IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing 2026

Emmanuel Candès is the Barnum-Simons Chair in Mathematics and Statistics at Stanford University, and Professor of Electrical Engineering (by courtesy). His research interests lie at the interface of statistics, information theory, signal processing and computational mathematics. He received his Ph.D. in statistics from Stanford in 1998. Candès has received several awards including the Alan T. Waterman Award from NSF, which is the highest honor bestowed by NSF to early-career scientists, and the MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the ‘genius award’. He has given over 100 plenary lectures at major international conferences, not only in mathematics and statistics but in many other areas as well including biomedical imaging and solid-state physics. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014. He received the 2020 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, the same year as one of his heroes, Ennio Morricone.

Michael Unser is Full Professor with EPFL’s School of Engineering and the academic director of EPFL’s Center for Imaging, Lausanne, Switzerland. His primary areas of investigation are biomedical imaging and applied functional analysis. He is internationally recognized for his research contributions to sampling theory, wavelets, the use of splines for image processing, stochastic processes, and computational bioimaging. He has published over 400 journal papers on those topics. He is the author with P. Tafti of the book “An introduction to sparse stochastic processes”, Cambridge University Press 2014. He was born in Zug, Switzerland, on April 9, 1958. He received the M.S. (summa cum laude) and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering in 1981 and 1984, respectively, from the Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. From 1985 to 1997, he was with the Biomedical Engineering and Instrumentation Program, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda USA, conducting research on bioimaging. Dr. Unser has served on the editorial board of most of the primary journals in his field including the IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging (associate Editor-in-Chief 2003-2005), IEEE Trans. Image Processing, Proc. of IEEE, and SIAM J. of Imaging Sciences. He was general co-chair (with Z.P. Liang) for the first IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging (ISBI’2002), which was held in Washington, DC, July 7-10, 2002. He is also the founding chair of the technical committee on Bio Imaging and Signal Processing (BISP) of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Michael Unser received the Dommer prize for excellence in 1981 (1st rank among all EPFL graduates) and the research prize of the Brown-Boveri Corporation (Switzerland) for his Ph.D. thesis in 1984. He is a fellow of the IEEE (1999), an EURASIP fellow (2009), and a member of the Swiss Academy of Engineering Sciences. He is the recipient of several international prizes including five IEEE-SPS Best Paper Awards, two Technical Achievement Awards from the IEEE (2008 SPS and EMBS 2010), the Technical Achievement Award from EURASIP (2018), and a recent Career Achievement Award (IEEE EMBS 2020). He was awarded three ERC AdG grants: FUNSP (2011-2016), GlobalBioIm (2016-2021), and FunLearn (2021-2026).

Lajos Hanzo (FIEEE’04) received Honorary Doctorates from the Technical University of Budapest (2009) and Edinburgh University (2015). He is a Foreign Member of the Hungarian Science-Academy, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng), of the IET, of EURASIP and holds the IEEE Eric Sumner Technical Field Award.

Shrikanth (Shri) Narayanan is University Professor and Niki & C. L. Max Nikias Chair in Engineering at the University of Southern California (USC), where he is VP for Presidential Initiatives, Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Computer Science, Linguistics, Psychology, Neuroscience, Pediatrics, and Otolaryngology—Head & Neck Surgery, Director of the Ming Hsieh Institute and Research Director of the Information Sciences Institute. Prior to USC, he was with AT&T Bell Labs and AT&T Research. He is a Visiting Faculty Researcher with Google DeepMind. His interdisciplinary research focuses on human-centered sensing/imaging, signal processing, and machine intelligence centered on human communication, interaction, emotions, and behavior. He is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America, IEEE, ACM, International Speech Communication Association (ISCA), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Association for Psychological Science, the Association for the Advancement of Affective Computing, the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE), and the National Academy of Inventors. He is a recipient of awards for research and education including the 2025 IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award, 2024 Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Computer Society, the 2023 Claude Shannon-Harry Nyquist Technical Achievement Award from the IEEE Signal Processing Society, 2023 ISCA Medal for Scientific Achievement from the International Speech Communication Association, the 2023 Richard Deswarte Prize in Digital History and a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship. He has published widely and his inventions have led to technology commercialization including through startups he co-founded: Behavioral Signals Technologies focused on AI based conversational assistance and Lyssn focused on mental health care and quality assurance. He served as the inaugural VP for Education of the IEEE Signal Processing Society and as Editor-in-Chief for the IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing.