Nelson Díaz and Alejandro Alvarado, Optolab members, traveled to Korea to present at the largest International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing in the world.
Nelson Díaz, a postdoctoral researcher, and Alejandro Alvarado, a doctoral student in Electrical Engineering at PUCV, are part of the Optoelectronics Laboratory, specifically dedicated to the area of Computational Imaging.
In 2023, both researchers published the paper “Multispectral Filter Array Design by Optimal Sphere Packing” in IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, the journal with the highest impact factor on the field of image processing by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
Because of this publication, they were invited to present at the 2024 edition of the International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP for short. “Publishing in that journal is practically the biggest event, in fact, it’s like when soccer teams qualify directly for the World Cup, with that, we could already go to present with a guaranteed spot at ICASSP”, says Nelson Díaz.
This conference was organized by the IEEE Signal Processing Society and took place from Sunday, April 14th, to Friday, April 19th, in the Gangnam district in Seoul, South Korea. There, our researchers presented their work in poster format, which “today is the state of the art in multispectral filter design”, comments Dr. Díaz.
Both researchers highlight an anecdote that occurred while they were presenting “we were able to meet a professor from the Tokyo Institute of Technology who knew our article and found it interesting”, says Alvarado, and Díaz added, “we obtained results using a database from that professor, and he also told us that they discussed the work in his seminar. It was striking to know that on the other side of the world, they read our work”.
The participation in the conference was successful. “We didn’t go more than 10 minutes without someone asking us during the 2 hours of the presentation, and we even started answering questions before”, recounts the doctoral student.
“It’s super important to have reached ICASSP with this work. Many projects come forward from this encounter with the researchers there at the conference”, explained the first author of the article, Nelson Díaz.
They also experienced milestones in the country and Korean culture. “I got to learn about the culture, ate exotic things, and every day something different. It was very nice to stroll around and visit the parks we went to, the entrance fees were always very economical”, Alejandro recounted.
Nelson highlighted that “in general, the people were very kind, and Korean culture was quite welcoming. I had high expectations regarding getting to know and learn about the technology they are developing there, various industries were discussed at the conference, which was quite interesting”.
We congratulate the researchers on this great achievement and experience. We look forward to soon learning about some of the new projects and works that will emerge from this conference.
