Opening remarks will be made by Dr. Fred J. Taylor, the ICASSP 2002 Chairman. Mr. Brett Doster, the Deputy Director from the Florida Governor's office, will follow with a welcome to the ICASSP attendees.

The IEEE and the IEEE Signal Processing Society will present a number of prestigious awards immediately after the ICASSP 2002 Opening Ceremony. This event, beginning at 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday, May 14, 2002, will be held in the Crystal Ballroom of the Renaissance Orlando Resort.

The IEEE, the IEEE Signal Processing Society, and ICASSP 2002 congratulates the following SPS members who have been selected to receive the Society's prestigious awards.

The 2002 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award sponsored by IEEE Life Members Committee will be presented to co-recipients: TED PAINTER - Intel Corporation, Hudson Massachusetts, USA and ANDREAS SPANIAS - Department of Electrical Engineering, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA; for their paper entitled: "Perceptual Coding of Digital Audio," Proceedings of the IEEE, Vol. 88, No. 4, April 2000, pp. 451 - 513

The award consists of a certificate and $1,000.

JAMES W. COOLEY, who can not attend, will receive a special recognition plaque from the Society marking his selection as the 2002 IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal recipient. The Medal itself will be presented to Dr. Cooley at the IEEE Honors Ceremonies. IEEE selected Dr. Cooley to receive the medal, "for pioneering the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) algorithm."

The Society Award honors outstanding technical contributions in a field within the scope of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and outstanding leadership in that field. The Society Award comprises a plaque, a certificate, and a monetary award of $2500. It is the highest-level award bestowed by the IEEE Signal Processing Society. This year's recipient is SANJIT K. MITRA, "for important and significant contributions to analog and digital signal processing and image processing."

The IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Award honors the author(s) of a paper of exceptional merit and broad interest on a subject related to the Society's technical scope and appearing in the Society's magazine. The prize shall consist of $500 per author (up to a maximum of $1500 per award) and a certificate. In the event that there are more than three authors, the maximum prize shall be divided equally among all authors and each shall receive a certificate. This year, the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine Award awardees are:

CHRISTOPH STILLER and JANUSZ KONRAD, for the paper entitled, "Estimating Motion in Image Sequences," published in the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine, Volume 16, Number 4, July 1999.

Two Technical Achievement Awards are being presented this year: one to P.P. VAIDYANATHAN, "for fundamental contributions to filter bank theory and design" and the other to MARTIN VETTERLI, "for technical leadership and fundamental contributions to the fields of multiresolution signal analysis and signal processing, compression, and transmission." The Technical Achievement Award honors a person who, over a period of years, has made outstanding technical contributions to the theory and/or practice in technical areas within the scope of the Society, as demonstrated by publications, patents, or recognized impact on this field. The prize for each awardee is $1500, a plaque, and a certificate.

AGGELOS K. KATSAGGELOS, will receive the Society's Meritorious Service Award "for outstanding service to the IEEE Signal Processing Society in many capacities, and in particular as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine." The award comprises a plaque and a certificate; judging is based on dedication, effort, and contributions to the Society.

The Signal Processing Society Education Award honors educators who have made pioneering and significant contributions to signal processing education. Judging is based on a career of meritorious achievement in signal processing education as exemplified by writing of scholarly books and texts, course materials, and papers on education; inspirational and innovative teaching; creativity in the development of new curricula and methodology. The award comprises of a plaque, a monetary award of $1500 and a certificate. The recipient of the Signal Processing Society Education Award is SIMON HAYKIN "for authoring books of high quality, spanning basic signal processing, adaptive filters, communications, neural networks, and intelligent signal processing."

Four Best Paper Awards are being awarded, honoring the author(s) of a paper of exceptional merit dealing with a subject related to the Society's technical scope, and appearing in one of the Society's Transactions, irrespective of the author's age. The prize is $500 per author (up to a maximum of $1500 per award), and a certificate. Eligibility is based on a three-year window preceding the year of election, and judging is based on general quality, originality, subject matter, and timeliness. Up to four Best Paper Awards may be presented each year. This year, the awardees are:

JACOB BENESTY, DENNIS R. MORGAN, and MAN MOHAN SONDHI, for the paper entitled "A Better Understanding and an Improved Solution to the Specific Problems of Stereophonic Acoustic Echo Cancellation," published in the IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing, Volume 6, Number 2, March 1998.

GUIDO M. SCHUSTER and AGGELOS K. KATSAGGELOS, for the paper entitled "An Optimal Polygonal Boundary Encoding Scheme in the Rate Distortion Sense," published in the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Volume 7, Number 1, January 1998.

RASMUS BRO, GEORGIOS B. GIANNAKIS and NICHOLAS D. SIDIROPOULOS, for the paper entitled "Parallel Factor Analysis in Sensor Array Processing," published in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Volume 48, Number 8, August 2000.

DAVID TAUBMAN, for the paper entitled "High Performance Scalable Image Compression with EBCOT," published in the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Volume 9, Number 7, July 2000.

The Young Author Best Paper Award honors the author(s) of an especially meritorious paper dealing with a subject related to the Society's technical scope and appearing in one of the Society's Transactions and who, upon date of submission of the paper, is less than 30 years of age. Three Young Author Best Paper Awards will be presented this year. This year the awardees are:

SAMIT BASU, for the paper co-authored with Yoram Bressler, entitled "O(N²log₂mN) Filtered Backprojection Reconstruction Algorithm for Tomography," published in the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Volume 9, Number 10, October 2000.

HELMUT BÖLCSKEI, for the paper co-authored with Franz Hlawatsch and Hans G. Feichtinger, entitled "Frame-Theoretic Analysis of Oversampled Filter Banks," published in the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, Volume 46, Number 12, December 1998.

ALEKSANDRA MOJSILOVIC, for the paper co-authored with Jelena Kovaceviæ, Jianying Hu, Robert J. Safranek and S. Kicha Ganapathy, entitled "Matching and Retrieval Based on the Vocabulary and Grammar of Color Patterns," published in the IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, Volume 9, Number 1, January 2000.