Join us for a panel discussion featuring students, academics, and industry professionals from diverse backgrounds, career stages, and regions. The panel will explore the benefits of joining the IEEE SPS Community. Audience members will also have the opportunity to ask questions and engage in a conversation about strengthening and improving the community to meet the needs of current and potential members.

Host and Moderator:

• Jing Dong
• Iole Moccagatta

Panelists:

• Prof. Kin-Man (Kenneth) Lam
• Prof. Constantinos Papadias
• Dr. Lei Yang
• Dr. Chone Keiichi
• Dr. Ioannis Katsavounidis
• Mr. Parham Eftekhar

Jing Dong

SPS Membership Development Committee Chair
Full Professor, Institute of Automation,

Chinese Academy of Sciences
China

Iole Moccagatta

SPS Member-at-Large,
Chair, IO&E Subcommittee Chair

Intel
San Jose, USA

Prof. Kin-Man (Kenneth) Lam
SPS Vice President-Membership
Professor, Hong Kong Polytechnic Univ.
Hong Kong

Prof. Kin-Man Lam received his Associateship in Electronic Engineering with distinction from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (formerly called Hong Kong Polytechnic) in 1986. He won the S.L. Poa Education Foundation Scholarship for overseas studies and was awarded an M.Sc. degree in communication engineering from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, England, in 1987. In August 1993, he undertook a Ph.D. degree program in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Sydney, Australia, and won an Australia Postgraduate Award for his studies. He completed his Ph.D. studies in August 1996, and was awarded the IBM Australia Research Student Project Prize.

From 1990 to 1993, Prof. Lam was a lecturer at the Department of Electronic Engineering of The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He joined the Department of Electronic and Information Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University again as an Assistant Professor in October 1996. He became an Associate Professor in 1999, and has been a Professor since 2010. He was actively involved in professional activities. He has been a member of the organizing committee or program committee of many international conferences. In particular, he was the Secretary of the 2003 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP’03), the Technical Chair of the 2004 International Symposium on Intelligent Multimedia, Video and Speech Processing (ISIMP 2004), a Technical Co-Chair of the 2005 International Symposium on Intelligent Signal Processing and Communication Systems (ISPACS 2005), a secretary of the 2010 International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP 2010), a Technical Co-Chair of 2010 Pacific-Rim Conference on Multimedia (PCM 2010), and a General Co-Chair of the 2012 IEEE International Conference on Signal Processing, Communications, & Computing (ICSPCC 2012) and the APSIPA Annual and Summit 2015, which were held in Hong Kong in August 2012 and December 2015, respectively. He was also a General Co-Chair of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo, held in Hong Kong. Prof. Lam was the Chairman of the IEEE Hong Kong Chapter of Signal Processing between 2006 and 2008. In addition, he was a Guest Editor for the Special Issue on Biometric Signal Processing, EURASIP Journal on Applied Signal Processing. He received an Honorable Mention of the Annual Pattern Recognition Society Award for an outstanding contribution to the Pattern Recognition Journal in 2004. In 2008, he also received the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Neural Networks and Signal Processing.

Prof. Lam was the Director-Student Services and the Director-Membership Services of the IEEE Signal Processing Society between 2012 and 2014, and between 2015 and 2017, respectively. He was an Associate Editor of IEEE Trans. on Image Processing between 2009 and 2014, and an Area Editor of the IEEE Signal Processing Magazine between 2015 and 2017. Currently, he is the VP-Publications of the Asia-Pacific Signal and Information Processing Association (APSIPA). Prof. Lam serves as an Associate Editor of Digital Signal Processing, APSIPA Trans. on Signal and Information Processing, and EURASIP International Journal on Image and Video Processing. He is also an Editor of HKIE Transactions. His current research interests include human face recognition, image and video processing, and computer vision.

