEE WIE History Subcommittee and 2021 Member, IEEE Educational Activities Board Faculty Resource Committee. She is 2020-21 Member, IEEE WIE Senior Member Elevation Drive, 2019-2021 Member, IEEE WIE WePower Subcommittee, 2020-21 Member, IEEE smart Village South Asian Working Group, 2017-2021 IEEE PES Women in Power (WiP) IEEE Region 10 Regional representative. She was a candidate for the 2021-22 IEEE Region 10 Director-Elect election, 2020 Member, IEEE New Initiative Committee, 2020 Chair, Women in SIGHT Working Group, , 2017, 2019 Communications Chair, IEEE SIGHT steering Committee, 2017-18 Chair, IEEE WIE Workshops Subcommittee, 2017-18 Member, IEEE Region 10 Subcommittees (WIE, Humanitarian Technology Activity, Education), and 2016 IEEE Region 10 WIE Coordinator. She has served as the 2018-6/2021Chair, IEEE Bangladesh Section.

She is the founder & Chair, IEEE SPS, IAS Bangladesh Chapters, Co-founder & Vice-Chair, IEEE RAS, SSIT Bangladesh Chapters, Founder and Advisor, WIE AG, IEEE Bangladesh Section. She has served as the General Chair, IEEE TENSYMP 2020, IEEE BECITHCON 2021, IEEE SPICSCON 2019, IEEE PEEIACON 2021 & 2019, IEEE RAAICON 2021 General Chair: IEEE WIECON-ECE 2021, 2019, 2018, 2016, General Co- Chair, IEEE Region 10 HTC 2017 and IEEE WIECON-ECE 2017, Founder and TPC Chair: IEEE SPICSCON 2021, IEEE WIECON-ECE 2015, IEEE BECITHCON 2019 & IEEE RAAIACON 2019.

She has served as an Editorial board member, IET Signal Processing From 2018 to date and 2018- 20 Member, Technical Committee, Image, Video, and Multimedia (IVM), Asia Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA).

She has more than 21 years of experience (21 years as an IEEE volunteer) in leading impactful Technical, Professional, Educational, Industrial, Women Empowerment and Humanitarian Technology, Power and Energy-related Projects at national/international levels.

Networking (1:40 – 2:20)

A networking session with the purpose to foster support and offer networking opportunities by engaging women across the signal processing profession to exchange ideas and experiences from academia, research and industry in an informal setting.

Add your name to the new Women in Signal Processing Directory and join the WISP mailing list! Visit the WISP website to learn more.