When there is a topic of special timeliness or when a topic investigated by members of other societies becomes of keen interest, an invited session may be of great benefit to the technical program. The Technical Program Committee determines which, if any, invited sessions are desirable, initiates them, and coordinates them with the appropriate SP Technical Committees. Invited sessions initiated by the SP Technical Committees are also coordinated by the Technical Program Committee. In the past, we have had special sessions on VLSI, fast algorithms, artificial intelligence, hidden Markov Models, neural networks, audio signal processing, etc. IEEE policy (and the Society Constitution) specify that no honorarium may be paid to any speaker.
The acceptance or rejection of all ICASSP papers is the shared responsibility of the Technical Program Committee and the appropriate SP Technical Committee. By tradition, the SP Technical Committees' decisions are generally accepted in such matters. This is also true of invited papers. Before any papers are invited, it is strongly advised that the Technical Program Committee discuss the matter with the appropriate SP technical committee and agree on any special provisions the Technical Program Committee may require. It is an embarrassment to our society to either accept poor papers merely because they were invited or to reject an invited paper.
Once the appropriate discussions have been held between the Technical Program Committee and the SP technical committee, an organizer for the invited session can be selected, and instructed in his duties. It is advisable that a person be chosen who is both prestigious and well-connected in the area of interest. The session organizer should build the session topic through an appropriately selected and ordered sequence of talks. Consider hosting a plenary session on the same topic preceding a special session. The special-session chairperson can also be responsible for selecting the plenary speaker. Informing the prospective organizer of the responsibilities at the onset should lead to a smooth session development.