Akihiko Sugiyama
Akihiko Sugiyama (a.k.a. Ken Sugiyama), affiliated with NEC Common Platform Software Research Labs., has been engaged in research projects on subscriber loop transmission systems, adaptive filtering for network and acoustic echo cancellation, MPEG audio coding, microphone arrays, noise suppression/cancellation, and noise-robust speech recognition for human-robot communication. His team developed the world's first Silicon Audio in 1994, the ancestor of iPod. He has been on the Audio and Electroacoustics Tech. Committee, IEEE Signal Processing Society, since 1990. He served as associate editors for several journals such as IEEE Trans. SP (1994-1996). He has contributed to 14 chapters of books and is the inventor of 85 registered patents in the field of signal processing in Japan, US, EPC (EU Patent Convention), Canada, and Australia. He received the 2001 Ohm Tech. Award, the 2002 IEICE Best Paper Award, the 2005 J. Soc. of Artificial Intelligence Excellent Paper Award, and the 2006 IEICE Achievement Award. He is also known as a big host for a total of 60 internship students.
http://splab.cs.kitami-it.ac.jp/sisb2008/

Masaaki Ikehara
received the B.E., M.E., and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Keio University, Yokohama, Japan, in 1984, 1986 and 1989, respectively. He was with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Nagasaki University, Nagasaki, Japan, as an Assistant Professor from 1989 to 1992. In 1992, he joined the Department of Electrical Engineering, Keio University. From 1996 to 1998, he was a Visiting Researcher with the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Boston University, Boston, MA. He is currently a Professor with the Department of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Keio University. Since 2001. He served as associate editors for IEEE Trans. SP. He is now a senior member of IEEE. His research interests are in the areas of multirate signal processing, wavelet image coding, and Filter design problems.