Prof. Constantinos Papadias
SPS Regional Director-at-Large Regions 8
Professor, The American College of Greece

Constantinos B. Papadias
Information Technology (IT)

Diploma in Electrical Engineering, National Technical University of Athens; PhD in Signal Processing, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications (Telecom Paris)

Dr. Papadias has been a member of the Department of Information Technology at Deree since February 2020. He is also ACG’s Associate Vice President for Research, Innovation, and Graduate Studies; Founding Executive Director of ACG’s Research, Technology & Innovation Network (RTIN); Head of ACG’s Smart Wireless Future Technologies (SWiFT) Research Lab; and Scientific Director of the ACG Research Center (ACG-RC). He is also Adjunct Professor at Aalborg University in Denmark and the University of Cyprus. He was Dean (2014-2019) and Professor (2006-2019) at Athens Information Technology, Technical Manager (2001-2006) and Researcher (1997-2001) at Bell Labratories, Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon University (2006-2011) and at Columbia University (2004-2005), post-doctoral researcher at Stanford University (1995-1997) and researcher at Institut Eurécom (1992-1995). His teaching and research interests include wireless communications, signal processing, antenna systems and machine learning, among others. He has published over 200 papers and 4 books, holds 12 patents and has received over 9000 citations and several recognitions for his work. He has attracted research grants whose total value exceeds 25M€. Ηe is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the European Alliance of Innovation.

Dr. Lei Yang
SPS Educational Community Committee Chair,
Principal Research Engineer at HP Hybrid Systems group

Yang Lei
Principal Research Engineer, HP Inc.

As a Principal Research Engineer at HP Hybrid Systems group, Yang Lei leads the development of computer vision and AI solutions for video conferencing products. Her work has been applied in various domains,
such as video conferencing, life science, digital manufacturing, education, etc. She is the author of 22 patent applications (9 granted) and has published and presented more than 19 articles in journals and international conferences, in the field of computer vision and AI.

Dr. Lei received the 2024 Purdue Engineering 38 by 38 award and is the inaugural recipient of the IEEE SPS Industry Young Professional Leadership Award in 2023. She won the 2021 Eaton Award of Design Excellence for her outstanding work on developing a novel method to image live cells in 3D. Her research on applying computer vision to detecting circulating tumor cells won the HP Reinventer Award, the highest award recognizing innovations at HP.

She received her Ph.D. from Purdue University, in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Dr. Lei is an IEEE Senior Member and active volunteer in the community. She currently sits on IEEE SPS Education Board, chairing the Educational Community Committee. She is also a member of the IEEE Women in Signal Processing Committee. Before that, she was the Chair of the IEEE SPS Santa Clara Valley (SCV) chapter from 2019 to 2021 (3 years), which is one of the largest and most active SPS chapters.

Dr. Chone Keiichi
Executive Professional in NEC Corporation, Japan

Keiichi Chono is Executive Professional in NEC Corporation, Japan. He has more than 20 years of professional experience in development of audio-visual signal compression products. And also, he has more than 15 years of professional experience in international standardization (ITU-T and ISO/IEC). He was a visiting scholar in the Stanford Center for Image Systems Engineering from 2007 to 2008. He is also engaged in Video Coding for Machines in Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology.

Dr. Ioannis_Katsavounidis
Research Scientist, Video Infrastructure, META, USA

Ioannis Katsavounidis
Research Scientist, Video Infrastructure, Meta

Dr. Ioannis Katsavounidis is part of the Video Infrastructure team, leading technical efforts in improving video quality and quality of experience across all video products at Meta. Before joining Meta, he spent 3.5 years at Netflix, contributing to the development and popularization of VMAF, Netflix’s open-source video quality metric, as well as inventing the Dynamic Optimizer, a shot-based perceptual video quality optimization framework that brought significant bitrate savings across the whole video streaming spectrum. He led the team that designed Meta’s Scalable Video Processort (MSVP), which received a Tech Emmy in 2024. He was a professor for 8 years at the University of Thessaly’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in Greece, teaching video compression, signal processing and information theory. He was one of the cofounders of Cidana, a mobile multimedia software company in Shanghai, China. He was the director of software for advanced video codecs at InterVideo, the makers of the popular SW DVD player, WinDVD, in the early 2000’s and he has also worked for 4 years in high-energy experimental Physics in Italy. He is one of the co-chairs for the statistical analysis methods (SAM) and no-reference metrics (NORM) groups at the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG). He is actively involved within the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) as co-chair of the software implementation working group (SWIG). He has over 150 publications, including 50 patents. His research interests lie in video coding, quality of experience, adaptive streaming, and energy efficient HW/SW multimedia processing.

Mr. Parham_Eftekhar
Ph.D Candidates of York University, Toronto, Canada,

Parham Eftekhar (Member, IEEE) received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in computer science from Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran, in 2017 and 2020, respectively. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer science at York University, Toronto, ON, Canada, since 2020. His research interests include graph signal processing, image processing, and computer vision.