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ICA Research Network

The ICA Research Network is a new UK network designed to improve communication in the interdisciplinary area of blind source separation and independent component analysis (BSS/ICA).

The activities of the Network will include: workshops and meetings, visits to conferences and other laboratories (particularly for younger researchers), and electronic communication such as email and this web site. Dissemination of activities and information relevant to the Network will be an important aspect of its work, leading to increased opportunities for exploitation and collaboration with UK industry and international researchers.

Previous Events

ICA Research Network International Workshop
25-26 September 2008, Liverpool, UK

The 2008 ICA Research Network Workshop will be held at the University of Liverpool covering the latest developments and techniques in the area of source separation and ICA. Submissions from international participants are most welcome. A special feature of this workshop will be a special poster session where authors will have the opportunity to present their current work in progress.

For more information, see:

• ICA Research Network International Workshop 2008

UK Sparse Approximation Day
3 November 2007
University of Edinburgh

In coordination with a distinguished Maxwell Institute Colloquium give by Albert Cohen on Nov. 2nd at the U. of Edinburgh School of Mathematics, the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences will host a one day meeting in which researchers of sparse approximation from throughout the UK will assemble.

Presentations will be given by: Mike Davies (U. of Edinburgh, EE), Albert Cohen (U. of Paris VI, Math), Sofia Olhede (U. College London, Statistics), Mark D. Plumbley (Queen Mary, EE), Arieh Iserles (U. of Cambridge, DAMTP), Laura Rebollo-Neira (Aston U., Information Eng.), and Jared Tanner (U. of Edinburgh, Math).

Further information can be found at the conference website:
http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/MIC/mic_07.html

Anyone who would like to attend this event should contact the organizer (Jared.Tanner@ed.ac.uk) in order to ensure that space is available.

ICA 2007: 7th International Conference on Independent Component Analysis and Signal Separation
9-12 September 2007

The 2007 Iinternational Conference on Independent Component Analysis and Signal Separation was held at Queen Mary University of London, organized by the ICA Research Network. [More ...]

ICA Research Network Workshop
18-19 September 2006

The 2006 ICA Research Network Workshop was held at the University of Liverpool covering the latest developments and techniques in the area of BSS/ICA. The 2-day workshop featured a keynote speech from Christian Jutten, and over 30 oral and poster presentations. For more information, see:

• 2006 ICA Research Network Workshop

Workshop on Applied BSS/ICA
University of Southampton, 23 September 2005

This Workshop on Applied Blind Source Separation and Independent Component Analysis was held at the University of Southampton on 23 September 2005. The workshop focussed on the applications of blind source separation (BSS) techniques such as independent component analysis (ICA) to a range of application areas, including Biomedicine, Audio/speech/music, Commerce and finance and Psychology. For more information see

• Workshop on Applied BSS/ICA

Launch Day 13 April 2005

The launch of the Network was celebrated with a Launch Day in London on 13 April 2005. Around 65 researchers from across the UK were there, to hear about current research in the area, find out about the Network, and meet other UK researchers interested in BSS/ICA and its generalizations. As part of the event we had keynote talks from two of the worlds most eminent researchers in the field: Prof Jean-François Cardoso (ENST, France) and Prof Erkki Oja (Helsinki University of Technology, Finland). There were also be posters on display describing with work of groups within the Network.

Slides and other documents from the Launch Day are now available. For more information see:

• ICA Research Network Launch Day

Blind Source Separation and Independent Component Analysis

In many signal and data analysis situations, observed data are known to be some mixture of underlying sources. The mixing process may be linear or nonlinear, and while the structure of the mixing process may be known, the mixture parameters (in the linear case, the mixing matrix) will be unknown. This problem is therefore often known as Blind Source Separation (BSS). For a simple audio example, we may have two speakers in a room, with two microphones each receiving a different mixture of the two speakers. The task is then to recover the original (unmixed) speakers from the two mixtures received at the microphones.

The BSS problem can be tackled using Independent Component Analysis (ICA) and related techniques. ICA assumes the underlying sources are statistically independent from each other; related techniques may assume few sources are non-zero at any time (sparse coding) or the sources and/or mixtures must be non-negative (non-negative factor analysis). Applications of these techniques have been demonstrated in the analysis of EEG signals, MRI spectra, computer vision, gene microarray data, fMRI images, text document collections, satellite images and economic data, and it has been applied to watermarking for information hiding, speech enhancement in noisy or echoic environments, and image coding.