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To promote the IMA Mathematics in Signal Processing 2022 conference, the IMA is holding a keynote talk from Professor Simon Maskell on the intersection of mathematics and computing, bridging the disciplines of signal processing in the Engineering community and machine learning in the Computer Science community, both underpinned by mathematics and statistics and their respective communities. The keynote talk will be followed by a panel discussion about the future of signal processing conferences in a machine learning dominated era.

Professor Simon Maskell is Professor of Autonomous Systems at the University of Liverpool, and sits at the interface between Computer Science, Engineering and Statistics. Simon’s research interests are focused on developing ground‐breaking algorithmic solutions that can be translated into tangible advantage across multiple sectors in both industry and government. The solutions that Simon has developed have, for example, benefited organisations operating within defence, security, insurance, petrochemicals, pharma and transport. The panel talk will consist of several experts from the signal processing and machine learning community from the UK and internationally.

Background The IMA Mathematics in Signal Processing conference started over the past 25 years ago, first being held in Bath in 1985, and held 11 times with the most recent being held in 2016 in Birmingham. We announced a date of May 2022 for the 12th conference but had only a small number of submissions. We gather from others that the pandemic has had a major impact on rebooting several conferences.

However, we also believe that it is also time to reconsider the scope and title of the conference in light of the major growth of data‐driven and deep‐learning based approaches to solving challenges in the signal processing domain. Although this change in scope was reflected in the previous call‐for‐papers, we believe that now is the time to consider renaming and rebranding the conference to reflect the shift to data‐driven approaches more explicitly.

We would still like the signal processing community to drive the conference, however. We propose that the 12th conference should take place in December 2022 in Birmingham, where we believe the interest in attending in‐person will be much greater. We hope this promotional event will help revitalise this national conference, to provide opportunities to both bring together the UK Signal Processing community, but also provide an environment for early career researchers to present their work.