International Conference on Signal Processing and Communications (SPCOM 2024)

The 2024 International Conference on Signal Processing and Communications (SPCOM) provides a forum for researchers from academia, research laboratories, and industry to come together to share and learn about current developments in these emerging fields. SPCOM 2024 is the fifteenth in a series of biennial events that have been organised since 1990 at IISc. It was hosted by the Department of Electrical Communication Engineering, IISc during 1–4 July 2024.

This year’s conference featured 3 plenaries, 5 tutorials, 20 invited talks, and around 75 contributed papers. The first plenary talk was on ‘Transformers for compression and communication’ by Krishna Narayanan (Eric D Rubin ’06 Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering, Texas A&M University). Maneesh Agrawala (Forest Baskett Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford University) delivered the second plenary on ‘Unpredictable black boxes are terrible interfaces’. The third plenary was by Piya Pal (Associate Professor, ECE, UC San Diego); she spoke on ‘Sensing, coding and the quest for superresolution’. The industry keynote was by Murthy S, Application Engineer (RF and Wireless) at VVDN Technologies, Bengaluru; he spoke on ‘6G vision and key technologies’.

There were six invited sessions featuring distinguished speakers in the broad areas of information theory, communications, networking, speech and language, applied machine learning and computer vision, and medical imaging. Examples of these talks are ‘Artificial general intelligence (AGI)-native wireless systems with common sense: a journey to 6G and beyond’, ‘Fundamentals of vision-based geolocation’, ‘Incentivising client participation in federated learning’, ‘Evaluating LLMs on languages beyond English: challenges and opportunities’, and ‘Generative models for simulating medical imaging from ultrasound to CT via MRI’.

There were five tutorials: (i) Approximate message passing algorithms for high dimensional estimation; (ii) Theory and experiments for peer review and other distributed human evaluations; (iii) The unlimited sensing framework: theory, algorithms, hardware and applications; (iv) IEEE 802.11ad based intelligent joint radar communication transceiver: design, prototype and performance analysis; and (v) Applying artificial intelligence effectively to signal processing applications. These sessions were conducted by experts from India and across the world.