Panel Discussion

Wednesday, 17 April 2024
11:40 PM – 13:40 PM
E5-E6, 3F

Join us at the IEEE Women in Signal Processing Luncheon during ICASSP for an enlightening panel discussion featuring accomplished women from academia and industry within the signal processing community. This event is a unique opportunity to hear personal stories, experiences, and insights on overcoming challenges and achieving success in their careers. It is an excellent occasion for networking, connecting with peers, and drawing inspiration from the journeys of our panelists. Take advantage of this chance to be part of an engaging conversation and celebrate the achievements of women in signal processing.

Midia Yousefi

Senior Research Scientist, Cloud and AI organization, Microsoft, USA.

Midia Yousefi is a distinguished Senior Research Scientist within the Cloud and AI division at Microsoft, where she is actively engaged in a spectrum of research initiatives pertaining to audio and speech technologies. She attained her Doctorate in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Dallas. Her career commenced with a postdoctoral tenure at the University of Texas at Dallas, under the supervision of Dr. John Hansen. During this period, she made significant contributions to numerous projects, notably in the restoration and digitization of the Apollo corpus, alongside the formulation of benchmarks for the detection, separation, and recognition of overlapped speech. Her scholarly pursuits predominantly revolve around the domains of End-to-End Speech-to-Speech Translation, Text-to-Speech Synthesis, Automatic Speech Recognition, and Speaker Diarization.

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

Songyee Yoon

As a tech visionary, humanist, and business leader, Songyee Yoon has been at the forefront and intersection of technology, ethics and play for decades. After graduating from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Songyee went on to earn her Ph.D. from MIT in Computational Neuroscience.

Her strong belief in the concept of “play” as a crucible for innovation eventually led her to NCSOFT, a leading global video game developer and publisher, where she served as president and chief strategy officer. Forecasting the importance of emerging technologies, she founded the NCSOFT AI Center and Natural Language Processing Center.

Songyee brings a unique lens to bridging countries’ approaches to technology and ethics and is an involved figure in the international business community. While a member of South Korea’s Presidential Advisory Council for Science and Technology, Songyee served under two presidents.

She is a member of the advisory council at the Stanford Institute for Human- Centered AI, served as an advisory board member of the Center for Asia Pacific Policy, and was a visiting fellow at the Center to Advance Racial Equity Policy at RAND, where she continued to explore social impacts of AI, equity and ethical sides of technology. She also serves on the board of trustees for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and one of the 50 Women to Watch in Business by the Wall Street Journal

Yonina Eldar is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel where she heads the center for Biomedical Engineering and Signal Processing and holds the Dorothy and Patrick Gorman Professorial Chair. She is also a Visiting Professor at MIT, a Visiting Scientist at the Broad Institute, and an Adjunct Professor at Duke University and was a Visiting Professor at Stanford.  She is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, an IEEE Fellow and a EURASIP Fellow. She received the B.Sc. degree in physics and the B.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Tel-Aviv University, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, in 2002. She has received many awards for excellence in research and teaching, including the IEEE Signal Processing Society Technical Achievement Award (2013), the IEEE/AESS Fred Nathanson Memorial Radar Award (2014) and the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Award (2016). She was a Horev Fellow of the Leaders in Science and Technology program at the Technion and an Alon Fellow. She received the Michael Bruno Memorial Award from the Rothschild Foundation, the Weizmann Prize for Exact Sciences, the Wolf Foundation Krill Prize for Excellence in Scientific Research, the Henry Taub Prize for Excellence in Research (twice), the Hershel Rich Innovation Award (three times), and the Award for Women with Distinguished Contributions. She received several best paper awards and best demo awards together with her research students and colleagues, was selected as one of the 50 most influential women in Israel, and was a member of the Israel Committee for Higher Education. She is the Editor in Chief of Foundations and Trends in Signal Processing, a member of several IEEE Technical 

Yonina Eldar

Nancy F. Chen

Nancy F. Chen is an A*STAR Fellow, Generative AI Group Leader, and AI for Education Program Director at I²R (Institute for Infocomm Research) and principal investigator at CFAR (Centre for Frontier AI Research). Her expertise lies in generative AI in speech, language, and multimodal conversational technology. She servers as IEEE SPS Distinguished Lecturer (2023-2024), Program Chair of ICLR 2023, Board Member of ISCA (2021-2025), Board of Governors for APSIPA (2024-2026) and is honored as Singapore 100 Women in Tech (2021). Dr. Chen has won professional awards from Microsoft, IEEE, USA National Institute of Health, P&G, L’Oréal and UNESCO. Dr. Chen consistently garners best paper awards for her AI research across diverse applications, exemplified by accolades at IEEE ICASSP 2011 (forensics), APSIPA 2016 (education), SIGDIAL 2021 (social media), MICCAI 2021 (neuroscience), and EMNLP 2023 (healthcare). AI technology from her team has led to commercial spin-offs and is deployed at Singapore’s Ministry of Education to support home-based learning. Dr. Chen has also consulted for various companies ranging from startups to multinational corporations in the areas of climate change (social impact startup normal), emotional intelligence (Cogito Health), EdTech (Novo Learning), speech recognition (Vlingo, acquired by Nuance), and defense and aerospace (BAE Systems). Prior to A*STAR, she worked at MIT Lincoln Lab while pursuing a PhD at MIT and Harvard. 

For more info: http://alum.mit.edu/www/nancychen.

As a Principal Research Engineer at HP Personal Systems Software group, Yang Lei leads the development of computer vision and AI solutions for computing products. Her work has been applied in various domains, such as video conferencing, life science, digital manufacturing, education, etc.

Dr. Lei is the author of 22 patent applications and has published and presented more than 16 articles in journals and international conferences, in the field of computer vision and AI. 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 ReinventerAward, the highest award recognizing innovations at HP. 

She received her BS degree from Sichuan University and Ph.D. from Purdue University, both 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. Lei received the IEEE SPS Industry Young Professional Leadership Award in 2024.

Yang Lei